Technocracy, Governance and Conflict Resolution (original) (raw)
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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, 2020
This chapter aims to examine the ways in which technology has been used in bottom-up ways that seek to resist and/or transform violent and oppressive contexts in order to build peace. At the same time, the chapter also highlights those instances by which international actors (organisations and states) seek to co-opt technological advances that debilitate traditional, top-down hierarchies of power and order because they perceive them as a tool that facilitates the erosion of their control. The chapter’s main argument is that technological advances hold great potential for the future of peacebuilding’s praxis and research by including marginalised voices, but it must be born in mind that they are nothing but a tool – meaning that they can be used to promote peace as much as they can be used to foment divisions or instigate and sustain violence. Nonetheless, any future research agenda on peace must unavoidably take into consideration the variety of technological tools and platforms utilised by grassroots actors.
The Rise of Illiberal Peacebuilding and Authoritarian Modes of Conflict Management
Cornell Internation Affairs Review
In recent years, the world has witnessed the regression of the liberal model in post-conflict resolution. Authoritarian Modes of Conflict Management (ACM) is the existing conceptual challenger to the liberal model; however, ACM has not fully captured the realities of authoritarian post-conflict governance. This paper aims to contribute to the ACM framework by addressing some of its major shortcomings. Through several historical and contemporary case studies, this paper suggests that weak authoritarian actors can obtain both material and discursive support from a strong international partner, thereby bolstering their capacity to govern and legitimizing their ruling status and controversial policies. The liberal model of post-conflict resolution has fallen short of its architects' expectations. Cases of internationally brokered peace rose markedly in the 1990s, but has dropped quite significantly since the early 2000s, from eight cases in 2001 to one in 2010. 2 This number is particularly worrisome because it implies that parties involved in conflict are losing confidence in liberal institutions (e.g. peace treaties, international organizations). Despite these developments, international relations (IR) scholarship has not caught up with fluctuating political reality. Peace and conflict studies tend to focus on the theorization of 1 Harold Cheung is a senior at the University of Hong Kong, where he is pursuing a double major in History and Political Science. He is currently an undergraduate research fellow at the Department of History at HKU. His research interests include international relations, American history, Sino-American intellectual contact, and the imperial Chinese legal system. 2 Mimmi Kovacs and Isak Svensson, "The Return of Victories? The Growing Trend of Militancy in Ending Armed Conflicts" (paper prepared for the 7th General Conference of the
PeaceTech: The Liminal Spaces of Digital Technology in Peacebuilding
This collection of articles contributes to the growing body of research on how technology is affecting peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, and research methodologies in the field. Assumptions about the use of technology for peace are interrogated, such as the purported deepening of inclusivity and widening of participation that technology provides to peacebuilders and communities. It frames the discussion from a peace-focused perspective, providing a response to the work done by others who have focused on the ways technology makes violence more likely. This supports a holistic discussion of the ways that technology can have an impact on contentious social and political processes. By expanding the base of knowledge about how technology can be used for peace and violence, we hope this collection increases the understanding of the circumstances under which technology amplifies peace.
BOOK REVIEW: The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-conflict States
South African Journal of International Affairs, 2018
International peacebuilding efforts have more often failed to deliver long-term stability and peace than offered successful models of building sustainable peace. Indeed, a growing body of literature has shown that international peacebuilding efforts impose Western, neoliberal ideas of governance and society that frequently fail to anchor peace locally in societies affected by conflict. Moreover, they fail to address the increasingly complex challenges relating to, among others, human rights, environmental and climate change, and health and sanitation, which affect societies long after conflicts have ceased. In The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-conflict States, Naazneen H Barma provides a new perspective on the question of why so many international peacebuilding interventions fail. Using a historical institutionalist lens, Barma conducts an in-depth comparative study of peacebuilding interventions in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan. She argues that these interventions failed to reach their intended goals because of the ways in which domestic elites constructed political order during three moments of intervention: conflict settlement, implementation and in the aftermath of intervention. She contends that, in such processes, international peacebuilding interventions selectively grant substantial power to specific elites, who in turn ‘use that power to enact subtle strategies of institutional conversion to their own ends’ (p. 4). Eventually, this leads to a consolidation of ‘neopatrimonial political order’ in which traditional and modern institutions coexist.
