A Post-Liberal Peace

Oliver Richmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415667821
• eBook ISBN: 9781136680823
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines how the liberal peace experiment of the post-Cold War environment has failed to connect with its target populations, which have instead set about transforming it according to their own local requirements.

Liberal peacebuilding has caused a range of unintended consequences. These emerge from the liberal peace's internal contradictions, from its claim to offer a universal normative and epistemological basis for peace, and to offer a technology and process which can be applied to achieve it. When viewed from a range of contextual and local perspectives, these top-down and distant processes often appear to represent power rather than humanitarianism or emancipation. Yet, the liberal peace also offers a civil peace and emancipation. These tensions enable a range of hitherto little understood local and contextual peacebuilding agencies to emerge, which renegotiate both the local context and the liberal peace framework, leading to a local-liberal hybrid form of peace. This might be called a post-liberal peace. Such processes are examined in this book in a range of different cases of peacebuilding and statebuilding since the end of the Cold War.

This book will be of interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, peace and conflict studies, international organisations and IR/Security Studies.

Part I

The Romanticisation of the Local

1 Civil Society, Needs and Welfare

Chapter 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to a realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organisation and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Chapter 23
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Chapter 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Chapter 27
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

Introduction

In the introduction to this study I argued that a post-liberal form of peace is emerging. This rests partly upon often hidden forms of local, critical agency, which is often resistant to external intervention, sometime compliant, but may question the sources of legitimacy. Such critical agency for peacebuilding, attempts to modify the liberal peace framework and also exploits some of its more emancipatory potential. In part it is provoked by specific weaknesses of the liberal peace, particularly in its needs and cultural awareness of others in post-conflict environments. Such agency is a response to the distancing and governmentalising project liberal peace has become.

It has long been argued that peacebuilding praxis should address issues of social justice, needs, welfare, and culture, and that such issues have represented major gaps in mainstream theoretical and policy agendas. Liberal peacebuilding has often distanced and marginalised its post-conflict subjects by contrast. Ironically, it is these subjects it has set out to ‘save’. Such distancing strategies maintain the legitimacy of the liberal peace model, often by preventing a sustained engagement with local context, needs and culture, and focusing on security, rights, institutions, and markets – with contradictory and controversial outcomes. Needs are supposed, in contemporary praxis, to be dealt with by trickle-down processes, both direct and indirect: as are norms, law, and institutional reform. Yet this often has produced an artificial form of civil society, disconnected from local political, social, culture, customary, and economic processes and expectations. This means any peace arising from such an approach cannot be locally owned or self-sustaining, but instead produces the very dependency on international actors that, it is often argued, should be avoided at all costs. A needs or welfare oriented model might therefore be more appropriate than one aimed solely at rights, though as the following chapters illustrate, this is also not without its problems.

The key feature of the dominant liberal approach to peacebuilding, which has been mainly responsible for its recent elision with statebuilding, represents a neoliberal marketisation of peace, rather than engagement with the agents and subjects of this peace, even on more traditional liberal terms. This elision has both ignored but also underlined the tension in the relationship between peace, post-conflict subjects and their state, and the international community. Its legitimacy is derived from its claim of an emancipatory social contract, which is to be produced externally in the exceptional circumstances of post-conflict polities. This production of legitimacy is a specifically Western- and Enlightenment-derived, problem-solving discourse of peace. It is the result of a long evolution of thought derived from the dominant, mainly Western promoted concern with security, reconstruction, development, modernisation, conflict resolution and transformation, peacebuilding and statebuilding. Yet, there is a major question as to whether it is culturally and socially appropriate or sensitive in all contexts.

This has implications for whether the liberal peace framework, loose as it is, has a chance of establishing a locally self-sustaining peace – as recent praxis in diverse locations has queried to a large degree. In this context, difference is only acceptable when it operates within the liberal framework of tolerance, and only becomes apparent if it moves into this context (i.e. difference converts itself into sameness). This is dangerously close to an external rejection of local, contextual processes of peace and politics: a ‘romanticisation of the local’ where only international agency is deemed capable of making peace. This is often for methodological and ontological reasons, for expediency and strategic goals. It reflects the liberal culture of peacebuilding, and its relatively hegemonic engagement with the local rather than an equitable engagement and concern with everyday life and local legitimacy. This propagates specific liberal-institutionalist and neoliberal practices, and defers responsibility for the needs and welfare of the local (the space where capacity is probably least in liberal eyes). Its cultural and needs engagement is therefore little more than instrumental and is often designed to maintain distance between the local and the international, denying local agency, so that the local can be governed in liberal ways irrespective of the complexity of context or a local legitimacy for such transformation. Liberal peacebuilding rests upon cultural assumptions that legitimate governance over the socio-economic wellbeing of a territories’ inhabitants, as well as over any contextual cultural dynamics, thus denying the very local agencies it seeks to enable.

