The limits of culture

Whereas classical liberal approaches to institutional frameworks of governance assume a universalist approach to the subject, in neoliberal or sociological institutionalist understandings, the efficacy or capacity of state institutions and the ‘rule of law’ is dependent upon their sociocultural foundations.Footnote ¹⁸ This neoliberal perspective was probably most famously articulated by Friedrich von Hayek, in his view that modern liberal institutions could not be exported or created by edict or plans but must emerge organically from society.Footnote ¹⁹ In the organic or culturalist perspective, the constitutional history of Great Britain is often highlighted to argue that even without a written (codified) constitution, the rule of law had more de facto purchase than in the former colonies where the rule of law needed to be produced through de jure democratic constitutions.Footnote ²⁰ The pluralist, ‘organic’ or institutionalist position involves problematic circular reasoning in attempting to explain the differences and divisions of the present as products of the cultural hold of the past. For example, Brian Tamanaha argues: ‘The rule of law existed [in Britain] owing to the widespread unquestioned belief in the rule of law, in the inviolability of certain fundamental legal restraints on government, not to any specific legal mechanism.’Footnote ²¹ Paola Cesarine and Katherine Hite put this well in the context of Latin America:

For constructivist or sociological institutionalist approaches, law could not provide its own legitimacy – its own basis, limits, or constraints – anymore than democratic theory could explain the constitution of the demos.Footnote ²³ The universal, ‘natural’ or ‘Cartesian’ assumptions of the liberal rationalist autonomous subject were subject to devastating critique from these sociologically-informed positions.

But while operating to highlight the limits of liberal constructions of the rule of law there appeared to be little that could be done to overcome these limits. Once it was established that merely having legal constitutions (which can, of course, be internationally exported or externally-imposed) was no longer adequate, then the sphere of sociocultural understandings appeared to pose a formidable policy challenge. As Augusto Zimmermann, law professor at Murdoch University, notes with regard to Brazil:

The focus of social constructivist and new institutionalist understandings upon the gap between the formal sphere of law and constitutionalism and the social ‘reality’ of informal power relations and informal rules, established a problematic but not a way of going beyond it.Footnote ²⁵ This attention to cultural differences marked the impasse of the liberal peace framework, which shaped international peacebuilding and statebuilding assumptions in the 1990s. The work of the sociological understanding of constitutionalism and law revealed the shallowness of the state-level or top-down focus of peace and democratisation approaches. In these frameworks, the social reality of countries undergoing democratic or post-conflict ‘transition’ could not be understood merely by an analysis of laws and statutes. In fact, there appeared to be an unbridgeable gap between the surface appearances or artificial constructions of legal and constitutional frameworks and the realities of everyday life, revealed in dealings between individual members of the public and state authorities.

Often this contrast, between the ‘reality’ of the everyday and the formal framework of law, was understood in terms of two – opposing – spatially-constructed rationalities: that of the ‘international’ and the ‘local’. This clash, between the formal and the real, has been captured in critical conceptual approaches, which have focused on hybrid outcomes of international interventions, which have attempted to transform societies through top-down mechanisms such as legal and constitutional reforms.Footnote ²⁶ In the framings of hybridity approaches: ‘the “laws” of the society can easily overrule the laws of the state’.Footnote ²⁷ As Zimmermann argues: ‘Socially speaking, the former can be far more institutionalized than the latter, which means that the state law can easily be undermined by the lack of connection between its formal precepts and observed behavior.’Footnote ²⁸

These ‘hybrid’, sociological approaches understood ‘local’, national, or community cultures and values as a socially-constructed barrier to the export or development of constitutional frameworks and the rule of law.Footnote ²⁹ The discursive framework in which these approaches developed was that of analysing and explaining the limits of external interventions based on liberal understandings. Universalist framings of law were held to fail where societies were understood to be ‘non-liberal’ and therefore not ready to, or incapable of, organising on the basis of law standing above social and economic conflicts. These barriers to the ‘rule of law’ were often understood to have deep cultural roots in the colonial era or in the parallel power structures that emerged during internal conflicts, and seen to be similarly deep-rooted. It is these deep societal roots that were held to explain the limits of liberal transition and international statebuilding. As Zimmermann concludes:

