III

Liberal Peacebuilding

‘[B]y stimulating the importation of Western models into societies in the South, it [statebuilding] reveals its own inadequacy; by inciting peripheral societies to adapt, it raises hope of innovation that may very well be false; by rushing the process of world unification, it encourages the rebirth and affirmation of individual characteristics; by endowing the international order with a centre of power more structured than ever, it tends to intensify conflict. By seeking to bring historical development to an end, it suddenly launches History in varied and contradictory directions.’1

Introduction

STATE FORMATION FOCUSES on violent indigenous processes that lead to the creation of a state that represents powerful interests often influenced by regional factors. Statebuilding mainly offers a modernisation-oriented response to these dynamics in the context of the construction of the neoliberal state via externalised strategies of intervention and conditionality. Thus, problems with local autonomy and local legitimacy soon arise. State formation represents liberal peace as being constantly threatened by local conflicts, statebuilding plays a disciplinary role in countering them via the development of a neoliberal state, and peacebuilding provides a liberal normative framework in which the individual is positioned as a citizen with a range of rights and protections. If conflict is driven by a series of asymmetries from the local to the global, then state formation exploits those same asymmetries by exercising direct and structural power. Statebuilding and peacebuilding mitigate conflict through mainly governmental power. Peacebuilding represents a broader normative framework in which statebuilding is nested in an attempt to advance both state and international legitimacy, and justice.

The liberal-peace project developed from the theories of the Abbé de St-Pierre, Kant, Penn and others, and from the early campaigns against slavery and for social welfare, enfranchisement and disarmament. It has moved from theory into practice, exemplified in a number of democratic revolutions, national and transnational campaigns on key liberal issues: the development of a liberal social contract and liberal state institutions, civil society and the redistribution of wealth, individualism and political autonomy. It eventually became an ideal held by key Western states (specifically the US and UK) built into constitutional arrangements, domestic law, and embryonic forms of international law and organisation, taken by some optimists to be early signs of world government or world federation. Liberal peacebuilding, as it has come to be known, aims at a positive peace by virtue of universal norms guiding representation and rights. Its universal claims indicate that hybrid forms of peace are probably undesirable.

In the light of the discussions in the previous chapters about the way state-formation theory has influenced statebuilding in a range of cases from Cambodia to Afghanistan, this chapter briefly explores the tension between liberal peacebuilding’s attempt to offer a positive peace and its encounters with its recipients. It argues, referring to a range of critical themes and empirical examples, that these have indeed tended to lead to a hybrid form emerging (because of subtle resistance), often also of a negative type.

The Development of Peacebuilding

To deal with the potential lack of local-scale consent, and therefore socio-political legitimacy for external intervention, peacebuilding was originally theorised in the peace-research literature as a grassroots, bottom-up process in which a local consensus led to a positive peace (in liberal terms, but also within a social-justice framework).2 As the concept evolved, it came to represent a convergence between the agendas of peace research, conflict resolution, conflict management approaches, and development and liberalisation debates.³ Peacebuilding is a reflection of Rousseau’s more positive understanding of a social contract in which society is interdependent, as opposed to Hobbes’s negative version in which it is based upon little more than fear.⁴ Peacebuilding is, however, strongly influenced by the ‘dominant ideology’ of the West. It reflects an attempt to represent the ‘peoples’ the UN Charter originally spoke of in the new world order that emerged after the end of the Cold War. Significantly, it has responded to accusations of racial and normative bias towards a specifically Western and Northern set of preferences by claiming to be universal in a normative sense. Its claim to represent the peoples of the world and their rights and needs, rather than the interests of the state, is an important part of this attempt to capture legitimacy. In practice, through the UN system it has also had to bring together conflicting political interests in the UN Security Council, which has often led to mandates too broad to implement, too narrow to address the conflict properly or too vague to guide a mission. However, a convergence of norms and interests after the end of the Cold War – a peacebuilding consensus – culminated in the post-Cold War liberal peacebuilding project. This was a response to post-Cold War conflicts, many of which revolved around collapsed or fragile states (meaning any non-liberal state that was subject to conflict). It required the development of more ambitious forms of peacekeeping, which evolved rapidly from multidimensional peacekeeping (via integrated missions) to peacebuilding and now statebuilding. At first, it relied on the consent of local actors, and later, on occasion, without local consent. As a result, the demands on the UN and its supporting actors multiplied and diversified enormously during this period.5

Liberal-peacebuilding policy debates focus on security, confidence-building, peace dividends and national capacity⁶ as an organising framework, structured by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO), Department of Political Affairs, the UN Development Programme UNDP and the UN Peacebuilding Commission.⁷ The peace architecture that has emerged with liberal peacebuilding includes human rights, development, reconstruction, gender, humanitarian assistance, international organisations (IOs), agencies, IFIs, NGOs and non-state actors. A broad definition of peacebuilding has been adopted, mirroring the conceptual pressure the concept of human security has provided in the UN system over the last twenty years. It is supported by various funds such as the World Bank State and Peacebuilding Fund, the UNDP Crisis Prevention and Recovery Trust Fund and the European Commission Instrument for Stability. While needs and identity are generally seen as secondary, democracy and human rights are central to peacebuilding (as they were in Cambodia or El Salvador in the early 1990s), as are the state, civil society and local ownership.

