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approaches centre on sub-state actors and on individuals, emphasising the importance of human agency in the development of sustainable peace.

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peacebuilding, but how it can realise its potential, what are the roles of various actors, what are critical factors and pre-conditions for their effectiveness, and how can external actors best provide support’ (World Bank, 2006: v). The European Union goes even further in linking it to democracy, with a European Commission Communication claiming that ‘[a]n empowered civil society is a crucial component of any democratic system’, within which it ‘represents and fosters pluralism and can contribute to more effective policies, equitable and sustainable development and inclusive growth, [and] is an important player in fostering peace and in conflict resolution’ (European Commission, 2012: 3).

While there is no commonly accepted understanding of what ‘civil society’

precisely means and who constitutes it, in the literature there seems to be no contestation of it being a space where voluntary collective actions shaped around common interests, purposes, and values take place (Paffenholz and Spurk, 2006: 2).

Furthermore, ‘civil society’ is also understood by many as a sector distinct from those of the state, the family, and the market, composed of various voluntary organisations, which are not solely driven by private and economic interests, are autonomously organised, and interact closely with the state and the political sphere (ibid.: 2–3). The term itself also appears to imply a certain level of civility expected by the organisations that are part of this sector (ibid.: 8). In the liberal peacebuilding framework, the civil society is seen in opposition to the state, from which it is expected to retain autonomy in order to be able to guarantee basic democratic values and principles, to protect the citizens from any despotic tendencies by the state apparatus, to ensure monitoring and

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accountability of the state officials, but also to act as a service delivery supplier when the state, in particular the welfare state, is weak (Spurk, 2010: 24; Debiel and Sticht, 2005: 9–10). This understanding of civil society originated in European intellectual discourse and is rooted in liberal individualism (Hann, 1996). Crucially, in the peacebuilding practice, ‘civil society’ has by and large become synonymous to civil society organisations (CSOs) or NGOs in certain societies. In fact, the aforementioned European Commission Communication draws a clear link between ‘civil society’ and CSOs, with the latter including organisations that adhere to the liberal democratic political orientation of the EU (Liden et al., 2016).

The seeming focus of the international community on the role of the local population in peace processes has, among other things, resulted in the introduction of concepts such as ‘local ownership’ and ‘local participation’ in the peacebuilding practitioners’ discourse in the last decade or so. A 2008 UN document, for instance, states that ‘[n]ational and local ownership is critical to the successful implementation of a peace process’ (United Nations, 2008: 36). In practice, ‘local ownership’ does not imply autonomy, but rather local responsibility for politics, which is disciplined and regulated by international norms (Hughes and Pupavac, 2005). Timothy Donais (2011) further argues that ‘local ownership’ is key for a lasting peace only if understood as a hybrid concept, rooted in both the ‘communitarian peacebuilding from below’, often advocated by NGOs, represented through a local social agency, and the ‘liberal’ vision of peacebuilding, in this case represented by universal norms. Such engagement with

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local agency, in whichever form, has not taken place in the peacebuilding practice thus far and has remained but a mere rhetorical commitment (Donais, 2009: 18).

In fact, the international peacebuilding community has by and large failed to engage with local populations in conflict-ridden societies in any meaningful way (Richmond, 2012). As noted before, the main focus of the attempt at engaging the

‘locals’ has remained the civil society, which as Oliver Richmond (2010: 670) points out, is a ‘Western-induced artifice’. This discourse has become so prominent that peacebuilding-via-civil society, along with statebuilding and democratic reform, has been identified as part of the triad of discourses of the liberal peace (Heathershaw, 2008: 603–604).

Exploring the conceptual framing of civil society in the peacebuilding discourse, Chandler (2010: 387) argues that by framing post-conflict societies in liberal democratic terms, as self-governing, autonomous, and rational individuals, the civil society discourse enables an interventionist policy paradigm while ‘reinforcing and reinstitutionalising international hierarchies of power and evading responsibility for policy outcomes’. Despite presenting the international intervention as an effort toward preserving the autonomy of the post-conflict subject, through actions under the rubric of empowerment and capacity-building, the discourse nonetheless remains based on the assumption that the intervened civil society, as showcased by the war, lacks the rational and civic qualities that can be found in a Western civil society (ibid.: 384). In addition, the internationals’ engagement conceptualised as focused on saving the post-conflict subjects’ autonomy in fact leads to subjection. Barbara Cruikshank, for instance,

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examining ‘technologies of citizenship’ from a perspective of theories of power and the creation of subjects, argues that people’s empowerment in a democracy is in actuality a measure of subjection rather than of any autonomy from power (Cruikshank, 1999).

What she identifies as ‘technologies of citizenship’, working through everyday practices, contribute to the governmental authority being extended. It can be argued that the same holds true for conflict-ridden societies brought under the umbrella of liberal peacebuilding, with the important difference being that it is usually not the national government, but the international peacebuilders whose authority is being extended.

In more practice-oriented terms, the criticism of this civil-society approach has been directed both at a predominantly Western concept being used in non-Western contexts and the practice which has rarely succeeded in understanding the realities on the ground and adjusting the approach accordingly. Overall, scholars have been vocal about the failure of the existing approach to establish a meaningful local engagement by mainly appealing to organisations that are part of the Western civil society imaginary, leading to marginalisation and supplanting of ‘the genuine grassroots local’ or ‘the local-local’, often seen by peacebuilders as corrupt, anti-democratic, inefficient, and neopatrimonial (Richmond, 2011a: 152). By not recognising and therefore excluding local knowledges and traditional forms of societal associations, what is created is a civil society that to a large extent appears alien to the wider local population. This approach, seen as formal and elitist (Pouligny, 2005: 507), has resulted in civil society organisations that have weak membership and are largely divorced from the general public (Orjuela, 2004: 256). These legitimacy issues aside, due to saturation with

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international funds in the aftermath of war, the number of NGOs in post-conflict zones has skyrocketed and, in particular, there has been a mushrooming of NGOs whose vision and mission overlap with the liberal peacebuilding agenda (Pouligny, 2005: 499).

Such donor-driven NGO-centred civil society that lacks legitimacy among its constituency clearly limits its capacity to create any kind of domestic social capital and ownership over the peace process. All of this leads to the organisations and the local development as a whole becoming dependent on foreign presence (Belloni, 2001: 163).

In addition to the process being approached as a primarily technical dimension, separated from politics, the development of a civil society is also based on the faulty assumption that there exists a clear distinction between the political and the social, or the non-political. Yet, despite this assumed distinction, practice shows that the interventions themselves often contribute to a state-society relationship that in actuality allows for the state to manipulate citizens’ representation (Cubitt, 2013). It is, therefore, for all these reasons that scholars and more seldom practitioners have sought to expand the understanding of the local beyond the present understanding of civil society.