Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding

A Critical Exploration of the Local Turn

Elisa Randazzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138670327
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317208686
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the logic behind the shifts and paradigm changes within the scholarship on peacebuilding.

In particular, the book is concerned with examining if, and how, these shifts have significantly altered how we think about peacebuilding beyond the 'liberal peacebuilding' paradigm. To do so, the book engages with the logic of critique that has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to peacebuilding, from hands-on institutionalisation, to the 'local turn'. It uses the case of Kosovo to understand how a lessons-learnt approach facilitated the shift towards more invasive and intrusive forms of peacebuilding first. However, it is also crucial to understanding the recent local turn, as the rise of local ownership discourses in Kosovo is fundamentally tied to the critiques of extensive international missions, and the associated resistance and marginalisation of local agency. The book examines the implications of the framing of 'everyday' agency in order to assess the extent to which these bottom-up approaches have been able to by-pass the problems attributed to the liberal peace approach. It argues that despite its critical and radical intentions, the local turn retains certain foundational modernist and positivist qualities that have so far characterised the very mainstream approaches these critiques claim to transcend.

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, statebuilding, peace and conflict studies, security studies and International Relations in general.

1
From liberalisation to institutionalisation

The birth of the critical turn in peacebuilding

Introduction

In a recent article published in Conflict, Security & Development in 2013 critical realist scholar Jan Selby discussed a largely ignored, albeit rather widespread tendency within the scholarship on peacebuilding to accept the existence of ‘liberal peace-building’ as a coherent strategy (2013). Drawing from Selby’s argument, this chapter suggests that this tendency to construct the liberal peace as a coherent paradigm was employed both to explain and critique contemporary peacebuilding. This construction, it is argued, begun not only with those scholars supportive of the liberal peace paradigm and its normative project, but also, more controversially, with critical perspectives that sought to cast some doubt on the motives, methods and outcomes of international involvement with conflict and post-conflict territories. This chapter suggests that the shift away from liberalisation focused on building more multi-layered, comprehensive, and invasive, forms of governance, rather than representing a more fundamental change in the way in which we think about the ontological and epistemological premises that lead to the problematisation of certain events in need of intervention (i.e. why is political conflict problematised? How is it problematised?). Where these foundations are ignored in favour of a focus on how to peacebuild more efficiently, the resulting shift is akin to a search for a technology of power that can govern populations better than the previous approach. The discarding of the latter as a limited and insufficient technology of governing produces a procedural critique that aims at amending the mechanisms and the techniques for peacebuilding rather than the core assumptions to lead to framing peacebuilding as a necessity.

‘Liberal’ peacebuilding

In the literature on conflict management it is largely accepted that one aspect that characterises foreign engagement with conflict and post-conflict contexts in the post-Cold War era is the liberal tradition that drove and determined the manner in which such engagements took place. ‘Liberal peace-building’ is identified, in the literature, as a paradigm characterised by a ‘problem solving’ attitude applied to the task of addressing the causes of war and underdevelopment through re-engineering the warring society (Mac Ginty, 2008, p. 146). It is widely believed, as Roland Paris put it, that ‘a single paradigm – liberal internationalism – appears to guide the work of most international agencies engaged in peace-building’ (1997, p. 56). Identifying what I suggest to be a large consensual view of the coherent and somewhat homogenous nature of liberal peacebuilding can be facilitated by following either of two analytical routes. The first approach would involve identifying the supporters of the liberal peace paradigm who, not only believe in the overall congruent and homogenous aim of spreading the reach of the liberal peace, but also normatively support it as a viable method of conflict resolution (Carothers, 1999; Doyle & Sambanis, 2000; Kang, 2006). The second approach, on the other hand, relies on the analysis provided by critics of the liberal peace. This section will begin by initially discussing the first approach.

