Peacebuilding and NGOs

State-Civil Society Interactions

Ryerson Christie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415693967
• eBook ISBN: 9781136218750
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Analysing the relationship between civil society and the state, this book lays bare the assumptions informing peacebuilding practices and demonstrates through empirical research how such practices have led to new dynamics of conflict.

The drive to establish a sustainable liberal peace largely escapes critical examination. When such attention is paid to peacebuilding practices, scholars tend to concentrate either on the military components of the mission or on the liberal economic reforms. This means that the roles of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the impact of attempting to nurture Northern forms of civil society is often overlooked. Focusing on the case of Cambodia, this book seeks to examine the assumptions underlying peacebuilding policies in order to highlight the reliance on a particular, linear reading of European / North American history. The author argues that such policies, in fostering a particular form of civil society, have affected patterns of conflict; dictating when and where politics can occur and who is empowered to participate in such practices. Drawing on interviews with NGO representatives and government representatives, this volume will assert that while the expansion of civil society may resolve some sources of conflict, its introduction has also created new dynamics of contestation.

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, development studies, S.E. Asian politics, and IR in general.

1 Introduction

Over five days in May 1993, Cambodians lined up at polling booths across the country to cast ballots in an election led by the United Nations (UN) that was designed to put Cambodia on the path to democratization and development, and to begin resolving the sources of conflict within the country. The vote itself is understood to have been a remarkable achievement: there was surprisingly little violence, the Khmer Rouge (KR) did not block participation, 20 parties ran for election, and nearly 90 per cent of the eligible voters cast ballots.¹ This marked the formal end of one of the first UN peacebuilding missions: a concept that had entered into popular discourse during the previous year through Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace (1992). However, this was only a momentary return to the ‘normal democratic politics’ sought by the international community. A struggle for power erupted between the two main political parties immediately after the election, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), and Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendent, Neutre, Pacifique et Coopératif (FUNCINPEC), ending in a power-sharing agreement that largely ignored the election results. This apparent shortcoming of the peacebuilding process resulted in a sustained debate about whether the mission itself was a failure. At the same time, other aspects of the peacebuilding initiative have been lauded, in particular the state’s market reforms, the repatriation of refugees, and the dramatic expansion of civil society. This discussion about the relative successes or failures of the mission obscures a broader debate about peace-building, and ignores the more profound issues of how peacebuilding has come to dominate the way the North interacts with the South; how it favours particular forms of political organization over others; and how it determines what counts as security for peoples and communities. Crucially, peacebuilding assumes that the introduction of liberalism is the most effective means of addressing the sources of conflict within a given society. This entails plural democratic governance, liberal market reforms, and the formation of a vibrant and independent civil society.

The drive to establish a sustainable liberal peace largely escapes critical examination. When such attention is paid to peacebuilding practices, scholars tend to concentrate either on the military components of the mission or on the liberal economic reforms. This masks the ways in which peacebuilding is a long-term endeavour, diminishes the roles of those organizations and institutions that take over the leadership of peacebuilding after the cessation of the main UN mission and ignores the shift in policy focus of the post-conflict phase of peacebuilding. In particular this has overlooked the roles of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the impact of attempting to nurture Northern forms of civil society.

This book opens peacebuilding, including its aims and means of implementation, to critical debate. It seeks to lay bare the assumptions informing peacebuilding policies, and to highlight the reliance on a particular linear reading of European/North American history. This book then argues that peacebuilding policies, in fostering a particular form of civil society, have affected patterns of conflict, dictating when and where politics can occur, and who is empowered to participate in such practices. These dynamics will be explored through an analysis of the relationship between civil society and the Cambodian state. It will then seek, through a process of immanent critique, to determine whether the promotion of civil society has led to a more stable and peaceful state (a central claim of peacebuilding). In identifying when and why the state intervenes in NGO activity, the validity of liberalism’s assumptions can be assessed. Building on interviews with both NGO and government representatives, it will assert that while the expansion of civil society may be resolving some sources of conflict, its introduction has created new dynamics of contestation.

The practice of peacebuilding is represented in scholarly and policy literatures as a significant break from the pattern of international intervention that dominated the Cold War. This has involved a partial shift in how conflict in the South is seen as affecting regional and international security, but more importantly it entails a move to address the sources of conflict, rather than just the manifestations of violence. This has been accompanied by an increase in the types of actors involved, with International Organizations (IOs) and NGOs taking on leadership responsibilities in reconstruction efforts. Overarching these changes is a liberal political– economic ethos that shapes both why and how interventions take place.

