Peacebuilding is a necessary effort to be achieved as it ensures a harmonious life for humankind, yet it is not easy to achieve. In 2019, countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America provided more than 92% of all military and police personnel for UN peace operations (Getie, 2024). As of June 2024, the UN’s fifth committee approved nearly $5.6 billion as one of the reasons to keep 14 peacekeeping missions (United Nations, 2024). Nevertheless, the world has not yet reached its peaceful coexistence, and most countries in the Global South are still in turmoil and instability. For instance, despite the presence of international actors, Sudan’s peacebuilding efforts still face challenges because of a lack of inclusivity and consistency (Getie, 2024). This led to a question: Why do international peacebuilding efforts continue failing to create sustainable peace in the global south despite decades of global investment and experience? To answer the inquiry, this essay argues that internationally led peacebuilding efforts in the Global South often fail to produce sustainable peace because they prioritize liberal institutional frameworks over local needs, power dynamics, and indigenous peace practices—resulting in interventions that lack legitimacy, ownership, and long-term viability. Several arguments will be analyzed, including the failure of liberal peacebuilding in creating sustainable peace and the question of neutrality in an internationally led peacebuilding effort.
Liberal Peacebuilding: A Universal Model or a Misguided Template?
The failure to create sustainable peace in the Global South is rooted in the emphasis on liberal peacebuilding in undergoing peacebuilding efforts. The liberal peace theory, as theorized by Paris (2004), assumes that democracy, free markets, and state-building are universal pathways to achieving sustainable peace. The aforementioned policy is also known as the “one-size-fits-all” approach, which believes that all countries must emphasize liberal values to achieve long-lasting peace (Spears, 2012). Liberal peacebuilding forgets to acknowledge the importance of considering local ownership and applying a universalist approach that ignores diverse local particularities. For instance, in Afghanistan, the US-led intervention following the 9/11 attacks, which aimed to establish democracy, promote human rights, and rebuild a state that resembles the top-down nature, has been deemed to have failed to address deep-rooted social issues (Mobaligh, 2021). The US-led peacebuilding had instead led to the creation of a fragile state and abundant practice of corruption, which resulted in the collapse of the government and made the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. Similarly, in the case of Iraq, the US-led intervention in 2003, which aimed to establish a liberal democracy, resulted in a power vacuum and sectarian violence, further destabilizing the region. As Spears (2012) argues, the international community’s repeated reliance on liberal peacebuilding frameworks does not address the root causes of the conflict but rather destabilizes the condition at the root level. These failures were not merely due to poor implementation. However, they were the nature of the liberal peacebuilding model itself—a model that imposed solutions without fully grappling with the complexity and specificity of local conditions.
Power, Politics, and Peace
International actors involved in peacebuilding are not politically neutral; donor agendas and geopolitical interests shape the efforts. From an economic perspective, this critique aligned with Langan’s (2018) argument that Western aid interventions in Africa often function as neo-colonialism, as the aid is often used for the donor country’s economic interest rather than to empower local communities. The value of liberal economics is brought to the mechanism of private sector development, which resulted in land dispossession, weakened local industries, and compromised policy autonomy instead of serving as a tool for pro-poor growth stimulus—as seen in cases such as Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania. Furthermore, the aid mechanism allows the unsteady local government to corrupt the government system, which failed the local entrepreneurial class (Moyo, 2008, as cited in Langan, 2018). From a geopolitical perspective, other examples can be drawn from the Sahel and the Middle East case. Driven by their foreign policy objectives, powerful states and international organizations emphasized their geostrategic priorities. They turned peacebuilding efforts into remote border security management by stabilizing conflicting regions to protect Western borders and limit refugee flows (Mansour & White, 2025). This reveals how international involvement in peace processes often prioritizes their security over local sovereignty.
Temporary Solutions, Lasting Instability
On the other hand, an internationally led peacebuilding effort can improve the prospects that a civil war will be resolved (Doyle & Sambanis, 2000). However, even though it can increase the possibility of resolving a civil war, in the Global South, internationally led peacebuilding efforts, which often heavily rely on liberal peacebuilding, produce a fragile peace rather than a sustainable order due to their nature that focuses on state development and neglects local legitimacy (Spears, 2012). An example can be drawn from Bosnia; even though they reached an end to the war, the society remains divided and frozen—not yet resolved—by ethnic tension (Spears, 2012). Other than that, Global-North-based peacebuilding often induces asymmetric relations of power, where donor countries dictate priorities, timelines, and institutional designs that reflect their own strategies and interests rather than prioritizing the recipient country (Cohen, 2014). These resulted in turning the recipient states into a laboratory for creating foreign-based design reforms that might delegitimize Indigenous knowledge systems (Cohen, 2014). In regards to that, internationally led peacebuilding must rather shift to a “local turn” strategy by prioritizing local concerns and embracing local participation to ensure the sustainability of grassroots peace.
A Local Turn for Sustainable Peace
The failure of the internationally led peacebuilding effort in the Global South is predominantly due to liberal peacebuilding that emphasized “one size fits all” approaches and policies. The aid given by international donors often served as their mechanism to favor their own agenda, such as to establish remote border security management. While international involvement might resolve civil war in conflicting countries, it cannot produce sustainable peace; it can produce fragile peace. Hence, to reach sustainable peace in the peacebuilding effort, it is significant for the international actors to take a “local turn” and focus on acknowledging local necessities and local urges rather than serving their interests.
