The concept of human security continues to defy definitional clarity at the same time as it is being embraced by policy-makers. This article proposes a practice-grounded approach, which focuses on investigative method as a way of linking conceptual understanding of human security to the research process. Probing the actorness of individuals in volatile contexts, a study of insecurity in Kosovo shows how dialogue can be applied as a research tool to access and assess human security in the field. Dialogue allows the recognition of the power of the researched in the construction of knowledge of security, reflecting the conceptual shift represented by human security from states to communities and individuals. In the Kosovo study, dialogic research captured individual agency in the face of pervasive insecurity, revealing its contradictory effects. It led to the identification of a multidirectional security marker as a means to understand experiences of insecurity in relation to strategies to combat it. Three such markers: self-reliance, informality and community solidarity, emerged and are analysed in the case of Kosovo. Simultaneously denoting restrictions on people's security and possibilities for overcoming those very same limitations, the markers express the agential dimension of human security and show how agency and security interact.

Focusing on conflict legacy, this article contributes to the study of domestic mediating conditions as an explanation of "shallow Europeanisation" in the Western Balkans, defined as a disconnect between European rules and local practices. It critiques the prevalent neoWeberian understanding of state capacity, which highlights rule-enforcement capability of state institutions, but reduces conflict legacy to a question of resources. The article argues that a relational approach to state capacity which attributes its strength to enduring ties among state and non-state actors better captures the challenge to European Union (EU)-driven domestic transformation in a post-conflict context. A case study of the Hercegovina Holding is used to unravel a Bosnian Croat network originating during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. The empirical evidence of the network's operation illustrates how key EU benchmarks for private sector development can be undermined, making a case for a more rigorous conceptualisation of conflict legacy as a domestic constraint on the EU's leverage.

Current understandings of why and how gender-based violence continues beyond the end of conflict remain siloed along theoretical and disciplinary lines. Recent scholarship has addressed the neglected structural dimension when examining the incidence and variation of post-conflict gender-based violence. In particular, continuum of violence and feminist political economy perspectives have offered accounts of gender-based violence during and after conflict. However, these approaches overlook how war and postwar economic processes interact over time and co-constitute the material basis for the continuation of gender-based violence. The war and postwar political economy perspective that we leverage examines critically the distinction, both in theory and practice, between global and local dynamics, and between formal and informal actors in post-conflict societies. Exposing these neglected structural and historical interconnections with evidence from post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, we demonstrate that the material basis of genderbased violence is a cumulative result of political and socioeconomic dynamics along the war-to-peace trajectory. Our findings point to the need to be attentive to the enduring material consequences of interests and incentives formed through war, and to the impact of postwar global governance ideologies that transform local conditions conducive to genderbased violence.

External peacebuilding interventions have moved towards comprehensive strategies to tackle the complex problems of peace, security and development. This paper proposes a 'Whole-of-Society' (WOS) approach which seeks to enhance the effectiveness of externally-led peacebuilding and conflict prevention through recourse to the social contexts within which they are implemented. The aim of WOS is to see complexity, both within local society and in the relations between external peacebuilders and local society, as an opportunity to be grasped, as much as an impediment to effective outcomes. A WOS approach adds a practice dimension to debates on ownership, local peace and hybridity, trust-in-peacebuilding and their conceptualisations of local agency and dynamics. It seeks to address the operational gaps that emerge within a societal perspective to peacebuilding, in particular by suggesting ways of achieving appropriate configurations of external and local resources, agency and initiatives. A recurrent theme in conflict and security studies is the integration of discrete concepts and policy actions in order to achieve a more rounded, and by implication, a more effective response to situations of violence and instability, delivered by external intervention. This has led to pairing security and development, the synthesis of civilian and military capabilities and combinations of global, regional and local

No abstract