IICRR’s Lecturer Dr Gëzim Visoka together with Prof. Oliver P. Richmond of the University of Manchester have published a major research on the emancipatory peace in the journal International Studies Perspectives.

The journal article entitled ‘After Liberal Peace? From Failed State-Building to an Emancipatory Peace in Kosovo’ argues that attempts to build a liberal peace and a concurrent neoliberal state in many post-conflict societies have not managed to produce a sustainable and emancipatory peace. Instead, international interventions have produced a local and negative hybrid peace that has been co-opted by the dynamics of local state formation and state contestation. These dynamics have overshadowed a meaningful transition from ethnic hostility to sustainable peace that should encompass pluralism, security, law, rights, and liberal institutions. Despite these challenges, authors argue that space for an emancipatory peace will emerge only in a conciliatory vision of peace and state between different internal and external forces, differently constituted rights and claims, and needs. This is not a utopian view of peace, nor another interventionary framework. It is rather an attempt to outline an emancipatory framework of peace as nondomination rooted in local peace-enabling agency, drawing on the perspectives and approaches of local peace actors, and pointing to how international actors might facilitate this framework.

Full study can be accessed here: http://isp.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/09/19/isp.ekw006

Dr Gëzim Visoka recently published Peace Figuration after International Intervention, which can be accessed from DCU’s Library, and available for purchase from Routledge.