Deferring Peace in International Statebuilding

Difference, Resilience and Critique

Pol Bargués-Pedreny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351174961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the last 25 years of international peacebuilding and recasts them as a growing crisis of confidence in universal ideas of peacebuilding and self-government.

Since current peacebuilding interventions are abandoning domineering, top-down and linear methodologies, and experimenting with context-sensitive, self-reflexive and locally driven strategies, the book makes two suggestions. The first is that international policymakers are embracing some of the critiques of liberal peace. For more than a decade, scholarly critiques have pointed out the need to focus on everyday dynamics and local initiatives and resistances to liberal peace in order to enable hybrid and long-term practice-based strategies of peacebuilding. Now, the distance between the policy discourse and critical frameworks has narrowed. The second suggestion is that in stepping away from liberal peace, a transvaluation of peacebuilding values is occurring. Critiques are beginning to accept and valorise that international interventions will continuously fail to produce sensitive results. The earlier frustrations with unexpected setbacks, errors or contingencies are ebbing away. Instead, critiques normalise the failure to promote stability and peace.

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, international intervention, conflict resolution, international organisations and security studies in general.

Part I

The disillusionment with liberal peace

Institutions to bridge a divided world

1 Introduction: the last agony of ‘liberal peace’

Liberal internationalism is not dead but is under siege in most international relations debates. In the United States, realists feel vindicated by the collapse of the liberal world order. They assert that the early hopes that liberal values and institutions would be welcomed universally and would transcend national identities, cultural wars or territorial disputes, have not been realised (Walt 2016). Committed liberals recount sorrowfully how democracy has broken down in at least 27 countries since the turn of the century and authoritarian regimes have become less responsive to their people (Diamond 2015). In a The National Interest symposium, major American commentators gather to discuss the loss of America’s purpose and dominance in world politics. Some of the commentators bewail the failures of democracy promotion in Iraq and Afghanistan, the moral and military retreat of Barack Obama’s years in office, or the United States incapacity and unwillingness to defeat Islamic State, change dynamics in Syria’s civil war or stop the Russian-Ukraine conflict. Others celebrate this loss as an opportunity to invest money at home and protect America’s interests abroad, rather than its values (Heilbrunn 2015). In Europe, liberals feel at bay, too. On the one hand, conservative parties dominate the landscape and right-wing populists protesting against immigration gain ground. On the other hand, critiques no longer appeal to universal ideas of truth and justice and express doubt about collective politics (Jacoby 1999, 101–24; Koddenbrock 2014). They have abandoned class struggle but have populated University classrooms, art exhibitions and coffee shops. Elsewhere, as Kenan Malik (2015) observes, anti-colonial sentiments have shifted from challenges to imperialist policies and a defence of the modernisation of the non-Western world to a rage against modernity, liberalism and the values of the Enlightenment.

In international intervention, the field under exploration in this book, liberalism also retreats. The optimism of the early post-Cold War era, when the United Nations Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992, 212), defended a strong United Nations (UN) ‘to consolidate peace and advance a sense of confidence and well-being among people’, contrasts with today’s pessimism and scepticism about international interventions. Since the 1990s and through much of the 2000s, international agencies were seen as capable of leading the transformation of countries beset by war into prospering liberal democracies. Foreign interference in domestic affairs and top-down strategies of statebuilding were considered necessary to protect human rights, promote market freedoms and spread democracy and peace worldwide. After more than two decades of international peace missions, the confidence in liberal interventions has drained away. The heyday of the ‘liberal peace’ – the governance project to transform post-war societies into liberal and democratic societies (Dillon and Reid 2000; Duffield 2001, 10–11; Paris 1997; Richmond 2005) – is long over.

As part of this crisis of confidence, there are two widespread lessons learnt by the UN and its partners: the first is that peacebuilding cannot be driven by external agents but must be owned and led by an inclusive conglomerate of local actors. The second is that international supervision must be long-term so that the objectives of peacebuilding can be consolidated. Although longer foreign interventions could be seen as a limiting factor of local ownership, in the policy literature it is assumed, quite the opposite, that the longer external agencies stay, the more ownership can be enhanced. The two assumptions are scrutinised below. The central point is that the non-contradiction hints at a fundamental shift away from liberal peace in the understanding of international intervention.