The framing of sociocultural norms and understandings, as a barrier, shifted the emphasis from the formal sphere of rights and law to the informal sociocultural understandings into which these were deployed.Footnote ³¹ However, while being able to process-trace understandings of these limits to the ‘rule of law’ backwards into the past, through the cultural reproduction of values, societal path dependencies and inter-subjective cognitive framings, these approaches offered very little in terms of being able to move forward beyond the impasse of ‘culture’.

The limits of neoliberal or new institutionalist framings, which seek to promote liberal peace outcomes, through interventions at the deeper, sociocultural level, are clearly highlighted in ‘culture of lawfulness’ policy interventions that attempt to transform culture to enable the rule of law. These programmes have been particularly prevalent in frameworks of the ‘war on drugs’ in Latin America. Heavily funded by the US Government and the World Bank, initiatives led by the US-based NGO the National Strategy Information Centre (NISC) have placed the culture of lawfulness at the centre of the US's global law enforcement strategy. According to US Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky: ‘Government efforts to enforce the law are insufficient in and of themselves to establish the rule of law in a country. This is a result of the fact that lawlessness and corruption often stem from social norms and historic practices.’Footnote ³² For Dobriansky, historic path dependencies and sociocultural norms meant that the rule of law could not operate universally. She argued therefore that sociocultural interventions were necessary to educate and win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of recalcitrant subjects:

A typical example is that of the NSIC ‘culture of lawfulness’ three-year project in the city of Pereira, Columbia, funded from 2008–10. The project's starting presupposition was that the local culture was a central barrier to the rule of law: ‘Prior to this project, rule of law principles had few public advocates and were not well understood by the people of Pereira. Apathy and fatalism were the norm for large segments of the population, and many engaged in or tolerated illicit behaviour.’Footnote ³⁴ The project started with local knowledge and understandings, developing ‘a Pereiran rule of law narrative, locally driven and cognizant of Pereira's unique history, customs and culture’ and with the desire of government and civil society leaders to tackle the barriers of the local culture.Footnote ³⁵ With the zeal of nineteenth-century missionaries, the NSIC attempted to align USAID and local funding, using local knowledge and access to society – at the level of government leaders, civil society organisations, faith groups, local businesses, the media, and schools – to initiate awareness of the rule of law, educate and inform, and begin to change ingrained patterns of behaviour.

Local culture was to be engaged with on the basis that the locals needed to adapt to and learn about universal liberal understandings of the ‘rule of law’:

It was understood that if the barrier of local culture could be successfully overcome, liberal institutions and frameworks could take root ‘even within one generation’, while reforms that worked at the state and institutional level would be doomed to failure, just remaining at the superficial level of the formal framework and not touching the local reality. To this end, local leaders were encouraged to buy into the programme, and an all-out ‘counter-insurgency’ campaign was launched to win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of the community: ‘A comprehensive citywide CoL [culture of lawfulness] campaign … touched Pereirans at nearly every point of contact – at school, at work, in transit (buses, taxis, billboards), through television/radio/print, at community events and in houses of worship.’Footnote ³⁷

The NISC evaluated their own project very positively, arguing that over the three year period it had a substantial impact on the community ‘measured through the degree of the institutionalization of CoL in long-term community processes, activities and planning as well as significant shifts seen during the program in popular knowledge and attitudes – a foundation of behavioral change’.Footnote ³⁸ It is important to note that new institutionalist framings operate at the level of intersubjective understandings – the empowerment that they offer the ‘local’ level is that of understanding the importance of the rule of law and their role as active citizens. These cognitive changes then lead to changes in behaviour, which enable liberal transformation, facilitating the rule of law:

