Post liberal Peace

Most of the critical peace literature has put 'a local turn' as an important aspect of a paradigm shift in liberal peacebuilding, both in academic and practice-oriented terms. Although most of the made criticism is valid, it is still being disputed by Western academics with their epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. The voice of researchers who live in post-conflict or conflict-affected societies is still very much restricted by structural, institutional or personal constraints. Consequently, by drawing mostly from the experience of local researchers in the Balkans, the paper analyses the main causes for the limited impact of local researchers in the liberal peace debates, and proposes several steps that could lead to their stronger involvement in this discussion. We are doing something we don't understand fully, and the best we can do is admit we don't understand it, and that we also don't have time to understand it. 1

Recent critical perspectives on peacebuilding have sought to shed light on experiences so far marginalized by mainstream approaches. In particular, critics have pushed peacebuilding towards radically different ways of thinking about governance, conflict and peace, by engaging with narratives, experiences and knowledge coming from societies perceived as not invested in modernity or liberalism, such as Indigenous communities. Whilst this may force theory to confront questions of human-centrism, colonial erasure, and structural violence, turning to Indigeneity without questioning the impact of liberal peace ‘thinking', might further elicit marginalization and appropriation, and simply ‘save’ liberal peacebuilding through the back door.

The understanding that liberal democracies do not fight each other has become one of the most disseminated ideas amongst scholars and pol-icymakers on the conditions for international peace and security since the initial statistical findings about the correlation between democracy and peace in the 1970s. Broadly defined as a paradigm that calls upon the active construction of lasting peace within the international system through the transformation of societies, 'liberal peace' connects the maintenance of international stability to the dissemination of liberal values and institutions, and to agendas geared towards socioeconomic and political restructuring of non-liberal sovereign States. This chapter explores some articulations of the notion of liberal peace over the past decades, tracing the debate that has culminated in moral and political justifications for liberal interventionism in non-liberal States after the Cold War. It investigates the influence of liberal ideas in conceptual and practical transformations of United Nations Peace Operations, which along with other historical developments and experiences in the field, shaped the emergence of more robust and intrusive generations of peace operations authorized to intervene in the domestic affairs of States and to actively participate in post-conflict reconstruction. As the deployment of peace missions shaped by liberal values and expecta-tions has been widely contested and criticized as a contemporary form of colonialism, the recent years have brought up questions about re-sistance and the emergence of a post-liberal order, but also about the capacities of international institutions such as the United Nations to de-liver the ambitious promises of previous decades.

Rossone de Paula F. (2020) Liberal Peace in Peace Operations. In: Richmond O., Visoka G. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

*Link to free version available*
Even in the context of a relatively flourishing state, fragility can be an enduring feature of a political system, particularly in the case of recently established or unrecognised states. This article examines the nature of state-building in a specific context to question the assumption that forms of hybrid governance or pre-existing forms of governance are a necessary evil to be tolerated but which needs ultimately to be overcome during state-building. It does this by adopting the language of resilience and focusing on the case of Somaliland to highlight the role of clan governance as a mechanism of political resilience and as a means of promoting the flexibility required for state-building. Yet, at the same time, the process of state-building often involves formalising governance and limiting the role of traditional social-political forms of governance such as clans, ignoring their role in legitimating and stabilising the political system. However, as this article argues, stability and fragility are inextricably linked; while the clan system has been an important force in stabilising the state, it has also become a pressure point for the state’s latent fragility. By contextualising fragility and stability within the language of resilience, though, this symbiotic relationship can be better analysed.

Las operaciones de construcción de paz se han convertido en la forma de reconstrucción posbélica más habitual desde los noventa. Este tipo de intervenciones, hegemónicas e incuestionadas en el ámbito operativo hasta hace poco, han suscitado en los últimos años un debate académico sin precedentes. Desde diferentes perspectivas y corrientes de las Relaciones Internacionales, el modelo de paz liberal, así denominado, ha sido intensamente problematizado por sus escasos resultados, por la manera en que se despliega y por la sospecha de que su objetivo último tiene que ver con el control y regulación de contextos de conflictividad que son percibidos como problemáticos para la estabilidad internacional por parte de los principales actores internacionales. El capítulo analiza el origen del modelo, los consensos sobre los que se construye y, sobre todo, los diferentes problemas que presenta y las críticas a las que ha estado sujeto. Si bien a estas críticas se les atribuye una sobreproblematización, a veces exagerada, habrían logrado construirse como una generación de pensamiento capaz de construir un corpus teórico y conceptual que obliga a replantear el núcleo de las intervenciones internacionales.

