ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some current shortcomings inherent to post-liberal peacebuilding research and indicated that empirical realities might not always coincide with its core assumptions. Post-liberal thinkers have partly taken up such sceptical perspectives and responded to the respective objections and suggestions. After the end of the Cold War, peacebuilding became a blooming business', frequently accompanied by large-scale intervention from outside. The mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is one outstanding example in the UN context. It is controversial whether the US-led military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan can be properly subsumed under the liberal peacebuilding framework. This crisis of liberal peacebuilding has brought critical approaches in the ascendant. Post-liberal notions of the local-local, in particular, tend to repeat mistakes of former locality research by conceptualising marked-off systems and neglecting the relationality of such categories. Indeed, nothing and nobody can be regarded as purely local.
