Economies of Peace

Economy Formation Processes in Conflict-Affected Societies

Werner Distler, Elena B. Stavrevska, Birte Vogel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429559297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Looking beyond and beneath the macro level, this book examines the processes and outcomes of the interaction of economic reforms and socio-economic peacebuilding programmes with, and international interventions in, people's lived realities in conflict-affected societies.

The contributions argue that disregarding socio-economic aspects of peace and how they relate to the everyday leaves a vacuum in the understanding of the formation of post-conflict economies. To address this gap, the book outlines and deploys the concept of 'post-conflict economy formation'. This is a multifaceted phenomenon, including both formal and informal processes that occur in the post-conflict period and contribute to the introduction, adjustment, or abolition of economic practices, institutions, and rules that inform the transformation of the socio-economic fabric of the society. The contributions engage with existing statebuilding and peacebuilding debates, while bringing in critical political economy perspectives. Specifically, they analyse processes of post-conflict economy formation and the navigation between livelihood needs; local translations of the liberal hegemonic order; and different, sparse manifestations of welfare states. The book concludes that a sustainable peace requires the formation of peace economies: economies that work towards reducing structural inequalities and grievances of the (pre-)conflict period, as well as addressing the livelihood concerns of citizens.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Civil Wars.

1 Precarity in Post-Conflict Yugoslavia

What About the Workers?

Michael Pugh

ABSTRACT
Framed by historical materialism, this study of labour in post-conflict settings contends that the Balkan peace has been disfigured by a political economy of precarity. Former Yugoslav territories experienced chronic unemployment and precarity, moulded by distinctive cultures and identities, though labour had already been pummelled by the impacts of global integration before violent conflict. Peace meant reordering of pre-war and wartime political economies, which failed to stimulate officially audited employment in order to privilege private capital accumulation. Whilst workers have exerted agency to cope with and resist this, the exercise of labour rights shrank markedly.

Introduction

Much of the policy and academic literatures on the political economies of peace and conflict acknowledge the significance of employment and livelihoods. Inhabitants of war-affected societies certainly do. But academic interrogation of precarity, and indeed class in general, is limited. As De Heredia (2018) points out, historically fashioned class dynamics are conspicuously absent from studies of resistance in peacebuilding in contrast to other identifiers such as ethnicity. This article seeks to redress the ‘conspicuous absence’ of precarity in the literature of peace and conflict in post-Yugoslav spaces. In that arena, continuities from pre-war political economy and post-conflict reinforcement of precarity have as much to do with the nature of capital accumulation as ethnicity or institutional failure. Economic maladjustment under the pressures of international trade relations and demands of external creditors, notably the International Monetary Fund(IMF) and World Bank Group (WBG), rendered a domestic distribution of resources untenable in the 1980s (Woodward 1995). Scraping a living through rural subsistence, smuggling, errati curban work and living off remittances became common. Class conflict and violence in the early 1990s created further livelihood deprivation. Some Yugoslavs grew wealthy from the civil wars that facilitated predation and primitive accumulation, including the seizure of social and public assets (Pugh 2003, Donais 2005). Most were impoverished. New patterns of precarity – associated with erratic income – ensued in peacebuilding, affecting low-income households which had enjoyed periods of regular income in Tito’s time. Since labour markets are the main mechanism by which economic development affects poverty, and social inclusion (Veselinović et al. 2014), the linkage between precarity, labour and needs for household reproduction has great significance. Following the collapse, international authorities seeking to assist economic recovery joined with domestic elites to foster policies designed to meet the exactions of private capital rather than stimulating household incomes through mass employment on public works for instance. As if commensurate with laws of physics, private capital accumulation became an embedded ideological tenet in determining social order. Discourses and practices of accumulation moulded labour’s precarity. A labour crisis into the peace should have been foreseen given the evident wartime turmoil in labour relations, disruption to production, and population movements throughout the territory. Peace in post-Yugoslav spaces meant that struggles for survival during the violence that transferred into precarity in post-war political economies now disciplined by international managers and domestic elites. Workers had thus experienced a triple succession of precarities which they now commonly navigate through social network coping,flight and resistance.

The article lodges in the academic political economy literature of peace and conflict in the region. Important work has focused on interventionism, institutionalism, recovery policies, corruption and rentierism (Woodward 2017, 2011, Sörensen 2009, Bojičić-Dželilović and Kostovicova 2013, Belloni and Strazzari 2014, Lemay-Hébert and Murshed 2016). In general, research touches only lightly on class and pecarity. Valuable work on administration and social policy including employment issues is conducted by Will Bartlett and colleagues (2013) largely from a public policy and administration perspective. Amongst the voluminous work on post-socialist Europe as a whole, pioneer studies of class and labour (Verdery 1996, Crowley and Ost 2001, Cazes and Nesporova 2003) have stirred further research and establishment of the Southeast Europe Journal for Labour and Social Affairs. For post-conflict Yugoslavia, fine-grained sociological and ethnographic work by Baker (2012) briefly alludes to the broader issue of post-socialist shocks interlaced with post-conflict upheaval, neither alone adequately explaining post-Yugoslavia’s experience of precarity. Pertinent, also, Bonfiglioli (2014) examines gendered precarity in the Macedonia textile industry, and Lai (2017) investigates work situations in the Bosnian cities of Prijedor and Zenica. Jasmin Ramović (this issue) reveals the limited interethnic social engagement among post-war factory workers. However, few outside the region with an interest in peacebuilding follow sociologists such as Paul Stubbs (2009), the economist Fikret Čaušević (2013) and labour historians like Goran Musić (2013) into factories, health centres, chambers of commerce, mines or farms.

