Crisis therapy

Paris makes several claims that require interrogation. First, he objects to the suggestion that the liberal peace is in crisis, citing Cooper's review article, On the Crisis of the Liberal Peace, as an exemplar of such arguments.Footnote ⁴ Instead, he points to the liberal principles underpinning critical work such as that of Chandler's and argues this demonstrates that claims about the crisis of the liberal peace are simply wrong (p. 355). (We deal with the ‘innate liberalism’ of liberal peace critiques in more detail below.) However, the discussion of the crisis of the liberal peace provided by Paris is problematic – no less because it is dependent on a misreading of Cooper's article. Cooper argued that critiques such as Chandler's highlight why the liberal peace is in crisis, but also pointed out that the same literature demonstrates ‘the continued power and pervasiveness of liberal models of peacebuilding’.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, Cooper emphasised the fact that any crisis was one of ‘confidence and perceived effectiveness rather than one of empirical extensiveness’Footnote ⁶ and that whether it was a crisis of the liberal peace project per se, rather than just specific forms of liberal peace interventionism was far more debatable.Footnote ⁷ Clearly, any discussion of the claims made about the crisis of the liberal peace need to reflect the important qualifications attached to them. Paris fails to do this.

Moreover, in retrospect Cooper's 2007 article was, if anything, too cautious in only claiming that the crisis was one of confidence. The crisis of liberal military intervention in Afghanistan (supposedly ‘the good war’) is now nakedly transparent (as exemplified by Senator McCain's comments cited at the start of this article). Indeed, the traumatic experiences of both Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to produce exactly the same aversion to ‘boots on the ground’ military strategies that occurred in the aftermath of the débâcle in Somalia in 1993, and which contributed to US (and UN) reluctance to intervene even in response to a compelling humanitarian tragedy such as the Rwandan genocide.Footnote ⁸ There has been a similar rolling back of the commitment to implement specific elements of the liberal peace model. In particular, the democratisation and human rights agendas have been substantially downgraded as oil and security considerations in the Middle East, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have led to serial accommodation with autocratic governments and rejection of uncomfortable democratic outcomes such as the election of Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territory.Footnote ⁹ At the same time, the global economic crisis has profoundly discredited liberal models of economy in the US and Europe, and the transfer of economic and political power to non-liberal states such as China has become more pronounced.Footnote ¹⁰

This is not to suggest the crisis of the liberal peace is, as yet, terminal. Indeed, as Naomi Klein has noted, one of the ironies of the neoliberal economic model propagated by liberal interventionists is that every crisis is treated as an opportunity to impose or extend the model even further.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, as we note below, donors and the international financial institutions have retained an evangelical faith in the transformative powers of neoliberal economics, even as core precepts such as the commitment to deregulation were demonstrated to be at the root of the worst global recession since the 1930s. Consequently, the neoliberal component of the liberal peace project has proved remarkably resilient in the face of its own crisis and may even (in the short term at least) experience a brief renaissance as crisis produces more opportunities for shock therapy.Footnote ¹² More generally, whilst the liberal peace model is certainly no longer as unquestioned as it was when Fukuyama produced The End of History it is still the dominant paradigm articulated by powerful donors, UN agencies and the international financial institutions (IFIs). Thus whilst the liberal peace model is certainly in crisis, it remains a powerful instrument of hegemony.

Imposed or consensual?

A key contention made in Paris's article is that liberal peace critics make the mistake of equating the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan with most other peacebuilding missions since the end of the Cold War. As Paris notes: ‘destroying a regime through external invasion is hardly equivalent, in degree, or kind, to deploying a mission at the request of local parties with the goal of helping these parties to implement a peace settlement’ (p. 348). But critics have explicitly drawn out the distinctions between post-conquest and post-settlement peacebuildingFootnote ¹³ – as Paris recognises when criticising Oliver Richmond for including the ‘victor's peace’ in his typology of the liberal peace (p. 350). However, the distinction Paris wants to draw between the ‘vast majority of missions’ and Iraq, Afghanistan and what he concedes were the ‘less-than-consensual conditions’ in Kosovo is not as clear cut as he seems to imagine.