Though peacebuilding is recognized to be a long-term endeavour, the analysis of peacebuilding has tended to look at the periods of direct UN involvement (defined by the presence of military forces). This is the case with the analysis of peacebuilding in Cambodia, where both critical and more traditional perspectives have focused on the period where the UN ran a formal peace operation and the proximate period after the end of the mission.² This has left the post-mission peacebuilding poorly understood, and has obscured how international engagement in the subsequent years are a continuation of the security policies of the North.³

The term ‘post-mission peacebuilding’ is being used here instead of the term ‘post-conflict’ for two reasons. First, it illustrates the way in which peacebuilding initiatives continue after the cessation of the formal international intervention and how they are entwined with development programmes. Secondly, it reflects a recognition that conflict cannot end; peacebuilding seeks to minimize the sources of conflict and through the introduction of liberal forms of governance to remove violence as a means of resolving disputes. The post-mission phase is dominated not by foreign military force, or an army of UN workers, but by a much broader grouping of international liberal governance actors that constitute the development sector, including: IOs, international donors, state development agencies, and, crucially international international and local NGOs (INGOs and LNGOs). The impact of these agents of peacebuilding exceeds their functional roles in the delivery of various projects and technical expertise. Rather, their very presence promotes particular forms of politics, and the reliance on such groups reflects a commitment to liberal associational civil society. The imposition of civil society reconstruction, informed by liberalism, is assumed to help transform the nature of conflict by removing practices of violence, limiting the abusive powers of the state, and by teaching democratic forms of behaviour. However, when civil society reconstruction is imposed on states in the South, the extent to which this meets the stated goals of peacebuilding are unclear. Studying the first decade of the post-mission phase of peacebuilding permits the analysis of this deepening and widening of liberal governance.

While there are numerous debates taking place within the literatures on peacebuilding, there are nevertheless broad areas of agreement, not the least of which is the validity and moral imperative of peacebuilding itself.⁴ There is now a general consensus about how the causes of conflict are best addressed, the core means of which is the establishment of democratic governance and liberal economics. Peacebuilding, then, does not end with a democratic election, though this is often presented as the culmination of the ‘formal’ process. It also involves the extension of other liberal institutions to the target state.⁵ Besides changing the political system, it also works to further entrench market reform to reshape the legal system and, crucially, to reconstruct civil society as a means of achieving a liberal peace (Richmond 2009). It is the last area that is easily measured by the international community, which equates NGOs to civil society, yet which has escaped any substantial critical attention.⁶ This is in spite of the influence that such groups wield, the resources they command, and their dramatic growth in size, number and roles in societies in the South.

The term ‘NGO’ conjures images of young women and men working amongst the poor and downtrodden to selflessly help improve the quality of life of those in the South. It is a difficult thing to consider how such forms of activity might be problematic. Indeed, the impulse to help is not one to be discouraged, but the sector itself – how it has manifested, how it is tied to particular forms of liberal governance, and as will be shown, of depoliticizing life – must be carefully explored. It is imperative that a greater understanding be reached about how these practices of international intervention have become possible, and how they legitimate civil society reconstruction under the rubric of security and development. As will be argued, the expansion of the number of NGOs and their roles in peacebuilding is inseparable from the broader pattern of an expanding liberal norm of governance. Indeed, the centrality of civil society to conflict resolution is laid out in An Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali 1992), which explicitly champions the construction of civil society as a keystone of building peace. This is based on scholarly liberal literature which views civil society as a core component of functioning Northern democracies, and as a missing piece in the liberal government puzzle of the South.

In application, this promotion of civil society has been translated into working with INGOs in the reconstruction of societies, and the funding and creation of LNGOs in states such as Cambodia. Richmond (2005b) argues that the reliance on NGOs as a central means of building a bottom-up peace, which he calls the civic peace (2009: 560), is now a core component of the peacebuilding consensus. This has been taken to the point where civil society in the South becomes equated to the NGO sector. As Fisher argues, ‘the strength of civil society is roughly related to the sheer number of functioning intermediary organizations between the citizen and the state’ (1998: 13). The logic behind this new form of international intervention, which is rooted in liberalism and democratic peace theory, has gone largely unchallenged. This relative lack of critical examination of NGO work results in part from the choice of scholars to focus more on the roles of the more powerful state actors, but also because NGOs (and thus civil society) are assumed to be more ethical in their behaviour (discussed in detail in Chapter 3). Yet the impact of fostering a dramatic growth in LNGOs on communities’ wellbeing, empowerment, and quality of life, is unclear.

