Description
Winner of the 2019 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize
About the Author
Dr Christine Cheng is Lecturer in War Studies at King's College London. She is co-editor of Corruption and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Selling the Peace? and she sits on the Conflict Research Society's Governing Council. Her publications include Corruption and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Selling the Peace? (co-authored with Dominik Zaum, Routledge, 2011).
Reviews
This book is highly recommended to scholars and policymakers interested in grappling with the fuzzy lines between state/non-state, licit/illicit, political/economic, and even war and peace. Rather than considering these fault lines as hermetically sealed boundaries closing off our current approaches to understanding politics, Cheng effectively demonstrates how powerful forces in fact emerge from them. * Thomas Patrick Hinkel, Contemporary Voices *
This book makes several important contributions to research on peacebuilding, state formation, and non-state actors ... Through careful, qualitative research in postwar Liberia, it demonstrates that local combatant networks play essential roles in postwar stabilization -- and potentially beyond. The book thus points to the importance of extralegal groups in postwar settings, and suggests that both researchers and peacebuilders ignore them at their peril. * Louis-Alexandre Berg, Canadian Journal of African Studies *
Chen's study is an excellent contribution to the growing literature on how extra-legal groups build state-like institutions where the 'legitimate' state is either absent or extremely weak ... Cheng brilliantly highlights how extra-legal armed groups provide the basic structures that allow market exchanges and the rule of law -- no matter how problematic -- to survive and even thrive. * Shortlisted, Canadian Political Science Association Book Prize *
Cheng's book makes important conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of the emergence, development and functions of extra-legal groups thereby enriching the African politics literature and comparative politics literature more generally. * Honorable Mention, African Politics Conference Group Best Book Award *
Awards
Winner of Winner of the 2019 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize.
Book Information
ISBN 9780199673346
Author Christine Cheng
Format Hardback
Page Count 384
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 164mm * 29mm