This chapter explores theses weaknesses in the context of liberal peace’s neoliberal turn, versus a potentially more needs or welfare oriented version of peacebuilding. This may be taken to have as its aim a social form of peace, in which civil society and culture is fully engaged with by internationals in both rights and needs terms. It examines the role of civil society, culture, and welfare in peacebuilding.

Civil Society, Needs and Culture

Recent attention amongst IR theorists, the development, peace and conflict studies communities, as well as many practitioners and policymakers in the peacebuilding and statebuilding community, has focused upon the problem of creating a self-sustaining, civil peace in post-violence, post-conflict environments. This focuses attention at the local level of analysis, which in realist-liberal terms (meaning the state as the aim of liberal peacebuilding which combines security, rights, and institutions)¹ denotes that of civil society. This is an artificial construct which introduces checks and balances, accountability, and representation between citizens and elites which tend to control the different aspects of the state, even in liberal form.

It has become clear that the challenge of understanding the politics of peacebuilding is far greater when the local, civil society, culture, class, gender, and needs are incorporated as key areas of concern. This is perhaps the reason why they are often relegated to lower (or localised) priorities than security or institution-building by internationals. Thus, the ‘local’ (in IR and political science) and for most international peacebuilding, statebuilding, and development actors indicates an acultural denotation of a general context, in which ‘civil society’ is created by internationals. Alternatively, it is a pre-modern sphere, which is non-liberal and not marketised, in an abrasive relationship with liberal notions of civil society. It is also often seen as apolitical (as opposed to the complex social institutions, needs, political traditions, identities, implied by the term ‘culture’). In fact, civil society from the perspective of most international actors, represents a method of privatising the service provision often associated with the state. Yet most members of civil society see it as denoting a political space through which citizens construct and control their political subjectivity and institutions (even though internationals resort to fairly directive means to induce the creation of a civil society). This enables them to hold the state accountable for their representation, rights, and needs.

Via such externalised strategies, local needs and welfare are removed from the statebuilding process, and culture is marginalised in a rights, security and markets version of liberal peacebuilding. Yet, to paraphrase Clifford, both culture and welfare are concepts that are difficult to understand and define, are deeply compromised, but yet cannot be ignored.² The fact that they often have been ignored is partly due to the widespread adoption of problem-solving rights oriented approaches into IR and for peacebuilding, and the subsequent bias introduced by its related methodologies. These have the unintended consequence of obscuring everyday aspects of political, social, economic, and cultural life in local contexts.

The term civil society now denotes a compliant and transformed social grouping, able to hold the state accountable, and to create wealth. This is to be enabled externally import conflict environments via a self-legitimating range of interventionary strategies to support formal and informal groups that are both part of, and relatively, independent from the state.³ Civil society holds the state and its elites accountable. It plays an essential role in a liberal state, and one that cannot be done without, if the state is not to become predatory. However, because it has been so externalised in post-conflict states, and dependent on donors’ rather limited support (though they have great ambitions for it) civil society in practice has often become an engineered artifice that floats above and substitutes for the ‘local’ and for context.

This is despite the fact that it is also generally assumed that civil society asserts historical and natural indigenous dynamics, represents a local synthesis or community of reconciled peoples, and their interested and disinterested mediation of rights and needs: it is ‘… not humanitarian but communitarian’.⁴ It consequently legitimates conservative liberal governance and enforcement strategies, is defined by international actors and donors according to their own ‘scripts’ of engagement with context, and is brought into being by externally funded NGOs and other organisations. It represents a liberal veneer over the local; it endeavours to assist, transform, and normalise it into the mould of a professional, corporate middle class.

Such strategies are clearly not contextually designed, but rest on liberal, cosmopolitan assertions of common norms and institutions. They are unconsciously designed to distance and marginalise uncomfortable and authentic local voices, their needs, expectations, and practices in favour of transnational liberal agents of peacebuilding. In this sense, while purporting to promote local ownership of peace and the liberal state which is coming into being, these strategies actually rhetorically marginalise context, needs, culture, and the material aspects of a peace dividend required to give rights substance – especially for the citizen and the subaltern. It removes these from international normative and material processes of responsibility, so peacebuilding can instead turn to promoting and developing the liberal version of what is civil.⁵

Foucault links civil society, as it is constructed in terms of liberal governmentality, to the need to be complicit with and support the neoliberal thesis: ‘… a space of sovereignty which for good or ill is inhabited by economic subjects …’. These subjects find the ‘good life’ in the liberal shell of the state and in the market.⁶ In this sense it is a ‘governmental technology’⁷ designed to depoliticise the really existing context and the local in its supposedly pre-modern, or undeveloped, and passive condition, while it learns about liberal civil society.⁸ The agency often associated with civil society is therefore negated by governmentality, which in neoliberal form enables distant government of post conflict spaces, according to Western rational forms of problem-solving, often without local support.⁹

