This chapter considers five practices, or constellations of practices, that emerge from imitating Jesus: (1) care for the poor and needy, including the contested practice of seeing Christ in the poor; (2) sacramental practices of the Lord’s Supper and baptism; (3) prayer, including lament; (4) forgiveness, reconciliation, and peacemaking; and (5) self-giving or kenōsis. Each practice flows in its own way from the twin imperatives to love God and the neighbor.

Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021 despite peace talk efforts in late 2020 and early 2021. International pundits had been predicting that Ashraf Ghani’s government might need to share power with a resurgent Taliban, but none had expected such a swift and complete takeover as the Americans readied to leave for good. Two decades of international intervention in Afghanistan were erased. The efficacy and desirability of intervention has been thrown into serious doubt, and with it the prospects for post-conflict state-building. This chapter introduces the rise, and possible fall, of the post-conflict state-building agenda. It introduces the reader to important concepts, noting the relationships between state-building, peace-building and nation-building, as well as underscoring the role of liberal ideology in shaping post-conflict state-building efforts, asking readers to reflect on what they believe external actors should, or should not, do.

This chapter presents the outlines of a constructivist understanding of world politics. We begin with a discussion of state identity and explore how identity defines and bounds state actions. To illustrate this concept, we address issues central to the study of world politics: change, governance and security. Overall, our goal is to present a textured, layered understanding of the international realm based on a notion taken for granted in much of IR theory, meaning. Constructivism is the newest but perhaps the most dynamic of the main theories of international relations. Unlike liberalism and realism (see Chapters 2 and 3), which have taken their bearings from developments in economic and political theory, constructivism – like Critical Theory (see Chapter 4) – is rooted in insights from social theory (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1967; Giddens 1984) and the philosophy of knowledge (Golinski 2005; Hacking 1999; Searle 1995).

This chapter explores third-party mediation and peacekeeping. Mediation, along with arbitration and adjudication, is a form of peacemaking. Peacekeeping means maintaining durable peace after conflict has ended. The UN is one of several kinds of actors that engage in peacekeeping missions. They leverage the costs belligerents would pay if they return to war, provide information, reduce uncertainty, and provide political cover to facilitate political concessions. Also discussed in the chapter are peacebuilding efforts, including developing the proper political, legal, social and economic infrastructure to stabilize the security environment. Challenges for third parties seeking to engage successfully in peacekeeping and peacemaking include the difficulties they face in providing long-term incentives for peace, the possibility of distorting information flows such that peace is less stable, and being sensitive to local contexts. The chapter applies many of its concepts to a quantitative study of the causes of peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse, and a case study of third-party involvement during the conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa in the 1990s and 2000s.

The founding father of the laws of armed conflict, Hugo Grotius assumed a ceasefire to be a temporary state of affairs that did not alter the legal state of war. He wrote that if hostilities resumed after a ceasefire is declared, there is no need for a new declaration of war to be made since the legal state of war is ‘not dead but sleeping’. While the official legal state of war may be sleeping’, Grotius’ metaphor perhaps does not imply that nothing happens. Even during sleep, much can and does occur that we are temporarily unaware of. However, ceasefires continue to be largely considered in relation to how to better bring warring parties to the negotiating table, hostilities to a halt and/or their influence on peace processes. The argument advanced in this book is that ceasefires in fact rarely only ‘cease fire’. Consequently, the book offers a more nuanced examination of two core questions: what ceasefires actually are and what areas they affect.

This chapter begins exploring Fambul Tok’s program. It looks at how the organization illustrates the different ways they project themselves as local and what this says about the reproduction of common local tropes by people who know and understand this vernacular, namely by highlighting national identity – Sierra Leonean – and cultural and traditional practices by examining the materials they produced. This is contrasted with ethnographic observations, which explored how the organization actually operated on a daily basis, looking in particular at the interactions and hierarchies both within the organization, between staff and program participants. Exploring these interactions demonstrates how local transitional justice organizations also create and reinforce internal societal hierarchies, mirroring international-local hierarchies. Thus, knowledge of transitional justice and how the local is constructed within TJ programs is its own form of power. Exploring how the agency is employed by different people in different contexts enriches how we understand the micro-dynamics of power, knowledge and discourse within post-conflict contexts.

When studying insurgency and civil war, understanding different exit pathways from violence could, ideally, help to prevent the resurgence of that violence. But criminologists have long stated that desistance from violent groups is notoriously difficult to measure: people might disengage from violence but still be committed to their group in other ways, or they might disengage temporarily, only to rejoin the group or commit violence in other ways or with different groups later on. Understanding why people join violent rebellions is not enough to understand the full trajectory of participation in armed activity – especially when a lot of that understanding is built on why men join violent rebellions. It is also critical to understand why both men and women stay, why they leave, and/or why they return after having disarmed. Desertion, perceptions of threat, and armed group fragmentation also cannot be understood at only the organizational level, nor at only the individual level. This chapter discusses how these phenomena are linked together: how these groups frame reality and threats to build cohesion and collective identities, and how their recruits interpret or dispute these frames.

The concluding chapter extends the book’s theoretical insights in three ways. First, it explores the extent to which the causal process elaborated here might travel beyond irregular civil war settings and reflect processes of institutional change in other threat-laden environments. Second, it revisits the theory’s scope conditions and discusses when we might observe the wartime emergence of state-bolstering or “reinforcing” rules, as well as whether different institutional logics can emerge in distinct policy arenas within the same state. Finally, it elaborates the broader theoretical, conceptual, and policy implications of this research. It focuses particular attention on what this framework means for state development amid armed conflict, the relationship between the state and organized crime in war, the theory and practice of post-conflict reconstruction, and understandings of “the state” more broadly.

Chapter 1 begins with the story of the 2015 La Línea customs fraud scandal and its connections to the criminal structures mounted by military intelligence at the height of the 36-year civil war. Drawing on this illustrative example, the chapter reframes debates on post-conflict statebuilding and puts forward a novel argument about how counterinsurgent elites introduce institutional innovations that undermine core state activities. It further lays out the key theoretical contributions of the book, specifically as they relate to war and state formation and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction. The chapter also introduces the Central American context and explains why it is a fruitful setting in which to explore the institutional legacies of civil war. It then discusses the book’s methodology and the unique archival and interview sources of data.