Although there is the language of local knowledge and resources, needs and interests and the empowerment of local people, it is clear that the agenda is very much one in which enlightened Western interveners, equipped with the external subject position of liberal universalist understandings, attempt to transform the barrier of local cultural-social frameworks. Because intervention is consciously aimed at transforming the minds and understanding of local people – and thereby necessarily setting up a hierarchy of understanding – the gap between the external perspective and the ‘local’ arena becomes clearer the more the international ‘empowerment’ agenda extends into the society.Footnote ⁴⁰

This becomes clear in projects such as the comprehensive ‘multi-sectoral’ campaign, considered here. In fact, reading their report it becomes difficult not to see this work as patronising and demeaning to those they are seeking to ‘empower’. Examples of good work highlighted in the report include a 60-hour Culture of Lawfulness course to be taught in schools,Footnote ⁴¹ encouraging the media to incorporate culture of lawfulness themes into documentaries, soap operas, game and talk shows,Footnote ⁴² therapeutic workshops for citizens to ‘give voice to the obstacles and frustrations they face along their “journey” to a culture of lawfulness’,Footnote ⁴³ an annual ‘Most Legal and Most Safe Neighborhood’ competition,Footnote ⁴⁴ culture of lawfulness supported hip hop and rap festivals – including ‘The Culture of Lawfulness is an Awesome Challenge’ rap contest,Footnote ⁴⁵ public education billboards with personal testimonies concluding with the phrase: ‘and YOU, what are YOU going to do for lawfulness?’,Footnote ⁴⁶ mime and theatre to discourage speeding and jay walking,Footnote ⁴⁷ pledges for lawfulness by the town mayor in front of primary school children,Footnote ⁴⁸ local Chamber of Commerce prize ‘Culture of Lawfulness is my Business’,Footnote ⁴⁹ and a Culture of Lawfulness ‘paint fest’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Local pastors and lay preachers have even been given manuals on how to introduce rule of law themes into their services.Footnote ⁵¹ Of course, the paradox is that the more multi-sectoral and comprehensive the culture of lawfulness intervention is, the more artificial and patronising it becomes; while any single activity on its own seems clearly unable to tackle the task at hand, ‘to transform an entire culture’.Footnote ⁵²

These approaches were limited by the liberal universalist framings which they explicitly drew upon (and explicitly defended). Here ‘the rule of law’ was consciously articulated as an external rationality, as somehow the preserve of the West (where, as noted above, it was often held that there was no cultural or societal mismatch), meaning that any attempt to ‘artificially’ construct rule of law regimes, even through ‘culture of lawfulness’ attempts to ‘transform entire cultures’, hardly appeared feasible. Even the best and most determined, you could even say messianic, attempts to engage with the ‘local’, in order to transform cultural values, seemed to fall prey to the problems of ‘artificiality’ (which had already beset international attempts to export the ‘rule of law’ through state and institutional level legal and constitutional reforms). Furthermore, no matter how culturally sensitive these interventions were, they still – in fact, inevitably – produced hierarchical understandings, which problematised (even pathologised) local understandings and values, and came across as patronising and neocolonial.

There are clear limits to attempts to overcome the barriers to liberal peace approaches on the basis of intervention to transform ‘local’ sociocultural understandings.Footnote ⁵³ However, the alternative approach to these barriers – of adapting liberal understandings of legal and constitutional practices to local sociocultural contexts – would appear to be equally problematic in terms of leaving international organisations vulnerable to accusations of providing support to ‘illiberal’ actors or undermining human rights norms.Footnote ⁵⁴ The paradox of liberal peace advocacy is fully highlighted in attempts to defend international intervention, but which deny that local culture will be necessarily seen in these liberal, ‘problematic’ ways by external interveners. For more critical or radical liberal peace theorists, intervention needs to be done in more self-reflexive ways, which similarly seek to problematise Western understandings of liberal universality. These critical approaches are often drawn towards pluralist anthropological frameworks in order to develop an ethical methodology of intervention, which can break free of the hierarchical understandings explicit in liberal internationalism. Here, the plural and ‘hybrid’ outcomes of international intervention are seen as positive and to be encouraged. In fact, the experience of intervention, it is alleged, can be a mutual learning exchange between intervener and those intervened upon, as fixed cultural understandings on both sides can be challenged through ‘unscripted conversations’ and ‘the spontaneity of unpredictable encounters’.Footnote ⁵⁵

