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Lecture Summary:
Local ownership is increasingly recognized as a key element in the long-term sustainability of post-conflict peacebuilding.   In practice, however, local ownership has been understood narrowly as a process through which domestic elites in post-conflict states are expected to implement key elements of what has come to be known as the ‘liberal peace’.   Recent experience in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere suggest that this conception of local ownership rests on questionable assumptions about the willingness of domestic actors to take ownership over external models of reform.   Drawing on examples from a range of recent peacebuilding processes, I re-conceptualise local ownership in terms of the ways in which agency is exercised by a diverse range of local actors throughout the post-conflict period, in ways that can both support and undermine the broader peacebuilding process.   Viewing ownership as part as an ongoing struggle for influence, authority and legitimacy across the international-local divide not only better captures the reality of contemporary peacebuilding processes, it also suggests the need for less paternalistic forms of outside engagement with post-conflict societies.