Perpetual Peacebuilding: A New Paradigm to Move Beyond the Linearity of Liberal Peacebuilding

This article will introduce the ‘perpetual peacebuilding’ paradigm. Academics and policy-makers have accepted that the linearity of the liberal peace neither reflects, nor should it drive, the tumult of peacebuilding. Nevertheless, practitioners have made merely cosmetic changes to their approaches. Within the perpetual peacebuilding paradigm, peacebuilding is envisioned as an ever-developing process manifested in a series of (re-)negotiations of the social and political contract. Notions of success and failure and concepts such as ‘tracks’ and ‘peace agreements’ are abandoned, and peace is both utopian and subjective. Lastly, the peacebuilding community is called upon to display greater courage and creativity.