David C. Chandler

Empire in denial : the politics of state-building

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1 Introduction: Empire in Denial 2 State-Building States without Sovereignty 3 The Governance of Government 4 The Ethics of Empire in Denial 5 Denial of the EUs Eastern Empire 6 Denying the Bosnian Protectorate 7 Techniques of Evasion (1) Anti-Corruption Initiatives 8 Techniques of Evasion (2) The Rule of Law 9 Conclusion: Six Theses on Phantom States and Empire in Denial References Index

Resilience and human security: The post-interventionist paradigm

In current discussions, many commentators express a fear that ‘broad’ human security approaches are being sidelined by the rise of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) and the ‘narrow’ focus on military intervention. An alternative reading is sketched out here, which suggests that debates over ‘narrow’ or ‘broad’ human security frameworks have undertheorized the discursive paradigm at the heart of human security. This paradigm is drawn out in terms of the juxtaposition of preventive human security practices of resilience, working upon the empowerment of the vulnerable, and the interventionist security practices of liberal internationalism, working upon the protection of victims. It is suggested that human security can be conceptually analysed in terms of post-intervention, as a shift away from liberal internationalist claims of Western securing or sovereign agency and towards a concern with facilitating or developing the self-securing agency – resilience – of those held to be the most vulnerable. This approach takes us beyond the focus on the technical means of intervention – whether coercive force is deployed or not – and allows us to see how international intervention, including under the R2P, increasingly operates under the paradigm of resilience and human security, thereby evading many of the problems confronted by liberal framings of intervention.

Rhetoric without responsibility: the attraction of ‘ethical’ foreign policy

This article analyses the shift, from the openly declared pursuit of national interests in foreign policy, to the growing emphasis on ethical or moral duties to protect the rights and interests of others, often in areas where western states have little economic or geo-strategic interest. It suggests that while international changes may have provided the opportunity to present foreign policy in ethical terms, an important impetus behind ethical foreign policy interventions may lie in the domestic sphere and the search for new mechanisms of enhancing political legitimacy. Ethical foreign policy is ideally suited to buttressing the moral authority of governments, often under question in the domestic context, because policy-makers are less accountable for matching ambitious policy aims with final policy outcomes in the international sphere. The gap between rhetoric and responsibility lies in the fact that policy can be declared a success with little regard for policy outcomes, as there is no formal accountability to non-citizens abroad, while problems can be blamed on the actions of other people or their governments. The freedom of manoeuvre provided by the ethical agenda of foreign policy activism allows governments to cohere a sense of purpose and mission through the projection of their power abroad when they find it increasingly difficult to act decisively at home.

Beyond neoliberalism: resilience, the new art of governing complexity

Resilience, as a framework informing governance, relies on an ontology of emergent complexity. This article analyses how complexity operates not only as a critique of liberal modes of ‘top-down’ governing but also to inform and instantiate resilience as a postmodern form of governance. In so doing, resilience approaches develop upon and transform neoliberal conceptions of complex life as a limit to liberal governance and directly critique the policy frameworks of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, which seeks to govern complexity ‘from below’. While actually existing neoliberalism focuses governmental regimes on the ‘knowledge gaps’ seen as the preconditions for successful policy outcomes, resilience asserts a flatter ontology of interactive emergence where the knowledge which needs to be acquired can only be gained through self-reflexive approaches. This distinction will be illustrated by drawing upon recent UK government policy practices and debates.

The uncritical critique of 'liberal peace'

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.