As Foucault argues even from his relatively Eurocratic perspective we should be cautious about arguments that rhetorically confirm the importance of civil society while at the same time undermining it.¹⁰ This sleight of hand is the essence of the ‘liberal civil society’ putatively installed in post-conflict zones. This externalised form is not constitutive of the liberal social contract but instead is driven by donor agendas, and deterritorialised by the market. The resultant focus on state level institutions, often on governance, corruption, and on elite relationships, means civil society becomes an afterthought for peacebuilding. This ironically returns the focus of local communities and elites to power, territory and sovereignty, by way of reaction. The liberal social contract – which one would expect to be crucial to the liberal state – is caught between paradoxical pressures, meaning that the needs of post-conflict individuals, communities, and societies are directly addressed by international peacebuilders and statebuilders, who instead adopt a strategic focus on security, rights, and institutions, as well as trickle-down wealth. Paradoxically, as a result, the ‘local’ has become a new site of contestation, whether to enable, emancipate, include, exclude, self-determine, marginalise, silence, or govern.

Civil society, thus fragmented and essentialised, has become a rather superficial melange of externally visible and supported normative advocates for liberal peacebuilding’s core values, rights, institutions, and processes. It holds back ‘uncivil society’, the barbarians, the traditional or customary, and the non-secular which it is feared lurk behind local politics and await an opportunity to undermine the liberal state. It has been elided into the very problematic liberal project of statebuilding,¹¹ which is assumed would supply the necessary security and institutions, not to mention material resources, to achieve the ‘good life’. Yet, civil society is supposed to be vibrant, play a key role in advocacy, make the state accountable and improve human rights and development, while also meeting material needs. It is through these paradoxical international expectations that the local is perceived as apolitical, in that culture and needs and often identity are made invisible. Civil society in such processes becomes relatively disconnected from its own local, and more connected to the Western, liberal ideal of civil society and its own context. Indeed, recently donors have begun talking about shifting funds from civil society to the market and the stimulation of private enterprise and to the state through budgetary support, because they cannot see discernable effects from previous civil society funding. This is due to their expectations and methodological biases.¹²

Lockean liberalism, aimed at the social contract between subjects and rules over the preservation of life, liberty, and property, is heavily reflected in the intellectual discourses of liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding.¹³ These processes have lent themselves to this interpretation via the intellectual and policy communities which support statebuilding practices as have emerged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and earlier in East Timor, Kosovo, or Bosnia. In reality, statebuilding, and its association with peacebuilding, is now focused on how to connect the technocratic institutions of the liberal state, which it is believed can be built by external actors, with or without local consent. Yet, with some form of social contract, a liberal state would actually be illiberal and illegitimate, possibly at best a trusteeship in which the local’s rights and needs are indefinitely deferred and any legitimacy mainly stems from donors, Security Council resolutions, international actors, and elite complicity or co-optation. Such legitimacy is often now constructed externally, through the support of international actors, and their aspirations towards international humanitarian norms and norms of liberal governance. This has the effect of marginalising the need for local engagements with peacebuilding and for reconciliation, which the liberal state might have better addressed through its more sweeping, but also more intrusive, older, social democratic position on equality and resource distribution.

States, institutions, and governmental practices have displaced some aspects of human needs in order to provide an emphasis on political rights as a result. Societies, groups, identities, cultures, and needs are only rhetorically part of this discourse. Yet, a civil peace, and its offshoots of local ownership and participation, has come to preoccupy the Western dominated peacebuilding consensus¹⁴ being employed in conflict and post-conflict environments around the world. This has generally focused upon institutional versions of the state and individualist Oakshottian ‘civil association’ in instances where context is extremely varied.¹⁵

Thus, it is widely accepted that where peacebuilding or statebuilding occurs it must both create and promote a vibrant civil society. It also expects to receive much of its legitimacy on the ground from civil society and local actors, so the notion of a civil society also acts as a crucial validation of liberal peacebuilding strategies and objectives. Yet, while the civil peace might be taken to denote the indigenous character of peace within local culture and traditional ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Romanticisation of the Local
• Part 2 Hybridity and the Infrapolitics of Peacebuilding
• Appendix I Appendix 1: HDI and GINI Data for Post-Conflict Countries: From Settlement to the Present
• Appendix 2 Appendix 2: International versus Local Perspectives of Peacebuilding in Bosnia
• Appendix 3 Appendix 3: Universal Welfare Support in Transitional States (Very Rough Model)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index