CCTS
Review 38

Case Study I: Cambodia

I turn now to some case studies, starting with Cambodia, which is where I first became alerted to the very negative consequences of this international consensus and the way it is being propagated. Early on in Cambodia there was a critique of peacekeeping and the UN’s role, including the conduct of some peacekeeping individuals on the ground, and of the collusion with political groupings which were seen to be predatory and self-interested. I found in discussions with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank that they feel that the population, which operates at the subsistence level, is not visible and therefore not relevant to the construction of Cambodia as a viable liberal state. They cannot play a role in the economic side of things, are not politically active, and not really engaged in the democratic politics of the state, other than through the occasional act of voting. Since they don’t consume, produce or threaten violence, they are not significant.

Those who matter are the corrupt and predatory elites with whom internationals have to make an unspoken bargain. Their corruption is tolerated, as is the massive drain upon aid and loans due to the fact that they are siphoning much of them off. Some of the figures here are scarcely believable. Fifty per cent or more of the resources that were put into Cambodia since the early 1990s has gone missing. The attitude of the Banks towards the subsistence economy is, ‘We can’t measure this, it is not part of our formal understanding of the economy in the liberal setting – indeed it is an indigenous form of welfare which we can tolerate.’ So the burden of the ‘peace’ is passed onto the ‘post-conflict individuals’, the subsistence farmers who constitute something like 85 per cent of the population of Cambodia, but are not given ownership of that peace. Ownership is at the elite level, with those who run the government and the institutions, even though they are ‘empty’. It is not surprising therefore that the fragility of the state continues.

Case Study II: Bosnia

In Bosnia there was much more direct international involvement through the Dayton Agreement, the use of force and the establishment of a kind of Trusteeship. If you compare the Dayton Agreement with the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, you see two very different approaches to peacemaking at the official level. The critique which you get from the policymakers, and the reporting of the International Crisis Group (ICG) for example, is that there has been stagnation because there has been no post-Dayton settlement. Dayton ended the war, but what is needed now is an agreement to end the post-war period and bring about a sustainable peace. There are claims that the state is too ethnically divided, and counter-claims that the ethnic divisions are imaginary: that when the internationals arrived in Bosnia what they saw there were Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs and concluded that this must be the way in which politics is configured there.

When you ask why those in charge of the official peacebuilding project do not engage more in civil society, why they do not promote more the notion of a civil peace and of re-building the state from the ground up, the answer you get is that civil society’s relations with donors are dominated by a few groups who get all the money and then use it for what they want. In other words there is a very distant relationship between ordinary people and this artifice of a civil society of NGOs. Hidden beneath that are the real people, if you like. And then there is the very divided and fragmented politics of the different governmental levels in the complex political entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. So there is the sense that this stagnation is the peace. Dayton is the peace – but Dayton was a very old-fashioned form of peace, focused on a diplomatic settlement between the warring elites. It is not based on some kind of integrated societal complex, nor an aspiration for an emancipatory form of peace.

The ‘silver bullet’ in the case of Bosnia is seen as the EU – and indeed the EU is regarded as the one solution in many post-conflict societies in and around its boundaries. The idea is that the normative setting of the EU will unpick the ethnic divisions, force through harmonisation, and induce political players to make the political reforms that are needed to move things on. The notion is that this will also enable the economy to open up, so that people can begin to self-help, be competitive in the global markets, and produce and consume in ways that the liberal market consensus indicates that they should operate. They will fulfil their role within the liberal state both by voting and consuming.

There is a very sophisticated local critique of this project that I have come across in Bosnia. The argument is that what has been brought to Bosnia is in some respects less sophisticated than what existed before the war, particularly in respect of welfare provision and cultural hybridity. People had more resources before the war, because they lived in a socialist setting, and the way which identities were dealt with in a hybrid cultural context was much more successful than it has been since. There is also the claim that many of the Western agencies, including the EU and OSCE, have accentuated ethnicity and divisions in their own political interest, as a way of creating political entities for the purpose of statebuilding and reform.

