Florian P. Kühn

‘The International Community Needs to Act’: Loose Use and Empty Signalling of a Hackneyed Concept

When political actors and international relations scholars invoke ‘the international community’, the term is commonly framed very loosely. It is used either as a reference to the norms of international politics or, according to its composition, as a coalition of concerned actors. This article, by contrast, argues that it is the interplay of image and practice of the terms invocation that shapes its multi-faceted character. ‘The international community’ can be used by many different groups, state and non-state alike, to locate their political goals in the context of a wider array of values. Usually, these norms are state related and can be used to simulate political relevance. Conversely, actors defying widely accepted values can be excluded and policy against them legitimized. Addressing domestic as well as international audiences, the claim to be acting as, or on behalf of, ‘the international community’ is mostly virtual but has definite political consequences.

Aid, Opium, and the State of Rents in Afghanistan: Competition, Cooperation, or Cohabitation?

Abstract The Afghan state competes for dominance with other local orders and structures. It constitutes a political space structured by external support in the form of political legitimacy (e.g. by international regimes), finance (external grants or development aid), military (troop deployment), and privileged access to information. It finds itself in the unpromising situation of having to respond to local needs and challenges in order to strengthen its internal legitimacy, and to (re-)act according to demands put forward by the financing bodies. These vectors of responsiveness and accountability diverge, in some cases leading to a situation that can best be analysed in terms of the rentier state. Rentier state relations shape the political-economic space in which parallel relations of power develop facilitating the political base of both a state class and of private rentier groups. Using the case study of Afghanistan, this paper argues that rent theories help explain some of the mechanisms at work in post-conflict states – at the same time, it is highlighted that rent theories must be less state-centric in their approach to grasp the dynamics of competition, cooperation and cohabitation at play.

The Peace Prefix: Ambiguities of the Word ‘Peace’

The Western security community has increasingly militarized its politics of peace, through peacekeeping, peace-making and other policies to which the ‘peace’ prefix has been attributed. Peace has become a virtual concept, which at times disguises rather violent management techniques of ‘global governance’. Peace, within this framework, is a practice and a policy, mantled by a narrative of a liberal, and teleological, desire for non-violence. Non-violence towards the governing institutions became viewed as peace, advancing the notion of ‘peace-as-order’. A teleology of liberal development helped to securitize the ‘not-yet-liberalized Other’, excluding non-liberal concepts from the idea of peace. Like the baby thrown out with the bathwater, peace lost its emancipatory content. A particular peace is the result, which includes transitional justice or reconciliation as rhetorical devices for its legitimization. However, the practice of ‘peace’ leaves these processes to the ‘losers’; lasting peace between equals remains elusive and the politics of peace an exercise in managing security.

Letter from the Editors: Taking the Hybridity Agenda Further

Research on the practical and theoretical failure of the liberal peace project has led to the emergence of a liberal–local hybrid form of peace—what Robert Belloni (2012) calls hybrid peace governance—which ‘intellectually enables an engagement with the lives of ordinary people, in their own everyday rather than in a static and distant state context’ (Richmond 2009, 333). The idea that in times of high-density communications the order of societies changes, adapts, and re-shapes following complex dynamics and narratives was developed in cultural studies earlier. As Stuart Hall describes in his excellent essay, hybrid interactions constitute the character of social relations where all ‘the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms [are] negotiated’ (Hall 1990: 234). Theoretically, this observation has been adapted to liberal intervention contexts and enables us to either apprehend the interplay between international and local practices, norms and institutions (Richmond and Mitchell 2012, 1; Mac Ginty 2010), or to transcend universalizing theories to include the plurality of social orders (Boege et al. 2009; see also Roberts 2008). In this context, studies about hybrid orders have revealed insights on spaces of interventions (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008, Charbonneau and Sears 2014), moving away from the unhelpful binaries of ‘local’ vs ‘international’, ‘bottom-up’ vs ‘top-down’, ‘modern’ vs ‘traditional’, ‘internal’ vs ‘external’, ‘Western’ vs ‘non-Western’ (see Bliesemann de Guevara 2010). While some see ‘hybrid forms of peace’ as a ‘possibility’—a theoretical alternative to currently limited international interventionist frameworks—others have started to investigate the emergence of specific ‘hybrid forms of peace’ and their implications. Rebecca Richards contributes to this new wave of scholarship with her article ‘Bringing the Outside In: Somaliland, Statebuilding and Dual Hybridity’. Departing from analyses of statebuilding failures, Richards explores the successful hybrid statebuilding case of Somaliland, where ‘state’ institutions meet some of the demands and expectations of the society, starkly contrasting with other neighbouring political communities. Looking at the inclusion of traditional structures of authority in the central democratic Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2015 Vol. 9, No. 1, 1–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2015.991078

