Abstract

NASCIMENTO, Daniela. Strategies for Responding to Violent Conflict and (Re)building Peace: A Critical Analysis. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [online]. 2014, n.105, pp.3-18. ISSN 2182-7435.  https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.5769.

With the end of the Cold War, the prevention and resolution of violent conflict, together with peacebuilding, became a kind of ‘mission civilisatrice’, according to Roland Paris, in the hands of external actors. In practice, this meant that these actors began to define broad, common strategies based on the principles of liberal peace in order to deal with the various internal conflict scenarios. Despite contributing towards raising awareness of the multiplicity and complexity of the underlying causes of the conflicts, these strategies rapidly became dominant, crystallizing into an agenda that favors civil and political rights and institutions and neglects social, economic and cultural guarantees. Bearing this in mind, the aim of this article is to critically analyze and evaluate the theoretical and empirical changes in the dominant peacebuilding strategies and models by focusing on the way in which the so-called ‘liberal peace model’ tends to hide forms of inequality that sustain and reproduce conflicts and violence.

Keywords : conflicts resolution; external intervention; liberal peace; peacebuilding; violence.

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