Review article: On the crisis of the liberal peace

Abstract

The liberal peace is in crisis. John Gray has already pronounced the death of liberal interventionism. 1 Tony Blair has effectively been forced out of office because of his association with the fiasco of intervention in Iraq. Debate on how to deal with the problem of Darfur is not only constrained by the Chinese veto in the Security Council but by the way Iraq and Afghanistan have created a crisis of both confidence and credibility for proponents of intervention. Meanwhile, Mark Duffield has criticised the liberal peace project as a form of biopolitics aimed at transforming the populations of ineffective states and as part of a strategy to 'insulate developed mass society from the permanent crisis on its borders'. 2 Michael Pugh has damned contemporary liberal peacebuilding as a mirage of development that instead prioritises 'therapy, medication and self-reliance'. 3 Oliver Richmond has described it as a 'chimera' 4 'a virtual peace' 5 , a form of 'peace on the cheap' 6 and as embedding 'poverty with rights' . 7 Hard and Negri simply characterise contemporary global politics as an 'imperial civil war '. 8 At the same time, Chavez leads the revolt against neoliberalism in Latin America; in the Middle East, the US has given up on democracy promotion and returned to what it knows best-propping up autocracies with billion dollar arms deals. 9 In addition, the Chinese economic model, with its statism, its corruption, its lack of democracy and its human rights abuses continues to outperform the West and the rest. Surely, this is not how the end of history was supposed to play out-as a tragedy masquerading as a farce, as a bonfire of neoliberal certainties and as brief precursor to the end of the end of history? Well perhaps not-or at least not quite yet. The four books reviewed here certainly do deal explicitly (or implicitly in the case of Easterly) with the multiple failings of the liberal peace project. Indeed, read collectively, they add up to a comprehensive indictment of the contemporary peacebuilding and development strategies devised by Western states for what Chandler terms the non-Western 'other'. At the same time, however, their various analyses also highlight the continued power and pervasiveness of liberal models of peacebuilding and development. The books themselves, therefore, embody a central characteristic of the current crisis of the liberal peace-that, China and Chavez notwithstanding, it is, as yet, mainly a crisis of confidence and perceived effectiveness rather than one of empirical extensiveness and influence. Christopher Cramer's, Civil War Is Not A Stupid Thing, has two main aims. The first is to critique current approaches to measuring, analysing and classifying conflict. He is particularly scathing about both the usefulness of neoclassical economic analyses of conflict and the tendency to make what he views as artificial distinctions between war and non-war violence. This latter observation in particular is used as the basis for challenging conventional assumptions about the 'peacebleness'...

China's Charm Offensive and Peacekeeping: The Lessons of Cambodia – What Now for Sudan?

“…In part, 'a crisis of legitimacy' of the liberal paradigm has led the study of peacekeeping and peacebuilding to pay more attention to local agency. 17 Oliver Richmond also contends that the 'universal and hegemonic discourse' of liberal peace has produced peacebuilding failures, and that peace needs to be 'contextualised more subtly, geographically, culturally, in terms of identity, and the evolution of the previous socio-economic polity'. 18 In this context, 'peace' needs to be researched in terms not only of how it is achieved, but also, more fundamentally, of what it means (or what 'they' mean if one takes the pluralist notion of 'peaces') and whose peace needs more attention.…”

The crisis of liberal peacebuilding and the future of statebuilding

“…The perceived crisis of the liberal peace thesis has prompted calls to save liberal peacebuilding to ensure that powerful states and international organisations continue to intervene in humanitarian crisis situations (Paris 2010). It has also, however, been seen by critics as an opportunity for other forms of peacebuilding to emerge that take greater consideration of indigenous socio-cultural institutions (Cooper 2007;Richmond 2009;Kappler and Richmond 2011;Jarstad and Belloni 2012).…”

“…I also gratefully acknowledge generous funding for this research provided by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP130102273) 'The politics of public administration reform: capacity development and ideological contestation in international state-building'. Cooper 2007;Richmond 2009). But does this mean that statebuilding interventionism is in jeopardy too?…”

Mapping the Nexus of Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding

“…The 'turns' through which peacebuilding studies have gone in the 2000s and 2010s as peacebuilding practices have themselves evolved share a concern with scale, asymmetry and power which is also visible in critical studies of 'top-down' transitional justice. Critiques of the 'liberal peace' as an ineffective, inappropriate or outright neo-imperialist form of Western power projection in the name of peacebuilding (Pugh 2005;Chandler 2006;Cooper 2007;Richmond 2009b;Jabri 2012) echo the reaction against 'top-down' transitional justice mechanisms that characterizes much critical literature on the ICTY, the ICTR and the International Criminal Court. Alternative models that are intended to be more participatory and accountable and that centre the local level as a site of capacity and agency in peacebuilding-whatever 'the local' actually consists of (Mac Ginty 2015) -are argued for along the same lines as the 'bottom-up' models of transitional justice recommended by authors such as Lundy and McGovern.…”