Adding Peacekeepers to the Debates of Critical Liberal Peacebuilding

Anne Flaspöler, Postdoctoral Researcher at the EDDA Center of Excellence, has recently published the article “Adding Peacekeepers to the Debates of Critical Liberal Peacebuilding: New Insights from the Perspective of Peacekeeping Training in Africa” in the academic journal Peacebuilding. The article explores the implication of peacekeeping training for the current debates of the critical liberal peacebuilding scholarship, more specifically the concepts of “hybrid peace” and “recourse to localism”. In so doing, it looks at the training realities presented by two case studies, the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center (Ghana) and the African Center for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (South Africa). This shows the training centers’ struggle to accommodate the demands posed by the complexities of today’s peace support operations while creating an active learning environment. Based on these findings, the article discusses what they reveal for the operationalisation of the concepts of “hybrid peace” and “recourse to localism”, identifying the challenges of their non-prescriptive nature and dismissal of standardisation for the peacekeeping training context.