ABSTRACT
Stabilizing ‘fragile’, ‘failed’ and ‘failing’ states imagined to harbour or project malice and menace of some kind has attracted substantial academic attention and international intervention. Indeed, such matters are very much front and centre of policy and theory debates in the discipline of International Relations, where once such issues would have ‘only’ attracted the attention of ‘lesser’ subject areas like peace and conflict studies or development. Successful management of this security–development ‘nexus’, wherein the development of the alien Other along liberal lines is argued to render the purported security problem moot, is underpinned by and underpins the idea of the Liberal Peace, and the various international interventions such an ontology sanctions. Through this transformative force, the problematized alien nation is assimilated into the liberal international through conditioned adoption of Weberian state-centric institutions. Attempts to pacify and promote such spaces revolve around the duopoly of political and economic liberalization as the core objectives and methods of postconflict peacebuilding, which is audited and legitimated in concordance with the ideological priorities of global governance, which are fundamentally neoliberal (Call and Cousens 2008, Slotin et al. 2010). Thus, postconflict peacebuilding, wherein unstable polities are stabilized through democratization and capitalization (as distinct from postconflict development), is presently legitimated by according with external preferences and liberal norms.