A key feature of the post-Cold War period has been the way in which the traditional concept of peacekeeping (with the consent of parties to a ceasefire or peace agreement for managing conflict peacefully) has given way to a much broader definition, one that embraces the idea of peace operations in the absence of either a ceasefire and/or consent by all parties. Surprisingly, Paris overlooks this truism of contemporary commentaries.Footnote ¹⁴ Leaving aside the Congo in the 1960s, an early example of ‘non-consensual’ operations was in Croatia and Bosnia where there was neither a peace to uphold nor universal consent for a UN presence and where the liberal peace eventually involved the use of NATO forces. Other examples include Somalia during the Black Hawk Down episode when UNOSOM II came to be seen as the ‘sixteenth Somali faction’,Footnote ¹⁵ and Sierra Leone where UK forces were involved in military action against the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). As Paris himself has noted with regard to the latter:

Even ‘peacebuilding by consent’ is usually understood as the consent of key elites and often rests on various degrees of coercion. For example, whilst the British and UN action against the rebel RUF noted above certainly received a high level of public support, the government of Sierra Leone only reluctantly agreed to the original Lomé peace agreement of 1999 under heavy pressure from the UK (a key aid donor and former colonial power) and, in particular, the US, whose officials reportedly drafted entire sections of the accord.Footnote ¹⁷ The agreement itself has been described as one that ‘scandalised Sierra Leoneons’ given the level of accommodation with the rebel RUF that external actors were willing to countenance.Footnote ¹⁸ Only the RUF's failure to uphold the peace agreement and its kidnapping of UN peacekeepers provoked a shift from ‘peacebuilding by coerced settlement’ to ‘forcible peacebuilding by invitation’. In occupied Palestine, ‘peacebuilding by consent’ after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords gave way to ‘peacebuilding by coercion’ after the election of Hamas in January 2006 which ushered in the Western and Israeli strategy of collective punishment of Palestinians.Footnote ¹⁹ In criticising others for failing to distinguish between different kinds of peacebuilding, Paris himself fails to acknowledge the far more extensive gradations that exist between the poles of ‘pure’ peacebuilding after conquest and ‘pure’ peacebuilding after ceasefire and consent, as well as the way in which peace operations can move backwards and forwards along a spectrum of consent and coercion over time.

Moreover, when critics of liberal peacebuilding draw comparisons between Iraq, Afghanistan and other peacebuilding operations, one of their aims is to highlight the fact that all peacebuilding operations involve the exercise of power and illustrate relations of power between actors at the global, regional and local levels. In particular, while specific operations may be conceived under very different conditions, they all reflect the exercise of hegemonic power, whether directly using cruise missiles or subcontracted to private security companies, UN peacekeepers drawn predominantly from the developing world, or various international organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). As Vivienne Jabri has noted, in this context,

This is not a particularly novel observation, but critics of liberal peacebuilding keep on having to make it precisely because liberal peace advocates keep recycling the notion that because peacebuilding by invitation does not involve firing cruise missiles from warships, it is an essentially benign process.

We acknowledge that there have been war-torn societies queuing up to get aid and help with organising and observing elections. And the UN was an early actor in the realm of post-war de-mining, hardly an objectionable programme.Footnote ²¹ Large numbers of combatants have been demobilised, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has made a difference to refugee returns and there have been accomplishments in property restoration in the Balkans, for example. These measures have all been critically interrogated.Footnote ²² But our key point is that the overall framing of peace by external agencies reinforces neoliberal prescriptions, particularly in the realm of political economy, that neither take sufficient account of local needs and agency, nor reflect on the role of global capitalism and structural adjustment policies as drivers of conflict. The damage inflicted by neoliberalism on peace was already evident to Paris in his critique of peacebuilding in El Salvador.Footnote ²³ Indeed, as Ellen Moodie shows, the narrative of successful peacebuilding continued to be shaken in El Salvador by the persistence of actual and structural violence after the 1992 peace accords – and the neoliberal framing of crime and corruption as unexceptional, to be dealt with by self-protection.Footnote ²⁴

Furthermore, critics do not ignore the statist, fragmented and ad hoc composition of the UN, otherwise the UN would not have to make efforts to establish ‘integrated missions’. But in that particular set of family relations, there are hierarchies of power. Compared to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), for example, the IFIs have considerable clout. The World Bank has a seat in the Peacebuilding Commission, uses Trust Funds to exercise leverage where it has no direct role, is widely considered as an ‘ally in peacebuilding’,Footnote ²⁵ drives the donor conferences and, backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities, places state institution building at the top of its agenda so that neoliberal political economies can be institutionalised. The UNDP and donors have varied degrees of emphasis on what needs to be done, but the culture of structural adjustment and conditionality is all-pervasive. Local authorities then have to manage the tensions that arise. As the British politician Paddy Ashdown commented when comparing his time as an MP during Margaret Thatcher's tenure in power with his time as High Representative for Bosnia:

Paris acknowledges the myriad problems of liberal peacebuilding including the limited knowledge of local conditions and ‘insufficient “local ownership” over the strategic direction and daily activities of such operations’ (p. 347). But for him these are merely technical problems of implementation rather than design faults hardwired into the model. Ultimately, therefore, Paris fails to appreciate the extent to which liberal peace intervention is predicated on ignoring the local and dismissing the everyday lived experiences of people as either irrelevant or as forms of deviance necessitating transformation.Footnote ²⁷ He also ignores the extent to which peacebuilding strategies pursued after peace settlements and after conquest have had a core of common prescriptions: neoliberal policies of open markets, privatisation and fiscal restraint, and governance policies focused on institutions, enhancing instruments of state coercion and ‘capacity building’ based on the now near-universal conceit that ‘development requires security’. There is little space to (formally) dissent from these policy prescriptions – whether international peacebuilders were originally invited in or not. This is an imposed – not negotiated – peace. And this is one reason why such prescriptions often fail – because local ‘buy-in’ is limited and the incentives for obstruction, co-option or evasion of neoliberal governance mechanisms commensurately higher.

The mission civilisatrice and the end(s) of history

Paris admonishes the critics for equating liberal peacebuilding with imperialism or colonialism and asserts that ‘observing there are echoes of colonialism in peacebuilding is quite different from asserting their equivalence’ (p. 350 authors' emphases). For him, critics manipulate history and historical comparison in order to condemn contemporary liberal peacebuilding by dint of association with a largely discredited colonial past. However, we are not aware of any critical academic literature that suggests current peacebuilding operations are the mirror image of late 19th century colonialism in the manner implied by Paris. Indeed, the only reference provided by Paris to evidence his claim is to an article by Seumas Milne of The Guardian newspaper which refers to Kosovo as a ‘Nato colony’ and Western intervention as a ‘system of imperial power enforcement’.Footnote ²⁸ Even that article, however, is best read as one that deploys rhetorical allusions to Empire to highlight the similarities with contemporary interventionism (a project Paris approves of) rather than one that details the way in which ‘old style colonialism and modern peacebuilding’ (p. 346) are exactly the same.Footnote ²⁹

There has, of course, been a broad post-Cold War debate on the extent to which Western powers have rediscovered imperial tendencies. But one of the features of this debate is that it is not confined to the critical literature on peacebuilding – neoconservatives and liberal idealists have also weighed in, some arguing for an extension of imperial ambition,Footnote ³⁰ others for retrenchment.Footnote ³¹ If critical scholars are deluded in seeing links between contemporary interventions and the practices of Empire they are certainly not alone. Moreover, Paris misses the point that critical discussions of empire and imperialism are far broader than the narrow association with the late 19th century colonialism he focuses on. For example, Hardt and Negri's discussion of Empire is explicit in declaring that the diffuse and non-territorial kind of empire they are describing is not comparable with the territorially-situated colonial models of earlier eras.Footnote ³² Similarly, the title of Chandler's Empire in Denial reflects his claim that modern practices and representations of empire manifest themselves in very different ways to those of traditional colonialism.Footnote ³³

Paris also rejects comparisons with imperialism on the grounds that old-fashioned colonialism was practised ‘largely to benefit the imperial states themselves, including through the extraction of human and material resources from the colonised society’ (p. 349). In contrast, he argues that modern UN missions ‘have not principally been motivated by efforts to extract wealth from their host societies’ (p. 349) and that critics have failed to provide evidence that ‘post-settlement peacebuilding’ has been motivated by the ‘expectation or desire for economic gain’ (p. 349). This last claim rests on the earlier distinction between post-settlement and post-conquest peacebuilding which, as we have already argued, is problematic. If this is set aside then it is clear that peacebuilding in Iraq was about imposing a neoliberal political economy particularly in the oil industryFootnote ³⁴ and the US-run transitional administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority, presided over such blatant profiteering by a handful of (predominantly) US companies that it is difficult to dispute that Iraq was indeed ‘for sale’.Footnote ³⁵ We are not suggesting this was without huge costs to the US state,Footnote ³⁶ but this was largely because pre-invasion assumptions about the mimetic attraction of the liberal being turned out to reflect the hubris of the interventionists rather than any assessment of local realities.