Introduction: Peacebuilding, Peace Operations and Regime Change Wars

This special issue critically interrogates the current practices of international ‘peacebuilding’ interventions and ‘peace missions’ to highlight the violence that inheres in their attempts to enforce socio-economic and political changes (such as regime change) from the ‘outside’. As in the Latin adage: ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’ (‘if you wish for peace, prepare for war’) the starting point of this special issue was the basic observation that these interventions and missions have little to do with peace but, rather, are violent from their outset. By combining conceptual analysis with case study articles, we hope that this special issue contributes to the on-going debate about how something normatively desirable – ‘building peace’ – has turned out so badly. In the face of apparently shipwrecked ‘transformative’ projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and Palestine, it is essential that the way Western states conduct the politics of peace is critically analysed. Contributors were asked to approach the puzzle of violent peace from a wide variety of perspectives – and this is reflected in the different approaches represented. Peace interventions are variously regarded in this special issue as being the outcome of a set of ideas about international order (including what ‘peace’ constitutes), the preservation of power relations, racist and ‘orientalist’ views of non-Western societies and individuals, and/or an implicit religious bias toward Christianity. However, while they vary in their analytical underpinnings, these articles all critically scrutinize the purported ‘peacefulness’ of international (particularly UN) interventions. In the conceptual section, Florian Kühn, Michael Pugh, Philip Cunliffe and Heidi Hudson challenge conventional discourses of peacebuilding and resulting policy. One of their shared concerns is that what is taken to be peace may be obscuring more violent political practices, and so they critically explore hegemonic Western (and specifically UN) discourses about international intervention. One effect of this self-referential discourse is that while the politics of peace has a teleological aim at its centre, the practice of peace pushes aside alternative routes and emancipatory ideas about social relations beyond Western prescriptive assumptions about the state. This practice can be regarded as aggressive in its drive to introduce a prescribed set of policies – economic and security related – into international attempts at building peace. Thus peace is subverted and turned into something serving the interests of governing elites. Extended to social relations, this helps to cement existing gender relations that, with closer examination, are reactionary in that they favour stereotyped roles and certain forms of agency as Hudson explores in her article. In effect, this narrows political

Securing Uncertainty Sub-state Security Dilemma and the Risk of Intervention

The theoretical concept John Herz called a ‘security dilemma’ has rarely been applied to sub-state social figurations, although security dilemmas do shape political behaviour in post-conflict peacebuilding. Comparable to state formation, sub-state groups develop institutional capacities. Often led by ‘warlords’ or ‘strongmen’, these entities resemble states within, while lacking recognition and legitimacy from without. Between these entities arises a sub-sovereign form of security dilemma. It is a result of uncertainty about the other’s motives regarding expansion, control of sources of funding, or domination within the legal order of the ‘state’. When statebuilding is pursued by external actors, aiming to fill the legal void, the ‘state’ can become a source of existential risks for sub-state entities. Risks – from extinction to the transformation of a group’s socio-political identity – can stem from another sub-state group taking over the state, appropriating superior means of coercion and hence enabling itself to subjugate others; relative deprivation concerning external funding or revenue from trade or smuggling; or loss of investment in networks of patronage, favourable terms of trade, or monopolies for certain goods. External support adds considerable uncertainty about interventionists’ capabilities, willingness and ability to steer and control statebuilding efforts. This article explores how risks and their perception shape interaction between social actors and at the same time how awareness and consideration of these risks may influence external actors’ behaviour. It argues that understanding risk constellations within an intervention and their processual transformation is vital for external statebuilding support.

