Building States, Building Peace

Global and Regional Involvement in Sri Lanka and Myanmar

A. Sánchez-Cacicedo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137274151
• eBook ISBN: 9781137274168
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sánchez-Cacicedo provides a critique of liberal peacebuilding approaches and of international interventions in statebuilding processes, questioning how 'global' these initiatives are, using case studies from the Asian region including Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

Part I

A Critical View on ‘Global’ Liberal Peacebuilding and Statebuilding

1

Introduction: The Way of Terrain

The recent evolution of events in Sri Lanka, the primary case study of this book, has been very different to that in Myanmar, the secondary case study. However, civil conflict endures in both countries. Sri Lanka is now in a state of alleged peace, as there is currently no longer armed violence; however, the roots of the ethno-political conflict remain unchanged. Rajapaksa’s increasingly totalitarian regime shows limited intentions of implementing a political solution to the ethno-political conflict that is agreeable to all parties and that includes genuine reconciliation measures, as well as a higher degree of power devolution to the Northern and Eastern provinces compared to the rest of the country. Moreover, the recent scattered episodes of violence against the Muslim minority point to a communalization of politics in Sri Lanka beyond the Tamil-Sinhalese ethnic cleavage.

In Myanmar, armed violence prevails throughout the multifold and decade-long armed conflict between ethnic minority armed insurgent groups and the Burmese regime. While the Rohingya conflict has captured the most media attention in recent times, it is only one of the many remaining foci of localized violence in Myanmar. The Western media’s attention to Myanmar’s democratization and statebuilding process, on which I focus, has somewhat overshadowed the ongoing ethnic strife in the country. This shows some of the contradictions inherent in the liberal internationalist rhetoric, as elaborated throughout this book.

I would like to make clear from the start that choosing to call the country Myanmar, rather than Burma, has no political connotations but must be seen as a rational acknowledgement of current reality. Burma was the colonial denomination; the name was changed to Myanmar in 1989, following the establishment of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Therefore continuing to call Myanmar by its colonial name is seen here as dogmatic and unnecessarily biased, as well as going against what I argue in this book: the absolute righteousness of a liberal form of peace and, more broadly, liberal internationalism. Similarly, Rangoon was renamed Yangon in 1989. While the capital of the country has been called Naypyidaw since 2005, the bulk of diplomatic missions remain in Yangon, the key hub for international political encounters in the country. There is additional controversy regarding the use of ‘Myanmar’ versus ‘Burmese’ to designate the people as a whole and for the language of the country. Some argue that ‘Burmese’ alludes only to the majority ethnic community in the country, the Bamar, while ‘Myanmar’ is seen as more comprehensive in scope. It is also the current regime’s official designation for the people and language. For some locals, nonetheless, Myanmar remains exclusionary and brings reminiscences of the kingdom of the Myanmar people.¹ I have chosen to use ‘Burmese’, due to its widespread use, but there is no ideological basis to this choice.

This book seeks to understand ‘the way of terrain’ in relation to peace and statebuilding. As Sun Tzu notes: ‘It is the general’s duty to study [the forms of terrain] diligently’.² The terrain is often not ‘accessible’ when it comes to peace processes and local governance, and is better described as ‘entangling’ and ‘precipitous’ for all involved. The unpredictable and unexpected military victory of the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009, years after I started my research on Sri Lanka, reinforces my claims regarding the influence of external engagement on the evolution of the 2002 Sri Lankan peace process. It was the failure of the recent peace process to bring about a negotiated political solution that legitimized the decisions of the parties in conflict (hereafter simply ‘the parties’) to pursue the military path. They were able show the world how an attempt at peace, with heavy international backing, had been in vain; this provided them with the necessary legitimacy to justify war domestically. The fact that Sri Lanka is now portrayed among its Asian peers as a model of how to terminate a secessionist insurgency by military means, rather than opting for political negotiations, makes this an important case study for any scholar of conflict resolution.

