1.

Shared sovereignty statebuilding

Some skeptics of the international enterprise to use inter-vention and aid flows to
rebuild the state after war have gone further to argue that no intervention may well
be the best approach. Jeremy Weinstein has argued that what may be best for war-
torn countries is "autonomous recovery" without out-side help, and that the
international community as a whole has often overstretched the assumption that
intervention is mostly helpful (2005). Backing the scholarship that shows that military
victories can lead to more durable peace, and referencing the scholarship on
endogenous statebuilding in Europe, the implication is that sometimes it is best to
back a winner strongly committed to statebuilding rather than pur-suing inclusive
peace agreements through "peacemaking." Citing cases like Uganda, Eritrea, and the
autonomous (but unrecognized) province of Somaliland, Weinstein argues that
sometimes little or no intervention yields more satisfactory results than does the
"aided" state building approach. Despite this argument, intervention in civil war and
post-civil war settings occurs anyway, in part because of the spillover effects of civil
war for international society (outlined in chapter r). For this reason, we can explain
the in-between space of international intervention and local ownership as one of
"shared" sovereignty between international actors and local elites (Krasner 2004);
international intervention, be it military or through development aid, restricts domestic
state autonomy. This is true most poignantly in cases where sovereignty is held solely
by the United Nations in transitional administrations (in which the UN assumes
temporary or transitional author-ity over a territory), as in Bosnia, Eastern Slavonia,
Kosovo, or East Timor (in its transition to Timor-Leste). Statebuilding outcomes under
transitional administrations have been disap-pointing; they seem subject to crisis and
reversal (Caplan 2005; Chesterman 2004). Today, it is recognized that statebuilding is
still-as historically-an essentially internally driven process, and that the most
appropriate role for outsiders is to facilitate and support capacity through military
intervention such. as peacekeeping, UN "political missions" as in Iraq, Afghanistan, or
Nepal, and through post-war aid flows.9 Indeed, the issues of statebuilding in fragile
states is at the top of the development community's agenda precisely because of the
enormous amounts of aid targeted to the frag-ile states, which receive more than 50
percent of the world's total overseas development assistance of the OECD countries.
Most of the money is spent, precariously, in the top six aid recipient states, which
also happen to be those that are highly fragile: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, West Bank
and Gaza, Sudan, Uganda, and the DRC (in order of total aid, 2008). There are
several serious criticisms about the ability of the international community to employ
aid -money and techni-cal help -to advance what are essentially internal political
processes of consolidation of authority and the building of state capacity. One concern
is that outsiders often lack a common strategy and seem unable to coordinate in such
a way as to create the right incentives for local protagonists to build capable
institutions. Second, resources -specialists, infrastructure needs, and capital -are often
insufficient, or, conversely, overwhelming of the context and thus create aid
dependencies. Third, there are those that suggest aid flows create incentives for local
leaders and bureaucrats of states to be more loyal to the donors than to their own
people. Even more nefarious, some -such as David Chandler in his analy-sis of the
state building approach applied to post-war Bosnia -see international statebuilding as
ultimately injurious and neglectful oflocal desires and realities (Chandler 2oo6).
2. Concept of peace
The orthodoxy of IR has been that peace and conflict studies deals only with specific
instances of mediation, conflict resolution, conflict transformation, or peacebuilding, and that
the broader questions of order, norms, structures, power, and international organisation and
governance were best left to ‘international theorists’. This of course, is indicative of
mainstream IR theory’s tendency towards reductionism (though at the same time it has quietly
adopted many of peace and conflict theory’s approaches).1 Despite this, what has emerged
from peace and conflict studies was the gradual extension of the subdiscipline to include areas
such as human rights, development, reconstruction, gender, humanitarian assistance,
international organisations (IOs), agencies, international financial institutions (IFIs), non-
governmental organisations (NGOs) and non-state actors. In addition broader approaches to
peacebuilding emerged, as well as research methods such as ethnography, in order to
understand violence, conflict, war, and peace from the perspective of grass roots directly
affected and not just from the perspective of states and elites. In this sense, it might be said
that peace and conflict studies has been in advance of the orthodoxy of IR and more in line
with its critical wings. As might be expected, such approaches have now led to a significantly
different, and quietly influential, view of the way peace is understood vis-ŕ-vis peacebuilding,
though such views tend to be relatively marginalised in a discipline and policy domain
dominated by mainstream realist, liberal, and neoliberal theories. Peace and conflict studies
cannot just be seen as an attempt to investigate their subdisciplinary areas in combination with
such mainstream IR theories (though many scholars did take this approach). Instead, it has
taken on a more significant role, which has been to question what many researchers see as
self-fulfilling militaristic or institutionalist paradigms focused on power and violence, interest
and status,2 and to endeavour to redesign or replace them. Such moves normally occurred via
interdisciplinary and detailed empirical research. Many of the concepts utilised and developed
as a result challenge the dominant frameworks of IR. Structural violence and the notions of
negative and positive peace, developed by Galtung,3 illustrate the deficiency of realism and
liberalism in understanding the extent of violence and its indirect impacts. The notion that the
transnational networks made up much of international relations, and that within this context
security was based upon interdependence and on ‘humans’,4 challenged key concepts such as
the hierarchical balance of power, which reordered states as the key actors in IR. The
Burtonian presentation of a set of basic sociobiological human needs5 as navigation point for
policy gave agency to individuals and implied that a general peace was not idealistic, and, as
Azar added,6 would rest upon the satisfaction of the needs of individuals in their social
