The End of the Liberal Episteme

Abstract

This concluding chapter summarises the transformation in the conceptual understanding of international peacebuilding over the last two decades; analysed through the framework of ‘The Twenty Years’ Crisis’. It suggests that the conceptual shifts within and beyond the impasse of the 2000s can be usefully interrogated through their imbrication within broader epistemological shifts highlighting the limits of causal knowledge claims. These are heuristically framed in this chapter in terms of the shift from peacebuilding interventions within the problematic of causation to those concerned with the pragmatic management of effects. In this shift, the means and mechanisms of international peacebuilding have been transformed, no longer focused on the universal application of Western causal knowledge through policy interventions but rather on the effects of specific and unique local and organic processes at work in societies themselves. The focus on effects takes the conceptualization of international peacebuilding out of the traditional terminological lexicon of politics and international relations theory and instead recasts problems in increasingly organic ways, suggesting that artificial or hubristic attempts at socio-political intervention should be excluded or minimized.