This investigation broadens such work, using a materialist framework for an understanding of disfigured peace. Whilst concurring with Tim Donais’s critique (2005) of Bosnia’s misshapen peace, his book adopts an epistemology of ‘normal’ free markets that would have mitigated the social damage of corruption and private capture of public assets. By contrast, the contention here is that precarity featured in pre-war dysfunctions and wartime disorder but was recast by post-war competitive accumulation as a project to restart economic growth and participation in international competition. Instead of launching an enquiry from the standpoint of ethno-politics or institutional failures, this perspective hinges on the dynamics of capitalism, particularly the neo-liberalism encoded by the Washington Consensus. A materialist perspective introduces a novel integration of precarity in peacebuilding studies that highlights contradictions in stabilising peace through such economic transformation. It indicates that post-Yugoslavia spaces exhibit an abject failure of peacebuilding to meet basic needs through stimulation of rewarded, formal employment.

Interpretive analysis of field research in Southeast Europe since 1997 provides the methodological basis of the article. Primary material comprises interview notes, an author’s survey of employee rights, factory and municipality visits, statistical coverage, media and official reports. The article is split into four sections and a conclusion. First, the interpretive framework of materialism and precarity is explained. Section two addresses pre-war continuities. Section three is an analysis of labour in the peace economies. Section four appraises the agency of inhabitants in dealing with precarity, to reinforce the argument that peacebuilding has been deformed by an approach to political economy that falls well short of stimulating employment income.

Materialism and precarity

Reflecting on historical materialism Engels (1890) explained that it was inseparable from critiques of global capitalism and represented a ‘conception of history [which] is above all a guide to study’. The premise denotes that the key to the history of transformations lies in the relations between organised material production and social orders (Rosenberg 1994: 53, 129). It concerns structural economic transformations in production and capital accumulation that pervade ideology, politics, rights and class relations. Here, it signifies restructuring by war and peacebuilding of the means for enabling life, in particular labour income. An early exponent of international relations E.H. Carr put this very basically: ‘Man does not live by bread alone. But without it he does not live at all’ –adding that ideational, sensory and psychological impulses, such as fear and ambition, flourish ‘in a soil of economic maladjustment’ (Carr 1942: 119–20, see also Lieven 2012: 218–9, Solimano 2014: 186). Writing about Yugoslavia, Jens Sörensen (2009: 28–29) cogently argues that war and peacebuilding shape opportunities for change as opposed to determining modes of transformation. Political collapse presents opportunities for international authorities, donors and financial institutions to mould ideas and exert control to cast political economies for private capital accumulation through the expropriation of surplus value of labour (Visoka 2016, Kostić 2017). Because competition is a prime driver of capitalism’s innovation, individuals are expected to compete with each other, and states driven to compete for markets and investment worldwide. Agencies that finance economic recovery from conflict seek unstintingly to curb state activity apart from helping make this endeavour work through ‘free markets’ (Woodward 2017, 42, C–U. Schierup et al. 2014). A materialist approach thus offers the construction of linkage between civil war, precarity, peacebuilding and imperatives of capitalist development.

Before turning to former Yugoslavia’s domestic specificities, it is also essential to elaborate the concept of precarity; it has several dimensions of meaning. Ontologically, the term skirts tautology because precarity is a condition of existence. Although material inequality means that wealthy classes can mitigate or insure themselves against some adverse contingencies, such as diseases associated with poverty, no one is guaranteed perfect security. Furthermore, individuals have visceral self-perceptions of deprivation relative to past experience, to general living standards and to socio-economic inequalities. The consciousness, generally impalpable for researchers, is not gainsaid. But it is equally valid to keep in view material living conditions dependent on income using precarity as an analytical category. From Engels to Orwell, industrialisation and its division of labour prompted historic empirical examination of working class conditions, although the ‘precarity’ label had currency only in the 1960s among unionists in France and Italy as industrial production began to falter. By the 1980s, social atomisation and the competition rules of economic modernisation, as Beck argued, required workers to market their biographies and shoulder personal responsibility for misfortune (Beck 1992, 87 et seq.). Erratic and unaudited work (the plight of four out of five working people in poor countries) accelerated in the capitalist cores to affect middle-class professionals whose job security was vanishing with the privatisation of public services. Involuntary temporary work grew further after the 2007 financial crash (Standing 2016, 70ff, Breman 2013, Lambert and Herod 2016). Precarity seems to characterise political economies in regression, core capitalist states included and, as argued here, peacebuilding economies. Commonplace explanations refer to the precarious being ‘left behind by globalisation’ –collateral damage of progressive development – as if the puzzle is how to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction - Economies of Peace: Economy Formation Processes and Outcomes in Conflict-Affected Societies
• 1 Precarity in Post-Conflict Yugoslavia: What About the Workers?
• 2 Looking into the Past to See the Future? Lessons Learned from Self-Management for Economies in Post-Conflict Societies of the Former Yugoslavia
• 3 The Mother, the Wife, the Entrepreneur? Women's Agency and Microfinance in a Disappearing Post-Conflict Welfare State Context
• 4 Intervention Gentrification and Everyday Socio-Economic Transactions in Intervention Societies
• 5 Peacekeeping as Enterprise: Transaction, Consumption, and the Political Economy of Peace and Peacekeeping
• 6 Street Level Bureaucrats and Post-conflict Policy-making: Corruption, Correctives, and the Rise of Veterans' Pensions in Timor-Leste
• 7 'And Everybody Did Whatever They Wanted to Do': Informal Practices of International Statebuilders in Kosovo
• Index