The need for a critical examination of peacebuilding

This study is not seeking to improve the practices of peacebuilding; rather, the intent is to understand how peacebuilding has served to dictate the nature and limits of politics that can take place within the targeted society, and how it serves to define the very meanings of society, security and politics. This is being undertaken with the intent of illustrating where the inconsistencies of peacebuilding practices are, and thus where there are points at which local communities can assert themselves to shape their own lives. It is motivated by a desire to empower communities to decide for themselves what form politics should take, and to point out the ways in which peacebuilding has served to enable greater local power, or to limit the debates that can take place, to foreclose various options of development and to constrain the operation of politics.

What is meant by ‘the political’ deviates from the way the concept is used in the liberal sense, where it refers to the jurisdiction of the state (I am drawing on Arendt 1970, 1973; Žižek 1997, 1999; Laclau 1990, 2006; Rancière 2007). In liberal pluralism, which underpins peacebuilding, politics is understood as the contestation between groups to affect decisions by the state (Dahl 1961; Truman 1962; Polsby 1963; Wenman 2003). In such a sense, which is predominately how it is used in policy and academic literature, political issues are those that pertain to the responsibility of the state. There is an expectation that these issues will be struggled over, and that there can be public discussion over these matters. That said, as Truman notes, the ways in which politics is pursued are constrained by norms deeply embedded within various political cultures: ‘political competition is understood to take place within certain “rules of the game” ’ (1962). These are also treated as given, and therefore beyond the scope of political adjudication’ (Wenman 2003: 58). Such a proscribed notion of what constitutes the political, of what forms of activity are legitimate for political actors, must be seen as disempowering. It dictates what is open to contestation and which matters are closed off. Simultaneously, the argument that there is a specific space within which politics can be contested, and who is able to participate in such debates, must also be seen as inherently conservative. The sovereign state, which peacebuilding supports, is the container of political action, and dictates the terms of political life (de Larrinaga and Sjolander 1998; Walker 1990).

There is a distinction between the concept of politics from the broader notion of ‘the political’, where, following de Larrinaga and Sjolander, ‘the political is found in the delimitation of an arena that is, in a prior distinction between what is “reasonable” (the legitimate subject of politics) and what is not’ (1998: 369). Laclau argues that ‘the moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature of the alternatives and their resolution through power relations becomes fully visible constitutes the field of the “political”’ (Laclau 1990: 35). Issues are not inherently political, but are made so through practice. The political then stands in opposition to discourses of technicality and security that foreclose debate, privilege particular voices and mask the exercise of power. It is precisely because it unsettles the received knowledge that politics is necessary. It is only in its absence that the possibility for local voices to be heard on how their societies should be shaped disappears. As we will see, peacebuilding – nominally undertaken to empower local communities and provide for their security and development – has approached political reform in a specific liberal way.

In spite of a dearth of analysis of the theory of peacebuilding, there are nonetheless a multitude of articles, studies and books by academics and policy makers on the history of peacebuilding and how it has altered the behaviour of states and the international community.⁷ These studies generally assess the impact of various operations on the state, and measure their effectiveness against the markers of democratic governance, declining rates of political violence, and economic growth. As Paris argues, the academic and policy literatures have tended to treat peace operations as ‘technical (or non-ideological) exercises in conflict management’ (2002: 638). Instead of asking how peacebuilding has been made possible, and what it dictates as reasonable, the vast majority of writing on the subject has sought to determine how such practices can be made more effective.⁸ When there is a discussion of theory amongst the proponents of peace-building, it predominately centres on how liberalism and civil society are crucial components to the resolution of the causes of conflict. This general lack of theorizing is not politically neutral, and instead serves to reinforce its legitimacy by assuming its very validity. Reconstruction, particularly the post-mission phase, is treated as a technical matter where the goals largely escape serious theoretical reflection. Following from the work of Doty (1996: 127), these connections between reconstruction, liberal democracy and economics, and civil society can then be seen as operating as nodal points in the discourses of peacebuilding, serving to fix the meanings of politics and economics.

