Introduction

In July 2003, after several years of internal violent conflicts, the Solomon Islands (SI) became the target of the biggest peacebuilding intervention in the Pacific region to date – the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). This mission is generally presented as a success story of post-conflict peacebuilding and state-building. It can be seen as a paradigmatic case of a peacebuilding intervention that closely follows a liberal peacebuilding-as-statebuilding approach. RAMSI has embarked on an ambitious project of state reconstruction, including the reform of the state's security sector, building the capacities of the central machinery of government and fostering the effectiveness of the various branches of the state apparatus. The underlying assumption is that a ‘proper’ state, that is, a state of the Western liberal ideal type, is the best guarantor of sustainable peace.

Copious resources have been poured into the peacebuilding-as-statebuilding project in this small country, with its population of just over half a million, and the international interveners have, without doubt, something to show for their engagement, particularly with regard to maintaining negative peace as the absence of overt violence on a larger scale. Nevertheless, there are concerns regarding the sustainability of peace, especially what might happen when the internationals finally withdraw for good. RAMSI has been in SI for twelve years now. Such long-term commitment is laudable – other interventions have been criticised for their short termism, and rightly so. But the repeated extensions of the mandate, at the request of the host government and according to the wishes of the majority of the local population, albeit in successively reduced form, also indicate an unease about what has been accomplished and how sustainable it will be in the absence of the internationals.

Sustainability can, indeed, be questioned, mainly because the internationals’ focus on building the capacities of state institutions ignores the presence of a wide variety of non-state providers of peace and order in the local context which could provide the basis for the emergence of a positive hybrid peace.

This chapter focuses on local peace agency, showing how locals have pursued their own indigenous processes of peace formation, detached from, and parallel to, RAMSI, albeit in its shadow.