ABSTRACT
This chapter explains whether peacebuilding as a strategic policy framework can survive growing policy-maker and academic concern with the problems of unintended consequences, understood to stem from the underestimation of relational interconnections, alterity and complexity. Roland monograph, At War's End, could be seen as the last gasp of liberal peacebuilding, arguing that its goals of peace, elections and markets needed to be implemented by external actors rather than be assumed to exist without guidance. The cause-and-effect model, the archetypal model of peacebuilding intervention, was developed in the policy debates of the late-1990s and 2000s, particularly during the post-conflict reconstructions following humanitarian intervention and regime change under the auspices of the War on Terror. The depoliticisation of peacebuilding and the removal of its former content the goals of liberal peace may, of course, be understood as positive. It enables peace-builders to evade the criticisms made of classical 1990s and 2000s peacebuilding approaches.