The obvious problem with the ‘unscripted conversations’ approach is the question: ‘Why then intervene in the first place?’ The answer is that intervention is essentially a mechanism of intersubjective enlargement of reflexivity, enabling an emancipation of both intervener and those intervened upon, through the opening up of possibilities for both to free themselves from the sociocultural constraints of their own societies and to share a pluralised ethos of peace which, through pluralising, goes beyond both liberal universalism and non-liberalism. As Morgan Brigg and Kate Muller argue:

For Richmond, this plural and emancipatory peace, based on mutual learning and exchange, is thereby ‘post-liberal’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Here, cultural understandings are also seen as malleable and open to intersubjective transformation, enabling liberal peace approaches to overcome the problems of conflict, crime, and reconstruction but without privileging universalist understandings (although these views can be critiqued as no more than the anthropological ethics of cosmopolitan liberalism, this is not the focus here).Footnote ⁵⁸

The paradox of liberal peace is merely brought into full focus in these critical approaches, which have found it impossible to escape the focus on sociocultural norms and values. The ethics of radical liberal peace are those of cultural pluralism and the ‘respect and the recognition of difference’ beyond the divide of ‘liberal and non-liberal contexts’.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, it is clear that the problematic is one that still shares much with the liberal universalist vision, merely questioning its ability to fully accept the existence of plurality.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Richmond argues: ‘Behind all of this is the lurking question of whether liberal paradigms are able to engage with, and represent equitably non-liberal others – those for which it infers a lesser status.’Footnote ⁶¹ For Richmond, the liberalism of liberal peace shapes the understanding of the problem as one of pluralisation that ‘requires a privileging of non-liberal voices’ and the ‘ongoing development of local-liberal hybrid forms of peace’.Footnote ⁶² As Audra Mitchell has pointed out, this framing problematically focuses on fixed or essentialised sociocultural understandings, counter-positioning an external ‘liberal’ internationalist subject to a ‘non-liberal’ local one.Footnote ⁶³ Mitchell points beyond liberal peace framings, in articulating practices as the key to understanding outcomes of intervention rather than focusing on the binary and hybrid perspectives of liberal/non-liberal and international/local. The focus on effects rather than on cultural difference is key to the discursive moves of resilience approaches, which take policy debates beyond the liberal peace and its limitations.

The starting point for resilience is a reinterpretation of the liberal discursive construction of ‘culture’ itself as a fixed or settled spatial community of intersubjective, constructed meanings, which external interveners are somehow external to.Footnote ⁶⁴ The new institutionalist or critical constructivist approach can thereby be understood to operate merely through inversing hierarchical liberal understandings of universal reason.Footnote ⁶⁵ The epistemological privileging of ‘local’ knowledge then becomes the basis of value pluralism, but always from the standpoint of the problems of liberal democracy and universalist approaches to public institutions and the rule of law.Footnote ⁶⁶ As long as the discourse stays on the level of shared rationalities of spatially differentiated inter-subjective collectivities, both academic and policy discussion remains on the terrain of liberal universalism and value relativism, based upon the judgement of the intervener, self-understood as external to the problematic.Footnote ⁶⁷ It is only in the sphere of practices and strategies in relation to concrete problems that there can be a shift away from spatial constructions to social practices. The ‘local’ or the ‘everyday’ then become the focal point, not on the basis of the epistemological differences of liberal reason but on the ontological basis of the practical production of the world.Footnote ⁶⁸