Review Essay: Human Security: The Dog That Didn't Bark

THE HISTORY OF THE RADICAL CHALLENGE of ‘human security’– from the first usage of the term in the United Nations Development Programme’s 1994 Human Development Report until the present time – is often written in terms that pose the centrality of the struggle between traditional, state-based, interest-based approaches and new, deterritorialized, values-based approaches that focus on individual human needs. For some authors, the struggle is at the heart of how we conceive of international relations and questions of security, and one that, after 9/11 and with the ongoing disaster of Iraq, is more important than ever. This struggle for the heart and soul of global policymaking is often posed as one between two different ‘paradigms’, two entirely different outlooks on the world, one paradigm reproducing current power relations and inequalities and insecurities, the other challenging such a view, recognizing the interconnectedness, interdependence and mutual vulnerabilities of security threats and the need for collective, collaborative, human-centred responses. This review article suggests that 14 years after human security was first taken up by the United Nations, its integration into the policymaking and policy practices of leading Western states and international institutions has revealed that talk of two different ‘paradigms’ – the radical counter-position of ‘individual’ and ‘state-based’ approaches, or between ‘critical theory’ and Review Essay

Peacebuilding and the politics of non-linearity: rethinking ‘hidden’ agency and ‘resistance’

This article reflects upon the shift away from linear understandings of peacebuilding, which assumed that Western ‘blueprints’ could be imposed upon non-compliant elites. Today, it is increasingly suggested, in both policy and academic literatures, that there should be a shift towards non-linear approaches. Rather than focusing upon Western policy prescriptions intra-elite bargaining and formal institutional structures, these understandings stress non-linearity, hybridity, local societal processes and practices and the importance of ‘hidden’ agency and resistance. This article highlights that, while these approaches set up a critique of liberal linear approaches, they tend to reify hybrid, non-liberal or non-linear outcomes as the product of local inter-subjective attachments. In this way, they reproduce the voluntarist and idealist understandings of liberal peace, locating the problems or barriers to peace and development at the cognitive or ideational level rather than considering the barriers of economic and social context.

New Rights for Old? Cosmopolitan Citizenship and the Critique of State Sovereignty

Cosmopolitan international relations theorists envisage a process of expanding cosmopolitan democracy and global governance, in which for the first time there is the possibility of global issues being addressed on the basis of new forms of democracy, derived from the universal rights of global citizens. They suggest that, rather than focus attention on the territorially limited rights of the citizen at the level of the nation-state, more emphasis should be placed on extending democracy and human rights to the international sphere. This paper raises problems with extending the concept of rights beyond the bounds of the sovereign state, without a mechanism of making these new rights accountable to their subject. The emerging gap, between holders of cosmopolitan rights and those with duties, tends to create dependency rather than to empower. So while the new rights remain tenuous, there is a danger that the cosmopolitan framework can legitimise the abrogation of the existing rights of democracy and self-government preserved in the UN Charter framework.

Introduction: Peace without Politics?

It is ten years since the Dayton peace settlement, which formally ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in November 1995. Since then there has been much discussion about the steep learning curve necessary for the new international tasks of state-building and post-conflict peacebuilding. BiH was the first such extensive international project since the post-Second World War USled occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan. Today, with the end of cold war geo-political divisions, BiH has become widely seen as a template for new experiments in international administration and external assistance in state reconstruction and post-conflict reconciliation. The contributions in this specially commissioned collection seek to probe the lessons of the BiH experience and highlight the nature of the problems confronted by international policy-making institutions; exploring the limitations and possibilities for external influence and drawing attention to some of the unintended consequences of projects of this kind.

From Dayton to Europe

Many commentators suggest that the transition to Bosnian ownership has been held back by the Dayton framework, which created a weak central state and a country divided into two separate entities, the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat Bosnian Federation (FBiH), with ten cantonal governments, as well as an autonomous region, Brčko. Ten years on, the idea that the post-war transition has been frustrated by a surfeit of Bosnian governing institutions, protected by their Dayton status, could not be further from the truth. Rather, the international powers of administration, under the Office of the High Representative, have been vastly increased, reducing the Bosnian institutions established by Dayton to administrative shells. There has been a transition away from Dayton, but this has been from the ad hoc regulatory controls of the self-selected ‘coalition of the willing’, the Peace Implementation Council, towards an expanded framework of European Union regulation, covering all aspects of the post-Dayton process. Dayton has proved highly flexible, with external institutions rewriting their mandates and powers. However, despite the transformation in post-Dayton mechanisms, it is still too early to talk of any indications of a shift towards Bosnian ‘ownership’.