At the end of the Cold War, the project promoting liberal democracy as a conflict resolution technique gained ground thanks to scholars such as Michael Doyle (Doyle & Sambanis, 2000; Doyle, 1986a, 1986b), Bruce Russett (Oneal & Russett, 2001; Russett, 1993) and Jack Levy (1988), who supported a connection between liberalism and democracy by examining the peaceful tendencies of democracies. Doyle, for example, drawing on Immanuel Kant’s To Perpetual Peace suggested that ‘liberal states are different. They are indeed peaceful, […]. Liberal states have created a separate peace, as Kant argued they would’ (1986b, pp. 1151–1152), thereby reviving the tenets of the centuries old liberal peace thesis, with a specific focus on democracy (see Doyle, 1986b, p. 1162). The pacifying effect of the liberal peace, it is argued, is not only ‘as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations’ (Levy, 1988, p. 622), or a ‘heuristic device with which to interpret history’ (Doyle, 1986b, p. 1159), but is also a fitting method to alter the domestic conditions that lead to the formation of civil wars as well as international wars. This normative function is espoused by supporters of liberal internationalism such as Fukuyama (1997), Oneal and Russett (1997) and Green (1999) who coalesced around the belief in the universal validity of liberalism, its fundamental connection to democracy, and in the value of democratisation as the tool to spread liberalism and its pacifying effects across the globe (Snyder, 2000). The existence of the liberal peace is understood as a factual reality brought about by the nature of the world system following the end of WWII and the Cold War – a ‘liberal moment’ (Green, 1999) – exemplified not only by the primacy of the liberal form of governance in theoretical terms, as Fukuyama famously proclaimed with his ‘End of History’ argument (1992), but also visible in the nature of the democratic interventions of the 1990s. These were, in fact, believed to be motivated by ‘bursts of liberal internationalism, renewed assertions of liberal principles such as the right to national self-determination, widespread democratization, and expansions of political freedoms’ (Green, 1999, pp. 3–4).

It is important to specify, at this stage, that the objective of this analysis is not to counter the construction of the liberal peace by suggesting what ‘it actually is’. Rather, my contention is that it is necessary to focus on the consequences of the emergence of such consensus, particularly as it pertains to approaches critical of peacebuilding. Where, in fact, the support for the existence of the liberal peace is not surprising within the context of the scholarship that embraced the viability of its normative project, the same belief in the existence of the liberal peace as a coherent strategy is puzzling when looking at perspectives that sought to problematise the endeavour of peacebuilding. Thus, while looking at the construction of peacebuilding through the prism of liberal theory itself is one way of approaching the subject, for the purpose of researching the emergence of critical approaches to peacebuilding, a second analytical route will now be taken to identify the elements that are considered to construct the effort known as liberal peace, by looking at the critical scholarship on peacebuilding. This scholarship, of which Roland Paris is undoubtedly one of the most influential representatives, has expressed a strongly suspicious attitude towards, and critical assessment of, the results of peacebuilding. This has primarily been operated through an engagement with the practical by-products, paradoxes and problems of peacebuilding missions of the early-to-mid 1990s. This required the identification of and engagement with peacebuilding’s driving logic, carried out mainly by examining the foreign policy trends of western liberal democracies towards mainly the global south. The nature of the world order was thus also largely identified with a liberal moment; after the end of the Cold War, it was suggested, ‘international power has been centred in the hands of a restricted directoire of industrial countries under the hegemony of the “global sovereignty” of the American superpower’ (Zolo, 2002, p. 170). The impact of this, it is suggested, is a protracted era characterised by the primacy of liberalism and its agenda in re-shaping the order of international relations (ibid., p. 170). This attempt to reshape the international order has also often been used as an analytical tool to understand the motivations behind foreign policy decisions towards certain areas of the world. This has allowed some scholars to identify and label a whole set of disparate missions under the label liberal peace as the driving principle behind peacebuilding endeavours. Willett, for instance, suggests:

The ending of the Cold War and the subsequent expanded reach of global institutions brought to the fore the possibility of achieving a Kantian peace. This encouraged a growing consent among donor nations, multilateral institutions, military establishments and NGOs, that conflict resolution in the South could be achieved through a number of interconnected processes involving the economic, political and social transformation of chaotic or collapsed states. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Africa, which has become a laboratory for the liberal peace project.