context. This provided an important avenue through which peace could be defined in terms of
an absence of structural violence and a win–win situation for all concerned actors. In the
context of peacebuilding, what this has meant is that it has been torn between two versions of
liberalism. On the one hand, it is often now seen to be based upon a very conservative form of
liberalism, in which the state is created as the vehicle of security and regulation, overlaid over
territorial sovereignty (though this approach is now generally becoming known as
statebuilding).8 On the other hand, drawing on the work of a range of liberal and more radical
theorists, peacebuilding is seen as an emancipatory activity, more concerned with a
sophisticated order of justice and equity in a societal context than a basic security enforced
through institutions as with the former. In essence, this has meant that peacebuilding theory
has become essentially contested and unstable, shifting from state security and sovereignty to
human emancipation, while struggling to find a balance between the two. I shall now sketch
how, in my view, this came about, and whether the choice that we are seemingly presented
with (statebuilding vs. emancipation) in a search for peace, order, and justice is indeed a real
choice or merely an attempt to prevent the consideration of peacebuilding as a transformative
activity, not just for conflict zones, but for IR more generally. In earlier work I have argued
that there are four main generations of theory relating to peace and conflict studies, and I
follow this usage here.10 In brief outline, the first generation is derived from conflict
management approaches that attempt to produce order without open violence by preserving
the state and its relations, such as traditional forms of UN peacekeeping, high-level
diplomacy, mediation, and negotiation, and other activities that take place in the elite, state-
centric realm of IR. This reflects a realist view of peace and the management of conflict. The
second generation focuses on dealing with human needs, removing violence, structural
violence, and injustice mainly for individuals. This combines elements of idealism,
structuralism, and liberalism, and presents a more ambitious version of a mutual peace and
conflict resolution. The third generation focuses on large-scale, multidimensional approaches
to creating peace. This latter version effectively reflects the liberal peace I have outlined
elsewhere, along with many others.11 The fourth generation seeks ways of dealing with
conflict that would not result in its replication in various forms, leading to a consensual and
legitimate, discursive and material form of emancipation.12 In my view this raises the issue of
how liberal peacebuilding and liberal notions of IR, such as self-determination, democracy,
the economy, development, human rights, the rule of law, and related issues, are transformed
by their engagement with non-liberal, non- development, non-Western locals which
peacebuilding often brings about. This indicates, in various ways, the possibilities of various
types of peace, and the interaction of different types of polities and their politics.
3. Critic of liberal peace
The critique of the liberal peace is based upon the assumption that Western
intervention is too ‘liberal’. The fact that it is too liberal is alleged to be revealed
in its lack of success on the ground; in its failure to achieve liberal outcomes. For
the policy critics, the sources of this failure are held to be located in the non-liberal
nature of the societies intervened upon. In the dominant policy framing of
interventionist agendas, this failing is because of the lack of capacity of domestic
societies and political elites; for more radical readings, the problematic impact of
external policymaking is often re-read as the resistance of indigenous ways of life
and knowledges, which should instead be understood and empathised with.
If the critique of intervention is for its liberalism, then it suggests that the
self-image of the West is being projected where it cannot work. The critique can
easily flatter the self-understanding of liberal interveners that if they are incapable
of transforming the post-conflict societies and failing states, that they are engaged
with, it is merely because they cannot easily be anything other than liberal and that
the societies being intervened in are not ready for liberal frameworks of
governance. This critique, can, in fact, result in the reproduction of the ideological
binary of the civilisational divide between the interveners and the intervened in,
which is seen to be confirmed the more interventionist approaches appear to have
little impact and to have to be scaled back. There are a number of problems with the
critical construction of ‘liberal peace’. These stem not merely from the fact that the
interventionist policies being critiqued seem to be far from ‘liberal’. Of greater concern
is the way that the term ‘liberal’ appears to have become an easy and unproblematic
assertion of critical intent. The critique of the ‘liberal peace’ – and its ability to
encompass both policy advocates and radical critics of intervention – appears to reveal
much more about the problematic state of radical and liberal thought than it does
about the policies and practices of intervention and statebuilding. The ostensible
framework of the ‘liberal peace’ – of the transformative dynamic ontology of the
universal rational subject – had already long since been critiqued and displaced by the
framework of governance and regulatory power. It is peculiar, in these circumstances,
that the dominant policy discussion and the radical discursive framing of post-Cold
War intervention should both therefore take this form. While apologetic intent can
perhaps be reasonably applied to some critics working within policymaking circles and
attempting to justify the continuation and revamping of current policy framings, this
charge cannot so easily be placed at the feet of those articulating more ‘power-based’
critiques of the liberal peace. That the radical critique of the ‘liberal peace’ should
reproduce similar framings to that of the policy orientated institutionalist critique of
liberal peace, highlights the use of the liberal paradigm as a ‘field of adversity’ to
give coherence to radical frameworks of critique. However, in focusing on the target
of liberalism rather than on the policy practices and discourses themselves, there is a
danger that radical criticism can be enlisted in support of the institutionalist project,
which seeks to rewrite the failures of post-Cold War intervention as a product of the
universalising tendencies of a liberal approach and suggests that we should give up on
the liberal aspirations of the past on the basis of an appreciation of the irreconcilable
‘difference’ of the non-liberal subject
4. Assumptions in statebuilding