This paper has a double-fold objective: firstly, I would like to bring the decolonial approaches of the Modernity/Coloniality Group up to the debate in Peace and Conflict Studies. Secondly, I aim to develop the concept of “Coloniality of Peace”, based on this theoretical background. By “Coloniality of Peace”, I understand an expression of a specific set of power relations in the international hegemonic narratives of peace and peacebuilding (the “liberal peace project”): it is based, I claim, in the hierarchical social categorization of human beings (especially through race) and in the compliance with processes of accumulation by dispossession. I intend to sketch a first analytical and methodological approach in this direction, namely through these three methodological strategies to access the "coloniality of peace": (1) the rescue of the historical weight of colonial legacies that compose the background of conflicts emergence and peace processes; (2) the unravelling of colonial rationalities in the peacebuilding narratives (mainly through discourse analysis) and (3) the bringing of subaltern voices and decolonial rationalities/imaginaries up to the debate. I then bring to the fore a brief analysis of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) through the theoretical lenses of the "coloniality of peace" and the methods proposed to analyze it.

The global resurgence of authoritarian and anti-democratic forces, coupled with the austerity crisis of the past decade, have posed significant strain on liberal democratic regimes, highlighting a need to reconsider widespread assumptions about liberal democracy and the capitalist economic system.
In this light, recent trends towards “illiberal” and “authoritarian” forms of governance in Central Asian states should be framed in the context of the region’s “post-liberal” trajectory. The key point of the post-liberal approach is that national paths of development, reform and policy-making are not – and have rarely ever been – determined by free and collective decision-making as envisaged by liberal political and economic theories. We can draw the implications of this post-liberal mode of governance for Central Asia by focusing on the fundamental changes brought by the post-socialist transition and the new, disembedded forms of collective decision-making and economic management they have created. As recent critical writing on Central Asia and other regions shows, understanding these changes and their implications for social mobilisation and political participation is key to making a realistic assessment of the region’s future development.

Desde los fallidos diálogos del Caguán entre FARC-EP y Gobierno colombiano (1998-2002) hasta la firma y refrendación de los Acuerdos de La Habana (2016), Colombia vivió un intenso acompañamiento internacional en su búsqueda de la paz negociada. Mediante un análisis estadístico y documental se constata que, durante este período, los recursos de la cooperación internacional provinieron, casi en su totalidad, de los dos socios más importantes de Colombia: Estados Unidos y la
Unión Europea. El primer actor, privilegiando un componente militar; el segundo, basado únicamente en ayuda civil. Estas dos diferentes, y a veces opuestas, políticas de cooperación para la paz, reflejan distintos intereses tanto de los donantes (EE UU y UE) como de los demandantes (el Estado colombiano y su sociedad civil). Sin embargo, las dos distintas cooperaciones convergen en torno a los diálogos de La Habana (2012 -2016) que, con la firma de los acuerdos proyectaron a Colombia hacia un nuevo e inédito escenario: el “posconflicto”, mejor llamado “posacuerdo”. Es precisamente esta convergencia de los dos grandes enfoques hegemónicos de la cooperación internacional la que hace de Colombia un país sui generis en escenarios de conflicto y de transición hacia posconflictos que podría ser representativo para otros contextos geográficos, alimentando y ampliando el debate entre
“paz liberal” y “paz posliberal” para futuras investigaciones específicas sobre el tema.

Decolonising Intervention is a beautiful account written in a clear, jargon free language. Sabaratnam weaves her case historically, methodically, in sustained empirical sediments. She strategically exploits the gap between intentionality and reality, presence and subjecthood in order to show that intervention is not a field of technocratic jostling but rather a field of negotiation of values towards, and against, an ever-receding horizon of “public integrity”. Decolonising Intervention is also an invitation to reform intervention as a space of emancipation – to elaborate conditions that can ensure that the space of experience and the space of knowledge coalesce.

Liberal Peacebuilding has failed to realize the ambitious agenda set after the end of the Cold War. This paper contributes to the critical debate about liberal peacebuilding by introducing some fundamental ideas from Thomas Hobbes' state of nature. Within the state of nature, Hobbes's state of fear resembles the deep-rooted mistrust that haunts most post-conflict societies. The paper describes human desires as the foundation of political power. As such, political authority must necessarily reflect social dynamics in order to be of relevance for its subjects and, ultimately, effective. In the volatile and rapidly changing environments of post-conflict states, human desires must be treated as context-sensitive. Therefore, rather than rebuilding institutions and structures according to liberal ideals, peacebuilding shall consider human interest as a dependent variable. This calls for the inclusion of every subject into the governing process and requires the meeting of preconditions that foster a common social order capable of responding to all individuals' desires.

Orientalist and liberal-modernist underpinnings of post-conflict gender programming in Afghanistan construct Afghan women's rights and freedoms " away " from the traditional domestic sphere (reliance on religious and cultural worldviews, local institutions and informal markets) onto a distinct path of western liberal (colonial) modernity, focusing on women's public roles, formal political participation, state-centric legal rights and neo-liberal market participation. This liberal-modernist bias has meant that the women's rights agenda is bound to the few, contested and hyper-militarized and politically fragile 'pockets' of liberal publics that are unevenly dispersed across the country and have limited accessibility for most women. The 'pull' to the masculine-militarized liberal publics is juxtaposed to an orientalist framing of a stifling traditional society wherein Afghan women are expected to flee, simply because emancipatory possibilities are deemed impossible. This article argues that countless rural and urban-based women are, for many reasons, unable to or lack the desire to " enter " the liberal public, and they may also not even have the choice or preference to " retreat " from the interpenetrating spaces of customs, values, traditions, culture and religion. In failing to account for the complexities of women's lives, gender programming has failed to offer a broad based, inclusive and more flexible approach to women's rights and gender relations.