Nevertheless, the state is the entry point for any donor or UN peacebuilding activity. Liberal peacebuilding has rarely focused on the formation of political entities other than states, though it has many supporters who focus on its internationalist and normative side (the international organisation of peace, security, development, human rights, democracy and a rule of law). However, it needs a state to support these normative frameworks in the absence of regional or global actors capable of maintaining such regimes. Peacebuilding thus cannot address local dynamics without equating the local with the national.8 There is a general fear of undermining the authority of the state given that it remains a basic institutional building block of the international system.⁹ Yet, to a certain extent, liberal peacebuilding also contradicts autonomy, political self-determination and difference in the interests of a common peace. In the UN system, the term ‘peacebuilding’ is generally preferred because there are concerns that statebuilding (and the associated state-fragility or state-failure discourses) is widely perceived to be an attempt to override the norms of sovereignty and non-intervention (as the recent cases of Afghanistan and Iraq would suggest).¹⁰ ‘New donors’, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the BRICS, and more specifically, India, Brazil, and South Africa – IBSA) and post-colonial states are also sensitive about this danger.

In keeping with its international-development frameworks, peacebuilding has become dependent on universal blueprints – effectively, standard operating procedures. It often has little access to the knowledge required to build peace in the political, social, cultural and economic context of non-Western and developing communities in the global South. Enclosing the liberal peace in the contemporary neoliberal and small-state model has exacerbated such problems, meaning the state has been the site of marketised politics and institutions, reflecting the power dimensions of state-formation arguments rather than the emancipatory goals of peace. Social and anthropological state-formation debates have influenced the development of peacebuilding, however, and there has been some recognition that social forms of democracy have historically been more suited to post-conflict environments (as long as an external actor is capable of supporting it financially, as with the US’s Marshall Plan strategy after World War II). Peacebuilding has generally been more sensitive to difference, in theory at least, than statebuilding.

It rests upon a northern consensus about the liberal peace (mainly in the eyes of the West but followed by many others) and has gradually linked peace processes with a somewhat contradictory search for a progressive form of politics and a neoliberal state. This evolution was a relatively quick process, starting with the role of the UN, in particular in Cambodia, Namibia and El Salvador, around the end of the Cold War and soon after, and rapidly developed via international trusteeships in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste into a statebuilding project. It later provided part of the justification for the UK and US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.11 It grapples in classical liberal fashion with the idea that interventionism is sometimes necessary to uphold the conceptual integrity of liberalism and international law. One of the newer UN instruments – the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine – developed to maintain the discourse of human rights versus sovereignty in this manner. This approach has meant that energies and resources were focused on building the shell of the liberal state, into which it was hoped local politics, society and economics would move wholesale. Liberal peacebuilding has become more all-encompassing and sophisticated, and also more ‘donor-driven’, initially more confident of its own legitimacy and less concerned about local partners’ particularities and now far less confident.

Legitimacy is a crucial concept in a more normative way for peacebuilding than it is for statebuilding, where it is understood juridically. For peacebuilding, it emerges from international liberal principles, accepted rules, custom, conventions and associated standards as commonly understood by citizens as a socio-historical legacy in a Western context.12 Authority is understood as both local (in Weberian terms, traditional, charismatic and legal) and wide-ranging, but international authority in the expansive range of areas that liberal peacebuilding covers (legal, normative and technical) is taken to be pre-eminent.

Liberal peacebuilding has been applied in a wide array of contexts: Eastern Slavonia, Timor-Leste, Kosovo, Bosnia, Cambodia, Liberia, Afghanistan and many others. Its universal international political and normative framework is taken to command automatic and a priori consent at local, state and international levels, marginalising tricky questions about sovereignty, autonomy, the right of non-intervention, and the need for local political actors and institutions to create social, economic and political systems that reflect their history, society and specific needs. Even so, it aims to transform local political structures into a democratic and human rights oriented framework (framed by notions of good governance)¹³ with a legal and enforcement capacity, which is both internationally and locally legitimate. Authority is vested in global liberal governance, international law and norms that in a top-down manner guide state governments in their relationships with neighbours and their own citizens.

Such thinking connects to a range of debates whereby modernisation theory has been replaced with a developmental approach based on liberal and democratic state parameters.¹⁴ In El Salvador, early on in this experiment in 1992, for instance, it was recognised that human development, poverty reduction and addressing the root causes of conflict were crucial to peace.¹⁵ Nevertheless, these in turn were secondary to security and the creation of state institutions. This balance has been captured in a range of policy documents and associated doctrines, including the UN secretary-general’s report Aftermath of Conflict.16

Liberal peacebuilding has achieved some progress in practice, including demilitarisation and a decline of violence in both interstate and domestic environments, and the delivery of emergency humanitarian assistance. There is widespread acceptance of democracy, human rights, gender equality and the need for development in a state framework, though there is limited acceptance of international authority over the state. Institutional and government capacity has been supported or developed, elections have been held, civil society has been supported and popular participation enhanced, technical assistance provided, along with financial resources and political support for liberal institution-building, and justice systems have developed. Some progress in development has also been achieved, though this has often been in a patchwork manner, limited to areas in and around the capitals: this relates to the emergence of post-conflict city-states. These improvements may well provide the basis for long-term economic, political and social improvement.¹⁷ The question is whether the liberal peace that this approach offers would be seen as emancipatory by its recipients, or whether it is more likely to lead to a negative or positive hybrid form.

What Type of Peace Does Liberal Peacebuilding Produce?

