Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency
- 1 Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland
- 2 Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace
- 3 Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo
- 4 Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool
- 5 Peace Formation versus Everyday State Formation in Palestine
- 6 Afghanistan's Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts
- 7 International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
- 8 Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia?
- 9 Timor-Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding United Nations Peace Efforts from Within
- 10 Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency
- 1 Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland
- 2 Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace
- 3 Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo
- 4 Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool
- 5 Peace Formation versus Everyday State Formation in Palestine
- 6 Afghanistan's Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts
- 7 International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
- 8 Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia?
- 9 Timor-Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding United Nations Peace Efforts from Within
- 10 Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In July 2003, after several years of internal violent conflicts, the Solomon Islands (SI) became the target of the biggest peacebuilding intervention in the Pacific region to date – the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). This mission is generally presented as a success story of post-conflict peacebuilding and state-building. It can be seen as a paradigmatic case of a peacebuilding intervention that closely follows a liberal peacebuilding-as-statebuilding approach. RAMSI has embarked on an ambitious project of state reconstruction, including the reform of the state's security sector, building the capacities of the central machinery of government and fostering the effectiveness of the various branches of the state apparatus. The underlying assumption is that a ‘proper’ state, that is, a state of the Western liberal ideal type, is the best guarantor of sustainable peace.
Copious resources have been poured into the peacebuilding-as-statebuilding project in this small country, with its population of just over half a million, and the international interveners have, without doubt, something to show for their engagement, particularly with regard to maintaining negative peace as the absence of overt violence on a larger scale. Nevertheless, there are concerns regarding the sustainability of peace, especially what might happen when the internationals finally withdraw for good. RAMSI has been in SI for twelve years now. Such long-term commitment is laudable – other interventions have been criticised for their short termism, and rightly so. But the repeated extensions of the mandate, at the request of the host government and according to the wishes of the majority of the local population, albeit in successively reduced form, also indicate an unease about what has been accomplished and how sustainable it will be in the absence of the internationals.
Sustainability can, indeed, be questioned, mainly because the internationals’ focus on building the capacities of state institutions ignores the presence of a wide variety of non-state providers of peace and order in the local context which could provide the basis for the emergence of a positive hybrid peace.
This chapter focuses on local peace agency, showing how locals have pursued their own indigenous processes of peace formation, detached from, and parallel to, RAMSI, albeit in its shadow.
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- Post-Liberal Peace TransitionsBetween Peace Formation and State Formation, pp. 197 - 216Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016