“Post-liberalism” denotes the fact that Kyrgyzstan, like other “young” states emerging from socialist or authoritarian regimes, is facing conditionalities, expectations, and imperatives that make the adoption of neo-liberal policies and liberal-democratic rhetoric less a political choice than a logical consequence of integration into the international community. However, this path dependency often leads to performative, rather than substantive, implementation of reforms and new policies and practices, as well as fatigue and resistance built up by the empty promises and adverse effects that have accompanied capitalist development in the post-independence period. The challenges facing the construction of secure communities must be understood in this context.

Original available at:
http://voicesoncentralasia.org/building-secure-communities-in-a-post-liberal-age-a-view-from-kyrgyzstan/

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Cultura y educación para la paz en Asia y África: teorías y metodologías Educación para la paz y análisis de los costos de la violencia en América Latina Derechos humanos y educación para la paz en el sistema educativo mexicano Filosofía de la no-violencia para jóvenes
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‘Post-liberal’ and ‘hybrid’ forms of peace sparked hopes that alternative approaches to the hegemony of the Western-centric ‘liberal peace’ were already existent and could be further institutionalized. Thus, the identification and incorporation of the needs, values and ideas of populations and vulnerable groups into post-conflict peace- and statebuilding were thought to make the predominant technocratic and culturally violent liberal framework more sensitive and context-driven. This idea, however, was shown to be grounded in merely cursory empirical research and to downplay the trajectories of governmentality and ideological embeddedness in post-imperial societies. In this chapter, I will show how everyday forms of peace and patterns of post-liberal and hybrid peacebuilding can be embedded in counter-hegemonic projects. While ostensibly expressing a modality of ‘post-liberal’ or ‘hybrid’ peace, the discourses and practices I examine can be seen to instantaneously endorse forms of ‘authoritarian conflict management’, which prioritise order and stability over a more fundamental discussions of post-conflict justice, minority rights and livelihoods. Drawing on biographical and fieldwork observation data as well as relevant literature, I will show how people in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan emphasize the importance of order, harmony and stability and thus end up endorsing the management and containment of conflict rather than its transformation.

This paper draws on previous research tackling not the process of recovery, but of collapse. Three states (Lebanon, Somalia and the former-Yugoslavia) were considered when collapsed, in crisis and relatively stable. These countries were selected because despite their stark differences – geographical (Middle East, Africa and Europe), political (a democracy, a nepotistic regime and a dictatorship) and economic (capitalist, neo-patrimonial and socialist system) –, all of them collapsed in the end. The findings of that analysis were turned upside down to develop priorities to salvage failed states. This paper will first develop the theoretical implications thereof, and second confront this theory with current attempts to put Humpty Dumpy back together.

The research is based on qualitative fieldwork rather than on quantitative data due to the scarcity and poor quality of such data in collapsed states. Quantitative data constrains the analysis because it is often designed to capture long-term structural and official indicators, whereas this paper focuses on short to medium term dynamics and recognizes the importance – particularly in weak states – of informal networks (e.g., the Lebanese state, formally a democracy, operated very much as an oligarchy). The information was processed by way of the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), a standardized comparison of qualitative data allowing though experiments.

This article seeks to show how the ethnographic peace research agenda can benefit from long-standing discussions in the anthropological literature. It sets out by arguing that the ‘anthropological imagination’ apparent in recent debates in peace and conflict studies is informed by an empiricist positivism that conceives of ethnography as a data-gathering tool. By drawing insights from the ‘writing culture’ and ‘Third World feminism’ debates, I will show how such empiricism was challenged and partly done away with in favour of new dialogical and collaborative approaches to knowledge production. In the second part, focussed on the context of the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia, I will illustrate the limits and blind spots of the prevalent empiricist approach to studying peace and conflict by showing how discourses and imaginaries of a ‘culture of peace’, tolerance and multiculturalism conceal forms of exclusion, marginalization and hidden conflict. I will show how my own collaborative research sheds light on community security practitioners’ efforts to understand and tackle security challenges. This practico-discursive analysis exemplifies how critical ethnographic peace research can help to uncover patterns of conflict management, post-conflict governmentality, and the construction and ‘othering’ of group identities.

Full text available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2017.1350576 or via message.

Given the legitimation problem with vertical (state vs. society) and horizontal (modernity vs. tradition) inequalities/differences as historical and cultural causes of conflict, peacebuilding in the post-colonial, post-conflict context requires deliberation to engage in the legitimation problem.