Liberal peacebuilding has, over the twenty years since it first began to emerge (for example, in the Guatemalan peace process),¹⁸ gathered around it a vast number of international personnel and resources, as well as institutional expertise, in more than thirty peace operations.¹⁹ It is an exercise in a significant amount of governmental power. Its encounter with conflict-affected societies has not been straightforward, however. So far its record has been mixed: it has often resulted in authoritarian regimes despite the best of intentions.20

Many tensions have arisen because liberal peacebuilding is inconsistent in its design, its support of the state and its relationship with local counterparts, and it is insufficiently well supported by international actors. Deficiencies have arisen, according to some assessments, because local actors are given too much say and thus insert their illiberalism into the process of peacebuilding (often by capturing the newly installed democratic process).²¹ Alternatively, they are given too little say, thus undermining the legitimacy of the peace. Legitimate authority, power, norms and customs, both local and international, vie with each other in any conflict-affected environment.

Many of the concepts utilised and developed as a result challenge dominant frameworks of IR. Structural violence and the notions of negative and positive peace²² illustrate the deficiency of realism and liberalism in understanding the extent of violence and its indirect impacts. The notion that transnational networks make up much of international relations, and that within this context security was based upon interdependence and ‘humans’,²³ has challenged key concepts such as the hierarchical balance of power, which reordered states as the key actors in IR. The Burtonian presentation of a set of basic socio-biological human needs²⁴ as navigation points for policy gave agency to individuals and implied that a general peace was not idealistic, and, as Azar added,²⁵ would rest upon the satisfaction of the needs of individuals in their social context. This provided an important avenue through which peace could be defined in terms of an absence of structural violence and a win-win situation for all concerned actors.²⁶ Peacebuilding, as originally understood as a grassroots activity, implied a hybrid form of peace, in that local and liberal values would merge.²⁷ However, it was heavily imbued with an underlying assumption that a liberal peace should be its goal, this being part of emerging thinking about human needs, human security and human rights, and democratisation thinking, along with a concern with social justice. Consequently, liberal peacebuilding later appeared to point towards a positive peace (but definitely not a hybrid peace) because it was mainly a top-down process, resting, therefore, on external norms, values and expertise.28

The positive aspects of this approach represent the most advanced Western and global consensus on peace. It has had some success in reducing violence and building compliance with liberal norms and institutions, and is derived from very significant expressions of collective human social agency (though principally understood from a Western, individualist and rational perspective). This agency is aimed at liberating the individual from slavery, poverty, discrimination and inequality, and situating his or her inalienable rights in the guaranteed legal, political and economic context of a state and international system designed to make these eternal and concrete. It has an emancipatory intent reflective of human agency. It harnesses the crucial and much-needed capacity of the UN, keeps alive dreams of liberal internationalism, and offers post-conflict citizens democracy, human rights, law and markets. Yet there have been few outright successes to speak of. Of course, this depends on how success is defined. If success is interpreted as not relapsing into violence, then the data shows that about half the states remain stable five years after the end of a conflict.²⁹ If it depends on providing citizens with a significant prospect of better lives in a progressive political framework, however, the picture is much worse.

Consequently, peacebuilding is torn between two versions of liberalism. The conservative version focuses on the state as the vehicle of security and regulation, underpinned by territorial sovereignty.³⁰ El Salvador provides one of the earliest examples of this approach: in 1992, the liberal-peace framework served as the basis for its peace agreement, called locally a ‘negotiated revolution’, which the UN and World Bank subsequently helped implement. By the 2000s, El Salvador was being cited in US policy circles as a statebuilding model for Iraq.31 However, the Peace Accords and the subsequent peacebuilding process did not touch upon structural, social or economic issues, and, more recently, neoliberal policies have undermined any broader peace dividend (beyond the immediate improvement in security) for the general population. Inequality has actually worsened since the peace agreements, though poverty has generally been reduced.³²

Such failings are set into relief by a second version of liberalism, which offers a more socially oriented and critical perspective of peacebuilding as an emancipatory and empathetic activity, more concerned with a sophisticated order of justice and equity in an everyday societal context (although this approach is still centred around Northern epistemology).³³ This more expansive version of peacebuilding represents a multilevel approach, attempting to incorporate the local, state and regional aspects. It has also become multidimensional, bringing together a wide range of actors who are able to deal with a broad range of conflict issues and dynamics.

This approach has influenced the (albeit restricted) development of the UN Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), which came about partly as a result of pressure from non-aligned countries. Though it offers a meta-narrative about how conflict may be sustainably ended (aimed at an inclusive, integrated and comprehensive approach),³⁴ it follows the more emancipatory version of peacebuilding and of peace – as can be seen in its mandates in Burundi, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and Liberia, among others.³⁵ The PBC’s Peacebuilding Fund, and Peacebuilding Support Office integrate and coordinate these processes.³⁶

In essence, these two versions of liberal peacebuilding indicate that it has become unstable, shifting between state security, markets and sovereignty, and liberal notions of emancipation, with grassroots and bottom-up processes. Peacebuilding is ultimately a transformative activity that seeks to keep domestic authority and legitimacy in line with international authority and legitimacy.37 This represents a significant tension between conservative and more extensive versions of peace, which is also reflected in the growing roles of the EU, emerging donors, the G7+ and other actors. Though they generally follow the liberal peacebuilding consensus, they also advocate subtle (or sometimes more radical) improvements or more significant changes in direction.³⁸

The peacekeeping operations in Namibia, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique and El Salvador seemed to offer the hope that the peace engendered by UN intervention could go beyond patrolling ceasefires and would instead contribute to the democratisation of failing and failed states by applying different levels of external transitional administration. Both conservative and broader versions were part of global governance, which now became the new imaginary of a positive peace in the minds of policymakers, political scientists, IR and development scholars, and peace and conflict researchers. Peacebuilding still mainly focused on top-down, elite-led, official processes. These debates and praxes offered what was seen to be the most sophisticated methodology for peace, which could now be created through the scientific application of liberal and rational-legal knowledge systems. In fact, it formed a new governmentality, propagated by the UN and IFIs, states, donors and NGOs, as part of the new global governance. Without incorporating citizens in conflict-affected societies, however, this could not be said to be a positive peace. Thus, though liberal peacebuilding aims at a positive form of peace, hybrid political orders and at best negative forms of hybrid peace have developed.

