ABSTRACT
Part II of this study illustrates how the distancing process by which liberal peacebuilding has enacted governmentality and its own priorities while marginalising local needs, culture and agency – ultimately reconciliation – in favour of institution-building. Yet, it has inadvertently become the stage upon which local agencies re-emerge. This is whether they are politically organised, identity, community or family organised. Through such a post-colonial turn, they have begun to reclaim peacebuilding, through what might be termed ‘critical agency’ often expressing non-violent forms of resistance, in unanticipated and sometimes controversial ways. This partly explains the emergence of hybrid forms of peace, which respond to the culture-welfare paradox, re-inject politics into peacebuilding and lead to local-liberal forms of peace: the post-liberal peace. This chapter attempts to provide some theoretical substance to such concepts, which emerged in the first part of this study as a result of the ongoing critique of the liberal peace. Such efforts based on everyday issues and capacities had much in common with a fourth generation4 of peacebuilding activity recognising identity, difference, structural constraints and inequality. Liberal peacebuilding has instead reaffirmed territorial sovereignty and hierarchical epistemologies of modernity. In Duffield’s words, liberal peacebuilding determines the sovereign limits of modernisation.5 This type of peacebuilding has become subservient to statebuilding, rather than statebuilding being one among many peacebuilding tools. It romanticises both the non-liberal and liberal self and operates in unanticipated ways at many levels of violence, cultural, structural, economic and physical.6 This is an unintended consequence of the third generation approach which has merged peacebuilding with statebuilding. It has given rise to its own ‘auto-immunity’ in which its own limits have been reached and ignored, thus undermining its local legitimacy.7 The liberal peace has become a brand of atomised liberal civility which diverts the state project away from its liberal functions of democratic self-determination, rights and needs, law, and agency in post-conflict situations via a rational choice approach and neoclassical economic assumptions. It is notable how documents like ‘Responsibility to Protect’ or doctrines such as ‘do no harm’ are
internationalised rather than localised and fail to engage with everyday life other than in basic emergency and narrow security terms. This liberal (and neoliberal) branding of peace has diverted attention away from local contexts, communities and individuals. Much academic and policy work has become complicit with this tendency. This is also true of the older projects of internationalism, peacebuilding and conflict resolution, which have been diverted away from individual and community conditions of peace in the context of the international, to sovereign ‘peaces’ organised around states and their territories, following on from a hegemonic liberal peace directed from a Western core of states and international organisations.8 The general derivation of internationalism from social advocacy and action, from the citizen, the informal sector, and the most marginalised, has been deferred in favour of the state, elite bureaucratic, political and business classes. Statebuilding has become the focus even as critical contributions to IR theory has problematised the state, sovereignty, embedded liberalism and the international system. The most marginalised, the individual, community, kinship, agency, needs, culture and context have been subsumed while only rhetorically being recognised. Complex responses and reactions have emerged in an interdisciplinary and transnational context, as opposed to one which is disciplinary and national. The liberal peace failed to negotiate with entrenched practices, commonly thought of in terms of custom and communalism in a classically colonial intellectual move designed to distance the everyday lives of post-conflict individuals (and those in ‘development’ settings) so that inequality can be effectively justified by alterity. Unsurprisingly, the age-old dynamic of colonial anxiety and local resistance has re-emerged in liberal modernity. At the same time the common requisition of post-structural insights in order to understand emerging agencies and resistance to liberal modernity and its emancipatory claims undermines, it is often claimed, the latter’s stable, rational agencies, and so ‘reduce [s] politics to critique and “resistance” ’.9
