ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the tendency to construct the liberal peace as a coherent paradigm was employed both to explain and critique contemporary peace building. It examines that the shift away from liberalisation focused on building more multi-layered, comprehensive, and invasive, forms of governance, rather than representing a more fundamental change. The chapter focuses on the foundations for the identification of the liberal peace as a coherent strategy have been laid by the critics of peace building of the late 1990s to early 2000s. In the literature on conflict management it is largely accepted that one aspect that characterises foreign engagement with conflict and post-conflict contexts in the post-Cold War era is the liberal tradition that drove and determined the manner in which such engagements took place. Jan Selby suggested the existence of a problematic tendency to identify the 'liberal peace' as a coherent project.