Critiquing Liberal Peacebuilding

Liberal peacebuilding’s key problem has been the juxtaposition of its normative and cosmopolitan goals with its inability to recognise difference and redistribute a peace dividend at the grassroots level. Power and the peace dividend has instead generally stayed in the hands of elites. Any improvements in development for the general population are set into harsh relief by escalating inequality, which is perhaps the result of the liberal-peace model being heavily influenced by neoliberal versions of capitalism.39 This is perplexing because the body of UN documents – agency and secretary-general reports, as well as General Assembly resolutions since World War II – suggest peacebuilding should also represent the culmination of an emancipatory process. It is envisaged as supporting local rights and agency, rather than pre-existing power structures or hierarchies.⁴⁰

Ultimately, broader and narrower versions of peacebuilding understand peace, the state, the international community and conflict-affected citizens as liberal, neoliberal or soon-to-be-liberal actors. From this perspective there is no room for hybridity in terms of norms or rights, which carries deleterious implications for law, institutions and material needs. This sheds doubt upon the peaceful and democratic claims that are being made, if conflict-affected citizens are not to be fully represented, have their needs responded to, identity respected and rights enabled, either by the international community or indeed by the state.

Yet an important aspect of the liberal peace is the argument that conflict cannot really be ‘resolved’ unless the concerns of civil society are met and, furthermore, that there cannot be a liberal peace unless there is a vibrant civil society. It is generally accepted that peacebuilding approaches should be particularly sensitive to civil-society actors’ expectations and needs.⁴¹ Yet civil society is conceptualised according to a legal, rights and economic rationality, where society conforms to the liberal peace, rather than as a space of political contestation over the role and nature of the state or against hegemony. This mirrors the different understandings of civil society of Hobbes, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gramsci and Marx.42 It reflects a Western and often culturalist bias against how societies organise legitimate authority structures outside the global North, which means any positive peace offered by liberal peacebuilding may exclude its real subjects in conflict-affected societies. This is a contradiction for liberal peacebuilding because the balance between legitimate authority and authoritarianism depends on civil society’s relationship with the state and power. This means that peacebuilding – a multidimensional and multilevel process including a wide range of actors⁴³ – must respond broadly to political, social, economic and developmental tasks in varied contexts. Without this, external guidance in, or control of, almost every aspect of state and society means liberal peacebuilding will face a legitimacy deficit and a lack of local knowledge and accountability. It may therefore revert to a problematic mixture of consensual and punitive strategies.

Thus, liberal peacebuilding raises questions about the nature of the universal peace it implies. The reform of governance is highly interventionary, has a rational and mechanical problem-solving character, and is constructed procedurally by those in possession of such specialised bureaucratic knowledge as is deemed necessary to be passed on for its creation. It appears at times to be insensitive, to be an extension of paternalist neocolonialism, deferring autonomy and rejecting local norms as well as socio-historical political structures and institutions. Liberal peacebuilding ignores politics and meaning for its subjects.

These problems are amplified by liberal peacebuilding’s alliance with neoliberalism. It is mainly in the realm of international political economy that more critical positions emerge about missed opportunities for development and a peace dividend. This is related to a hidden global and state class structure, the extraction of natural resources from the global South and the inability of weak economies to protect themselves or compete with other states.44 Managed economic integration into the global economy with strong state support is the lesson of the history of post-war reconstruction; it is a lesson that contradicts the ideological neoliberalism that mars most statebuilding and peacebuilding projects. Peacebuilding is not simply supported by ‘invisible hands’, austerity or structural-adjustment regimes.⁴⁵ Indeed, development tends to disrupt pre-existing economic patterns and fails to replace them with anything more suitable or ‘indigenously’ resonant, as in arguments about Cambodia and in other cases,⁴⁶ which has ramifications for legitimacy. The liberal-peace framework has been aimed at reforming or creating neoliberal democracies open for international trade rather than social democracies created to reconcile and support their citizens’ welfare. This reiterates global inequality and doubly marginalises post-conflict economies. Structural adjustment-style processes have long been under scrutiny in terms of their contribution to peace. Post-conflict citizens are deprived of crucial welfare support to make their rights a reality, and are exposed to the efficiencies of international markets, dominated by long-established producers.

