This book is about local-level peace-building.
Since 1945, the most common form of armed conflict in the world has been intra-state wars (Sarkees & Wayman, 2010). Such wars have accounted for around three quarters of all armed conflicts in the period.1 Approximately half of these internal armed conflicts have relapsed into war after an initial termination brought about by a peace agreement or by military victory, several more than once, and about three quarters left behind authoritarian regimes (Michael Barnett, Kim, O’Donnell, & Sitea, 2007, p. 35). At the same time, in the post-Cold War period there has been a marked increase in war termination through negotiated settlement rather than victory (T. D. Mason, 2007, pp. 1–8). It would appear then that efforts at bringing wars to an end peacefully have become more successful in recent decades, while the efforts to keep this peace have not. Even where international intervention has managed to end large scale organised violence, the results have typically failed to match expectations (Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2013, p. 774).
That this has been the case would seem to be the result of two, interlinked factors—the multiplication of sovereign states through decolonisation, which had de jure but often lacked de facto statehood (R. H. Jackson & Rosberg, 1982), and the logic of the Cold War in which the United States of America and the Soviet Union competed through proxies and clients in the new states and some of the old. In the Philippines, two insurgencies broke out at the very end of the 1960s. One was rooted in the injustices suffered by the Muslim inhabitants of Mindanao, the major southern island; the other in economic injustice and oppression of peasants and workers by a deeply entrenched oligarchy.
The winding-down and end of the Cold War opened up political space for a new kind of international intervention into these conflicts, peace-building. Defined as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict” (UNSG, 1992, para. 21), it was to be carried out after the formal ending of conflict. It was originally pioneered by the United Nations with the intention of transforming war-torn states into modern liberal democracies, respectful of human rights, market-oriented and integrated into the global economy.
This has come to be known as liberal peace-building and it has proven rather successful at one level and less so at another. As a concept, it has achieved a degree of success inasmuch as it has become the norm when it comes to dealing with internal armed conflict. Even governments of countries in internal war but without an international peace mission presence have adopted its language and practices. This has been the case in the Philippines.
As far as achieving its professed goals, the outcomes of peace-building are more ambiguous. Approximately half of the post-conflict countries where international peace-building missions have been implemented relapsed into armed violence (Michael Barnett et al., 2007, p. 35), and many of those that have not linger in a state of “no war, no peace” (Mac Ginty, 2010).
One particular difficulty peace-building has confronted is in having a constructive and lasting impact on what is referred to as ‘the local.’ This has been problematic in at least three ways. First, when international intervention has failed to deliver a ‘peace dividend’ to people, leaving behind unpeaceful conditions, legitimation issues have arisen. Second, as the mixed results of earlier peace-building missions have become evident, the question has arisen: what justifies future interventions? Third, and from a practical perspective, it has become obvious that local dynamics often serve as the drivers of renewed conflict, undermining the effectiveness of elite pacts and macro-level peace-building. For example, in the Philippines, clan feuding poses an effective challenge to the peace process in Muslim Mindanao (Canuday, 2014); the failure of the agrarian reform fuels continued communist insurgency (Borras, Carranza, & Franco, 2007). Thus, the question of the local has become a prominent subject of enquiry and policy. It is here that infrastructures for peace—“a network of interdependent systems, resources, values and skills held by government, civil society and community institutions that promote dialogue and consultation; prevent conflict and enable peaceful mediation when violence occurs in a society” (UNDP, 2013)—have been proposed as a way of connecting peace-building and the local.
In 2010, the incoming Aquino administration launched Payapa at Masaganang Pamayanan (Peaceful and Prosperous Communities—PAMANA), its “peace and development framework.” PAMANA is based on already existing programmes and structures, which it reconfigures into a network of organisations within the broadly understood state apparatus and beyond it, reorienting them towards peace-building.
This book is about the PAMANA programme of the Philippine government. It is about what happens to it when it enters municipalities and village communities; it is about the impact it has on these local units; and it is about how this programme and ones similar to it fit in the larger picture of peace-building and state-building.
1.1 Peace-building
Johan Galtung (1976), when he first coined the term, proposed peace-building as one of three approaches to peace, to complement peacekeeping and peacemaking. Already in this formulation, the concern was with the creation of structures that would “remove causes of wars and offer alternatives to war in situations where wars might occur” (p. 298). Thus, peacemaking refers to bringing armed conflicts to an end, peacekeeping to the provision of physical security, through the separation of forces and monitoring peace agreements, while peace-building seeks structural change in polities to ensure the peace is sustainable. This makes peace-building at once the most amorphous and most ambitious of these interventions.
