International Political Sociology of Peacebuilding

Abstract This chapter explores how sociological methods, concepts, and theories have been engaged to study international peacebuilding. Sociology is used in three ways to study peacebuilding: as general ontological understanding of the research object as a “society” in which policymakers can intervene in order to achieve specific policy goals; as a set of observation methods; and as a reference in social theory and philosophy that allows criticizing peacebuilding’s configurations of power and inequality. Given their substantially different epistemologies, these ways draw a very uneven image of what that society actually is, how it “works,” and how it affects or is affected by peacebuilding.