Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding: Critical Developments and Approaches. Edited by Oliver P. Richmond New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 288 pp., $28.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-230-55523-5). Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding: Moving From Violence to Sustainable Peace. Edited by Bruce W. Dayton, Louis Kriseberg. London: Routledge, 2009. 288 pp., $42.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-48085-7). The Role of International Law in Rebuilding Societies After Conflict. Edited by Brett Bowden, Hilary Charlesworth, Jeremy Farrall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 346 pp., $127.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-50994-7). The promise of international peacebuilding as articulated by national policymakers and officials of international organizations has not been fully realized in any of the countries where it has been applied. Although external involvement in post-conflict cases has led to improvements in terms of containing violence, and thereby allowing some return to normalcy, in many cases those benefits rest on a shaky foundation of limited and half-implemented structural changes, reforms in international parlance, that serve merely to obscure the grievances and tensions that make violence more possible. These three volumes take on this conundrum to investigate why peacebuilding falls so consistently short of its goals and provide some recommendations for how it could be reconfigured, or in some cases radically redesigned, to allow for more positive outcomes. They are recent entrants in a growing body of literature offering critical analysis of peacebuilding in terms of both its premise and outcome. The tide of academic attention has turned from primary focus on the technical and mechanical aspects of peacebuilding—specific reform programs and their impact—to question more fundamentally the objectives underlying the action and the ways in which it interacts with the local society. The three volumes find a similar fault in peacebuilding as currently practiced. Though they focus on different aspects of conflict and its transformation, the volumes reviewed here point to the lack of engagement with and understanding of local actors and cultures as a central flaw of international peacebuilding. It is not something that works with societies but on them, the authors in these volumes find, in ways that reinforce local frustrations, solidify perceptions of great power hegemony, and benefit the few at the expense of the many. Taken together, these works are a welcome addition to the literature and should force greater consideration about what peacebuilding intends to accomplish …