CCTS
Review 38

Whose war? Whose peace?

Presentation by Oliver Richmond

Introductory remarks

I was not sure how formal the occasion would be and I came with a formal paper.

In fact it is clearly informal, so we can talk around the paper and what lies behind it – what brought me to these ideas, and why, in a sense, I dared put them out into the public domain when I knew that the policy reaction would often be quite negative, and the formal liberal response very sceptical. In my defence I have to say that I did not just imagine these things: they are based a great deal of field work over a period of several years.

I wanted to ground my understanding of peacebuilding in specific places by talking to ordinary people, not simply engaging with policymakers in formal constitutional settings. This is one reason why I have rebelled to some degree against the formal toolbox of the literatures, both methodological and theoretical, that we are given. I feel we have somewhat lost our way in International Relations (IR), because of the narrowness of research methodologies. These are mainly influenced by Western and US approaches to the social sciences, and are linked to elite policymaking processes. The academic process has really been configured to confirm what policymakers think, rather than to examine received views critically. We need to be more sceptical, to re-engage with the deep universal norms that lie behind the Academy, behind peace and conflict studies, and behind IR. Fortunately, within the British university system there is a long critical tradition.

The challenge we face in peacebuilding is much greater when we start engaging with ‘the other’ - those who do not share liberal assumptions derived from the Enlightenment. Although we can never escape from the Enlightenment and the liberal culture that is inculcated within our institutions and systems, we are required to think how they connect, communicate, respond and react to other discourses and political systems. There is a kind of culture war going on in the research policy nexus, over the purpose of research and what policies are for.

The Liberal Statebuilding Project

This is what my book, The Transformation of Peace (Palgrave 2005), is about. It looks at the whole notion of peace, including peacebuilding, conflict transformation and conflict resolution, and suggests that it has been, to a degree, co-opted into the liberal statebuilding project and into a set of practices that are not necessarily conducive to peace. (I refer here not to the level of activist scholars and practitioners but to the higher levels of donors, state and agencies.) The liberal state becomes the solution to every problem there is – war, development, the environment, security – and it is driven increasingly by an idealistic American foreign policy.

It may seem ironic to call current US foreign policy idealistic, but in a sense it really is so. There has always been within the liberal spectrum an almost anarchical tendency at one end and a coercive, imperialistic but idealistic tendency at the other. There are graduations within this framework which you can see represented in the key documentation of the international system as it has developed since the end of World War II. If you look at the UN system, from the Declaration of Human Rights, through to the notion of a Responsibility to Protect (R2P), you always find this tension. In the case of R2P, someone has to determine the normative framework in which someone else is protected, therefore determining who is to be designated as a victim, according to what reasons and standards.

One particularly interesting document for me in the genealogy of this documentation is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), because it is here that one starts to see, at the high international level, a discussion of the person, and the non-material rights and needs of people, and these considerations being brought into the discussion of what peace is, and how one regulates political behaviour and reduces instability between and within states. The document discusses the right to work, the right to welfare, the right to cultural expression – things which we seem to have lost in policy terms. But there is a wing of Academia which has always been concerned with these things, even though its representative thinkers may not frame their ideas within that particular international document, but see things from the perspective of Marxist or Foucauldian thinking or some other theoretical approach to critique liberalism.

The net result of the orthodox, conservative framework of liberalism has been a focus on states, on territoriality and on sovereignty, as the main stabilising mechanisms to deal with peace and conflicts. So it is no surprise that the discussion in the Middle East is about a two state solution, and that it is automatically assumed that the states will house a set of liberal institutions: they will be democracies, they will conform to standards of human rights, they will have a rule of law which guarantees those institutions and frameworks and that normative setting.

However, the experience of conflict and war is borne chiefly by people in an everyday setting, and the documentations, instruments and mechanisms we have to deal with that experience are rather anachronistic. We send in armies to do peacekeeping or peace enforcement or bring about regime change, on the understanding that there will be an automatic trickle down of benefits to the population following the displacement of authoritarian regimes, or the changing or reforming of institutions that will allow peacebuilding to follow. But the main benefit of such interventions in conceptual terms, and in the minds of policymakers, is that they provide the opportunity to create states with peaceful regional relations. There is much less emphasis on the internal experience of daily life on the ground. This harks back to nineteenth century diplomacy, which, in the context of Europe, was an elite conversation between members of a mono-cultural group in which interests, states and territories were integral to each other and in which that elite exercised power and authority in all sorts of ways, whether along the lines of an enlightened, benevolent version of liberalism, or an interest-based and conservative version.