Moreover, in his distinctions between ‘colonialism as self-interest’ versus ‘modern peacebuilding as altruism’, Paris introduces qualifications that demonstrates why critical scholars are right to interrogate the altruistic claims of liberal peacebuilders. He agrees there are ‘echoes of colonialism in peacebuilding’ and agrees that modern UN missions ‘still reflect the interests of the world's most powerful countries’ (pp. 349–50). He also reasserts the claim made in his earlier work that today's post-conflict missions can be viewed as a modern version of the mission civilisatrice,Footnote ³⁷ albeit translated into the contemporary parlance of capacity-building and good governance (p. 348), and acknowledges that old-fashioned colonialism was not wholly or purely about self-interest (p. 349). We agree with these points, but suggest that any critique of those exploring the links between imperialism and modern peacebuilding that starts by admitting the latter is a modern version of the mission civilisatrice is built on very shaky intellectual foundations. We would also add that the critical literature on liberal peacebuilding includes work that explores the way in which concern for the ‘other’ and projects of development, modernisation and civilisation have intertwined with the economic and strategic considerations of powerful actors in both contemporary peacebuilding operations and earlier imperial interventions.Footnote ³⁸ Exploring how such similar themes are manifested in different eras is a useful way to interrogate claims that current techniques of liberal intervention are both novel and benevolent.

The ‘free’ market fairytale

Paris's final – and perhaps more revealing – criticism of the critics rests on a deterministic paradigm that deems there is no alternative to the capitalist market economy. Paris contends that while critics may be correct in pointing to the destabilising consequences of economic liberalisation strategies, there is no alternative to ‘some version of market-orientated reform’ in post-conflict states (p. 361). The second half of the 20th century, he notes, demonstrated that centrally planned and state-dominated development strategies such as ‘Soviet-style’ communism and the import substitution strategies pursued in many parts of Latin America and Africa ‘generally produced lower levels of economic growth than market-orientated development strategies’ (p. 361). This unsubstantiated assertion is contradicted by the evidence analysed by the Cambridge economist, Ha-Joon Chang, who, among others, points out that developing countries experienced their best growth rates and rise in per capita income during the 1960s and 1970s under strategic dirigisme.Footnote ³⁹

For Paris, ‘non-market-orientated economic policies (or those that do not give the market a priority in allocating scarce resources) are too inefficient to generate sustained economic growth’ (p. 361). Four brief counter-points can be made. First, most modern economies combine state-direction of markets and development with some element of private market activity; differences lie in the balance between the two elements. There are, therefore, no ‘non-market orientated economic policies’ as even the most dirigiste states create markets, they just happen to be more subject to national control or direction. Second, so-called ‘free’ markets are highly managed as evidenced by the $100 billion worth of agricultural subsidies rich nations dispense each year, by state investment in R&D (research and development), industrial policies, and employment legislation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Third, one of the reasons why the political economy of liberal peace is under pressure is because one of the recurrent crises of the liberal economic model has coincided with the perceived success of statist development models, particularly that of China. The claim that there is no alternative and that only private markets will generate sustained economic growth is being disproved by the Chinese economy which, despite private market reforms, is still dominated by state-owned enterprises and heavily directed by the state.Footnote ⁴¹ We are certainly not suggesting that the Chinese model represents the kind of emancipatory alternative to liberal peacebuilding advocated by critical scholars. It does not. The example does, however, refute Paris's contention that there is only one possible economic model for developing and post-conflict societies. Indeed, part of the explanation for China's growing influence in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa is not just that it is more willing to turn a blind eye to non-liberal forms of governance but that governments increasingly view it as both a successful and more amenable model of development compared to that preached by Western donors.Footnote ⁴² There is also evidence to suggest that intensified aid and trade links with China have produced higher growth rates, better terms of trade and higher public revenues for states in Africa.Footnote ⁴³

