International Statebuilding : The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance

Spanning a broad remit of policy practices from post-conflict peacebuilding to sustainable development and EU enlargement, Chandler draws out how these policies have been cohered around the problematization of autonomy or self-government. Rather than promoting democracy on the basis of the universal capacity of people for self-rule, international statebuilding assumes that people lack capacity to make their own judgments safely and therefore that democracy requires external intervention and the building of civil society and state institutional capacity. Chandler argues that this policy framework inverses traditional liberalûdemocratic understandings of autonomy and freedom û privileging governance over government û and that the dominance of this policy perspective is a cause of concern for those who live in states involved in statebuilding as much as for those who are subject to these new regulatory frameworks. --