Work on the role and functioning of peacebuilding has tended to focus on sovereignty as a monolithic entity, something that states either have or do not have. The role of external factors like the UN is typically seen as being either to bolster such sovereignty, or to undermine it. Adopting an anthropological studying-through approach to the UNâs peacebuilding activities in Liberia, I will show how UN peacebuilding activities turned Liberia into an object of governing, whereby the UN, in seeking to build the state, also became the state. The sovereign state of Liberia here emerges as a franchise, not a self-contained entity. Two implications follow: First, that, to maintain an international system based on sovereign states, international peacebuilding turns post-conflict countries into clients of the international community. Second, that sovereignty becomes unbundled, no longer exclusively associated with the state, and is organized in and through specific practices of governing, with state actors as one among many kinds of actors. These findings move beyond other studies of peacebuilding by narrowing in on the unbundling of sovereignty, adding to our insights on the changing forms of sovereignty by showing the specific ways in which it is packaged and enacted, often by actors who are acting in the name of the international.
The first chapter lays the foundations for the main themes of the book, defining key concepts such as franchised states and ownershipping, and setting out the main elements in the analytical framework. I specify what can and cannot be grasped through current approaches, and opt for an analytical strategy that allows me to make as few assumptions as possible about the organization and functioning of state sovereignty. By âstudying throughââa well-established anthropological strategyâI identify the various layers of the organization of sovereignty for many conflict-ridden states in the global South, using Liberia as a case. Key layers of this organization are (i) the UN Security Council (UNSC), (ii) peacebuilding bureaucracy and policy-making in DPKO in New York, and (iii) the implementation level and peacebuilding process in Liberia. This strategy enables us to see peacebuilding as a method of distributing concepts and ideas about states and state capacities, linking organizational practices in New York with those in Liberia, and thereby capturing the sites where sovereignty is variously enacted, negotiated, and put to work. The perspective on franchised states allows us to see that while sovereign states are generally perceived as being constitutive of the international system, that system is also constitutive of (some) states, insofar as itâas exemplified by the UNâorganizes, manages, and enacts statehood, often in paradoxical and contradictory ways. Approaching the international system and state sovereignty in this wayâbackwards, as it wereâmakes it possible to detect, describe, and interpret taken-for-granted assumptions about sovereignty.
In the empirical chapters of this book, I move along with actors working with global peacebuilding processes, to capture intentions that travel, and further to explore what happens when they change sites and reappear in new contexts. This has meant studying empirically how organizational aims and goals become transformed and contextualized by peacebuilding actors to fit with local settings. Further, I investigate how articulations of peacebuilding at the top level of the UN organization differ from those on the ground, and explore the friction between these levels by studying social processes and individual actions. In this exploration, I began by focusing on how UN and other international actors emphasized creating ânational ownershipâ to the peacebuilding process in Liberia. That led me to ask how people involved in the peacebuilding process in Liberia created bureaucratic and institutional links, how they produced taxonomies and shared communicative platforms.
As I empirically traced policies through these systems, it increasingly looked as if the UN bureaucracy became intertwined with the Liberian bureaucracy. In trying to build the state in Liberia, the UN paradoxically also became the state, so peacebuilding activities aimed at building the state, and creating national ownership, also seemed to undermine Liberian national ownership of the state. That is an observation also made by several scholars concerned with development assistance, peacebuilding, and statebuilding. My point here is that we must move beyond this observation. Empirical studies of such global processes can explore how sovereignty gets organized and performed. That requires a combination of diachronic and synchronic approachesâor a historically oriented anthropology, combined with tracing how state institutions become entangled with and transformed through their relations with external forces, ambitions, and processes. I analyze these processes of connections and disconnections through anthropological perspectives on organizations and sovereignty, which in turn reveal sovereignty as not exclusively associated with state actorsâthereby revealing Liberia as a franchised state.
Through this study, I trace how the bureaucratic logic in the UN shapes its actions in a specific way. When the UN deploys a peacebuilding operation to a post-conflict country like Liberia, an interface is created between the UN organization and the Liberian state. This interface consists, on the one hand, of the UN, with its organizational way of seeing and sorting the world by making bureaucratic taxonomies that enable UN actors to perform and implement organizational tasks on the ground; and, on the other hand, the Liberian government, with the particularities of Liberia as a sovereign country whose state institutions and customary structures have been shaped by their specific historical trajectory. For Liberia to be recognized by the international community as a state and to maintain the legitimacy of the UNâs presence in the country, it is imperative for both the Liberian state and the UN to create national Liberian ownership to the peacebuilding processes. Tracing these processes empirically revealed how an emphasis on creating national ownership entailed paradoxical effects and emergent properties specific to the Liberian political and historical context. This, in turn, made it necessary to draw on an understanding of sovereignty as a modus operandi or as a governmentalized template (Bartelson 2014, p. 88) through which political processes like peacebuilding are organized. In this way sovereignty is understood as a symbolic form âthat has conditioned the ways in which we habitually talk about, reflect upon and organize the political worldâ (ibid., p. 8). The focus on national ownership, it seemed, help to reproduce Liberiaâs state capacities and status as a sovereign country. However, it also appeared that creating ownership to peacebuilding processes was something the UN bureaucrats and officials did in order to turn Liberia into a governable object in line with the UNâs bureaucratic taxonomies. This might undermine the Liberian state apparatusâbut would it mean that Liberiaâs status as a sovereign country became undermined? The studying-through approach enabled me to follow up on this question by exploring contradictory aspects and emergent properties of peacebuilding and furthermore to avoid a claustrophobic notion of sovereignty. Thus, the book deals with the following key questions: What is peacebuilding? What political significance does it have? To what extent does it contribute to organizing people within systems of power and authority?
