Book Review: Peacebuilding Legacy: Programming for Change and Young People’s Attitude to Peace

A critical challenge faced by both peacebuilding scholars and practitioners is the failure of a normative approach to peacebuilding, one that is largely technocratic and programmatic, to achieve lasting peace. Following the limited successes of what is now referred to as the “liberal peace paradigm” after conflicts in places such as Rwanda, the DRC, Iraq, and many others in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many have suggested shifting towards more locally guided peacebuilding. As alternatives such as this “local turn” have been proposed, a rift has emerged between status-quo technocrats and advocates for transformative change through more “radical” or critical ideologies. At the heart of this debate is a question of the relevancy of liberal peacebuilding norms in societies where such norms have little, if any, resonance. In her new book, Peacebuilding Legacy: Programming for Change and Young People’s Attitude to Peace, Sukanya Podder tackles the fissure between technocratic and transformative peacebuilding. She addresses the extent to which peacebuilding initiatives positively shape attitudes towards peace over the long term. To do so, she investigates the fundamental question of whether a technocratic approach to peacebuilding is effective in building sustainable change after conflict. More specifically, Podder examines the uptake of liberal norms in peacebuilding programs and the ability of these norms to transform intergeneration and intergroup relations at the local level. Peacebuilding Legacy contributes to an important conversation regarding the relationship between the theoretical ideals of peacebuilding and their practical application and therefore is relevant for both scholarly and practitioner audiences.