Afghanistan and the ‘Graveyard of Empires’: Blumenberg, Under-complex Analogy and Basic Myths in International Politics

Kuhn provides a concise application of Hans Blumenberg’s work on myth to analyse western interpretations of Afghanistan. In portraying historical ‘facts’ as myth, he shows how these are not false or correct but in a productive way shape our understanding by selecting what can be considered relevant and what is dismissed. Following Blumenberg, Kuhn demonstrates how myths’ relative indeterminacy allows integrating incongruences, tying together historical analogies and selected real-world experiences. Myth helps structure knowledge, which Kuhn illustrates by looking at the myth of Afghanistan as ‘graveyard of empires’, as ‘safe haven’ for terrorists, and fame for Afghan ‘fierce fighters’. Explaining how these myths intersect to create an image of Afghanistan taken for real, he shows how Blumenberg’s ideas can be applied to analyse contemporary politics.

Introduction: Rwanda 20 Years after the Genocide: Reflecting on Intervention and Reconciliation

The twentieth anniversary this year of the genocide in Rwanda has presented us with an occasion to reflect on the way the crisis and its aftermath have been experienced by Rwandans, how the genocide was dealt with by the ‘international community’ (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2011) and how it has impacted on our understanding of intervention and intervention practices. The political evolution in Rwanda continues to fuel debates and discussions on the nature of the governance regime that emerged after 1994. Twenty years after the assassination of Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana, which produced waves of genocidal massacres, the circumstances surrounding this event are far from resolved, from a political, judicial, or diplomatic point of view. While the military victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, put an end to the genocide, a number of scholars have underscored the repressive nature of the political regime subsequently put in place by Kagame—first as vicepresident, then as minister of defence, and, from 2000, as president of the country (Samset 2011). Indeed, since Kagame’s ascent to power in 2000, Rwanda is said to have moved ‘from genocide to dictatorship’ (Reyntjens 2004). Yet, under Kagame’s impulse, the country’s economic development and diplomatic standing have gone through substantial transformations. Innovative policies of urban planning in the capital city Kigali, strategies of poverty reduction and the fight against malaria have promoted Kagame as the ‘global elite’s favorite strongman’, heralded as ‘a shining example of what aid money can do in Africa’ (Gettleman 2013). At the international level, Rwanda has displayed considerable agency by shifting from ‘weak state’ to ‘savvy international player’ status (Brown and Harman 2013). For instance, the Rwandan government has managed to maintain local ownership over the reform of the security sector, despite high levels of external funding (Wilén 2012). Through prominent contributions to UN peacekeeping initiatives and active involvement Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2014 Vol. 8, No. 4, 273–279, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2014.964453

Risiko als Sozialtechnologie

Risiken in modernen Gesellschaften dienen der Steuerung und Regulierung von Verhaltensweisen. Spezifisches Wissen uber Bevolkerungsgruppen, etwa durch statistische Erfassung, erlaubt gezielt steuernde Interventionen in die Gesellschaft vorzunehmen. Manche Lebensweisen werden dadurch begunstigt, andere erschwert – jeweils entlang ihres okonomischen Nutzens fur die Gesellschaft. Risiken als Herrschaftsinstrument zu analysieren erlaubt, Wissen als produktives Instrument der Macht zu verstehen.

Umgang mit Risiken

Mit Risiken umzugehen, ist eine zentrale Herausforderung des Lebens. Wer nicht richtig einschatzt, welche Gefahr ihr droht, spielt mit dem eigenen Leben, haufig auch mit dem anderer. Risiken gehen vom Verhalten Einzelner aus, aber auch vom aggregierten Verhalten von Gruppen – das heist, es entsteht als Summe kollektiver Handlungen, die ungewollte Risiken produzieren, sei es fur diejenigen, die sich an einer bestimmten Betatigung beteiligen, sei es fur jene, die augenscheinlich unbeteiligt sind. Infrage steht also unsere Fahigkeit, Risiken realitatsbezogen richtig einzuschatzen. Mangel an Information (absichtlich vorenthaltene ebenso wie fahrlassig nicht eingeholte Informationen), Fehleinschatzungen oder unzureichende Priorisierung von Risiken sind Probleme, denen wir im Umgang mit Risiken standig ausgesetzt sind.