Norm Contestation and the Global Peacebuilding Order

This book focuses on the transformation of the global peacebuilding order and develops a new matrix-based approach to analyze this.

For three decades, major Western actors shaped the instruments and normative orientations of peacebuilding. That consensus is now gone, and rising and re-emerging powers – China, Japan, and Russia - are advancing distinctive conceptions of peace that diverge from liberal peacebuilding in their approaches to sovereignty, human rights, and governance in conflict-affected societies. This book develops two ideal-typical normative orders in international peacebuilding: statist and pluralist. It uses these to map China’s, Japan’s, and Russia’s respective positions on the core norms of peacebuilding and the broader orders they imply. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in all three countries and in the policy hubs of Geneva and New York, the volume provides a comprehensive account of a shifting normative landscape shaped by great-power competition and contested multilateralism. By comparing three consequential yet different non-Western actors and combining elite interviews, policy documents, and theory-building, this book bridges peace and conflict studies, International Relations and norm research, and foreign policy analysis.

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, security studies and International Relations.