So again the sense on the ground among the non-political players – those who don’t inhabit parliaments or the institutions of government, or work for the internationals – that this is a virtual peace. The local constituency that is involved and integrated into the Commission, and the various internationals, receive enormous benefits, but this alienates them from the social context in which they live and work.

Various contacts of mine in NGOs and human rights groups accuse the internationals of being ambivalent. The internationals, they say, come with big ideas and institutions, but produce a very ambivalent form of peace. It doesn’t compare favourably with what they had before the war, and it doesn’t live up to what they expected. However, even they look to the EU as the new liberal nested setting in which they can re-constitute a viable state. So there is in Bosnia a kind of rhetorical resistance and a sophisticated conceptualisation on the ground which one doesn’t find in other settings. A critique is emerging, a recognition of the problems of this kind of project which we would do well to listen to more attentively.

Case Study III: Kosovo

My next case is Kosovo, a particularly interesting one. The European Bank individual I spoke to yesterday said that it was not possible for them to do the work that they would like to do at the local level, and it was the local people who were the problem. They did not have the capacity and were too implicated in conflict. My response to them was that the primary problem was not the local people but institutions such as theirs and the local elites. The liberal state project in Kosovo started very coercively and progressed through Trusteeship and a protracted contest over sovereignty that culminated in the recent declaration of Unilateral Independence. This process illustrates how much agency local leaders and local people can have, particularly if they coalesce around an agenda – in the case of Kosovo, statehood, and the ethnic Albanian control of the state. It was in Kosovo that we had the almost pragmatic merging of peacebuilding and statebuilding. The UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) went in to stabilise the situation and provide security, and to co-ordinate the many different actors – to do all these things, but not to prejudge the outcome. Would Kosovo remain part of Serbia or be autonomous or independent? The UN mission kept that discussion at bay, almost to prevent the self-determination of the majority ethnic community. Its role was to prevent that debate from happening while it dealt with institution-building.

In Kosovo there was a consensus within the Albanian majority that statehood should be the outcome. There was a tension between the international administration and the majority community and their representatives who entered parliament or, in many cases, got good jobs in the OSCE and the Commission and other international agencies involved in peacebuilding. I think the internationals, the UN, the EU, the OSCE and the World Bank, did not foresee that. What they wanted was to have consensus within Kosovo and across the border, which they couldn’t get and which they should have known they wouldn’t. (Actually they did know they wouldn’t but for a long time the US in particular were pushing statehood for Kosovo as the outcome of this project, regardless of Serbia’s position.) Then there was local cooption of peacebuilding, merging it, with US and to some degree British complicity, with statebuilding, leading to the UDI of a state that is not ethnically pluralist.

Some of the dynamics that allowed this to happen had to do with local ownership – with local elites adopting and exploiting the language of the liberal peace. They cooperated with the OSCE, the EU and the UN to a large degree, but occasionally flexed their muscles, even with riots in the streets, to show in which direction things should go, and put pressure on the international community to hurry up the statebuilding project. In the end even the internationals themselves were beginning to assume that there would be a national state as an outcome of intervention in Kosovo.

This subversion of the statebuilding project has some very negative connotations. It was designed for a national project, not a Greater Albania, but a pluralist Kosovo/a. Discussions about avoiding partition, avoiding the shifting of ethnic populations, were quite Machiavellian in some quarters, and were designed to lend support to the international project liberal peace and pluralist project. The argument was that it wasn’t really the Kosovan Albanians who were being un-cooperative but the Serbs who were withdrawing – which was also true. But that was indicative of a lack of consensus about the politics of the state, and did not necessarily indicate whose fault it was that we now have an ethnically divided polity in the region. Pluralism has almost been abandoned, under pressure from both international policymakers and the local majority who wanted self-determination.

