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The uncritical critique of ‘liberal peace’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2010

DAVID CHANDLER
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Abstract

For many commentators the lack of success in international statebuilding efforts has been explained through the critical discourse of ‘liberal peace’, where it is assumed that ‘liberal’ Western interests and assumptions have influenced policymaking leading to counterproductive results. At the core of the critique is the assumption that the liberal peace approach has sought to reproduce and impose Western models: the reconstruction of ‘Westphalian’ frameworks of state sovereignty; the liberal framework of individual rights and winner-takes-all elections; and neo-liberal free market economic programmes. This article challenges this view of Western policymaking and suggests that post-Cold War post-conflict intervention and statebuilding can be better understood as a critique of classical liberal assumptions about the autonomous subject – framed in terms of sovereignty, law, democracy and the market. The conflating of discursive forms with their former liberal content creates the danger that critiques of liberal peace can rewrite post-Cold War intervention in ways that exaggerate the liberal nature of the policy frameworks and act as apologia, excusing policy failure on the basis of the self-flattering view of Western policy elites: that non-Western subjects were not ready for ‘Western’ freedoms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 36 , Special Issue S1: Evaluating Global Orders , October 2010 , pp. 137 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

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11 This critique is probably most associated with the work of Michael Pugh, see, for example, ‘The Political Economy of Peacebuilding’; see also Pugh, and , Neil Cooperand Turner, Mandy (eds), Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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15 See note 7.

16 Duffield, Global Governance.

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19 Duffield, , Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)Google Scholar . See also, Dillon, Michael and Reid, Julian, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009), who argue (p. 20)Google Scholar that:

[…] the liberal way of rule is therefore biopolitical […] The same goes for the liberal way of war, which waging war on the human in the name of the biohuman, systematically also now demonizes human being, from the individual to the collective, as the locus of the infinite threat posed…by the diverse undecidability of the human as such.

20 See also, Jabri, Vivienne, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , applying a Foucaultian framework to the divisive politics of neo-liberal intervention, she states (p. 124):

The discourse, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Iraq is one that aims to reconstruct societies and their government in accordance with a distinctly western liberal model the formative elements of which centre on open markets, human rights and the rule of law, and of democratic elections as the basis of legitimacy. The aim is no less than to reconstitute polities through the transformation of political cultures into modern, self-disciplining, and ultimately self-governing entities that, through such transformation, could transcend ethnic or religious fragmentation and violence. The trajectory is punishment, pacification, discipline, and ultimately ‘liberal democratic self-mastery’.

21 See, for example, Bellamy, ‘The “Next Stage” in Peace Operations Theory’.

22 Ibid.

23 Richmond, Peace in International Relations.

24 As Richmond states:

Interdisciplinary and cross-cutting coalitions of scholars, policy makers, individuals – indigenous, local, transnational – and civil society actors can develop discursive understandings of peace and its construction [facilitating] a negotiation of a discursive practice of peace in which hegemony, domination, and oppression can be identified and resolved. (Richmond, ‘Reclaiming Peace in International Relations’, p. 462).

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26 Nevertheless, authors such as Roland Paris have been happy to defend their rejection of critiques based merely on the interests of power, asserting, perhaps not unreasonably, that: ‘Peacebuilding missions have taken place in some of the poorest and most economically stagnant parts of the world […] countries that, to put it bluntly, have little to offer international capitalists […] The balance sheet of peacebuilding simply does not sustain the economic exploitation thesis.’ Paris, ‘International Peacebuilding and the ‘Mission Civilisatrice’, p. 653.

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31 Ibid., pp. 179–211. This critique of the export of liberal models to non-liberal societies echoes that made in the 1960s by Huntington, Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . See also Chandler, David, ‘Back to the Future? The Limits of Neo-Wilsonian Ideals of Exporting Democracy’, Review of International Studies, 32:3 (2006), pp. 475–494CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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38 See, for example, Dahrendorf, Ralph, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Warsaw, 1990 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990)Google Scholar .