(Willett, 2005, p. 571 my emphasis)

Overall, the critical scholarship began to trace and delineate the contours of the ethos behind the liberal peace. This coherent vision of the teleological project of the liberal peace is also shared by critical approaches of the early 2000s whose work tends more towards the deconstructive, critical and anti-foundationalist side of the theoretical spectrum. For these, the liberal peace can be defined as or characterised by:

[…] a new or political humanitarianism that lays emphasis on such things as conflict resolution and prevention, reconstructing social networks, strengthening civil and representative institutions, promoting the rule of law, and security sector reform in the context of a functioning market economy.

(Duffield, 2001, p. 11)

In these critical accounts a connection between the liberal order and peacebuilding is then made through the pattern of foreign policy interventions of the 1990s. Dillon and Reid similarly identify elements of a common purpose in the pursuit of the liberal peace, by exploring the manner in which development has been promoted:

Much of the disorder that borders the domain of liberal peace is clearly also a function […] of its very own normative, political, economic, and military agendas, dynamics, and practices, and of the reverberations these excite throughout the world. It seems increasingly to be a function, specifically, of the way in which development is now ideologically embraced by all of the diverse institutions of liberal peace as an unrelenting project of modernization.

(Dillon & Reid, 2000, p. 118 my emphasis)

Critical, anti-foundationalist scholars, thus, also concur in the identification of the liberal peace by providing a sense of intentionality driving the project. Where they identify ‘liberal’ strategies and practices, they suggest these be pursued as a ‘deliberate policy of comprehensive social transformation, and of power projection’ (ibid., p. 119). We will engage with the consequences of anti-foundationalist critiques in later chapters, though, for the purposes of the analysis carried out in this chapter, these critiques are worth mentioning in that they feed into the construction of the idea of a coherent project of the spread of liberal hegemony through peacebuilding.

The consensus around the nature of the liberal peace also revolves around the common tracing of the relationship between liberalism and peacebuilding in the historical legacy of western liberal foreign policy dating back to before the Cold War (Fox, 2008). The connection made between western liberal powers and conflict territories subject to peacebuilding in the 1990s is, as a result, not just considered to be a consequence of the end of the Cold War per se, or of the rise of humanitarian advocacy, but is often tied to the project of post-Second World War reconstruction through ‘embedded liberalism’ as the post-war strategy employed mainly by the United States to ‘create an open and non-discriminatory international economic order’ (Ruggie, 1996, p. 107). Furthermore, scholars of different theoretical provenance have agreed on the identification of a degree of consistency and coherence between the work of development agencies and international financial organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF. Paris for instance argues that ‘now more than ever, many international NGOs and intergovernmental organizations seem to share the desire to transform war-shattered states into stable societies that resemble the industrialized market democracies of the West as closely as possible’ (1997, p. 62). This seemingly coherent effort to transform war-torn states into liberal democracies is identified both in the strategies promoting economic liberalisation (Chopra, 1997, p. 201), as well as in the promotion of democracy by agencies that had not traditionally been interested in the content of governance, such as the case of NATO, publicly demonstrating concern for the need to promote democracy, liberty and the rule of law in post-conflict contexts such as Bosnia (Paris, 1997, p. 62). These perspectives thus conflated theoretical debates, actors, aims and policy objectives around a coherent strategy primarily identifiable through the preference for neo-liberal reform. Common ‘liberal’ methods were thus identified in the practices employed by international organisations and state actors alike. In particular, critics focusing on practices consistent with neo-liberal reforms, particularly prominent in the Cold War period and in the immediate post-Cold War period (Kaldor, 2012, p. 86), widely adopted by donor countries, foreign investors, international financial organisations and liberal democratic western countries. Amongst these practices much emphasis was given to the repeated reliance on strategies to lower deficits, manage monetary policies, liberalise foreign trade rules, reduce inflation and establish a thriving private sector (Del Castillo, 2008, p. 29).