Edward Newman (2009, pp. 46–51) distinguishes three trends within contemporary peace-building. Realist peace-building is mainly concerned with systemic stability; transformatory peace-building is concerned with changing the relationships of actors, institutions and constituencies, from conflictual to peaceful; and liberal peace-building, which has two sub-types, the Wilsonian, which seeks to create liberal democratic states seen as the guarantor of peace and stability, and hegemonic neoliberal peace-building interested in integrating ‘dysfunctional’ states into the global capitalist economy.
When UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali made peace-building one of the key components of the UN’s post-Cold War internationalism, his programmatic document, An Agenda for Peace (1992), made it clear that peace-building was based on the primacy of the state as the principal structural unit of the international system; it was the state that was the organiser of society and guarantor of peace. The image of the state in all this was a liberal democratic one, pursuing capitalist economic development and integration in the global economy. It was only after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States by al-Qaeda that the emphases shifted from the liberal character of the state to strengthening these states’ core security functions.
As a result, peace-building has increasingly adopted a state-building approach, so much so that some authors argue they are effectively the same (Cubitt, 2013). I refer to this as the peacebuilding-as-statebuilding position.2 While there are organisations and initiatives that concentrate attention on such things as inter-communal reconciliation, psychosocial support to victims and perpetrators of violence, and peace education to inculcate a culture of peace in societies, this peacebuilding-as-statebuilding reading is generally correct, especially when powerful actors such as states, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are involved.
This strain of peace-building—in theory as well as practice—promotes a version of the modern state as it emerged in Europe since the sixteenth century; sometimes called the OECD-model of the modern state, which is seen as the default guarantor of stability, security, and development (Fukuyama, 2005; Ghani & Lockhart, 2008). Although occasionally discussed as a specific area of peace-building (Daoudi, 2009), what is truly striking about state-building, when one takes a closer look, is that it permeates the entire peace-building enterprise.
Unburdened by questions of what peace or the good society amount to, peacebuilding-as-statebuilding has produced a significant volume of literature of the problem-solving kind (Cox, 1981). This literature seeks to improve the effectiveness of peace-building operations as a whole and particular activities within it. There is a plethora of books, journal articles, guidelines, websites and so on dedicated to highly specialised activities within the peace-building field, such as the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants (DDR), security sector reform (SSR), civil society development, the (re-)construction of physical infrastructure, rule of law, electoral support, to name a few. As a reaction, a critical literature emerged, questioning some of the fundamental assumptions of liberal peace-building, particularly the validity of its universalising tendencies (Clements, Boege, Brown, Foley, & Nolan, 2007; Richmond, 2006), and its interventionism (Chandler, 2006; Schellhaas & Seegers, 2009).
Both the problem-solving and the critical approaches have, in different ways, been part of the local turn in peace-building. This increased attention to the local dynamics and context of conflict and peace-building, and to the epistemologies, culture and agency of those not in positions of power, stems either from an interest in improving the effectiveness of peace-building or in the emancipation of the locals (e.g. Leonardsson & Rudd, 2015; Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2013).
Beyond the ethical and practical imperatives (the distribution of peace dividends and responding to local drivers of conflict), the increased interest in the local has two further intertwined roots, one conceptual, the other practical. Conceptually, the modern state is understood as a territorial entity exercising sovereignty over its territory as recognised in international law. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back to the eighteenth century (Bobbitt, 2002). In this regard many post-colonial states resemble pre-modern states where state power emanated from political-military centres and dissipated as one moved further away. Related to this is a practical security concern. After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, it became conventional wisdom that terrorism and related security threats originated in so-called ungoverned spaces (Rabasa et al., 2007), making ‘bringing government’ to these places a priority.
It is in this context that the concept of peace infrastructures, originally proposed by John Paul Lederach (1997), began gaining traction, partly through the work of the United Nations Development Programme’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery (UNDP-BCPR) and non-governmental initiatives like the Global Alliance for Ministries and Infrastructures for Peace (GAMIP). Lederach’s inspiration was his work in Nicaragua in the 1980s where communities organised committees integrating key local actors in an effort to deal with the ongoing violence of the anti-Sandinista counterrevolution. These local peace committees showed how local agency could achieve peace—at l...