Illiberal Peace? Authoritarian Modes of Conflict Management
Cooperation and Conflict, 2018
In a contested international order, ideas of liberal peacebuilding are being supplanted by state-centric, authoritarian responses to internal armed conflicts. In this article we suggest that existing research has not yet sufficiently recognised this important shift in conflict management practice. Scholarship in peace and conflict studies has avoided hard cases of ‘illiberal peace’, or categorises them simply as military victories. Drawing on accounts of state responses to conflicts in Russia, Sri Lanka, China, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Turkey, we develop an alternative conceptual framework to understand authoritarian conflict management as a form of wartime and post-conflict order in its own right. Although violence is central to these orders, we argue that they are also dependent on a much wider range of authoritarian policy responses, which we categorise in three major domains: firstly, discourse (state propaganda, information control and knowledge production); secondly, spatial politics (both military and civilian modes of controlling and shaping spaces); and thirdly, political economy (the hierarchical distribution of resources to produce particular political outcomes). In conclusion, we propose a research agenda that moves on from discussions of liberal peace to examine hard cases of contemporary conflict and conflict management.
PDF Ngonela et al The Muted Voices in Peacebuilding and Implications on Conflict Resolution
Journal of Popular Education in Africa, 2023
Over years, in the realm of peacebuilding, there have been questions on what really constitutes peacebuilding. The central place of decision-making and the voices of the people at the lowest incidence of interventions have been contentious. After the 2007-2008 Post-election violence, Kenya embraced the state-centric National Accord and the Peace Committees that straddle the stratum of the regional administration from the Sub County level to the Regional and National level. This linkage formed the country's new peace infrastructure. The very nature of the transformation of the infrastructures for peace into a state-building project ought to be examined given the idea that in the post-Westphalian state system, the efficiency of the state is the requisite of peace, and 'building states' is seen as the panacea to peace. The methodology employed is a documentary review, In-depth interviews and narratives from fieldwork and the neo-Gramscian theory of domination is used as a theoretical framework. The official and grand entry of the international into the affairs of the Kenyan state created a meeting point for both illiberal and liberal frameworks of peacebuilding. Therefore, this study argues out that despite the assumption that the people have a stake in their making given their history, the power metrics between the international, the state, and the local means that there is a dominant script of the liberal ideology. The entry of international actors and the state into the micro-politics of Kenyans robs it of its inherent hue and essentializes a reengineering process.
Astrolabio. Revista Internacional de Filosofía, 2012
Notoriously, state-building is a key enterprise in regard of addressing the international conflicts throughout the globe. The consolidation of peace associated to it is intimately connected with the institutionalization of liberal ideas in structuring realms such as the political, the economical and the social spheres. Departing from Foucauldian concepts such as dispositif, government, discipline and biopolitics, this paper aims to critically analyze the post-conflict state-building practice. In a first moment, the paper delineates how peace was operationalized during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. In a second moment, it will present the Foucauldian conceptual tools that enables the (re)problematization of the state-building practice as a post-conflict normalizing dispositif, rather than merely a conflict-resolution tool.
Despite the volume of research exploring the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for destructive purposes (terrorism, crime, war propaganda) on the one hand, and development (ICT4D) on the other hand, very little has been said about the role that traditional, and especially new social media, can play for the transformation and prevention of conflicts. This paper recognises ICTs as a tool, thus accepting their multi-level and multi-dimensional potential in the transformation as well as the intransigence and promotion of conflict. The paper seeks to explore: (a) whether ICTs can empower marginalised actors to transcend the peacebuilding and statebuilding processes, and lead to a more locally-owned, more representative transformation of the conflict; (b) whether ICTs can foster more hybrid forms of peace; and (c) whether they can be co-opted as a platform by donors to promote their agendas and impede resistance.
Analogue crisis, digital renewal? Current dilemmas of peacebuilding
GLOBALIZATIONS, 2020
The international architecture of peacebuilding and statebuilding, with the United Nations’ efforts central among them, is currently responding to a shift from ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ approaches in international relations. This is affecting intervention, peacebuilding and development. This article analyses the potential that these new digital forms of international relations offer for the reform of peacebuilding – namely, the enhancement of critical agency across networks and scales, the expansion of claims for rights and the mitigation of obstacles posed by sovereignty, locality and territoriality. The article also addresses the parallel limitations of digital technologies, as well as the risk of co-optation by historical and analogue power structures, existing modi operandi and agendas of the United Nations, and other international actors. We conclude that though aspects of emerging digital approaches to peacebuilding are promising, they cannot yet bypass or resolve older, analogue conflict dynamics revolving around the state, territorialism, and state formation.