A Post-Liberal Peace

A Pedagogy of Peacebuilding: Infrapolitics, Resistance, and Liberation1

“…These both critique liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding and also by implication offer a more emancipatory version-from a contextual perspective. Some of these responses arise at the elite level, some in civil society, while many emerge as local-local responses (i.e., in an indigenous space not necessarily represented by Western notions of civil society) to both elite and nationalist agendas and liberal peacebuilding (Richmond 2011). These responses are even more significant in the challenges they raise for international actors, pointing to language, historical, cultural, and customary obstacles for mutual understanding.…”

“…In Kosovo, local employees of international actors, as well as political and business elites, all placed their weight behind the notion that statehood would lead to peace in Kosovo. In Guatemala, indigenous people do not regard the capital city as ''their'' country, given it represents the dominance of an elite and an international ideology of states and markets not commensurate with their ontology (Richmond 2011). From the Solomon Islands, Timor, Mozambique, to Liberia, there have been local attempts to connect customary forms of governance and law to the international blueprint for peacebuilding (Boege, Anne Brown, Clements, and Nolan 2008:5;Woods 2008;Focus Group, per.…”

“…At the same time, because such agonistic dynamics are mainly oppositional, ''parallel states'' have often emerged in which liberation means not just self-determination but a level of political and epistemic isolation. The result has been unilaterally declared states (as with Kosovo or the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), or more generally the way civil society is now perceived by many donors to be less malleable and more autonomous than internationals desire (Richmond 2011).…”

“…Even so, in all of these cases, interesting dynamics have emerged in terms of local responses, at community (or tribal, customary, or other identity forms) or elite levels (politicians, business, and state elites) to the liberal peace project (Richmond 2011). These are sometimes from within civil society, but they are also often connected to a range of ''local-local'' actors and issues, which represent contextual issues, actors, and dynamics in more resonant and indigenous terms that civil society (as it is often a donor-sponsored artifice).…”

“…It is predicated on the compliance of the subjects it produces and the technical and intellectual expertise for peace on the part of external actors, often state-funded and internationally organized-with all of the attendant tensions this produces. It is hardly surprising that from below and according to the ''infrapolitics'' of peacebuilding (Scott 1990:183-184;Richmond 2011)-meaning the modes of critical, often resistant agency via which individuals and communities mobilize in hidden and fragmented ways for peace on contextual, rather than merely external, terms-such an approach seems to its subjects to be overbearing, perhaps even colonial, and not representative of their own notions of peace and politics.…”