ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the shift from democratisation to international statebuilding in frameworks of international intervention. First it seeks to draw out the intellectual origins of this policy shift by examining Douglass North's work in institutional change. The next section analyses liberal peace and its universal normative and methodological basis for peace, which is based on implementing democratisation and liberalising the economy. In a more rigorous analysis, Roland Paris evaluated interventions in 11 countries such as Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, Croatia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua and Rwanda to test whether democratisation and marketisation had created the conditions for stable peace. The disillusionment with the results of democratisation approaches can be compared to North's disenchantment with abstract neoclassical economic policies when applied to underdeveloped states. Unlike democratisation frameworks, statebuilders recognised the limits of universal ideas and pretended absolutes, as democracy and economic liberalisation processes generally failed when practiced in the Second and Third Worlds.
