Building positive peace: Investigating institutional approaches to peacebuilding and the "local turn"

Abstract

Despite efforts to better understand and address the root causes of conflict, violence continues to affect nations and communities around the world, displacing millions and avoiding resolution. Global institutions, developed to promulgate a more cooperative and peaceful world order, have failed to adequately resolve conflicts, with many spanning multiple decades, regionalising, and involving an increasing number of non- state actors. Through historically situating the roots of liberal peacebuilding and analysing recent UN and AU approaches to peace consolidation and conflict resolution, this dissertation seeks to better understand the ways in which these institutions' pasts have influenced their present approaches. By bringing together historicist and sociological approaches to peace research, and following in a constructivist IR tradition, this dissertation traces norm formation at these institutions and contextualises calls for more "locally-led" approaches. I use historical research to situate the roots of UN and AU approaches and conduct thematic analysis to investigate norm shifts related to state sovereignty, protection of civilians, conflict prevention, gender, development, democracy, peacebuilding, and bottom-up approaches to peace. I find that while norms have shifted significantly in both...