In some instances we see liberal statebuilding focused on the top, with no social contract. In this instance there is a social contract, but it is not with the internationals but with the local elites, who were then able in various ways, all of them legitimate, to mould the project in a way which probably none of the internationals themselves would have wanted – not very pluralist, rather pragmatic, not well recognized and potentially regionally destabilising. Certainly the situation which has emerged out of the peacebuilding operation is very risky. So there is a real paradox here, where local ownership of the peacebuilding project has taken it in a direction which the internationals did not want and which is not necessarily conducive to regional peace or local pluralism. And it may not be conducive either for an everyday peace on the ground for Serbs and other minorities.

Case Study IV: East Timor

In East Timor, we see some of these same dynamics but also others. This was the one case in which the internationals had absolute sovereignty. Again there is the notion that the establishment of a liberal state is de-facto legitimate, to the extent that the internationals can have sovereignty over another territory. The theory is that it can be right to deny self-determination for a time in order for a territory to achieve self-determination. The interim can be used to put the institutions for liberal democracy in place. This was not colonialism and not imperialism, but it was external sovereignty, and was a kind of mandate. It was also ideological, and extremely ambitious. The goal was to use this blueprint machinery of state-building to institutionalise democracy, deal with the constitution, translate all of the legal documents, gain consensus, establish human rights, build a viable economy, and put the state and government in place.

Initially, things looked good, at least as far as the internationals were concerned. However, if you talked to local NGOs who were more involved in social justice issues, their comments were often damning. This was early on, well before the near collapse of the new state in 2006. Lots of people recognized that the state being constituted was a UN state, owned by certain people at the elite level, and that it did not reflect many of the dynamics on the ground, not least the emerging ethnic divides, the language question, and the distribution of resources. All these things were pushed into the background because the key issues were governmental training, governmental reform, dealing with the budget, and dealing with the revenues from the Timor Gap.

So when independence was declared, and the drawdown of the UN peacekeepers began, what we had was a virtual state. It had the institutions, the political players, all the labels, but it didn’t really reflect what was going on within society in its socio-political and economic dimensions. It wasn’t a liberal state. The social contract was missing completely. It was a great irony that the Head of the World Bank visited Indonesia and pointed to East Timor as an undoubted great success, in a speech given very shortly before the relatively minor incident that led to state collapse and the re-engagement of the UN in March 2006. Then came the beginning of the recognition at the institutional level that issues like poverty, youth unemployment and inactivity, as well as ethnic and identity issues, and these sorts of things were dangerous, and needed to be dealt with institutionally. The agenda had to encompass thinking about a meaningful future, about the welfare aspects of the state, and about redistribution, rather than relying only on the market.

There had also been a cultural resistance at the grassroots level. In Kosovo people longed for Kosovanization and talked about local control and ownership of the peacebuilding project. In East Timor there was much the same debate – though I think it might have been more of a top down, elite level, discussion. There was a demand for Timorization that would give a local colour and flavour to the new state, as it was being born.  I was given the impression at one point that there was the potential, before the events in Afghanistan and Iraq, for quite physical local resistance, amounting almost to political and social rebellion against the new state, if Timorization did not occur within the peacebuilding process. It was an interesting dynamic, which was reminiscent of resistance to colonialism in an earlier epoch. So there was some sense of a need and desire for local ownership, but local ownership of a state that didn’t yet really exist, and could not provide its citizens with the resources they needed. I think that is still true today, but I am returning there soon to look at this question further.

Another interesting outcome of all the peacebuilding-statebuilding projects has been a re-institution of class systems, that is, configurations of power within these societies which would be regarded from a liberal perspective as rather negative and inequitable, but not necessarily so from a neo-liberal perspective. This has been particularly the case in East Timor, especially in light of the language laws that have been brought in, which favour Portuguese over the far more widely used indigenous languages.

