ABSTRACT After the demise of liberal peacebuilding, the policy literature often views peacebuilding as a project aimed at avoiding relapse into conflict, focusing on prevention, stabilisation and hard security. Also, critical peace scholars have predominantly narrowed peacebuilding down to gradual, small, hybrid, everyday work. There is no enthusiasm for pointing towards new ideals of peace. To this aim, this article engages with the work of the American social worker, feminist, and peace activist of the early twentieth century, Jane Addams, who was the first to theorise what a positive peace may be. According to Addams, a positive peace was about enlarging human relations and already emerging from the ashes of the First World War. Peacebuilding had to be heroic, courageous, and aggressive, substituting the virtues of war. Her pragmatist work is useful for thinking of alternative imaginaries of liberal peace in times when imagination about peace and peacebuilding has dimmed.