The rise of resilience

While the liberal peace problematic deploys external standards of judgement and downplays the critical and agential capacity of actors, philosophical pragmatism argues that the world is made ‘from below’,Footnote ⁶⁹ through the practices of the ‘everyday’, and that the only purpose of external intervention can be to facilitate and respond reflexively to these practices rather than seek to remake or constrain them through either liberal universalist or cultural relativist approaches. The importance of understanding society ‘from the bottom-up’ rather than ‘from the top-down’ has been well articulated by a number of authors with a growing impact on debates on international policymaking. Perhaps the classic text in this regard is Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life.Footnote ⁷⁰ In his analysis of the practices of the ‘everyday’, de Certeau shares much with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour and the work of the French pragmatist theorist, Luc Boltanski.Footnote ⁷¹ Just as Latour argues that ‘we have never been modern’ – in his devastating critique of the artificial division between science and cultureFootnote ⁷² – so de Certeau hints at the ever-present reality of the practices of local and ‘everyday’ agency outside the reach of liberal representational theory.Footnote ⁷³

These practices of ‘bottom-up’, tactical adaption, and creativity ‘present in fact a curious analogy, and a sort of immemorial link, to the simulations, tricks and disguises that certain fishes or plants execute with extraordinary virtuosity’.Footnote ⁷⁴ And, while we, indeed, ‘have never been modern’, the complex global world seems to make liberal myths of institutional power and the sciences which have supported them, more and more unreal or artificial; while the tactical practices ‘from below’ appear to become more and more dominant: ‘Cut loose from the traditional communities that circumscribed their functioning, they have begun to wander everywhere in a space which is becoming at once more homogeneous and more extensive.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Rather than seeing the ‘everyday’ as only operating on the margins, or merely as a barrier or limit, ‘altering or defeating’ the instruments of power, de Certeau agues that it is the external grand narratives and strategies of power which should be seen as marginal, artificial, phenomenological constructs.Footnote ⁷⁶

What is vital about the pragmatist framework is not so much the fact that policy attention is drawn to the everyday but its methodological centrality. Authors such as James C. Scott have focused on everyday life as the sphere of resistance, but the transformative capacities of the ‘everyday’ remained marginal, erupting on the surface only on rare occasions.Footnote ⁷⁷ What differentiates the pragmatist philosophy of authors such as de Certeau, Boltanski, and Latour is their critique of the structural discursive understandings, which marginalise the concrete and specific practices of the everyday. As Boltanski argues, the resources of the local provide the empirical material for a ‘sociology of critique’, which gives agency to previously marginalised subjects, seen as constrained by discursive structures of power in the ‘critical sociology’ of authors such as Althusser, Foucault, and Bourdieu.Footnote ⁷⁸ For Boltanski, pragmatic sociology, with its rigorous empiricism can offer ‘better descriptions of the activity of actors in particular situations’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Rather than starting from the external subject position of critical sociological theory, pragmatic sociology ‘refocused the sociologist's attention on actors en situation, as the main agencies of performance of the social’.Footnote ⁸⁰ As Boltanski argues, the key intent is to go beyond both the universalist and culturalist frameworks:

Informed by philosophical pragmatism, resilience approaches do not start from liberal universalist assumptions of the rational autonomous subject and thus are no longer concerned with explaining the limits of liberal universalism, or attempting to work on culture to overcome the ‘gap’ between liberal assumptions and ‘everyday’ reality. In fact, this methodological framework seems to speak to us much more clearly than the neoliberal or critical conceptions of some sort of ‘organic’ cultural connection between society and law. Today, it seems that the ‘rule of law’ seems just as alien and ‘artificial’ in a Western domestic sphere as it does in the debates on democratic transition and international peacebuilding in the international context. What we apparently ‘discover’ in meetings with the exotic Other in post-Cold War interventions (as earlier), we can now see clearly in our own societies.Footnote ⁸²

