The Myth of Liberal Peace-building (original) (raw)
2013, Conflict, Security and Development
‘Liberal peacebuilding’ is a subject of intense debate within contemporary IR. This article contends, however, that for all the merits of much of the work on the subject, the overall terms of the debate are rooted in a series of questionable assumptions. Proponents and critics alike hold that peacebuilding is an essentially liberal project, over which there is a global (or Western) consensus, and which is pursued by a decentralised plurality of institutions irrespective of the particularly of war-endings. This article shows that this is misleading. Focusing on the relations between peace agreements and peacebuilding, it shows that peace agreements are contextually specific political arrangements, driven above all by strategic considerations of power and legitimacy, in relation to which liberal peacebuilding doctrines and practices are unevenly applied, instrumentalised, or plain ignored – including by international actors. It argues in turn that liberal peacebuilding discourse overstates both the liberalism of contemporary peace interventions, and the degree of global consensus thereover, and fails to capture the enduring centrality of states, strategy and geopolitics in the making of peace. These arguments are developed with reference to a wide range of cases of post-Cold War peace interventions, though with especial focus on UN peacebuilding in Cambodia in the early 1990s.
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One of the pressing problems with contemporary peacebuilding research is that much of the analysis focuses on the practical and technical challenges while paying little attention to the philosophical assumptions of those operations. Any understanding of peacebuilding is underpinned by philosophical frameworks as they shape and orient us towards particular strategies for peacebuilding. This paper makes a philosophical critique of liberal peacebuilding (the mainstream peacebuilding) and explores a postmodern post-liberal hybrid peacebuilding. The analysis claims neither the categorical rejection of liberal peacebuilding nor the exclusive reliance on locally-oriented peacebuilding. Rather, the upshot is the need for deconstructing dualistic view of either liberal peacebuilding or locally-oriented peacebuilding so that both external liberal actors and local actors engage in jointly learning and mutually transformative process wherein both liberal international actors and local actors lo...
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This paper assesses the discursive environment of post-conflict intervention as a prism through which to view the international politics of the post-Cold War era. I argue that the `liberal peace' is not a single discourse but a tripartite international discursive environment that dynamically reproduces technical solutions which fail to address the core issues of conflict in a given place. The paper starts from the assumption that over the last twenty years we have seen a shift from an understanding of peace as a state of affairs in a given territory (as explored by Michael Banks in a 1987 paper) to peace as a process of post-conflict intervention; a move from peace to peacebuilding. This `liberal peace' sets a standard by which `failed states' and `bad civil societies' are judged according to ethical, spatial and temporal markers. However, the apparent homogeneity of the model obscures the divisions and mergers which characterise the scholarship and practice of international peacebuilding. The boundaries of the peace debate remain; the political differences latent in Banks' three conceptions are retained in the evolving discourses of democratic peacebuilding, civil society and statebuilding. The paper shows how these three basic discourses are reproduced in international policy analyses and major academic works. Moreover, the discursive mediation of their differences is the dynamic by which the liberal peace is sustained, despite its detachment from the lived experiences of post-conflict environments. It is in this sense that we can comprehend international peacebuilding as a virtual phenomenon, maintained in the verbal and visual representations of international organisations, diplomats and academic policy-practitioners. In light of this disaggregation of the discursive environment, a better, more nuanced understanding of the liberal peace can be attained: one that is able to grasp how critics and criticisms become incorporated into that which they seek to critique. The paper concludes with three propositions regarding the nature of world order in the era of the tripartite `liberal peace'. During this time coercion, military force and even warfare have become standard and legitimate features of peacefare. The discursive dynamics of international peacebuilding illustrate how peace has become ever more elusive in contemporary international politics.
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One of the pressing problems with contemporary peacebuilding research is that much of the analysis focuses on the practical and technical challenges while paying little attention to the philosophical assumptions of those operations. Any understanding of peacebuilding is underpinned by philosophical frameworks as they shape and orient us towards particular strategies for peacebuilding. This paper makes a philosophical critique of liberal peacebuilding – the mainstream peacebuilding – and explores a postmodern post-liberal hybrid peacebuilding. The analysis claims neither the categorical rejection of liberal peacebuilding nor the exclusive reliance on locally-oriented peacebuilding. Rather, the upshot is the need for deconstructing dualistic view of either liberal peacebuilding or locally-oriented peacebuilding so that both external liberal actors and local actors engage in jointly learning and mutually transformative process wherein both liberal international actors and local actors look beyond peace constructed around their narrow and restricted conception and framework to create the meanings of peace that can interconnect the global and the local.
Beyond the Liberal Peace Approach Debate
In recent literature on the postwar peacebuilding interventions, attention has been drawn increasingly to the socio-political dynamics of war-affected states. However, much attention has not been paid to the reciprocal relationships of local sociopolitical dynamics on the outcomes of peacebuilding programmes such as the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR). This article placed sociopolitical factors, including the political structures of South Sudan, at the centre of its analysis while unpacking the shortcomings of externally imposed peacebuilding procedures. I argue that the externally imposed lens of DDR suffered from many limitations. First, security as the central pillar of international support to prevent the relapse to war is not often in the hand of the fragile states. Thus, the assumption of peacebuilding through liberal approaches misplaced a belief in a state monopoly of violence in war-affected states. The data I collected about South Sudan show that critical contextual pitfalls are being ignored and peacebuilding activities, notwithstanding significant institutional obstacles limiting the impact of these efforts. This problem requires empirical scrutiny of if international peacebuilders had engaged with the local dynamics of conflict, the process of DDR would have been inclusive instead of the resistance it faced in South Sudan.
International Agendas and the Legitimacy of the Liberal Peace
The hegemony of the liberal peace theory is under scrutiny in contemporary peacebuilding research for its failure to build sustainable peace in states emerging from conflict. Yet the international community increasingly relies on the tenets of the liberal peace to combat the insecurities of failed states in the international order. ‘Peacebuilding-as-governance’ dictates a policy of statebuilding that focuses on building the institutions of a liberal market democracy. This has potential for sustainable peacebuilding as long as a balance is maintained between providing security and establishing legitimacy in a local context. Unfortunately, this type of peacebuilding is influenced by the neo-liberal agenda of the international community. As a result, the processes of liberalization and democratization championed by the neo-liberal peace are destabilizing. Combined with the inability of western donors to reconcile a doctor-patient mentality with the promotion of local ownership, liberal peacebuilding praxis leads developing states to insecurity and illegitimacy. Thus, the liberal peace in praxis appears to be unsuited to building peace within weak or failed states emerging from conflict. The cases of Afghanistan and Somaliland demonstrate that while international agendas, neo-liberal praxis, and loss of local legitimacy are detrimental to sustainable peace there are local patterns that could help to balance these issues. Locally driven processes that enjoyed high levels of legitimacy in Somaliland were able to overcome some of the more disastrous effects of the statebuilding project in Afghanistan including several civil conflicts. The keys to Somaliland’s success appear to be the lack of pressure from the international community and the locally driven hybrid peace process, both of which reinforced the precarious balance of security and legitimacy. Perhaps there is an answer to be found in this hybrid method for moving beyond the hegemony of the liberal peace for conducting peacebuilding within states emerging from conflict.
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