Welfare and the Civil Peace: Poverty with Rights?

Though the importance of a social contract and civil peace has long been recognised, peacebuilding approaches have increasingly been co-opted by a statebuilding agenda that reflects a predatory, neoliberal, ideological perspective aiming to justify and enhance the governance of unruly others. Lockean liberalism, which aimed at the social contract between subjects and rulers over the preservation of life, liberty and property is heavily reflected in the intellectual discourses of conflict resolution and liberal peacebuilding. Yet, societies, groups, identities, cultures and welfare are often only rhetorically part of this discourse, even though the problem of the civil peace has come to preoccupy the Western-dominated peacebuilding consensus.