Legal theorist, Professor Reza Banakar, is typical in drawing upon the radical sociological framings of globalisation theorists, Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck, to argue that in ‘late-’, ‘liquid’, and ‘reflexive’ modernity, liberal framings of law no longer have an ‘organic’ connection to Western societies.Footnote ⁸³ In our more fluid, reflexive, transient and networked world, the cultural institutions and social structures – through which the modernist state operated, cohered, and legitimated itself – no longer bind communities together through shared frameworks of meaning. Western everyday realities, it appears, also trump any attempts to use the law for purposes of societal regulation: ‘Under late modern conditions, where law's normativity can no longer find a durable foothold in fleeting social structures, legal measures aimed at generating new patterns of behaviour or social change grow evermore ineffective.’Footnote ⁸⁴

It is important to note that, in these approaches, the complexity and fluidity of social practices is highlighted and the spatial dispersal of ‘communities’ with networked connections, which lack a strong sense of shared intersubjective values. Law fails to connect with society but not on the basis of the structured or cohered ‘gap’ between culture(s) and law. In fact, it is possible to argue that the attempts to renegotiate liberal frameworks of representation, in terms of the operation of democratic institutions and legal regimes, on the basis of cultural differences and multiculturalism, can retrospectively be seen as precursors to the discussion of governing complexity in terms of resilience.Footnote ⁸⁵ Resilience approaches start from the assumption that there is no ‘organic’, ‘cultural’, or intersubjective construction of community, which gives legal frameworks a purchase on social complexity, but do not problematise this. Their concern is with how societal regulation can operate on the basis of fluidity and complexity. As the Stockholm Resilience Centre argues:

Law follows society but not because there is a clash between liberal universalism and cultural relativism but because liberal frameworks of law are understood to be the barrier to governing complexity rather than a solution. These approaches share the focus on the local societal milieu of liberal peace debates, but in these framings the milieu is seen as providing the sphere in which transformative agency is generated through practice. In effect, resilience approaches to law repose the problem not in terms of a ‘gap’ between law and society (or the abstract and the concrete) but in pragmatic terms of specific problems or consequences, which can no longer be meaningfully addressed through the mechanisms of law (or external subject positions) as a guide to practice.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is the internal processes of practical relations and outcomes that need to be understood and worked upon, not the external mechanisms and frameworks which need to be refined.Footnote ⁸⁸ This pragmatic approach evades the problems of liberal peace, neither imposing a universal framework over sociocultural difference, nor recognising or privileging ‘local’ choices as emancipatory.Footnote ⁸⁹ The problem is the contextual assemblage within which practices take place.

The ‘local’, or the ‘everyday’ is understood neither as a product of social and economic structures or fixed ideological and cultural values nor as a barrier or limit but rather as a set of fluid micro-processes of practices in a constant interaction driven by the agency of ordinary people in concrete circumstances. In this way, ‘everyday’ life operates across or outside of the structural spatial orderings of critical sociological theory and the homogenising assumptions of top-down understandings of science, law, and politics. For the advocates of resilience approaches, it is the ‘tactics’ of the everyday which constitute the world and its problems, not the universalist ‘strategies’ of liberal regimes of power shaped by an external viewpoint somehow ‘outside’ the problematic. As Foucault indicated, this shift away from the sovereign and disciplinary power of law, focuses on the real lives or the ‘everyday’ of individuals and communities ‘and their environment, the milieu in which they live … to the extent that it is not a natural environment, that it has been created by the population and therefore has effects on that population’.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is this ‘milieu’ of societal practices which thereby ‘appears as a field of intervention’ rather than the formal sphere of law.Footnote ⁹¹ In this framework, governance operates through societal processes rather than over or against them.

The drug problem in the Americas

A good example of the resilience approach to law and institutional frameworks is that of the discussion with regard to the ‘war on drugs’, which has been reposed not as a question of law enforcement but in terms of ‘the drug problem in the Americas’.Footnote ⁹² What makes the report particularly interesting is that it is produced in two parts: the Analytical Report based on a series of case studies, which analyses the problem; and a Scenarios Report based on a hypothetical analysis of four possible futures. It is the Scenarios Report, which I wish to focus upon here. The four possible future scenarios are categorised as ‘Together’, ‘Pathways’, ‘Resilience’, and ‘Disruption’. These different scenarios can be heuristically categorised, respectively, as: liberal internationalist institution-building; cultural pluralist experimentation to align law and sociocultural norms; resilience-based approaches which are concerned with the problem in terms of the contextual framing of local practices; and the perceived status quo, which would lead to diverse responses, including compromising with criminal networks where the costs of controlling them were considered too high.