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41 Where there has been the rhetorical use of liberal claims of promoting democracy and the market this has often been a post hoc response to policy failure, used for public relations rather than as a driver of policymaking; see Hehir, Aidan, Humanitarian Intervention after Kosovo: Iraq, Darfur and the Record of Global Civil Society (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

42 A liberal international order would be one which excluded interventionist projects exporting universal models, such as those described under the rubric of the ‘liberal peace’. For liberal political theory there can be no liberal order outside the borders of sovereign states, where there are frameworks of legal and political equality. As long as we live in a world of sovereign states the international sphere is of necessity pre-liberal; only the creation of a global state would create the institutional framework of a liberal global order. In the narrow terms of IR theory this is confused and what is often described as ‘Realism’ – an ontological framing of the international sphere as one made up of states ascribed the formal status of legal equality and treated as autonomous rational actors – is a classical liberal conception of the international realm, explaining why liberal assumptions cannot apply. See, for example, Rosenberg, Justin, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994)Google Scholar . Faisal Devji makes the point that the emergence of global framings of the political demonstrates the implosion of liberal theory and liberalism as a political form, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (London: Hurst, 2008), p. 173.

43 See, Walker, R. B. J., Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

44 See, Ghani, Ashraf and Lockhart, Clare, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar ; I use the term ‘phantom states’ in describing the impact of internationalising state structures in EU approaches to Eastern Europe and the Balkans; see, for example, Chandler, , Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building (London: Pluto Press, 2006)Google Scholar ; in relation to sub-Saharan Africa, this process of internationalising state institutions is described by Graham Harrison through the concept of the ‘governance state’, see, for example, The World Bank and Africa: The Construction of Governance State (London: Routledge, 2004).

45 The focus on institutional capacity, rather than on development and democracy, is, in fact, recognition of the limits to transforming these societies upon Western lines.

46 Bickerton, Christopher J., ‘State-building: Exporting State Failure’, in Bickerton, and , Philip Cunliffeand Gourevitch, Alex (eds), Politics without Sovereignty (London: University College Press, 2007), pp. 93–111Google Scholar ; Chopra, Jarat, ‘Building State Failure in East Timor’, in Milliken, Jennifer (ed.), State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 223–243Google Scholar .

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58 See, for example, Leys, Colin, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory (Oxford: Indiana University Press, 1996)Google Scholar ; Pender, John, ‘From “Structural Adjustment” to “Comprehensive Development Framework”: Conditionality Transformed?’, Third World Quarterly, 22:3 (2001), pp. 397–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

59 See Sachs, Jeffrey, The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime (London: Penguin, 2005)Google Scholar .

60 Mark Duffield's work on the divisive effects of post-Cold War development policies draws out well what could, perhaps more critically, be called the ‘illiberal’ nature of the shifting discourses on development and security, see Development, Security and Unending War.

61 See, for example, Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar .

62 Pugh, ‘The Political Economy of Peacebuilding’, p. 34.

63 Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, pp. 215–34.

64 See Richmond's ‘Conclusion’, in Peace in International Relations. See also his ‘Whose War? Whose Peace?’ presentation at the Committee for Conflict Transformation Support seminar (5 June 2008); in this piece, Richmond goes further to state that the problem of relating to the ‘non-Liberal other’ needs to be resolved, not through greater knowledge but the development of empathy, where intervention aims not at social engineering but at ‘allowing unscripted conversations […] which give voice to the local’. Available at: {http://www.c-r.org/ccts/ccts38/index.htm} last accessed on 19 May 2009.

65 See, for example, Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory.

66 This is the key point being made in Foucault's study of the transformation of liberal discourse in The Birth of Biopolitics.

67 Critiques of institutionalist approaches are provided in Chandler, Empire in Denial; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; and with regard to their depoliticising effect, see, for example, Hay, Colin, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)Google Scholar ; Williams, Robert, ‘Democracy, Development and Anti-Corruption Strategies: Learning from the Australian Experience’, in Doig, Alan and Theobald, Robin (eds), Corruption and Democratisation (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 135–148Google Scholar ; Krastev, Ivan, Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004)Google Scholar .

68 A similar process of conflating liberalism with Nazism and Stalinism, and reducing rights to regulatory control, can be seen in the work of Giorgio Agamben, see, for example, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For a critique, see Chandler, , ‘Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism?: The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach’, International Political Sociology, 3:1 (2009), pp. 53–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar .