This paper explores why Afghanistan’s centralized planning and budgeting policies, despite consistent failure to improve local participation and allocative efficiency, remained stable. Based on policy feedback theory, there are two explanations. First, policy actors, given their interests, often tend to keep the status quo unchanged; and second, policymaking processes play a facilitative role for policy actors. This paper explains how centralized policymaking processes enable policy actors to bypass specific constraints of institutional environment such as agenda setting, principalagent dynamics, information symmetry, and credible commitment to keep certain policies unchanged. With the recent collapse of Afghan state, the Taliban would most likely continue the centralized planning and budgeting policies given their past governance approach and their recent performance.

Peace education in conflict affected societies has achieved widespread popularity amongst international aid agencies seeking to find a place for education in supporting peacebuilding since the 1990s. However, its aims, content, and effectiveness have been critiqued particularly for its failures to address structural causes of grievances. This article draws on empirical research exploring a UNICEF supported peace education related curriculum reform in Sierra Leone developed in 2008 called “Emerging Issues.” The article draws on a critical discourse analysis of its content and qualitative interview data with key informants. It argues that while “Emerging Issues” was well-intentioned, its lack of regard for contextual dynamics generating conflict and a tendency to pathologize the nation served to undermine its transformatory goals.

Post-war reconstruction in Sri Lanka, which is aided by many countries, is aimed at consolidating the unitary state structure as part of a geo-strategic security complex in the Indian Ocean Region. In this process, discourses of democratization and human rights have been reconfigured to contain or totally remove any threat to the unitary state emerging from the Tamils in the North and East whose claim to self-determination is seen as a major challenge to the geo-strategic complex in South Asia. In such a context, the bio-politics of the development-security nexus and neo-liberal governmentality operates by strengthening the hegemony of the Sinhala state against the Tamils and weakening or destroying the essential foundations of Tamil nationhood. Without recognizing these local and global dynamics every peacebuilding attempt will fail.