This shift towards a neoliberal form of peace contradicts the fact that many donors are themselves social democracies (as with the Scandinavian donors, Germany and the UK to some extent) and maintain a strong welfare component in their own states, or have used protectionist measures to stabilise their own polities and competitive advantages in an earlier epoch (as with both the US and the UK). Most theories appear to agree that poverty, relative deprivation and inequality are causal factors in, or at least encourage, conflict.47 This contradicts the lessons of the historic Marshall Plan and the development of the EU, to name two very significant examples. ‘Neoliberal peace’, it has to be concluded, is overly idealistic about the capacity of markets to make peace, but it is a cheaper option than the Marshall Plan model, which nevertheless led to social democracies emerging in the European peace process after 1947. In the longer term, however, neoliberal influence over peacebuilding may be more costly: it misunderstands the way that market systems in post-conflict situations allow those versed in their practice and circumvention to undermine rather than support democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Furthermore, control of material resources enables the subversion of representative political systems, which in conflict-affected societies are already weak. Many conflict states today are marred by predatory elites and unsustainable, extractive and exploitative economic practices (often supported by multinational corporations), as well as environmental problems. This is particularly problematic because most post-conflict states rely for their citizens’ survival (often 80 per cent of them or more, as in Cambodia)⁴⁸ on subsistence strategies and customary landownership, both of which are undermined by marketisation. This once again has the contradictory effect of reinforcing local and global inequality.

For such reasons it is inevitable that disputants and citizens in conflict-affected societies will attempt to renegotiate this process according to their own interests, culture and frameworks. In other words, the positive peace according to cosmopolitan values that liberal peacebuilding claims to create appears as a negative peace to its recipients unless it also incorporates their views, needs and rights. It should not be surprising, therefore, that out of eighteen UN attempts at democratisation since the end of the Cold War, thirteen suffered some form of authoritarian regime within fifteen years.⁴⁹

This underlines the wider implications of peacebuilding beyond any simplistic assumptions that the holding of free and fair elections means that positive peace is automatically self-sustaining.50 More critical positions point to the need to consider what a positive hybrid outcome would be. This would include issues related to history, society and identity, as well as material issues. The role of IFIs has driven economic structural-adjustment and development projects through neoliberal strategies that have failed to provide the economic opportunities and welfare that would be expected within a liberal state. The relationship between peacebuilding and justice and the problems of establishing post-conflict social justice have often been undermined by such factors. This problem revolves around the definition of justice itself and the argument either that justice needs to be incorporated into any self-sustaining peace, or that social justice may have to be secondary in the short to medium term to the creation of negative peace. Justice has often remained subservient to stability and a limited notion of peace because so many individuals and organisations in conflict environments are implicated in violence, corruption or crimes against humanity.⁵¹ In effect, from the perspective of its subjects in conflict-affected societies, liberal peacebuilding has been turned into a system of illiberal governance rather than a process of reconciliation.

Even worse, at a state level, and encouraged by statebuilding approaches, elections and elites are dominated by, or produce, hegemony and resource control while attempting to curry international favour. Rights, transparency and redistribution are avoided by elites. They amass control of the resources of the state, territory and labour, as well as cement their position in global capitalism. Democratic checks and balances are undermined and civil society is marginalised or controlled while public services are undermined, and justice is avoided in order to direct the peace dividend towards elites and away from citizens.⁵²

From such critical perspectives, liberal peacebuilding has failed to come to terms with the lived experiences of individuals and their everyday needs vis-à-vis their welfare, culture or traditions.53 There has emerged a monumental gap between the expectations of peacebuilding and what it has actually delivered in practice. There are several common complaints: that there are not enough resources available for its vast scale; that there is a lack of coordination and too much duplication among the agents of intervention; that the peacebuilding process is mainly owned by international actors rather than by its recipients; that the issues that face a conflict society in cultural and welfare terms are ignored; and that peacebuilding is mainly driven by neoliberal marketisation and development agendas. Liberal peacebuilding is also criticised on the grounds of being inefficient, wasteful and ill-coordinated, unable to mobilise sufficient force to stop violence completely. It is sometimes forced to compromise with local warlords, to compromise customs that include gender inequality or rigid racial, class, identity or religious hierarchies. From a local perspective, it has been perceived as neocolonial and coercive; in focusing on conditionality as its main method of inducing compliance, it ignores the culture and needs of post-conflict states, it reiterates global and local inequality, with national elites easily able to hijack the process, and it is generally unaccountable to citizens.⁵⁴

Privately, many policymakers and bureaucrats agree with this analysis, and the UN, World Bank, and many donors and NGOs have constantly adjusted their approaches to engage with such critiques. Discussions of ‘local ownership’ and ‘participation’, for example, in the UN and World Bank are indicative of a concern that peacebuilding and statebuilding are more or less irrelevant to some or many post-conflict citizens’ everyday lives.⁵⁵ Indeed, the latter have developed their own way of coping, far from the governance and reform in their capital cities, and irrespective of concepts of statebuilding in alien international fora. It has also become clear that democratisation itself may be an inherently violent process, as the recent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan attests. Democratization may also lead to stalemate because of ethnic nationalism, as the situation from the Dayton Accords from 1995 until today suggests in the context of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the latter’s Brčko district, even positive stories about peacebuilding are often not all they seem when examined closely: there is a consensus that there has as yet been no reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina.56 The continuation of the ‘two schools under one roof’ system of ethnic division in educational establishments and the constitutional momentum towards separation rather than cooperation indicate that a social peace has not been achieved and indeed may have been hindered by the ideology and philosophy carried through liberal peacebuilding.

