The Organization of Peacebuilding: Governance and Government in the New Protectorate.

When it comes to modern-day peace- and statebuilding, detractors and supporters alike seem to be in broad agreement: their goal is the construction of “well-adjusted" states that guarantee peace and prosperity. By taking a look at the organization of peacebuilding efforts, this paper challenges the received wisdom that state-building lies at the centre of the peacebuilding project. It does so in three steps. First, a survey of "exogenous statebuilding" experiences throughout the 20th century shows them to have been premised on mimicry of Weber's modernist states with a focus on a monopoly of violence, territorial coverage, fiscal sustainability, and a strong bureaucracy: in short, on the establishment of "government". Second, the paper argues that the new protectorates are not characterized by the airlifting of Western state organizations and the technologies of administration that are tried and tested in industrial states. Instead, the governance of the new protectorates is enacted through a patchwork of loose, decentralized arrangements with ill-defined and some times non-existent hierarchical relationships. This preference for networked, un-hierarchical approaches to the running of the peacebuilding operations -in effect, the consistent choice of "governance" over "government"- constitutes the most strikingly distinctive factor of contemporary peacebuilding efforts. The third section discusses current peacebuilding as an original "political form" presenting the paradoxical picture of an exercise in state-building where no state is actually ever built. The emphasis here is on the deep ambivalence of western liberals towards state power, and the priority given to checking the power of institutions over building them up in the first place. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]