As a consequence, positivist approaches are constrained in their ability to understand the issues at stake. The traditional orientations to social science that have been deployed for problem solving (Cox 1986) treat the world as a social reality that the researcher or policy maker is able to make sense of and, through an appropriate application of policy, therefore change in limited ways. More importantly, the mainstream approaches also dictate how the world should look: a mirror of Northern liberal states.⁹ In searching for causal relations between various phenomena, the social categories and the variables are taken for granted and in turn provide meaning through the very process of problem solving. By making assumptions about the validity of peacebuilding, the crucial discussion about the effects of peacebuilding is subsumed in debates about technique.¹⁰ As Whitworth (2004) points out, this results in claims by the advocates of peacebuilding, such as the UN, that failures are due to insufficient funding or international support for various operations, rather than due to any limitations of the peacebuilding process itself. As a result, peacebuilding as a policy is generally taken for granted in both the academic and policy communities, and assumed to be both feasible and desirable, even if specifics of method and timing are debated. The very possibility that this might not be so is not given any serious consideration. We are not able to ask how peacebuilding may have negatively affected people’s lives, how it may make some social groups less safe, or how it may contribute to politics of nationalism.

While traditional social science provides tools with which we can come to terms with specific social relations and problems, it is unable to allow us to see the range of issues at stake. It determines the problems to be addressed, and their means of resolution. In terms of peacebuilding, the central concern is how to build a sustainable liberal democracy. This has the effect of limiting both how the North understands the problems of the South, but also the sorts of solutions to enduring problems that the South can enact. The range of possible solutions is then curtailed, limited primarily to extrapolations from previous historic examples (as interpreted by the North).

Thus, the peacebuilding project is a universalizing force, presenting a common sense approach to addressing conflict and violence in the South. It operates as a meta-narrative, telling academics and policy makers what to examine, how to approach the subject, all the while serving to cast these inherent political questions as technical issues that foreclose debate. The dominance of the peacebuilding narrative, and its very real material effects on the South, demand a critical examination of its historical roots, of its mobilization into policy, and of its repercussions for peoples in the South. The universalizing impulse of liberalism, while nominally supporting difference, subordinates it to the state and the rational economic individual, and depoliticizes it. Liberalism is incapable of asking these critical questions, as it is constitutive of them in the first place. Therefore, it is essential that an understanding of peacebuilding’s intellectual roots be established, uncovering the assumptions upon which it is based. Doing so demonstrates the complexity of peacebuilding, and reveals how its practices must simplify, obscure and mask other representations of politics, identity and security. In short, peacebuilding must be understood as a political, not a technical, process.

This analysis is framed within a critical security studies (CSS) perspective to understand how peacebuilding has come to be a dominant narrative of both analysis and action, and how it is in turn linked to particular forms of global power and societal relations. It then asks at the outset, ‘what are the politics of peacebuilding knowledge production’? By demanding a contextual and historical reading of peacebuilding, its connection to, and role in replicating, the liberal global order becomes visible. In short, following in the footsteps of Cox, the politics of the ideas of peacebuilding and civil society can then be laid bare.

To undertake this analysis, this book makes use of the practice of immanent critique to assess the impact of peacebuilding from within its own framework and to explore the extent to which peacebuilding is able to do what it claims to do (this is discussed in detail in Chapter 2). As Browne argues, ‘immanent critique is based on an account of the volitional aspects of change and generative processes, typically either of the actions of subjects or the contradictory dynamics of systems’ (2008: 17). It is thus premised on the belief that any attempt to universalize is incapable of containing the breadth of diversity of social life. This should result in contradictions in the theories informing practices, and manifest in events that cannot be understood from within the given theoretical framework. By engaging in such an analysis, the c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Critical analysis of peacebuilding
• 3 Critiques of NGOs in peacebuilding
• 4 A brief history of Cambodia and peacebuilding
• 5 State intervention in NGOs for personal gain
• 6 Bureaucratic intervention in NGO activities
• 7 Intervention on identity issues
• 8 The non-politics around the meaning of politics
• 9 Conclusions
• Annex A – List of interviews
• Annex B – Categorization of NGOs interviewed
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index