Abstract
This special issue aims to account for some of the political and social processes at work in the aftermath of armed conflicts; by the same token, it explores the production of public policies in sectors frequently neglected by “post-conflict” specialists. As such, it stands in contrast to the exceptional approaches of “post-conflict”, which usually focus on the upheavals brought about by war and on the social and political engineering of peacebuilding. Our challenge is to empirically identify the links between war, endeavours to bring an end to it, and other spheres of policy action. The introductory article links this approach to recent scholarship emphasizing the “ordinary” during war situations, proposes a brief state of the literature and presents the main objectives of the special issue: to analyse the multiple uses of the “post-conflict” category in the production of public policy and to trace the various ways in which a violent past bears an influence upon policy-making.