This project aims to increase our understanding about how to bring about peace after violent conflict. Peacebuilding policy and practice is dominated by efforts to build liberal democracies and free markets, despite mixed results in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste. Peacebuilding scholarship is also very normative and overly focused on this liberal paradigm. What is mostly overlooked is how some post-conflict states have taken a very different route to peace, using illiberal means to achieve political stability, physical security, and economic growth over the medium-term. The pressing questions are whether illiberal methods can create durable peace and openings for future liberalization. These questions can best be answered using a political economy approach that draws on recent scholarship on political settlements and political marketplaces.

The project will fund a workshop to stimulate innovative and collaborative research into illiberal peacebuilding in Asia. There is very little theorizing or comparative work on illiberal peacebuilding so the workshop can help fill that gap. The workshop will bring together 10 early-career and established researchers from different disciplines and different methodological approaches to look at specific case studies and cross-cutting themes. The workshop is being held in Sri Lanka as that offers an opportunity to engage in knowledge exchange with local researchers, policymakers, and peacebuilders as that country makes a tentative shift from illiberal to more liberal peacebuilding. The workshop has three components: a one-day public conference on Sri Lanka’s peacebuilding, a one-day closed workshop, and a three-day “peacebuilding tour” of the north.