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This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Third World Quarterly on 19 Jul 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2019.1637729 . ; Recently there have been calls from policymakers around the world for practically engaged research to produce evidence-based policy for peace, security and development. Policymakers aim to align three types of methodological approaches to knowledge about peace, security and development in international order: methodological liberalism at state and international levels, aligned with 'methodological everydayism' in order to constrain methodological nationalism. Policy operates through broad forms of intervention, spanning military, governmental and developmental processes, which scholarship is expected to refine. Critical scholarship is sensitive about the subsequent 'interventionary order', often connecting methodological everydayism with global justice frameworks rather than methodological nationalism or liberalism.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Global Society on 25 March 2018, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13600826.2018.1451828 . ; International Relations (IR) and related social science disciplines focusing on peace and conflict studies have enabled a bureaucratic understanding of peacebuilding and a liberal form of peace. This has extended into a neoliberal type of statebuilding. There is now an impressive international architecture for peace, but its engagement with its subjects in everyday contexts has been less impressive. An earlier group of conflict researchers, grouped around John Burton and later A.J.R. Groom, have long argued that this is partly because IR has concentrated on elite power, problem-solving methodology and positivist epistemologies. It has failed to understand the dynamics, agency and hybridity of human society and institutions when it comes to peace, or that inequality is conflict inducing. Rescuing peacebuilding from neoliberal epistemological frameworks requires an anthropological and ethnographic sensitivity.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Peacekeeping on 21 August 2018, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13533312.2018.1511374 . ; Contrary to most debates about state formation, this article outlines an alternative perspective on the shaping of political community – and the international peace architecture – based on the agency of actors engaged in peaceful forms of politics after war. Drawing on long-standing critical debates, it investigates the positive potential of 'peace formation', outlining the theoretical development of this new concept as a parallel process and often in opposition to modern state formation with which it is often bound up. It also examines the limits of peace formation and its engagement with old and new types of power and conflict. This perspective on the formation of political order has implications for the international peace architecture and its evolution, including in terms of a shift from analogue to digital form of peace.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the Australian Journal of International Affairs on 16 December 2018, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10357718.2018.1557106 . ; The 'long peace' of the last twenty-five years has linked various forms of intervention—from development to peacebuilding and humanitarian intervention—with human rights. This 'interventionary system/order' model has premised its legitimate authority on expanded versions of human rights, connected to liberal frameworks of democracy, rule of law, and capitalism in order to connect peace more closely with justice. Human rights offer a tactical way forward for those interested in conflict resolution, but this has led to unintended consequences. Unless conceptions of rights are continually expanded as new power structures and inequalities are uncovered and challenged, philosophical and material matters of distributive and historical justice will remain.

Source at https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0010836717750198 . ; What does it mean to mediate in the contemporary world? During the Cold War, and since, various forms of international intervention have maintained a fragile strategic and territorially sovereign balance between states and their elite leaders, as in Cyprus or the Middle East, or built new states and inculcated new norms. In the post-Cold War era intervention and mediation shifted beyond the balance of power and towards the liberal peace, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Timor Leste. In the case of Northern Ireland, identity, territorial sovereignty, and the nature of governance also began to be mediated, leading to hints of complex, post-liberal formulations. This article offers and evaluates a genealogy of the evolution of international mediation.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Mediterranean Politics on 11 June 2017, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13629395.2017.1338214 . ; Policy debates on conflict research, which are mostly directly used to develop practices of soft intervention (including conflict resolution, peacebuilding and statebuilding), emanate from common epistemic and ontological frameworks. Most have been produced and perpetuated by key institutions in the global North through their encounter with historical direct and structural violence, both North and South. Power has followed Enlightenment knowledge, along with its various biases and exclusions. Its progressive normative, political, economic and social assumptions about a 'good society' and an 'international community' have been fed through social science into the building of international institutions, IFIs and the donor system. Using a method called ethnographic biography (in which biography is broadly defined to include the bibliography produced by the subject, as well as interviews and discussions), this article illustrates how peace thinking is mutually constructed as both positive and hybrid, confirming earlier critical work. However, the research methods deployed to engage with the contextual production of knowledge by local scholar-practitioners are sorely underdeveloped. This is illustrated through an analysis of the work of 'local' conflict scholars on their own peacebuilding and statebuilding processes in Cyprus, Kosovo and Timor Leste.

As a response to the dynamics of state formation, statebuilding has not created model states in the last twenty years as was intended. Instead, the states that have emerged around the world are heavily contextually contingent. This is despite international attempts to shape them according to a common pattern, dominated by neoliberal models of statehood. This raises the question of what kind of hybrid states are actually forming as a result of the encounter between international statebuilding and local political dynamics? This article argues that international statebuilding aims to create neoliberal states and treats local political dynamics as dysfunctional. Yet from a local perspective the limitations of the statebuilding model are also apparent, as is the need for any locally legitimate state to be grounded in its context. Adapted from the source document.