ABSTRACT
International peacebuilding initiatives directly affect the lives of peoples across the globe in countries such as Mozambique, El Salvador, Somalia, Cambodia, Bosnia, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. 1 In Cambodia the intervention of the international community after the Paris Peace Agreements (PPA) resulted in what was, in 1 991, an unprecedented drive to reconfigure the state along a democratic and liberal economic model. Yet for all of the research that has focused on the peacebuilding mission in Cambodia (Boua 1993; UNRISD 1993; Chetty 1993; Akashi 1994; Doyle and Suntharalinam 1994; Farris 1994; Jennar 1994; Um 1994; Brown and Timberman 1998; Chong 2002; Collacott 1994; Lizée 2000; Roberts 2001; and Hughes and Öjendal 2006), there have been relatively few attempts to assess peacebuilding generally from a critical perspective (Richmond 2005a, 2005b; 2008, 2009; Heathershaw 2008; Pouligny 2005; Duffield 2002; Fetherston 2000; Chandler 1999; Campbell 1998a). Any critical analysis of peacebuilding needs to commence with an appreciation of the assumptions built into the concept; in so doing its theoretical roots can be identified, and it can be tied in to broader patterns of liberal global governance. As such, it will be grounded within a particular understanding of history and social relations that is culturally specific, at the same time as they are represented as being grounded in a universalized conception of the nature of the liberal man (Richmond 2005b). This in turn provides the basis for identifying the contradictions inherent in theories of peacebuilding, and the ways in which peacebuilding works to reinforce and produce particular visions of the world.