To investigate these questions further, I turned to theories and literature that enabled me to explore institutions, organizations, and bureaucracies, and how institutions influence the thinking of individuals, and how individuals come to share categories of thoughts (Douglas 1986). This evoked anthropological perspectives on organizations and sovereignty, in which the Liberian state emerged as a franchised state.
This theoretical point of departure made it possible to analyze how actors connected with the peacebuilding process in Liberia were engaged in activities aimed at creating national ownership through rebuilding state capacities, while simultaneously producing other unintentional and sometimes contradictory effects. Activities of UN officials and people working for other international organizations involved with the peacebuilding process in countries like Liberia tended to turn processes pertaining to the state in post-conflict countries into recognizable social spaces familiar to actors in the international apparatus. In this way, actions concerned with establishing a national ownership to peacebuilding processes invoked social spaces where contradictory processes unfolded simultaneously. The emphasis on creating national ownership provided legitimacy to the UN and the international peacebuilding operation, thereby reproducing activities pertaining to ideas of sovereignty. However, it also gave rise to a clientelistic relationship between the Liberian state on the one hand, and the UN and other international peacebuilding actors on the other. With the help of perspectives provided by Mary Douglas (1986), it proved possible to analyze this as an institutionalization process. Creating national ownership required building capacity in established national institutions. In this capacity-building process, the UN and national elites would tend to find each other by working together, establishing a shared communicative platform or categories of thoughts.
Institutions are built up over time and are products of their historical trajectories (see, for instance, Berger and Luckmann 1979). A historically oriented approach to social institutions and institutionalizations is needed for understanding aspects of power, so as to avoid a structural-functionalistic view of political and social institutions (see, for instance, Meeker 1980). With this in mind, I include a historical perspective on the making of Liberian state institutions. This in turn made it relevant to ask whether the UN, in its efforts at building the state in Liberia, paradoxically also became the state and contributed to (re)producing Liberia as a franchised state. Anthropological perspectives on organization and sovereignty have proven particularly well equipped for analyzing this question.
The present chapter presents the direction and frameworks for this book. After explaining the basis and background, I continue with a section defining ownership as practitioners used it; next, I introduce ownershipping as an analytical perspective for explaining complexities in peacebuilding processes.
Tracing Connections and Traveling Intentions
The empirical chapters in this book move back and forth between villages in rural Liberia (where global policies shape, influence, and have direct and indirect impacts on statebuilding processes in Liberia), via a perspective on the historical trajectory of Liberia as a nation-state, to negotiations, diplomacy, and backstage decision-making processes in the UN Security Council in New York. I explore more centralized sites in Monrovia where I traced global policy processes and the making of connections and disconnections in Liberian ministries, as well as a policy-producing section in the UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations in New York where I was involved in producing normative frameworks, principles, policies, and guidelines for the field in Liberia. Through my anthropological fieldwork, I have also been to several other sites not specifically mentioned here. Thus, the ethnography presented has undergone a selective process where I have chosen to focus on elements that contribute in weaving together a coherent argument based on empirical findings at important sites of peacebuilding, and connecting this phenomenon as a global institutionalization process.
Anthropologists have studied the interconnectedness between local and national levels and between formal and informal state structures in Liberia (e.g., dâAzevedo 1962, 1969; Murphy and Blesoe 1987; Moran 2006; Richards 2005; Tonkin 2002). The present book adds a layer of complexityâthe international layerâby describing how the UN and others produce state effects in Liberia. This made it necessary for me, as an anthropologist, to choose the long road of long-term, multi-sited fieldwork, traveling between Liberia, New York, and Oslo to trace connections, or selective social relations, across time and space. On the other hand, these findings would be of little value unless combined with a description of the historical trajectory of Liberia. Drawing on the history of Liberia, I see todayâs international engagement as the continuation of a long tradition of supporting elite interests in the country.
The fieldwork was conducted between 2007 and 2016. The book is organized with each chapter focusing on one place, so that each chapter can contribute a specific perspective to the larger argument about franchised states and how global processes like peacebuilding challenge our conception of states, causing new kinds of state formations and making it necessary to revisit questions of sovereignty. Through participant observation and âstudying-throughâ fieldwork, I examine three sites of the peacebuilding process as it pertains to Liberia.
The highest hierarchical place or site is the executive level of the UNâs responsibility for international peace and security. This site is presented in Chap. 5 on the UN Security Council (UNSC), the arena for international politics and big decisions. UNSC decisions have effects across the world, from big capitals to small villages in isolated rural areas, but these decisions are also affected by internal patterns of action grounded in big politics. The Council produces far-reaching and extensive policy, Security Council Resolutionsâbut has an inward focus. The content of these resolutions and statements arrived at through negotiations and compromises could be understood as representing the overarching organizational intentions of the United Nations. These intentions travel through HQ bureaucracy in New York, where they are transformed into practical guidelines and policies for officials deployed to peacekeeping missions. In Liberia, these guidelines an...