Liberal peacebuilding is top-down, defers local autonomy and self-determination, and demands compliance with international norms and policy frameworks. Elites and citizens from El Salvador and Kosovo to Timor-Leste have demonstrated their disapproval of such approaches. They have sometimes done so overtly, through demonstrations and even violence, as in Kosovo and Timor-Leste in 2004 and 2006, but more often they have done so behind the scenes, being careful not to undermine the peace efforts but rather wanting to influence their direction, as in parts of Central America, Rwanda and Namibia, where the liberal-peace consensus of the donors has simultaneously been adopted but also modified. Public adoption has camouflaged private resistance: local everyday resistance, hidden and obvious, has arisen within the span of resistance agendas.⁵⁷ Sometimes, this is very understandable: in the Palestinian case it appears that the role of donors, from the EU to the UN, however well meant, has been exploited by the Israeli state to subsidise the cost of the occupation of Palestine. Turner calls this an ‘assemblage of colonial and imperial practices’, in which peacebuilding has been influenced by, or even driven by, counterinsurgency, both in local contexts as well as in the more general terms of maintaining the current order.58 This strategy is evident in calculations regarding who should be empowered or coerced by external actors. Hidden tensions have caused a post-colonial critique of these ‘peace projects’ to become very relevant, both in the way internationals respond to emergent problems and in the way in which a wide range of local actors position themselves vis-à-vis such interventions to make the most of their existing and embryonic capacities.

The experimental nature of liberal peacebuilding also raises uncomfortable normative and ethical issues, not to mention very serious methodological problems, in that they represent experiments on ‘human subjects’ with an undetermined outcome, which may include costs and other forms of unintended results. Thus, critical agendas are much needed, especially in the light of the need for legitimacy, local ownership and the assuagement of local expectations, especially in acknowledging the importance of the everyday lives of the millions caught up in these experiments.

As Suhrke argues, using the example of Afghanistan and contrary to the thrust of the mainstream literature, less international intervention may be better than more in avoiding supporting rentier states, their international dependencies and limited local legitimacy.⁵⁹ Ordinary Afghans have been disillusioned and disempowered by international intervention.⁶⁰ Suhrke is clear that a significant local component and driving force may be found in local capacities for political, economic, social, military and institutional organisation, whether customary or hybrid. Such arguments, pointing to international exclusion of the very subjects they are supposed to be saving, are now common, as in Kosovo, where a ‘local’ perspective points to the importance of local ownership in building legitimacy and avoiding local resistance. The UNDP has also recognised this need to connect with informal and hybrid processes.61

Such criticisms about the limitations of liberal peacebuilding indicate that at a minimum a significant revision is required to find a renewed balance between local legitimacy and its associated authority structures, and external interests, norms and institutions. This move away from a ‘New York consensus’ (for which, read the now-defunct Washington consensus) is unlikely to produce a new single blueprint, as critical literatures on peacebuilding have long held. If ‘deep local knowledge’ and multidisciplinarity are to have any real point other than engendering more efficient biopolitical forms of intervention, they should be used to assist in achieving local, autonomous agencies (as far as these are possible) that lead to a resonant form of peace with a positive impact on everyday life. A social contract between internationals and statebuilding ‘subjects’ is also required: one that those subjects accept. Peacebuilding should not be a Western enterprise to reconstruct the post-colonial and post-Cold War world and to push it into an industrialised modernity. In practice, liberal peacebuilding is close to being a failed endeavour. These versions of peacebuilding have fallen into the same trap that liberal imperialism fell into around a hundred years ago – full of good intentions but unable to respect difference or improve the wide range of conditions that cause conflict, both in material and rights terms. States without peace and states without reconciliation have been built, and peacebuilding without peace has come into being, reflecting an underlying goal of counterinsurgency aimed at maintaining a relatively iniquitous order.⁶²

The new conditions for emancipation and liberation have not been achieved by liberal peacebuilding. It has not created citizenship or a social contract, though it has often reprieved individuals and communities from the worst excesses of overt forms of violence. Many donors, policymakers, development workers and NGO personnel would claim an emancipatory peace as the goal and objective of the projects they have designed. This emancipatory peace, in the liberal imagination, involves a territorial state, security, democracy, rights, prosperity and civil society, all bound up in a cosmopolitan international society. From a local perspective, however, it may involve further, far more complex, calculations relating to social justice, equality, custom, history, society, religion and identity. The lack of consensus in local settings means that internationally imposed peace frameworks have not always been resonant with their subjects, do not always have their consent, do not create social contracts and citizenship, and are often forms of experimentation with unknown consequences. They are not considered fully legitimate or reciprocal, and have become distant even from the civil, constitutional and institutional agendas for peace that emerged out of the Enlightenment, and more specifically from the historical experiences of the twentieth century. In this way, liberal peacebuilding relies on problematic methodological approaches, depending effectively on subtle coercion, and the ethical frameworks used to guide its construction are in no way commensurate with the ethics by which Western citizens and institutions interact in their own contexts. Experiments where human life is affected in unpredictable ways that are not accepted a priori by the subject are very problematic: they were a sign of colonialism in the past, and are often taken as such by their subjects today. Interventionary practices, even for peace and development, operate as if the local context were an ethical and methodological free zone. They are at liberty to exercise the authority they derive from international norms, law and practices. They are not constrained by local contextual needs, culture or practices, because these are regarded as being of a lower order of development, and as dysfunctional because they may have led to conflict in the first place. Western knowledge systems about peace confirm that this process is based on international, not local, legitimacy (some would say hegemony). The everyday lives of individuals and communities are disregarded. According to the perspectives voiced time and time again by the subjects of these interventions in locations around the world, there is certainly a ‘Eurocentric’ attitude from Western donors and international institutions to development and post-conflict states and subjects. It is almost as if the echoes of colonial superiority cannot be helped – the relevant actors have learned on the job in internationalised spaces rather than through local consultation.