The predominance of liberalism as the primary method of peacebuilding was believed to be visible in the manner in which neo-liberal macro-economic strategies were inserted into peace settlements, reform projects and reconstruction projects (Chesterman, 2004; Paris, 2004; Paris cited in Richmond, 2004a, p. 141; Shah, 2009). Despite the fact that no common manifesto was called upon by actors to inspire their developmental and peacebuilding plans, Paris suggests that it is still possible to see that ‘in practice most of them have worked towards a common goal: peace through political and economic liberalization’ (1997, p. 63). As a consequence it was suggested that the mainstream approach of peacebuilding in the late 1980s to early 1990s held the general view that ‘the future internal peace in former civil-war societies hinges on how fast their economies will recover from civil war and transform it into economic development’ (Kang, 2006, p. 220), suggesting a prioritisation of the development-security nexus (Duffield, 2001). This entailed that progress, as Jarat Chopra suggested in looking at the prevalent approach to development after the end of the Cold War, ‘relies on liberal style, capitalist democracies as a global standard of measurement’ (1997, p. 186). The perspectives that addressed peacebuilding in the late 1990s to early 2000s sought to re-conceptualise peacebuilding by examining the practical outcomes of some of the missions initiated a few years earlier on the basis of a lessons-learnt approach. Scholars attempted to make sense of the outcomes of conflict and post-conflict missions by identifying certain ‘reverberations’ caused by the liberal peace (Dillon & Reid, 2000, p. 118). These critical assessments of peacebuilding, all starting with elements of empirical considerations for the outcomes of peacebuilding missions on the ground, thus began pointing out the problems that were besieging the missions of the early 1990s. These issues were then attributed to the previously identified coherent strategy of ‘liberal peacebuilding’, ascertained as driving the logic and the practice of peacebuilding, and, thus, also recognised as the primary culprit. It is to the emergence of this critique of liberalisation that we now turn.

Critiquing liberalisation

Several of the most thorough examinations of case studies of the late 1990s and early 2000s focus on the failures of peacebuilding missions and on their causes. Through an array of peacebuilding case studies ranging from newly decolonised territories in Africa to post-Soviet Republics in Asia, the suggestion was gradually put forward that liberalisation as the primary policy strategy of the 1990s was responsible for the resurgence of fighting, the recreation of conditions that lead to the war, and the creation of new problematic and conflict-inducing conditions. In his seminal work At War’s End, Roland Paris points to evidence from Mozambique, Bosnia and Liberia to demonstrate the recurrence of violence and conflict in territories undergoing different levels of liberalisations (2004, p. 153). Paris’s critical assessment of the limits of the liberal approach of the 1990s is not an exception to scholarly trends of the time. The second half of the 1990s was characterised by a large body of scholarship pointing to instances where the ‘liberal’ approach prioritised thus far was falling short of its aims. Citing as examples Haiti, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and several instances of Central American countries faced with continued social unrest, institutional deficits, and continued economic problems even after exponential economic liberalisation, these critics began to dismantle what they believed to have been an earlier misplaced if widespread support for trickle-down economics. For instance, Castañeda suggested that evidence from Sierra Leone proved that peace did not necessarily follow economic logic (2009, pp. 236–237) Boijcic-Dzelilovic suggested that hasty liberalisations had created polarised growth instead of broad-based development (2009, p. 202), and Salih pointed to the resulting failure to address developmental issues such as poverty, and to resolve the tension between economic and political liberalisation (2009, p. 134). Widespread scepticism was also evidenced towards simple aid and poverty relief strategies (Calder...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a genealogy of bottom-up peacebuilding in the age of non-linearity
• 1 From liberalisation to institutionalisation: the birth of the critical turn in peacebuilding
• 2 The local turn: the problematisation of the ‘liberal peace’ and the end of top-down peacebuilding
• 3 Reflections on Kosovo: shifting discourses and paradigms of peacebuilding
• 4 What ‘local’ in Kosovo? Exploring the plurality of Kosovo’s local agency
• 5 The ‘emancipatory’ local turn? The limits and paradoxes of the local turn’s normative project of re-conceptualisation
• 6 The ‘uncritical’ turn: between modernity and non-linearity
• Conclusion: life after critique?
• Index