Violent Peacemaking: The Violence Within Liberal Peacebuilding

This introduction advances the concept of violent peacemaking to suggest ways that violence is constitutive of, rather than incidental to, liberal peacebuilding. It foregrounds three characteristics of liberal peacemaking: formality, distance, and delimitation, and links them to the ways violence is enacted, concealed, and legitimised within interventions. Taken together, the contributions recast violence not as failure but as integral to liberal order-making, offering empirically grounded analyses that trace how it is embedded across contexts, scales, and temporalities. In so doing, the Special Issue shows how interventions that claim to ‘make peace’ may simultaneously reproduce and normalise violence.