Thus, though neocolonialism, trusteeship and expediency are not the intent of peacebuilding, many post-conflict subjects of the UN and World Bank, donors and INGOs, in Bosnia or Timor-Leste, for example, might see aspects of it as an affront to their identity, culture and history, and perhaps more importantly to their right to self-determination. The lack of direct engagement with everyday needs in post-conflict situations, especially over the longer term, merely confirms these deficiencies to post-conflict citizens. Defying self-determination places internationals in a weak position, as the process leading up to the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo indicated in 2008.

The liberal-peace project is ontologically incoherent. It offers several different states of being: a state-centric world dominated by sovereign constitutional democracies, a world dominated by institutions and markets, and a world in which human rights and self-determination are valued. The only way in which this peace system can be coherent is if it is taken to be hierarchical and regulative, led by hegemons who set political and economic priorities, and this provides the framework in which human rights and self-determination can be observed. Democracy provides the political system in which this process is made representative. The trouble is that the individual is subservient to the structure and system, or is ignored by their biases. Where the gaze of the guardians of the liberal panopticon cannot reach,63 abuses may follow, often committed by those elites who control the various systems that make up the liberal peace. Effectively, this means that the individual, who is relatively powerless, is required to perform liberal-peace acts such as voting, paying taxes, engaging in the free market and exercising rights in order to keep the international gaze satisfied, but is not to expect that this performance carries any material weight. The assumptions that go with the liberal peace are contested across the world, in Islamic settings or those of other religions, in authoritarian states, in tribal and clan settings, and in societies where traditional and cultural practices do not fit with the Western conception of human rights and democracy. At a very basic level, muted by the preponderance of the liberal international system and global economy, the very ontology and related epistemology of the liberal peace are being disputed by local communities. This is not necessarily on an ideological basis, but quite often because of the system’s inefficiencies, its distant directors and executors, its cultural and ideological biases, and its failures to provide sufficient resources to support the everyday lives of post-conflict communities.

Liberal peacebuilding restructures power relations with the aim of creating a peace that maintains the current historical order. Citizens must become liberal and must also contend with a continuation of a range of economic inequalities even if other asymmetries are mitigated. This peace is prone to elite hijack. It is strongly contested by actors who want to determine their own peace or want social justice. This has been taken by some to indicate a hybrid model of governance emerging as a new form of ‘peace as governance’.⁶⁴ The Loya Jirga in Afghanistan is often cited as an example, as are the parliaments and chiefs in Timor-Leste, the Solomon Islands and Liberia, and various transitional justice approaches in Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Rwanda. Such local processes can contribute to liberal peacebuilding by bringing it legitimacy, access and greater efficiency.

Nevertheless, this may not be the case as any such hybridity may be either representative of local cooptation into the liberal-peace system (colonialism redux) or more balanced towards locally representative traditions (which might be quite democratic, even if not in a formal sense).65 However, in sum, critiques of liberal peacebuilding from a number of perspectives point to the externally envisioned positive peace it proposes often resulting in a negative form of hybrid peace in situ.

Liberal Peacebuilding Responds

Liberal peacebuilding has tried to respond to the reality of its limitations in practice, as well as to the broad academic critique it has received.⁶⁶ Peacebuilding documents have indicated that national (rather than local) ownership and contextual specificity are necessary for peacebuilding, particularly because of its increasingly trusteeship orientation.⁶⁷ However, even this is a problematic move in that the delegation of authority and legitimacy to the national level creates similar hierarchical dynamics according to competing forms of authority in the local context (state, ideological, military, bureaucratic, identity, religious, customary, etc.). Another response has been a focus on ‘early’ employment generation and economic vitalisation, as well as the creation of transitional safety nets.⁶⁸ Before and during the current neoliberal era, the UN (even during the ‘war on terror’) was focused on the broader micro- and macro-level conditions for a sustainable peace outside its state-centric fora. Indeed, there is a ‘silent discourse’ of some significant critical capacity hidden within the UN system that steers its agency work towards sustainability, equality, empathy and contextual sensitivity (that is, a fourth generation of peace).69 The work of the UNDP and PBC hints at this contextual potential, though countercurrents have emerged from their attempts to develop an ‘integrated approach’, as in Burundi.⁷⁰ A fuller contextual engagement has been dependent on the various UN bodies being willing to give the PBC control and on the host government giving consent, as with Guinea.⁷¹ So the shift towards integration and efficiency is counterbalanced by pressure from below for legitimacy and accountability, recognition, humility and empathy. The UN also has the capacity to learn in an empathetic manner from its experiences and the subjects of its previous missions, though such potential improvements are heavily counterbalanced by the darker sides of UN politics: state-centric interests at the higher political level, bureaucracy (including status and contract-renewal obsessions, corruption and the incompetence of some employees) and its lack of resources.