The liberal peace approaches to the drug problem are divided into two in the OAS report – the liberal universalist approach, focusing on state institutional frameworks, and the cultural pluralist approach of attempting to ‘organically’ relate the law to social practices. The universalist liberal approach focuses on state-level institutions, arguing that the drug problem ‘is part of a larger insecurity problem, with weak state institutions unable to control organized crime and the violence and corruption it generates’.Footnote ⁹³ The response is then that of strengthening the capacity of judicial and public institutions, improving their professional status and bringing in new techniques, benchmarks, and success indicators. Collectively, states in the region will then be able to launch a sustained campaign against transnational criminal organisations. In this scenario, liberal institutional changes are seen to be effective: reducing the power of criminal organisations and trafficking gangs through increasing the strength and effectiveness of democratic and legal institutions. This liberal good governance framing would also be understood to strengthen economies in these states and to transform local values and understandings, lessening support for organised criminal groups and enabling liberal institutional frameworks, based on human rights and transparent procedures, to extend even in outlying areas where drugs are grown and produced.Footnote ⁹⁴

However, the universalist approach is seen as just one possible scenario. The report argues that there is also plenty of evidence against such approaches, which were the sine qua non of international programmes in the 1990s. The complexity of drug production, trade, and consumption in the Americas and the different contexts, which state institutions are faced with, can also be argued to undermine such universalist understandings of ‘good government’. For many of the states concerned, the focus on law enforcement and drug prohibition ‘produces more damage that the drugs themselves’.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is understood that enforcement efforts not only fail to sufficiently reduce the supply and the demand for drugs but that they also have the unintended consequence of providing illegal criminal gangs with huge profit margins, while risking the security of their citizens and the integrity of their democracies.Footnote ⁹⁶

The neoliberal or new institutionalist approach of cultural pluralism argues that there is no such thing as a universal solution to the drug problem, particularly at the level of formal framings of law, good government, and institutional capacity. While drugs might be a problem, using the law to prohibit drug production, transportation, and use is also a problem where the sociocultural context militates against its effective operation, or produces even more problematic unintended consequences in the increase of police and paramilitary power. It seems that the paradox of universal liberal approaches is that the unintended consequences of their adoption appear to be just as problematic as the problems they are intended to resolve. The ‘paradoxes’ or ‘contradictions’ of liberal interventionist approaches based on universalist assumptions, have of course been well rehearsed in the international peacebuilding and statebuilding literatures.Footnote ⁹⁷

Pluralist approaches attempt to escape this paradox through either working to adapt local cultures to the rule of law or (using the same ontological framing, but privileging ‘local’ rather than ‘international’ voices) adapting law to the social context. The pluralist approach as portrayed in the OAS report appears to adopt the latter perspective, advocated by the more radical critics of liberal peace,Footnote ⁹⁸ and outlined in the ‘Pathways’ scenario, which rearticulates the drug problem in less universalist terms.Footnote ⁹⁹ The reason for a pluralist approach, it is argued, is that the drug problem and the use of law enforcement to address it cannot be properly grasped outside of the specific cultural-socio-political context:

This argument to a certain extent reflects the discussion in the United States where the war on drugs has been seen to be a war on the poor and marginalised (both inside and outside America) and it is argued that the balance needs to be refocused in a more ‘emancipatory’ way to concerns of human rights, health provision, and the development and protection of cultural and indigenous rights.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The cultural pluralist understanding focuses much less on the institutional frameworks and more on the specific cultural context in which the law operates, and in this way seeks to mitigate the unintended consequences of universalist approaches. The location of the solution is shifted downwards to experiment with alternative legal and regulatory frameworks. The most consensual regulatory shift in this regard is experimentation with the decriminalisation of softer drugs such as cannabis and focusing more resources on major criminal networks than on small-scale production and consumption. In this way, resources can be better distributed, lifting the burden on police, prisons, and courts as well as reducing the drug market and enabling drugs, which are decriminalised, to be better regulated.

