Myth or reality: the liberal peace and post-conflict reconstruction

Conflict, Security & Development, 2006

Democratic Liberalism is based on the notion that liberal democracies are more peaceful and law-abiding in relation to other political systems. The liberal peace theory – or Liberal Democratic theory or Democratic peace – and therefore liberal peace-building, have become more prominent after the end of the Cold War because of the predominance of the western ideology. How valid are they though? The questions that this theory raises are not only related to how one defines democracy or peace but also to whether the model of liberal democracy is suitable for every society or every post-conflict state. Moreover, given the role liberal democracy plays in state/peace-building in fragile countries, it raises questions regarding the moral dilemmas of imposing liberal democracy as a form of neo-imperialism rather than development. In other words, even though the build-up of a democracy could – at least to some extent – benefit the recipient country, is it really something that is right to do considering that in the long term this model of development may institutionalize western interests or local problems?

Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 2008

This paper assesses the discursive environment of post-conflict intervention as a prism through which to view the international politics of the post-Cold War era. I argue that the `liberal peace' is not a single discourse but a tripartite international discursive environment that dynamically reproduces technical solutions which fail to address the core issues of conflict in a given place. The paper starts from the assumption that over the last twenty years we have seen a shift from an understanding of peace as a state of affairs in a given territory (as explored by Michael Banks in a 1987 paper) to peace as a process of post-conflict intervention; a move from peace to peacebuilding. This `liberal peace' sets a standard by which `failed states' and `bad civil societies' are judged according to ethical, spatial and temporal markers. However, the apparent homogeneity of the model obscures the divisions and mergers which characterise the scholarship and practice of international peacebuilding. The boundaries of the peace debate remain; the political differences latent in Banks' three conceptions are retained in the evolving discourses of democratic peacebuilding, civil society and statebuilding. The paper shows how these three basic discourses are reproduced in international policy analyses and major academic works. Moreover, the discursive mediation of their differences is the dynamic by which the liberal peace is sustained, despite its detachment from the lived experiences of post-conflict environments. It is in this sense that we can comprehend international peacebuilding as a virtual phenomenon, maintained in the verbal and visual representations of international organisations, diplomats and academic policy-practitioners. In light of this disaggregation of the discursive environment, a better, more nuanced understanding of the liberal peace can be attained: one that is able to grasp how critics and criticisms become incorporated into that which they seek to critique. The paper concludes with three propositions regarding the nature of world order in the era of the tripartite `liberal peace'. During this time coercion, military force and even warfare have become standard and legitimate features of peacefare. The discursive dynamics of international peacebuilding illustrate how peace has become ever more elusive in contemporary international politics.

Conflict, Security and Development, 2013

‘Liberal peacebuilding’ is a subject of intense debate within contemporary IR. This article contends, however, that for all the merits of much of the work on the subject, the overall terms of the debate are rooted in a series of questionable assumptions. Proponents and critics alike hold that peacebuilding is an essentially liberal project, over which there is a global (or Western) consensus, and which is pursued by a decentralised plurality of institutions irrespective of the particularly of war-endings. This article shows that this is misleading. Focusing on the relations between peace agreements and peacebuilding, it shows that peace agreements are contextually specific political arrangements, driven above all by strategic considerations of power and legitimacy, in relation to which liberal peacebuilding doctrines and practices are unevenly applied, instrumentalised, or plain ignored – including by international actors. It argues in turn that liberal peacebuilding discourse overstates both the liberalism of contemporary peace interventions, and the degree of global consensus thereover, and fails to capture the enduring centrality of states, strategy and geopolitics in the making of peace. These arguments are developed with reference to a wide range of cases of post-Cold War peace interventions, though with especial focus on UN peacebuilding in Cambodia in the early 1990s.

Routledge, 2011

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 International Relations/ Security Studies.

Global Change, Peace and Security, 2021

Focusing on post-Cold War international interventions, this article traces the emergence of a malaise within the liberal universal project. While it is agreed that the liberal peace is in crisis, there is disagreement on the nature of the impasse. For mainstream IR scholars, there is a resistance by actors in the Global South to follow the policy dictates of powerful Western governments and the international organizations they dominate. While this is certainly the case, this article argues that the crisis of the liberal peace is also rooted in the erosion of liberal universal foundations. In addition to liberal norms being rejected by Southern actors, the liberal peace crisis reflects a deeper scepticism on the part of international policy elites regarding the ability of liberal market democracy to resolve a wide range of social, political and economic problems. In addition to being a crisis of legitimacy between the Global North and the Global South, there seems to exist an erosion of liberal universal foundations which is undermining the ability of international policy elites to act purposively in global affairs. This argument is drawn out with reference to post-liberal approaches to peacebuilding which foreground the radical potential of non-liberal forms of agency.

The literature on contemporary peacebuilding is increasingly being framed by the liberal peace debate. Sometimes labelled "liberal interventionism" i or "liberal internationalism", ii the authors under review concur that the liberal peace paradigm is the dominant form of internationally--supported peacebuilding. The liberal peace debate is linked to the wider debate surrounding democratic peace theory, as defined by authors such as Bruce Russett or John Oneal. iii Liberal peace refers here to the idea that certain kinds of society will tend to be more peaceful, both in their domestic affairs and in their international relations, than "illiberal" states. iv Hence, liberal peacebuilding implies not just managing instability between states, the traditional focus of the IR discipline, but also to build peace within states on the basis of liberal democracy and market economics. Mirroring the democratic peace debate, the liberal peace encompasses socio--cultural norms associated with peacemaking, as well as the international and national structures instrumental to promoting the liberal peace. The liberal peace's main components vary, but usually include democracy promotion, the rule of law and good governance, promotion of human rights, economic reform and privatisation. More than an absence of violence and war, a negative peace to use Galtung's terminology, v advocates of the liberal peace focus on social engineering meant to constitute the foundations for a stable society. The blurring and convergence of development and security -dubbed the "security--development nexus" -is at the roots of the liberal peace, in the process bringing together two previously distinct policy areas, and different sets of actors and agencies. The double dynamic of the radicalisation of the politics of development and the reproblematisation of security entails the transformation of societies to fit liberal norms and Western expectations. vi Then the main objective underlying liberal peace promotion is to create a "a self--sustaining peace within domestic, regional and international frameworks of liberal governance in which both overt and structural violence are removed and social, economic and political models conform to a mixture of liberal and neo--liberal international expectations in a globalized and transnational setting." vii The process of taming "overt and structural violence" can in itself create or reinforce modes of cultural and social domination occurring within the everyday social habits, forms of order and social restraint produced by indirect, cultural mechanisms; what has been described as "symbolic violence" by Pierre Bourdieu. viii However, symbolic violence requires acceptance as legitimate by the subject to reach its aim - this is the process of misrecognition (méconnaissance):

The stunted and stumbling progress of the ‘liberal peace’ philosophy since 1990 tells a complex story. In this article, I give a history of the liberal peace project from its academic and activist origins to today’s global application, discussing how policymakers and liberal peace architects see liberal peacebuilding, and how emerging powers such as India and China relate to these goals. I close with a discussion of the future of liberal peacebuilding, the ‘Business for Peace’ paradigm and how relationships between powerful states and their peripheries will still matter despite a more consolidated international aid community.

2011

This book presents a critical analysis of the liberal peace project and offers possible alternatives and models.