The fourth point relates to the ‘organised hypocrisy’ of Western donors who advocate a purist version of the neoliberal economic model that is not necessarily followed ‘at home’, as indicated in Ashdown's confession quoted earlier. Part of our critique of liberal peacebuilding, therefore, is that, notwithstanding the shift to a post-Washington Consensus, donors and IFIs advocate macroeconomic policies designed to lower both trade barriers and financing for welfare programmes in ways that would not be accepted in Western capitals.Footnote ⁴⁴ One striking illustration of this is the way in which the global economic crisis that erupted in 2007 prompted Western governments of all political shades to (temporarily) rediscover Keynes and the benefits of counter-cyclical financing – a discovery used to justify massive government intervention to prop up ailing banks and subsidies to the car industry at a cost that substantially exceeds global aid budgets.Footnote ⁴⁵ At the same time, the IFIs have maintained their insistence that transition and post-conflict economies avoid similar measures themselves. For example, in Hungary, Latvia and Ukraine, the IMF prescribed pro-cyclical monetary and fiscal policies as part of the standby arrangements signed in the wake of the global recession – policies that have produced unemployment, cuts in social services and political instability.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, in a review of IMF agreements with 41 countries (including standby arrangements, poverty reduction and growth facilities and exogenous shocks facilities), the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that pro-cyclical economic policies were in place in 31 cases.Footnote ⁴⁷

Towards alternative approaches

Paris asks what an alternative approach to peacebuilding might look like. We have already begun to outline an answer to this question in earlier discussions of our concept of life welfare as an alternative to human security.Footnote ⁴⁸ Underpinning our concept of life welfare is our concern to develop an alternative, unsecuritised language and paradigm that rejects the universalism of human security in favour of a dialogue between heterodoxies. As such, it is a paradigm that encompasses alternative notions of life (the individual, community, the biosphere, and the planetary environment). This is not to imply a resigned relativism about the ends of policy but rather to incorporate a concern for optimising the life potential of individuals and diverse forms of community into a politics that recognises that the means by which such goals are to be realised need to be the object of serial negotiation (as opposed to simulated negotiations masking serial impositions). In the context of this article it is worth briefly reflecting on what this might mean in terms of the political economy of peacebuilding.

In the sphere of political economy, neoliberalism exhibits a particular hubris in which ‘the end of history’ is valued for the triumph of capital, as if that is the code to a teleological convergence project. But it does not follow that because the liberal peace transmits a universalising and cosmopolitan vision of political economy that alternatives need to follow suit.Footnote ⁴⁹ Contrary to trying to imagine competing meta-alternatives to liberalism, it is more constructive to acknowledge and investigate the variety of political economies in post-conflict societies – whether influenced by dirigiste, state welfarist, neoliberal, centralised, decentralised, protectionist, integrative, modernising or respecting tribal, religious and customary forms of production and exchange. And rather than measuring them against a liberalising norm, it is important to consider them in their own right as varied forms of peace. Of the many empirically-rich cases, from Sudan to the South Pacific, two can be mentioned here. In Lebanon, forms of Islamic peacebuilding are partly consonant with modernisation and neoliberalism, in support to entrepreneurialism for example, but also that Arab states have granted relief and development funds to entire co-religious communities to decide on reconstruction.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Timor—Leste, the notion of a centralised state, and the social engineering it entails, is alien to a rural majority which follows traditional power structures of kinship and patrimonialism, and which value traditional forms of agricultural production and exchange.Footnote ⁵¹ In consequence, the ‘post-post-conflict’ period in Timor–Leste has been characterised by the adoption of hybrid forms of governance that combine elements of the liberal and the local. Whilst these are not without flaws, they illustrate the potential of peacebuilding strategies that investigate, articulate and respect heterodoxies as a means to building effective forms of governance and economy.

Another theme in our work and in that of othersFootnote ⁵² is that liberal peacebuilding focuses primarily on configuring the political economies operating inside post-conflict states. In contrast, we have argued that such approaches ignore the gross inequalities and forms of exploitation in the global economy and the way developed world actors strive to maintain these at the same time as proffering limited forms of global poor relief to contain potential revolts of the poor while ensuring they do not migrate to western shores.Footnote ⁵³ The effort to reform the inside of post-conflict economies is therefore akin to training goldfish in a desert – regardless of how good individual programmes are they are ultimately destined to fail.Footnote ⁵⁴ Along with reforming global economic structures, another step would be to at least allow post-conflict societies to adopt the same policies on issues such as trade protection and social welfare as developed economies currently employ and on which they based their original development.Footnote ⁵⁵ Paris notably fails to engage with these aspects of the critique of the liberal peace.