Of course, it should be noted that, in this framing, law is being adapted to the sociocultural reality rather than making a ‘culture of lawfulness’ attempt to adapt sociocultural reality to the law. However, the problems of privileging local culture and values and of adapting law to the reality of the ‘local’ – the paradox discussed above – become clear. In relation to the discussion in the US, regarding the decriminalisation of cannabis, the contradictions have been highlighted by critics, such as The Wire creator David Simon, who have argued that such changes would be just as ‘artificial’, merely benefitting privileged ‘middle-class white kids’ while intensifying the criminalisation of poor African-Americans in crack-infested communities.Footnote ¹⁰² There are clear limits to the capacity of adapting law to local reality, as removing the universal ‘detachment’ of law from reality leaves the law open to accusations of arbitrariness and cultural relativism. If law really was ‘culture’ then these accusations would be hard to avoid.

The ‘Resilience’ approach is notable in that the focus is no longer upon law and its enforcement nor upon how law may be pluralised but instead is placed upon states' ‘improved social capital to build community-based approaches, in which the underlying emphasis shifts from treating drug use and related violence as primarily a legal or security matter to responding to the drug problem by strengthening community resilience’.Footnote ¹⁰³ The resilience approach locates the problem of drugs as an outcome of complex societal practices not as something which can be dealt with as a discrete problem to be tackled by law. Rather, ‘the drug problem is a manifestation and magnifier of underlying social and economic dysfunctions that lead to violence and addiction’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

It should be clear that not only is the drug problem not a discrete problem to be solved in isolation, resilience approaches, of necessity, construct the drug problem as a matter of community practices and amenable to community solutions. In resilience approaches, communities imbricated within the production and trade of illegal drugs are less likely to be seen as criminal objects of the law and more likely to be understood as in need of facilitating intervention to enable them to be the leading agents of transformation. The individuals most likely to be involved in the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs, and the communities in which they live, would be subject to enabling interventions designed to use cultural, communal, and informal networks to produce less problematic practices. Rather than intervene coercively to enforce the law or adapt law to the differentiated level of the ‘local’, resilience approaches seek to use the ‘really existing’ power of the local community as a transformative mechanism.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It is this element of internalisation of the problem and focus on local transformative agency that distinguishes resilience approaches from those of the external subject positions of liberal peace, both the liberal top-down approaches – which see individuals as objects of law and subject to social engineering – and those of cultural pluralism, which understand local cultural-socio-political milieus as barriers to universal frameworks of law and thereby seek to adapt the law to the circumstances.

As the OAS scenarios report suggests, the resilience approach works directly with – and not over or against – individuals and communities caught up in the drugs problem:

Rather than a cultural pluralist or new institutionalist approach, which emphasises the hold of the past, in terms of path dependencies and deep cultural values, resilience approaches argue that everyday settings can be enabling and transformative. As well as focusing on the ‘roots’ of the problem in terms of those directly involved in the practices of producing, trafficking, and consuming drugs, there is also a great deal of attention to the community networks and relationships seen to provide the context for practices; thereby resilience responses:

The emphasis, as stated, moves away from drugs per se to a focus on resilient people and communities. As the OAS report states, in this framing: ‘citizens gradually become aware that they are fundamental part of the solution and not just victims of the problem’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ With this shift, the focus is no longer on the problem of community understandings and values – the problem is not understood to be ‘in the heads’ of local people, but in the context shaping the outcomes of their practices. Law is no longer the key framework for measuring success in dealing with the ‘drug problem’, instead the metrics concern everyday practices from parenting to employment training: ‘The paradigm change of focussing on building resilient societies forces people and governments to look inward for solutions and to acknowledge the need for social reforms.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