The notion of state building, as the twentieth century progressed, was focused on international peace, defined as peace between states. The peace produced in this context was owned by states and, more precisely, by the multilateral institutions that govern state frameworks: international law, the UN systems, and the sets of different agencies and actors surrounding them. This notion of peace was very top-down, an architectural project mainly of the United States, comprising a set of institutions in which everything was nested – ordinary life, ordinary people, communities and societies.

If you look at the literature, not just the policy literature but the academic literature, you find that there is no discussion of ideology, or liberalism, or its ontology – i.e. the basic assumptions underlying all of this. These are taken as read. It is taken for granted that a set of institutions, human rights, democracy, development and the rule of law within the territorial state are the key to it all, with the states being nested within an international system and regional organisations. I call this a conservative version of the liberal peace. It reflects the nineteenth century diplomatic culture, which was re-configured throughout the institution building in the twentieth century from Versailles to San Francisco.

The other side of the liberal project, the good life, freedom side, is also there, represented by social activism, advocacy, a concern for everyday life and needs. But these have not had the huge material resources, or the states-level and international-level normative power, to be presented as the key to thinking about peace. You can point to a host of examples showing how ordinary people taking civil action have resisted some tendencies, and also shaped and reformed institutions and put their interests onto the political agenda as things developed in the nineteenth century and right through. I call this the emancipatory wing of the liberal peace framework, within which ordinary people have the rights and capacities to express their needs and interests in ways that may work within or circumvent the liberal paradigm.

This, then, is the liberal peace typology I am proposing, with graduations between the conservative and the emancipatory. Right in the middle I put the orthodox, which I relate to the UN vision of peace, which is multi-level and multi-dimensional. The argument here is that when the UN became involved in conflict and peacekeeping, and then increasingly in peace operations and peacebuilding (and a range of other issues such as democratisation, human rights, development, the environment and gender equality), it was imagining a statist form of peace in a very orthodox setting, right in the centre of the liberal peace typology. It was well away from imperialism but also well away from the dangerous emancipatory, possibly anarchic, notion of individuals taking on politics for themselves, rather than working through institutions.

The Social Contract

The whole liberal project is held together by a social contract. The social contract is between those who are represented but also have agency – that is to say, the communities that conflict transformation and emancipatory peacebuilders are most concerned with – and the governments and institutions of state that are supposed to represent them and to channel their interests. Whether this is a positive social contract in the sense that it favours the people, or a negative one in that it favours the states, is a matter of some debate. The argument I make in The Transformation of Peace is that in the states that were being created through liberal peacebuilding, whether orthodox (Bosnia and East Timor being possible examples) or conservative (in which you might include Afghanistan, or Bosnia in the very early stages), there was no social contract. These were top-down states. They had institutions in place, but the people, the societies, in these states had very little agency to express themselves through these institutions, or to resist, modify or change them without resorting to extreme forms of action.

So there is something problematic about the way the liberal peacebuilding, or the statebuilding paradigm developed, creating a virtual peace, and virtual states that are basically empty. They are not populated, the people are hidden, and therefore any notion of solidarity or resistance or community, welfare, or culture is legitimately overlookable; they are not things you have to engage with as part of the peacebuilding project. This global peacebuilding-statebuilding project represents some kind of institutional consensus.

I know that is a large claim to make and a big generalisation, because if you examine the role of different actors you see that there are many variations, and actors who sometimes disagree with each other. However, I think there was, and probably still is in the post Cold War period of triumphal liberalism, a consensus that if you can get the five key institutions of the liberal state in place, everything else will follow. Everything revolves round building Democracy, the Rule of Law, Human Rights, Development, and Free Markets, as the silver bullet to establish the liberal peace.

I think there was also a sense that this would be an orthodox peace. It would not necessarily be emancipatory, in the sense of being owned by the people for the people, because you also had to deal with the problematic groups and people who had conducted the war and continued the violence. You had to bring them into the situation, and take account of other interests, so the goal would not be too ambitious, but it would not be the very conservative form that we see today in Afghanistan or Iraq. It might start there, but it would certainly graduate to something more ambitious later on.

Liberalism and the use of military force

I think this question replicates the classic dilemma of liberalism. As a liberal policymaker you become seduced by the idea that one finds in the R2P language, and in the UN framework, namely that you can use force or coercion legitimately to build peace. It is legitimated by your ambition to build something that is more orthodox and potentially emancipatory in the future, and the conviction that force can be the basis for the achievement of these goals. In 1990 there was a big debate about military intervention, and then you had the Clinton-Blair-Bush era in which there was an increasing sense that we knew what peace was and therefore needed to use the tools we had in order to introduce it in conflict areas and to produce a post-conflict polity which would start at this very tough end of liberalism and move forward from there. This argument and agenda were based on the understanding that the liberal state is universal and can work in any space and under any conditions.

