Book Review: Peacebuilding Legacy: Programming for Change and Young People’s Attitude to Peace
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231198210 |
| Author | Alina Dixon |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
with Priya Satia’s recent Time’s Monster,
13
mark an important new direction in impe-
rial history that investigates the British Empire’s resilience not only as an institution,
but as an idea—one that has been repeatedly legitimized within the public conscious-
ness well into the twenty-first century.
ORCID iD
Jessi A. J. Gilchrist https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8955-0567
Sukanya Podder,
Peacebuilding Legacy: Programming for Change and Young People’s Attitude to Peace.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 336 pp. $85.00 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-19286-398-0
Reviewed by: Alina Dixon (a.dixon@queensu.ca), Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario,
Canada
DOI: 10.1177/00207020231198210
A critical challenge faced by both peacebuilding scholars and practitioners is the
failure of a normative approach to peacebuilding, one that is largely technocratic
and programmatic, to achieve lasting peace. Following the limited successes of what
is now referred to as the “liberal peace paradigm”after conflicts in places such as
Rwanda, the DRC, Iraq, and many others in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many
have suggested shifting towards more locally guided peacebuilding. As alternatives
such as this “local turn”have been proposed, a rift has emerged between status-quo
technocrats and advocates for transformative change through more “radical”or critical
ideologies. At the heart of this debate is a question of the relevancy of liberal peace-
building norms in societies where such norms have little, if any, resonance.
In her new book, Peacebuilding Legacy: Programming for Change and Young
People’s Attitude to Peace, Sukanya Podder tackles the fissure between technocratic
and transformative peacebuilding. She addresses the extent to which peacebuilding ini-
tiatives positively shape attitudes towards peace over the long term. To do so, she
investigates the fundamental question of whether a technocratic approach to peace-
building is effective in building sustainable change after conflict. More specifically,
Podder examines the uptake of liberal norms in peacebuilding programs and the
ability of these norms to transform intergeneration and intergroup relations at the
local level. Peacebuilding Legacy contributes to an important conversation regarding
the relationship between the theoretical ideals of peacebuilding and their practical
application and therefore is relevant for both scholarly and practitioner audiences.
13. Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2020).
490 International Journal 78(3)
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