Why is it that states emerging from intervention, peacebuilding and statebuilding over the last 25 years appear to be ‘failed by design’? This book explores the interplay of local peace agency with the (neo)liberal peacebuilding project. It looks at how far local ‘peace formation’ dynamics can go to counteract the forces of violence and play a role in rebuilding the state, consolidate peace processes and induce a more progressive form of politics. By looking at local agency related to peace formation, the book finds answers to the pressing question of how large-scale peacebuilding or statebuilding may be significantly improved and made more representative of the lives, needs, rights, and ambitions of its subjects.

In the face of the current decline or spectacular collapse of peace processes, this article investigates whether peace has become systematically blocked. It investigates whether the ineffectiveness of an ‘international peace architecture’ (IPA) can be explained by a more potent counterpeace system, which is growing in its shadow. It identifies counterpeace as proto-systemic processes that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational), while exploiting structural blockages to peace and unintended consequences of peace interventions. It elaborates three distinct patterns of blockages to peace in contemporary conflicts across the globe: the stalemate, limited counterpeace, and unmitigated counterpeace. Drawing on the counterrevolution literature, this research asks: Have peace interventions become the source of their own undoing? Which factors consolidate or aggravate emerging conflict patterns? Are blockages to peace systemic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counterpeace edifice?

With Palestine gaining increasing international recognition for its sovereignty aspirations, this paper investigates the ongoing Palestinian state-formation process. It examines how far grassroots movements, domestic political leaderships and international actors have promoted or undermined intra-Palestinian unity and societal consensus around the rules, design and extent of a future Palestinian state. The paper introduces the novel concept of everyday state formation as a crucial form of grassroots agency in this process. Moreover, it illustrates the internal tensions of contemporary statebuilding: without reconciliation across multiple scales -local to global -the complex interactions of structural, governmental and subaltern power tend to build societal fragility into emerging state structures.

This article explores the relationship between contemporary revolutionary agency, domestic reforms and liberal peacebuilding in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings. In particular, it focuses on the tensions between the liberal peace’s orthodox and emancipatory strands by asking: Does liberal peacebuilding support or hinder revolutionary emancipation in the Arab region? The article aims to close a gap in PCS scholarship by delivering insights into contemporary revolutionary processes (here called ‘everyday state formation’). After elaborating the disjunctures between revolutionary agency and liberal peacebuilding interventions in the spheres of statebuilding, development and democratisation, many peacebuilding interventions appear as counterrevolutionary practices.