ABSTRACT

International statebuilding aims to build states that will sustain domestic and international peace. Western governments and international organizations have come to see statebuilding as the antidote to ‘weak’, ‘failing’ or ‘failed’ states, which they blame for many of today’s most intractable security threats. International peacebuilding, on the other hand, aims to build peace, in part by building peaceful and just states. Because peacebuilding and statebuilding try to achieve similar results in countries affected by violence, they are often conflated by both scholars and practitioners, masking important differences and potential contradictions.