Further attempts to refine peacebuilding instruments have emerged recently, notably in the World Bank Development Report of 2011, which talks of a ‘social compact’, the Busan Partnership Agreement on development cooperation and on a ‘New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States’, and a UNDP report linking governance, peacebuilding and the establishment of a social contract. These reforms occurred in the context of what was estimated in 2011 to be a $129bn global official aid budget, with perhaps another $50bn in private aid (and another $20–30bn given by China, as well as an unknown amount by donors from the Gulf States). The ‘International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding’, including the G7+, donors and multilateral agencies, agreed in particular on five main principles to guide its signatories, who undertook to ‘align international donor interests with those of fragile countries’.⁷² The principles included: local ownership (for which read national ownership owing to the fact that most such agreements are negotiated with states as predominant actors) over institution-building and anti-corruption measures; donor alignment to support these processes through recipients’ budgets (that is, at state level); harmonisation and coordination to avoid duplication of efforts; and accountability of donors to recipients and vice versa via civil-society engagement. ‘Security, justice and legitimate politics’ has become the rallying cry of this ‘new deal’ version of donor–recipient relations, which also informs peacebuilding praxis and expands upon the old Millennium Development Goals (MDG) model. The OECD-DAC has been tasked with monitoring the achievement of such objectives. Peacebuilding and statebuilding, now differentiated, at least in recent UNDP documentation, are seen to be intermediary approaches by which the MDGs (and their 2015 replacements) might be achieved.73

To illustrate the reach of this version of the liberal peacebuilding project, the UNDP alone has offices in over a hundred countries with a direct mandate to support civil-society institutions, citizen participation, the development of democracy, law and state accountability, and to achieve the MDGs. In 2008–09, $3.5bn was spent across ten ‘fragile’ contexts, which represented one-sixth of available UNDP resources.⁷⁴ Within this modern formulation of a classic Lockean liberal social contract, the UNDP has also worked on democratising local governance at the subnational level in order to improve its conflict-prevention capacities and to promote cross-group cooperation and trust. At this level it has encountered different forms of political, economic and social engagement (as it has at the state level) but its response has remained one of advocating liberal reforms.⁷⁵ In other words, liberal peacebuilding’s encounter with alterity has had limited effect. However, the UNDP has embraced ‘hybrid delivery mechanisms’ in its attempt to support a social contract, and one that does not depend on single templates for governance. Context must in this new formulation shape governance.76 Furthermore, drawing on the lessons of its long experience in the field, it has started to support local forms of peacemaking agency and their relationship with the state and the international architecture of peacebuilding. Ultimately, the UNDP approach is still aimed at governmental authority as the root of stability (running the risk of this becoming centralised and predatory unless citizens can be quickly empowered).⁷⁷ As with the OECD-DAC approach in general, it is assumed that it is safe to hand a reforming state the responsibility and authority to ‘mediate citizen–state’ relations, even if the state has historically been seen as predatory.⁷⁸ Businesses, local NGOs, and religious and tribal, kin and clan networks and organisations, as well as what the UNDP mysteriously describes as ‘self-help’ organisations, are also to be drafted in to this process to assist in ‘service delivery’ through the state.⁷⁹

It is possible that the drafters of international documents, within the UNDP or the World Bank, when they increasingly call for more local input into justice, institutions and service delivery, are not fully aware that this may not take place through systems envisaged by internationals, but instead through local systems, often customary, traditional or neopatrimonial. Internationals may not agree with the way these work, or the order they propagate, which is why the peacebuilding discourse is still an externalised one. From this perspective, legitimacy arises according to international standards. Yet local ‘resilience’, as the agency and politics of populations in conflict-affected states are now being called, indicates pressure for improvements to the externalised ‘positive peace’ envisaged by intervention: cases such as Somalia or Somaliland illustrate that institutions may come into being and survive informally at the community level, and even higher, without a viable or liberal state.

Conclusion

Liberal peacebuilding is now being thought of by its proponents in the liberal international community as providing a ‘best fit’ or being ‘good enough’ – but not as ideal. This may be more ‘realistic’, but it is hardly a respectful way of describing locally evolving peace processes. Though ‘living’ peacebuilding practices evolve over time, they still tend to be underpinned by state interests and perspectives while also showing some adaptation in order to begin to address some of the problems that have emerged. Engaging with the social in the context of a compact or contract, accepting the need for legitimacy (though it is unclear whether this is taken to be general, local or international), people’s security (or human security), justice (but not social justice), economic development and ‘fair services’, as well as the return of civil society and gender equality, are positive steps. These new policies seem to denote a more socially oriented state and a more contextual peace, potentially a positive hybrid peace (also reflecting the increasing complexities of donor relations, where recipients have access to a diverse range of donors). The role of personnel from post-conflict zones or the global South should also not be underestimated. ‘System accountability’ is improving80 to a limited degree, but more localised forms of accountability would probably place issues such as local and global inequality on the peacebuilding agenda (which most internationals are wary of engaging with). Redistributive components of local, state and international peacebuilding would be an inevitable outcome, especially if peacebuilding is democratised.

The UN now engages with ‘critical peacebuilding tasks’⁸¹ and the international community’s version of liberal peacebuilding tends not to reach beyond the state, elites, markets and institutions. Thus, the positive peace proposed often ends up being translated into a negative hybrid peace. Multilateralism has tended to remain at the state level, providing a brake on state interests, but also subtly promoting them over the ‘people’s’ interests and needs. Liberal peacebuilding is ultimately very significantly constrained by dominant international preferences. This cocktail of constraints, as well as the tendency of liberal peacebuilding to work from an ideological basis suitable mainly for advanced capitalist and stable states, derails its capacity for making peace. It also carries a subtly neocolonial undertone of trusteeship. The emerging wider range of cooperation partners, including non-traditional donors, may offer some perspective on these problems. Suggestions to overcome such limitations and biases include restoring the centrality of ECOSOC to the UN system, introducing ombudspeople, and bringing the IMF, World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Bank under the control of the General Assembly.82 However, while liberal peacebuilding seeks to create ‘open-access societies’,⁸³ elite structural and governmental power often displaces local, historical architectures of peace and order with a modernisation (and extraction) project that often seems to run contrary to a positive peace. These deficiencies would be amplified if a positive hybrid peace were its goal.