Romanticizing the local

What do we see from all this? The first thing that occurs to me is that there is a kind of ‘romanticization of the local’. We see this both positively and negatively in the debate about who owns the peace. This romanticization takes a number of different forms, but the main dynamic in East Timor and other cases is first a classic orientalism – seeing local culture as something exotic and also quixotic and unknowable, something we can’t quite get to grips with in our engagement with local elites and the grassroots because of its differences and because of language. And because the peacebuilding-statebuilding framework cannot engage, this becomes an argument for top-down statebuilding. The argument, as I heard it at the Asian Bank of Reconstruction, is that we can’t really engage and so we don’t engage; instead we do what we know we can do which is to build institutions which are universal, derived from the Enlightenment, and have a record of success in producing stable, successful and peaceful states.

This becomes a justification for illiberalism. If we remember the spectrum of liberalism, this takes us down towards its coercive end. However, in saying you can’t engage with the local culture, you shrug off any responsibility for welfare. Also human rights and self-determination can be deferred: not for ever of course, as in imperial/colonial systems, but just in the short to medium term, until you can really understand and access the local, and the local has been ‘tutored’ into taking up ownership. There are many problems with this, but it is one of the core mindsets within the major institutions involved in all the aspects of peacebuilding at the elite policy level. Sensitivity to the local dynamics is much greater as you move down to the grassroots level.

You also find the assertion of a lack of capacity. In East Timor, for example, it was suggested when internationals arrived after the violence of 1999 that there was nobody with whom one could engage. The locals couldn’t speak English and couldn’t even drive. So they were helpless, blank sheets. The country was a terra nullis on which one could inscribe the liberal state.

Let me just add a footnote to that. One of the claims that liberalism as an ideology made was that indigenous peoples did not exist. They didn’t exist because they did not have ownership of land, did not use land in a certain, productive, way. They did not farm, they roamed. This was used to justify the parcelling out of colonial lands both in a private capacity but also to colonial powers. You see this in Lockean thinking, for example, and in other great liberal thinkers who then come on the scene. In Lockean thought, it was extremely important that you had the right to take away land from indigenous peoples and create the liberal state and the social contract with those who would be productive.

A third assertion is of local deviousness, a form of incivility and illiberalism. A fourth assertion, which is slightly more positive but also can have negative connotations, romanticises the indigenous capacity for peacebuilding. This has been taken as something which the internationals can co-opt; they can use the indigenous approaches for peacebuilding, if they can access them, for liberal statebuilding.

To engage with critiques of this kind requires a close understanding of the local, of the community, of the peoples one is engaging with, of the potentially non-liberal other, and I am not sure policymakers are capable of this, or that necessarily the methodological and theoretical frameworks we have in our Kantian universities give us much access to it either. Even ethnology and anthropology have been part of colonial projects.

The Post-Liberal Peace

What would a post-liberal form of peace be like? It would be one where we are able to engage with these sorts of dynamics, to overcome the failings of the peacebuilder in engaging with the local. It would mean seeing ownership not just in the functional and institutional way that I think internationals often see it, but as something much more related to culture, to emotion and empathy, and not just to the technical, the material, the political and the economic. That kind of empathy has, I think, been expunged from the state run projects as a result of the fact that the Enlightenment project itself has an imbalance towards rational interests over the qualitative and everyday experience of societies. It is not that rationality is wrong or bad; it is just that such a narrow view of it has become hegemonic. What comes out of all this is that it is important to recognize that peacebuilding at whatever level is itself a cultural practice, rooted in certain social conventions, political mores and so on.

The post-liberal peace agenda, then, means moving on from liberal peace as a product of Western modernity to a peace or peaces which may be developed much more broadly. You could see this as being a much more cosmopolitan practice than that which the cosmopolitans themselves believe in. This is not to attack liberalism per se, but an attempt to sophisticate and refine it, to say that it is only a staging post. Liberalism is not, as some have claimed, the end of history, the ultimate paradigm. To engage with that fact, to begin really to understand the dynamics of the local, organic, engine of peace, one needs to have a very intimate access to a society, not for the purpose of social engineering but to allow unscripted conversations to take place which give voice to the local on the various levels on which peacebuilding takes place.

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