Preface

I HAVE LONG BEEN interested in the nature of the contemporary form of peace, and how the major players in world politics are attempting to build this new peace. Yet it is clear to me that attempts to propagate the new peace are in part responsible for some of the structural violence we see in the world today. A new peace in the twenty--first century, as a consequence, needs to be more sensitive to context and culture, to its own unintended consequences, and particularly to how it is embedded in old patterns of exclusion, discrimination, class, greed and elitism, as well as in ideological prescriptions about states and markets. Peacebuilding and statebuilding in today’s world resemble the colonial projects of previous eras when looked at from the perspective of their recipients in far-flung corners of Liberia, Guatemala, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan or Bosnia, for example. The liberal peace and statebuilding derived from them have similar contradictions and tensions within them, as Keynes saw in the Treaty of Versailles.1

Many would imagine that war and post--conflict zones are devoid of any component of peace, or any aspect of normal life. They are not. Everyday life continues for most. But it is disrupted, moulded and shaped by the tensions of personal, political and group interests channelled into ethnonationalism, tribalism, religious or ideological extremism, terrorism and fear. Poverty and insecurity are the result for most ordinary people, though elites often continue relatively untouched. I have seen such dynamics from a wary proximity over a long period of research spent on peace processes, peacebuilding and conflict. While I was initially relatively apolitical and disconnected from the world ‘out there’ thanks to the predominantly positivist methodology the Western Academy dictates, these experiences helped me understand everyday life in such places better, and become more self--critical and aware of how embedded the developed world is in those conflicts. So this reflection is part an exposé of hypocrisy, an uncovering of the inflexibility of peace processes revolving around state power and sovereignty, and part a celebration of the braveness and resilience in everyday life shown by children, women, and men – hundreds of millions of them around the world – who live under the pressure of intractable conflicts. It is an investigation of the processes of peace formation they bring into being, often with external help, but also often by themselves.

Since the Cold War ended, many have waited for policymakers, politicians, bureaucrats, economists, development specialists, military and academics to consolidate peace through peacebuilding and statebuilding, to tame the violent internal and regional dynamics of state formation. The last twenty years have shown they cannot do this without grounded and embedded legitimacy, which connects to the everyday lives of the citizens of the states they are attempting to create. International law, Security Council resolutions and donor development policies are not contextual or legitimate enough. International institutions are too mired in their own routines of thought, in their own internal hierarchies and, of course, those of international sovereignty – their own paradigms – and in their own comfortable professional situations. They are afraid of context and the local, because they expose their ignorance and lack of capacity. They are thus caught in a trap of their own making.

Agency on the ground in hidden, local and contextual modes – representing little-noticed or little-understood dynamics of peace formation – plays a far larger role in international peacebuilding than has so far been realised, if only in blocking elements seen to be unsuitable for peacebuilding on the ground (and, of course, in challenging the entrenched power of local elites). In post-conflict situations, people are very aware of this, and of the need to find modes of political organisation that maintain their integrity in ways that do not necessarily mirror the West. The liberal international dream has missed peace’s absolutely crucial contextual dimensions.

The understanding of peace is often far superior in post-conflict environments than in the developed world, where those who have been through conflict have spent much time thinking and actively working for peace, resisting conflict structures, and building solidarity, social justice and empathy across ‘national’ borders, ceasefire lines, and religious and linguistic barriers. Everyday life is in this sense about transgression, resistance and solidarity in the name of peace. It underlines the significance of hidden peacebuilding agencies even while statebuilding may be failing.

This has both negative and positive aspects. The post-conflict individual – one of the hundreds of millions of people on the planet who have lived through a conflict – is much more motivated to strive for peace, but has much less capacity, both material and emotional, to bring it about. The West has more capacity to question the current orthodoxy of peace, but less interest in doing so. Despite so much Western philosophising about political liberalism, the acquiescence of the ‘dismal science’ of economics, development studies and other disciplinary approaches, statebuilding has not produced peace, but instead – for the weak, at any rate – the structural violence (in its Galtungian sense of hidden, indirect violence) of competition, inequality, resource exhaustion, human exhaustion and loss of community. Development, free trade and prosperity might be an answer to war, but they also have a dark side: much of the corruption, arms trade, exploitation and violence we see rests on some complicity from within the Western states-system and global economy. In some cases, the profits of such behaviour are recycled into the Western economy, and conflict may be exacerbated by the strategies of Western institutions, organisations like the World Bank, or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and humanitarian agencies. The militaries of the US and UK are also themselves often in the difficult situation of being perceived to be fighting ideological wars or for natural resources, rather than defending the rights of citizens – Iraq is a recent example of this. Democracy also has its dark side, especially where it promotes majoritarian behaviour on the part of one interest or identity group over control of a state and its territory.

