The liberal peace is in crisis. John Gray has already pronounced the death of liberal interventionism. 1 Tony Blair has effectively been forced out of office because of his association with the fiasco of intervention in Iraq. Debate on how to deal with the problem of Darfur is not only constrained by the Chinese veto in the Security Council but by the way Iraq and Afghanistan have created a crisis of both confidence and credibility for proponents of intervention. Meanwhile, Mark Duffield has criticised the liberal peace project as a form of biopolitics aimed at transforming the populations of ineffective states and as part of a strategy to 'insulate developed mass society from the permanent crisis on its borders'. 2 Michael Pugh has damned contemporary liberal peacebuilding as a mirage of development that instead prioritises 'therapy, medication and self-reliance'. 3 Oliver Richmond has described it as a 'chimera' 4 'a virtual peace' 5 , a form of 'peace on the cheap' 6 and as embedding 'poverty with rights' . 7 Hard and Negri simply characterise contemporary global politics as an 'imperial civil war '. 8 At the same time, Chavez leads the revolt against neoliberalism in Latin America; in the Middle East, the US has given up on democracy promotion and returned to what it knows best-propping up autocracies with billion dollar arms deals. 9 In addition, the Chinese economic model, with its statism, its corruption, its lack of democracy and its human rights abuses continues to outperform the West and the rest. Surely, this is not how the end of history was supposed to play out-as a tragedy masquerading as a farce, as a bonfire of neoliberal certainties and as brief precursor to the end of the end of history? Well perhaps not-or at least not quite yet. The four books reviewed here certainly do deal explicitly (or implicitly in the case of Easterly) with the multiple failings of the liberal peace project. Indeed, read collectively, they add up to a comprehensive indictment of the contemporary peacebuilding and development strategies devised by Western states for what Chandler terms the non-Western 'other'. At the same time, however, their various analyses also highlight the continued power and pervasiveness of liberal models of peacebuilding and development. The books themselves, therefore, embody a central characteristic of the current crisis of the liberal peace-that, China and Chavez notwithstanding, it is, as yet, mainly a crisis of confidence and perceived effectiveness rather than one of empirical extensiveness and influence. Christopher Cramer's, Civil War Is Not A Stupid Thing, has two main aims. The first is to critique current approaches to measuring, analysing and classifying conflict. He is particularly scathing about both the usefulness of neoclassical economic analyses of conflict and the tendency to make what he views as artificial distinctions between war and non-war violence. This latter observation in particular is used as the basis for challenging conventional assumptions about the 'peacebleness'...

Bradford Scholars -how to deposit your paper Overview Copyright check• Check if your publisher allows submission to a repository.• Use the Sherpa RoMEO database if you are not sure about your publisher's position or email openaccess@bradford.ac.uk.

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In the April 2010Review of International Studies, Roland Paris argued that liberal peacebuilding is the only viable solution for rebuilding war-torn societies, and supported this by assailing critics of the liberal peace. In this article we challenge four key claims made by Paris: imposed and consensual peacebuilding are different experiences; there are no echoes of imperialism in modern peacebuilding; there is no alternative to the capitalist free market; and critics of the liberal peace are ‘closet liberals’. We argue that Paris ignores the extent to which all peacebuilding strategies have had a core of common prescriptions: neoliberal policies of open markets, privatisation and fiscal restraint, and governance policies focused on enhancing instruments of state coercion and ‘capacity building’ – policies that have proved remarkably resilient even while the democracy and human rights components of the liberal peace have been substantially downgraded. There is little space to (formally) dissent from these policy prescriptions – whether international peacebuilders were originally invited in or not. Furthermore, the deterministic assumption by Paris that ‘there is no alternative’ is unjustifiable. Rather than trying to imagine competing meta-alternatives to liberalism, it is more constructive to acknowledge and investigate the variety of political economies in post-conflict societies rather than measuring them against a liberal norm.

Bradford Scholars -how to deposit your paper Overview Copyright check• Check if your publisher allows submission to a repository.• Use the Sherpa RoMEO database if you are not sure about your publisher's position or email openaccess@bradford.ac.uk.