The first assumption was expressed with directness by the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, in his influential report ‘Peacebuilding in the Immediate Aftermath of Conflict’ (UNSG 2009, 4): ‘First and foremost, we know that peacebuilding is a national challenge and responsibility. Only national actors can address their society’s needs and goals in a sustainable way’ (see also, UNSG 2014, 2012). Rather than leading, imposing or governing, the UN (2010, 9–10) counsels ‘the international community’ to ‘understand the limits of its role as midwife to a national birthing process’. Local and national ownership is assumed to be ‘an imperative, an absolute essential, if peacebuilding is to take root’ (ibid.). In another report, the UN summarises the shift: ‘peace cannot be imposed from the outside’, ‘peace needs to emerge organically from within society’ (UN 2015b, 21). From international organisations to the UN’s individual programmes, almost every policy document today argues that local ownership is a ‘bedrock principle’, as ‘the transition from fragility to durable peace and stability is primarily an internal process’ (UNDP 2012, 101; see further, OECD 2011, 12).

Not only local ownership, but the policy of facilitating resilience also denotes a move away from liberal peace. While the concept of resilience had been used diversely in a variety of other disciplines, from psychology to ecology, it initially emerged in the contexts of development, disaster reduction and peacebuilding towards the end of the decade of 2000s (Bourbeau 2015; Chandler 2014). The UN Development Programme, for example, defines resilience as a ‘condition achieved by managing risks over time at individual, household, community and societal levels in ways that minimise costs’ (UNDP 2016a, 6). ‘A resilient governance system’, the report continues, is ‘a system that demonstrates acceptance of uncertainty and change, adaptability, robustness, resourcefulness, integration of its different parts, diversity and inclusiveness’ (ibid., 7). Similarly, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development describes resilience as a condition opposed to ‘fragility’: ‘the ability to cope with changes in capacity, effectiveness, or legitimacy. These changes can be driven by shocks – sudden changes – or through long-term erosions’ (OECD 2009, 78). Unlike weak, fragile or failing states and societies, resilient ones are considered to manage risks successfully and adapt to crises as they emerge (FAO 2016; Interpeace 2015; World Bank 2008). In brief, resilience is associated with adaptation to an adverse situation and it conveys a positive connotation.

The key is that resilience frameworks (international policy discourses that seek to strengthen the resilience of fragile societies) renounce externally driven and top-down regulatory mechanisms to achieve resilience and peace. Rather than seeking to apply generic models and setting ambitious goals a priori, international peacebuilders focus on fixing concrete situations and adapt to shifting circumstances. Rather than importing policy solutions from the outside, external peacebuilders cooperate with diverse local actors and use the existing indigenous capacities and resources at hand (Interpeace 2015; New York Peacebuilding Group 2015; UN 2015a; UN System Staff College 2010). The United Nations Development Programme elucidates the policy shift:

Increasingly, international policymakers look at the issue of fragility and conflict as one of strengthening the resilience of complex social and political processes that need to be worked with rather than against, and less as one of mechanistic eradication of discrete causal factors of conflict through the transfer of ‘best’ practices.

(UNDP 2016a, 7)

International policymakers, or so they openly avow, proceed with caution in processes of strengthening resilience. They have developed self-awareness and accepted that their actions to influence peace processes generate negative unintended consequences, like fostering dependency or constraining abilities of self-organisation (de Carvalho, de Coning and Connolly 2014; de Coning 2016).

Western states engaged in humanitarian assistance have drawn parallel conclusions, highlighting the importance of local ownership and strengthening resilience. The United States claims to have learnt from the negative experiences of post-conflict recovery in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which traditional military strategies, based on territorial control and massive troop deployments, failed to stabilise the security situation. In contrast, the new counterinsurgency approach demands that foreign actors develop low-cost and small footprint initiatives, giving priority to national partners. The United States military has drawn lessons for the future: the less force external actors use, the more efficient; the more counterinsurgency is nationally-owned the better, or sometimes doing nothing is the best option (U.S. Marine Corps 2006, 26–7; U.S. DoD 2012, 1–8). Similarly, the United Kingdom is cautious that ‘our humanitarian responses do no harm’ and are ‘delivered in a way that does not undermine existing coping mechanisms and helps a community build its own resilience for the future’ (DfID 2011, 10–11). Germany openly draws on John Paul Lederach and his emphasis on locally owned processes to shift from concerns with external regulatory actions to a focus on how diverse local actors become agents of peace (Paffenholz et al. 2011, 15). In short, there is a tendency among international agencies to withdraw from leadership roles and hand over responsibilities to multiple national actors. As pointed out in a UN (2015b, 21) review report: ‘the UN should do less and enable more’.