Behind all of this is a major difficulty with the way in which the developed world’s actors, states and institutions, as well as its academics, gather their knowledge, analyse and respond. Many commentators, pundits, scholars and policymakers only talk to each other rather than to local actors below the elite level. They do not travel outside the isolated and secure bubbles that are provided for them ‘out there’, normally in national capitals, and so tend to circulate among themselves gossip as knowledge and fact, or use very limited raw data. This leads to the creation of theories, concepts, policies and approaches that appear to be relevant when looking from the privileged, metropolitan capitals of the West and the local ‘bubbles’ they create, but in actual fact tend to avoid issues relating to ordinary everyday life ‘out there’, and in doing so sacrifice the quality of life of conflict-affected generations. Such problem-solving knowledge resists positions critical of the orthodoxy, which have often been built up via generations of experience, and often mounts its own countercritiques to local complaints. ‘Local ownership’ is a classic example. This concept was first developed as a World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) response to local criticisms that they were not allowing local actors ownership of their own poverty reduction and development; but international actors then channelled local ownership into the liberal and neoliberal systems of politics and economics, rather than enabling local choice about which systems to adopt. As a senior UN political officer once told me, ‘We should not expose ourselves to local contexts. We risk our ignorance undermining our legitimacy.’

As a consequence of this dominant attitude among many of the world’s political and bureaucratic elites, the developing and conflict-affected world has become a laboratory for the unethical experimentation of those who claim superior knowledge from afar, with little local knowledge. Local knowledge is viewed as cant, regressive and valueless, in contrast to the knowledge of those in their ivory towers, offices and ministries far away. This is why an understanding of peace-formation dynamics is so important, and also why it has been ignored. International actors feel it exposes their weaknesses and lack of legitimacy, and so rarely take notice of it. Local life means little in a global context. It is little wonder that the modern liberal state is in crisis and the West has lost some of its store of legitimacy. Even worse, this encourages the bird’s-eye, international-level view sometimes expressed in foreign policies or by international institutions that trusteeship and soft forms of colonialism are preferable to allowing local people to work peace out for themselves (with international assistance, of course).

One of my first experiences of these dynamics was in Cyprus during the early 1990s. I arrived with a vague idea that there had been a recent conflict that formed part of a historic, if not primeval, cycle of wars between Greeks and Turks. Much of what I was told over the next ten years spent on the island confirmed this stereotype. It seemed that the will of the people was reflected by politicians whose paranoia about status, territory, sovereignty and security allowed them publicly to decry peace in favour of victory, often referring to justice and international law as the reason for a frozen peace process. International actors were also seduced by this view. It is still repeated by analysts, whether Cypriot or not. This victory was endlessly deferred until some mythical future when a Greek or Turkish ‘power’ would arise and drive the other into the sea on the island. This was not idle and occasional chatter, but a mainstream, oft-repeated and endlessly recycled view on both sides of the divide that was used to shape just about every political decision taken on the island – and not just those taken in relation to the conflict.

The ‘other’ of this seemingly intractable conflict – and the all-pervasive dynamics of fear and insecurity that it promoted (along with ethnic cleansing, rape, nationalism, private armies and so on) – was the very small conflict-resolution workshop ‘industry’. This evolved under the patronage of a number of US universities and academics, and was the only space where ordinary people who wanted to talk about peace could congregate – and a few of them did so, even though they were often socially and professionally disciplined for doing this. Yet it was isolated and marginalised by the political, military and economic elites of both sides’ race for statehood. Statehood and territorial sovereignty had become more important than peace. Conflict resolution had become marginal, even treacherous, in the eyes of many local nationalists. Even so peace formation in Cyprus has – in indirect ways, admittedly – proven to be the only space where many of the conflict’s issues have already been settled.

This book extends this argument. Increasingly, if autonomy, local ownership and legitimacy, and a social contract are to connect with democracy, human rights, a rule of law and a vibrant civil society, it is the dynamics of peace formation that need to be understood. Brave groups and individuals, as in Cyprus, can act in small ways, and such agency makes a disproportionately big difference when it connects to key sources of both local and international legitimacy, not merely legality and institutional frameworks. As this is where much legitimacy and capacity for peace, especially at the societal level, lies, it is surprising that relatively little thought has been put into it. This book is an investigation of the political consequences of the liberal peace and its statebuilding turn, and how local actors have taken peace into their own hands in an attempt to form a post-liberal peace. Peace-formation dynamics lead to the creation of new and contextual forms out of social, political, economic, cultural and historical forms of peace in local, transnational and international terms, while still remaining cognisant of the liberal peace and its norms, technologies, capacities and advantages. This realisation offers significant opportunities for the reconsideration of emancipatory and hybrid notions of peace beyond the liberal-peace and liberal- or neoliberal-state frameworks. These may lead to the development of forms of peace and related polities that have more contextual legitimacy, relevance and significance, while maintaining international norms, institutions and processes in modified forms.