The Sri Lankan case shows that there was no peace to keep in the first place. The 2002 peace process was more ‘a continuation of war by other means’, to borrow from Clausewitz’s ‘war is a continuation of policy by other means’.³ Domestic structure – the balance of forces between the parties – provided little incentive for the Sri Lankan government to deal with the LTTE. The power asymmetry between the parties was stark from the start of the 2002 peace process and grew as the peace initiative evolved, largely due to the support of external actors. The external engagement was itself embedded within an international structure of its own. In this book I distinguish between the international material and normative structures, which were intertwined with the regional and domestic equivalents. External involvement in the recent peace initiative in Sri Lanka was not a benign exercise: it exacerbated the violence and led to the polarization of the sides, as Crawford and Kuperman explore more generically.⁴

The fact that the recent Sri Lankan peace process included an unprecedented degree of external involvement led to overconfidence on the part of external actors, who saw themselves as in command, when in reality their leverage over domestic and regional actors was limited. Their desire for a liberal peace lacked the necessary domestic and regional recognition from its inception, despite their conviction about its righteousness and global applicability. Liberal peace is seen in this book as an extension of Western-led global governance.⁵ The focus is on neo-liberal economic and liberal democratic principles for ‘post-conflict’ statebuilding purposes with a view to achieving a sustainable peace. Liberal peacebuilding has also been applied in multifold peace processes in the global South in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The idea of an overarching, consistent external component did not correspond to reality among non-regional actors, and certainly regional actors, who never legitimized liberal peacebuilding. This is replicated in Myanmar, where there has been a clear divergence from the liberal internationalist approach to statebuilding of non-regional actors as opposed to regional ones.

External involvement in Myanmar reproduces many of the traits of liberal peacebuilding, seen as embedded in liberal internationalism, but in this case focused mostly on international statebuilding. External engagement, much as in Sri Lanka, was stratified along non-regional (international), regional and local lines. This interaction between the different structures at a normative level is emphasized in this book. I look into how the different external actors have reacted to domestic developments in Myanmar highlighting events after 1988, when the SLORC came to power. More specifically, the focus is on foreign players’ core claims and approaches pertaining to the liberal internationalist agenda, where relevant. In a parallel analysis, I focus on the impact of Western versus regional actors’ engagement in the recent evolution of Myanmar’s foreign and domestic policies.

Part of the reason behind Myanmar’s recent opening up to Western powers is its wish to counterbalance China’s historical and overpowering influence. Another important aspect is economic and development-driven, mainly due to the country’s lack of technological knowledge and the means of exploiting its own resources. Myanmar has made sure to establish an economic and trade relationship with its neighbours to compensate for Western disengagement. This book illustrates the wide spectrum of approaches to Myanmar’s statebuilding process and discusses how different actors’ agendas and interests coalesce. Their motives are far from solely normative; all the actors involved have had utilitarian intentions concerned with Myanmar’s unexploited economic and resource potential. Western actors’ normative discourse about the domestic statebuilding and peacebuilding processes has been permeated by liberal internationalist ideas. In contrast, regional actors have adopted a much more subtle and certainly less critical public discourse about the Burmese regime. Besides the differences in the material structure surrounding each actor, this clash in the normative agendas of the various external players eventually led to marked differences in leverage vis-à-vis Naypyidaw. So where exactly did the gap in perceptions lie? I address this question in the next section.

One of the key questions that I raise in this book is how ‘global’ the international normative structure and liberal solidarist norms, supportive of international intervention, really are. Attempting to apply a liberal interventionist discourse at the regional level is not feasible or politically palatable in Asia for historical reasons and due to resistance to what is seen as neo-colonialism.⁶ The cases of Sri Lanka and Myanmar illustrate this point well: the internationalization of virulent domestic politics beyond the regional sphere, directly or indirectly involving non-regional actors, has brought about clashes between global, regional and domestic normative structures. It has favoured domestic actors aiming to delegitimize Western countries, who only had to tap into the historical discourse against foreign interference pervading local constituencies. The regional sphere has acted as a normative shield for the anti-interventionist discourse of domestic stakeholders in both countries, to the further detriment of Western countries’ liberal internationalist agenda.