However, while there is an acceptance of the limits of influencing from afar, while there is a growing awareness of some dangerous effects of interventionist practices, while it is assumed that peacebuilding is an endogenous process, self-government is continually deferred. This is the second widespread assumption in today’s interventions. As it will be argued, local ownership of peacebuilding does not mean national sovereignty, but hybrid processes in which the presumed end goal – self-government – is continually postponed. Similarly, the idea of facilitating resilience implies persistent external supervision and precludes an end-state of national recovery in which support is no longer required. In contexts of state fragility, underdevelopment or post-conflict, the possibility of external withdrawal to defend self-government seems to have become unthinkable. The ‘States of Fragility’ report ranks the 50 most vulnerable states, which suffer on five fronts: they are exposed to different forms of violence, the rule of law is not inclusive, institutions are inefficient, endemic poverty and societies are vulnerable to shocks and disasters (OECD 2015). In the prospects for social progress and economic growth, there is no trust in the capacities of the local government of these countries to revert the situation, no confidence in the people to make sensitive advances on their own. Instead, the report considers that networks of aid organisations are vital to fix their institutions and strengthen their resilience.

More than two decades of engagement in post-conflict societies have eroded the respect for the equal rights and self-determination of peoples, as recognised in the UN Charter after World War II, or the faith in democracy as a motor for peace, as believed in the early 1990s. Conservative thinkers have tended to emphasise that culture – community-specific ideas, beliefs or values – in war-torn states affects negatively their societal and economic performance (Harrison and Huntington 2000; North 2005). Robert Keohane (2002) has emphasised that psychosocial stresses produced during the war make the population unready for taking up free democratic processes. If they exist at all, post-war local institutions are considered to be weak and dysfunctional, limiting the viability of states after external support ends (Fukuyama 2005; Ghani and Lockhart 2008; Paris 2004). Examining concrete dilemmas of statebuilding in conflict-affected spaces, some commentators note that certain uncivil groups tend to fuel conflict and shun reconciliation policies, interrupting advances for democratisation (Marchetti and Tocci 2009). Other scholars observe that post-conflict arrangements tend to marginalise women, youth or ethnic minorities and thus stress that aid provided by foreign organisations should correct these exclusions (Paffenholz 2010; Pouligny 2006). Furthermore, in the most sensitive sectors of state activity, such as security or the rule of law, local ownership is seen as utterly unrealisable and sometimes even counter-productive (Donais 2008; Laurie 2007).

Precisely because there is little reliance on self-government, all these analyses believe that the extension of international supervision is crucial to enhance ownership and resilience of conflict-affected societies. Rather than granting self-government, foreign regulatory mechanisms and resources to assist the consolidation of peace are increasingly put on a more durable footing. The latter is not framed as an inconsistency (longer intervention could be seen as undermining sovereignty or democratic politics), but as the lesson learnt from the externally driven and short-term interventions of yesteryear. According to the UN (2015b, 18) one of the most important shortcomings of the 1990s missions was the implementation of plans with concrete and fixed timelines and deliverables because ‘hurried’ processes and ‘impracticable timelines’ generate unstable outcomes. They reproduce war tensions and are likely to exclude large sectors of the population. Instead, the UN (2015b, 18) explains that ‘successful peacebuilding requires much longer than had previously been appreciated’. Current operations last an average of three-times longer than the previous ones and the trend is continuing (UN 2015a, 4, 93–6). As the UN Secretary General (2014, 10) emphasises: post-conflict ‘political processes and institution-building require sustained and long-term international political, financial and technical support’.

The expanding time horizon of intervention is reflected in the UN shift from peacebuilding to ‘sustaining peace’, implying a constant and longstanding commitment, where benchmarks for exit remain flexible (UN 2015b, 2010, 11–13, 17–18). The UN blurs the distinctions between conflict prevention, peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding that provided a logical sequence of external strategies. In its place, sustaining peace is seen as an ‘accompanying exercise’, in which a group of coordinated international organisations support conflict-affected societies in multifaceted tasks from prevention to peacebuilding across time (UN PBC 2014, 2; UNSG 2014, 1–2). According to the Working Group on Lessons Learnt of the UN Peacebuilding Commis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I The disillusionment with liberal peace: institutions to bridge a divided world
• 1 Introduction: the last agony of ‘liberal peace’
• 2 The disillusionment with democratisation
• 3 The shifting governance of post-conflict Kosovo
• PART II From agony to love: vorarephilia at the end of liberal peace
• 4 Local ownership and deferral
• 5 Resilience and deferral
• 6 Connolly, critiques and vorarephilia
• 7 Conclusion: uncanny optimism at the end of liberal peace
• Index