"Encouraging practitioners to question and challenge narratives around strategic peace building frameworks this research critically analyses such narratives and shows that they tend to be subjective in nature, signal certain political positions and are often framed through the lens of modernist state-building theory.".....Introduction: "There are innumerable actors engaging post-conflict contexts at the international, national and local level. Their activities target a broad range of political, economic, social and cultural agendas, spanning long pe riods of time and enduring particularly unstable conditions. Since the publication of An Agenda for Peace,2 the international community has been driven to amalgamate all such activities into an increasingly broad and multidimensional enterprise labelled post-conflict peacebuilding. As ti me passed, additional elements related to this new concept continued to be identified and duly incorporated into the undertaking, seeing in practice the ever-widening scope and breadth of peace building. In light of this, and after a string of less than successful experiences, practitioners and policy-makers alike recognized the need to tame such complexity and requested a more coherent master plan. In response to this demand s trategic planning frameworks for int ernational post-conflict peace building (SFPs)3 have been pr oduced since the mid-nineties, by the UN, IFIs, governments of donor and conflict-affe cted countries, regional organiz ations and NGOs. By 2010 the g7+ group of fragile states had identified ?the pr oliferation of strategic frameworks” as a significant challenge to peace building.4 Meanwhile, the European Parliament was considering drafting the EU?s own SFP.5 SFPs are policy planning documents comprising analysis and recommendations. They belong to the genre of technical- administrative texts but, as many plans do, SFPs also make use of narrative devices usually associated with literary works. In trying to produce a coherent prioritization, phasing and sequencing of activities, they construct a plot with a beginning, middle and end. In the process of attempting to identify and coordinate multiple actors, SFPs make distinctions between main and secondary characters, and between heroes, villains, and victims. And in trying to give a common meaning and purpo se to the myriad of tasks performed under the label of peace building, these documents portray themes of progress and crisis against the backdrop of dramatic stories about the fight between good and evil. This paper will try to illustrate how such narrativity present in SFPs signals certain political positions. To achieve this it will present an outline of the narrative analysis approach to policy planning. This is followed by a description of how the methodology has been adapted for this study to the requir ements of SFPs. The analysis is then divided in two distinct parts. The first discusses some features of the characters in the ?peace building story”: who are the heroes and their allies, the anti-subjects, the donor, and what does this signify. The second part deals with plot: how SFPs are structured around the triad Security-Development-Political Reform, and how this produces a set of recognizable stories. It is considered how the attempt to give coherence to a collection of literally hundreds of episodes, each of them an intricate narrative in itself, reflects the fact that the peace building story may turn out to be a version of another one, namely the modernist state building story. The paper ends with some reflections about how a narrative policy analysis can help us read and construct different discourses on peace building."