This book is the first to chart the rise and fall of peacebuilding. It explores its beginnings as an ad-hoc extension of peacekeeping responsibilities and its formalization as a UN-supported international project aimed at building liberal states. Twenty years later, the foundational policy assumptions of peacebuilding—that democracy, the rule of law, and free markets were universal solutions to conflict-prone states and societies—have been revealed as naïve at best, and at worst, hubristic and Eurocentric. Here, Chandler traces the disillusionment with international peacebuilding and the discursive shifts in the self-understanding of the peacebuilding project in policy and academic debate. He charts the transformation from peacebuilding as an international project based on universalist assumptions to the understanding of peace as a necessarily indigenous process based on plural and non-linear assumptions.