There are so many problems with this thinking that I don’t know where to begin. However, I will make a few observations about it. One negative consequence of it is that it has co-opted other people who see themselves as involved in conflict resolution, conflict transformation and peacebuilding into that same project. The very people who were mining at the coalface, that is working at the civil, emancipatory, human end of peace, were at the forefront of the legitimisation of the global consensus for building liberal states as a response to conflicts.

The kind of argument that was implicitly being made was that the people in the countries concerned were capable of engaging in emancipatory processes whereby some form of reconciliation would be achieved, and some kind of consensus reached at least about institution building. This was surely a shortcut that enabled NGOs and activists to engage and therefore was a good thing. This was an argument to legitimise this very old-fashioned interventionary project. UN peacekeeping is a classic in this regard. It uses military forces for intervention to bring ‘peace’. This, I think, is a euphemism for something which is not peace, or which you could call, at best, the victor’s peace.

Clearly this is a peace that is owned by a specific set of actors and institutions.  It conforms to their interests and their world view, and conveniently it is generally thought of as universal – which means it can be used to justify all sorts of interventions. The things we see happening in the 1990s right up to the present time in Baghdad and Kabul are the result of this kind of thinking. Yet in a sense it is almost delusional because the evidence stacks up quite largely against it. If we compare the way the institutions were justified with the way they have performed, the positive elements have been very limited. Their achievement in the way they have dealt with the views of people on the ground is limited.

It is limited even in the way they have dealt with security, although there you see relative improvements. There is not much evidence at all that a self-sustaining peace has been achieved, that is, a peace built up from inside and resting on community support, as against a peace dependent on external forces to keep it in place. So we have the consensus that the liberal state works, but evidence involving a lot of people and issues that it hasn’t worked very well. There is a debate to be had about what success means in that kind of peacebuilding. When do we say this has been a success, and when do we say this hasn’t been a success so far? There is also the question of alternatives. How would the liberal, peacebuilding-statebuilding constituency deal with these criticisms? Would they reform the model or replace it?

An Ideological Project

My biggest concern is that this peacebuilding-statebuilding project is an ideological one, not rooted in universal norms. If that is the case, then we need to engage much more carefully and sensitively with the post-conflict individual, that is to say the non-liberal other, our counterpart who isn’t part of the nested environment in which we find ourselves. We have to think not only about unintended consequences but also about how to communicate.

I had a conversation yesterday, with someone who works for the European Bank of Reconstruction, which throws light on how they see these sorts of problems. They, along with other organisations like the World Bank, accept the neo-liberal paradigm of development, in which free markets get things moving within states and across state boundaries, at a trade and development level. So they engage very much with Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), and they fund 80 per cent private initiatives, but they don’t do any welfare work or give any grants, and they impose punitive interest rates. In the Balkans and other places, they are working with SMEs which are particularly disadvantaged when it comes to operating across global markets. Local people probably don’t have any sort of welfare support, and are therefore least well placed to operate in the neo-liberal market.

This brings me to the almost unexplained importation of the neo-liberal framework into the liberal peace. The notion is that all markets are free, all property is private, all individuals help themselves. This has become a core belief and value system – part of the culture we now have in the liberal peace consensus, which again is largely traceable to the US approach. There has always been a resistance within this framework to the idea that the individual is significant, except in so far as they relate to the market. If you look at the evolution of politics, particularly liberal politics, the person has always trailed behind the institutions – the states, the elites, whoever they are. The rights and material well-being of the ordinary person in the street come in later. So historically the abolition of slavery, gender issues, the extension of voting rights – all these things were brought in later, well after the state and its institutions.

In the countries where the liberal peacebuilding-statebuilding project has been put in place, it is largely the prosperous elites who have benefited and have the ownership of the peace, even if they are implicated in war or have ‘dirty hands’. These are the people best able to benefit from peacebuilding. They can learn the language and engage with institutions like the European Bank of Reconstruction. The net result, as we see in Bosnia now, is political and economic stagnation. Prosperous elites are emerging out of these new settlements, but the states themselves are not representative of a self-sustaining, civil form of peace. So local ownership, even where it is beginning to emerge, is still problematic.

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