ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses and evaluates the changes and evolution in the traditional and dominant models to resolve conflicts and build peace, by shedding light on their limited agenda and priorities and the way in which this liberal peace project tends to obscure much more complex - and often invisible - forms of inequality and dynamics that sustain and reproduce conflict. Conflicts have become increasingly complex in terms of number of actors and regional connections between those actors. There is a larger proportion of new and minor armed conflicts being resolved than long-running and complex major armed conflicts. Preventing conflict and building peace is an externally driven process that often results in an experiment of social engineering controlled by outsiders and often disengaged from the societies they are trying to rebuild. The values and institutions of the liberal democratic core are transplanted into the domestic affairs of peripheral host states to reconstruct parts of the periphery in image of the core.