As explained in Chapter 2, the main conceptual chapter, structure- versus process-related aspects and material, as opposed to normative factors, are used for a nuanced analysis throughout this book. At the core of my argument is the view that structure-related aspects prevail over agency and process-related ones. The eventual outcome of the 2002 Sri Lankan peace process proves this best. I do not mean to imply by this that agency cannot influence the path of events, but this happens within a broader structural framework that marks the limits that agents have for manoeuvre. Choices and strategies are constrained by the underlying domestic balance of forces and this can be exacerbated by the involvement of external actors, as happened in both Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

1.1 The gap: perceptions of legitimacy and ‘global’ international norms

The theoretical core of this book is based on a critique of mainstream approaches to external third-party involvement in domestic conflict resolution initiatives and statebuilding. Within the broader framework of international intervention, and particularly that of the liberal internationalist kind, liberal peacebuilding has emerged as the leading form of external involvement in domestic conflict resolution initiatives. The liberal peace approach enjoys the support of international regimes institutionalized by international organizations and backed by leading Western states.⁷ This approach contrasts with current peacebuilding and statebuilding practice, particularly in a regional context with pluralist conceptualization of the international order, characteristic of Westphalian states in the global South.⁸ The bulk of Asian states can be considered Westphalian, including India and China, as demonstrated by their behaviour towards their neighbours, which I explore in this book. Thus the material and normative nature of the regional structure differs from what is presented as ‘global’. New Delhi’s hegemony, which dwindled as other Asian actors came into the picture, was a defining feature of the regional material structure in the Sri Lankan case. China remains the leading actor in Myanmar’s regional material and normative structure, although other Asian countries are seeking to counterbalance this influence, in particular India, Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) grouping. The regional material and normative structure has had key implications for the influence of external actors, particularly non-regional ones, in both case studies analysed here.

The divergent views on external third-party involvement at the global and regional levels discussed above have serious implications when the regional prevails over the global structure, as is the case in both countries. This is strongly related to immediate security concerns; that is, the material structure. Constructivists argue that it also has to do with perceptions, identities, and the importance afforded to the international legitimacy granted by actors at different levels of analysis. Legitimacy granted by regional powers is more sought-after than that of global actors due to the immediacy of its implications: regional powers – India and China in this case – are key norm carriers on which their smaller neighbours rely to legitimize their normative discourse domestically.⁹ Where there are substantial normative differences between the external actors involved, domestic perceptions of legitimacy will accommodate accordingly. Like their regional counterparts, local actors in the global South seek to comply, at least rhetorically, with the minimum of what is imposed as ‘good and appropriate’ by the international state system in order to obtain international legitimacy in the eyes of global actors, while acting otherwise at home and with their neighbours.¹⁰

The regional factor has largely been ignored in favour of an overarching external conceptualization; such reductionism is unhelpful for a nuanced analysis. Regionalism and the regional component are increasingly factored into peacebuilding and statebuilding initiatives worldwide: the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative of 2002–2007 and the globally acknowledged recent Qatari involvement in Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen mark a significant shift. Is it substantive enough, however? When addressing the regional factor, the focus is often on issues of regional integration, cooperation and power distribution without linking these outwards to the global and inwards to the domestic in relation to external involvement in domestic peacebuilding and statebuilding initiatives. Unlike the non-regional actors, India’s involvement in Sri Lanka had direct implications for the country’s domestic politics and its role in South Asia and the wider Asian region. Overlooking the role of regional actors, beyond their economic interests, in Myanmar’s domestic politics illustrates this point further. Underestimating the vital stakes of China, India, ASEAN countries and Japan in Naypyidaw’s foreign and domestic policy developments can only be considered short-sighted and naïve.

1.2 Non-material variables: why on the margins?

Another key claim that I make in this book refers to the marginal role granted to non-material variables by global liberal peacebuilding and liberal internationalist approaches. While Norway and other proponents of liberal peace highlighted the importance of identity, values and norms in their discourse, they prioritized material aspects when attempting to exercise leverage over the parties. By doing so, the proponents of the liberal peace approach – which were mostly Western actors – disregarded the potential for domestic and regional actors to instrumentalize social-psychological factors. This...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  A Critical View on Global Liberal Peacebuilding and Statebuilding
• Part II  Lessons from the Sri Lankan Case: 20022009
• Part III  The Region to the Fore: External Involvement in Asia
• Part IV  Conclusion
• Notes
• Index