Michael Pugh

Whose peace? : critical perspectives on the political economy of peacebuilding

Introduction M.Pugh, N.Cooper and M.Turner PART I: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LIBERAL WAR AND PEACE The Political Economy of Peace Processes J.Selby The Gendered Impact of Peace D.Pankhurst Nationalism Versus Peacebuilding in Iraq E.Herring PART II: TRADE Trading with Security: Trade Liberalization and Conflict S.Willett Corporate Social Responsibility S.Tripathi As Good as it Gets: Securing Diamonds in Sierra Leone N.Cooper PART III: EMPLOYMENT From Waging War to Peace Work: Labour and Labour Markets C.Cramer Employment, Labour Rights and Social Resistance M.Pugh Securitizing the Economy of Reintegration in Liberia K.Jennings PART IV: DIASPORAS Three Discourses on Diasporas and Peacebuilding M.Turner Diaspora Engagement in Peacebuilding: Empirical and Theoretical Challenges K.Bush Rwandese Diasporas and the Reconstruction of a Fragile Peace R.Davies PART V: BORDERLANDS AND THE CARTOGRAPHY OF VIOLENT ECONOMIES War, Peace and the Places In Between: Why Borderlands are Central J.Goodhand Microfinance and Borderlands: Impacts of Local Neoliberalism M.Bateman Potential Difference: Internal Borderlands in Africa S.Jackson PART VI: CIVIL SOCIETY Welfare and the Civil Peace: Poverty with Rights? O.P.Richmond Peace Constituencies in Peacebuilding: The mesas de concertacion in Guatemala C.Mouly El Salvador: The Limits of a Violent Peace M.Hume PART VII: GLOBAL GOVERNANCE Post-Conflict State-Building: Governance Without Government D.Chandler The UN Peacebuilding Commission: The Rise and Fall of a Good Idea M.Berdal Material Reproduction and Stateness in Bosnia and Herzegovina B.Bliesemann de Guevara Conclusion: The Political Economy of Peacebuilding: Whose Peace? Where Next? M.Pugh, N.Cooper and M.Turner

Peacekeeping and Critical Theory.

A deconstruction of the role of peace support operations suggests that they sustain a particular order of world politics that privileges the rich and powerful states in their efforts to control or isolate unruly parts of the world. As a management device it has grown in significance as the strategic imperatives of the post-industrialized, capitalist world have neutered the universal pretensions of the United Nations. Drawing on the work of Robert Cox and Mark Duffield, this essay adopts a critical theory perspective to argue that peace support operations serve a narrow, problem-solving purpose – to doctor the dysfunctions of the global political economy within a framework of liberal imperialism. Two dynamics in world politics might be exploited to mobilize a counter-hegemonic transformation in global governance. First, a radical change in the global trade system and its problematic institutions will create opportunities to emancipate the weak from economic hegemony. Second, future network wars are likely to require increasingly subtle and flexible teams, similar to disaster relief experts, to supply preventive action, economic aid and civilian protection. This might only be achieved by releasing peace support operations from the state-centric control system, and making them answerable to more transparent, more democratic and accountable multinational institutions.

Transformation in the political economy of Bosnia since Dayton

The transformation dynamics of Bosnia and Herzegovina adversely affects economically vulnerable sectors of society in a context of fragile economic growth and a contested balance of power between international direction and local ownership. International agencies and financial institutions have imposed a model of economic transformation, ultimately derived from the neoliberal ideology of aggressive capitalism and the 1989 Washington consensus on developmentalism. Daytons complex constitutional arrangements fragmented the market and its economic governance. The population has clung to clientism, shadow economic activities and resistance to centrally-audited exchange. This essay references Baumans concept of ‘liquid modernity’ to contend that what is sometimes portrayed as a clash between neoliberal modernity and a pre-modern ‘Balkan way’ is questionable in its dyadic assumptions and its underestimation of linkages between the spheres of neoliberalism and nationalist–clientism.

The Political Economy of Corruption in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article contends that the complex administrative mechanics prescribed in the Dayton Accords presented opportunities for nationalist leaders to abuse public office. At the same time, economic reforms and a high degree of decentralization gave elites and local communities the facility to resist externally induced structural adjustment. The economic paradigm introduced for transition limited any attempt to establish a social contract between individual and the state. Consequently, a degree of social cohesion remains through adherence to local, clientelistic loyalties and informal economic activity. This provides the cultural and structural economic context in which the abuse of public office flourishes.

The end of history and the last liberal peacebuilder: a reply to Roland Paris

In the April 2010 Review of International Studies , Roland Paris argued that liberal peacebuilding is the only viable solution for rebuilding war-torn societies, and supported this by assailing critics of the liberal peace. In this article we challenge four key claims made by Paris: imposed and consensual peacebuilding are different experiences; there are no echoes of imperialism in modern peacebuilding; there is no alternative to the capitalist free market; and critics of the liberal peace are ‘closet liberals’. We argue that Paris ignores the extent to which all peacebuilding strategies have had a core of common prescriptions: neoliberal policies of open markets, privatisation and fiscal restraint, and governance policies focused on enhancing instruments of state coercion and ‘capacity building’ – policies that have proved remarkably resilient even while the democracy and human rights components of the liberal peace have been substantially downgraded. There is little space to (formally) dissent from these policy prescriptions – whether international peacebuilders were originally invited in or not. Furthermore, the deterministic assumption by Paris that ‘there is no alternative’ is unjustifiable. Rather than 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 rather than measuring them against a liberal norm.

The Challenge of Civil‐military Relations in International Peace Operations

The relationship between military and civilian humanitarian organisations has developed in an increasingly integrative way. Military initiatives to institutionalise the relationship, since the interventions in Somalia and the Balkans, entail a dilution of humanitarian independence as was manifested in practice in Kosovo. Further, the state-centric foundations of military intervention run counter to the potential for humanitarian organisations to foster a cosmopolitan ethos that would not only preserve humanitarian principles but also contest statist assumptions about conflict, development and power.

Rubbing Salt into War Wounds : Shadow Economies and Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Kosovo

MICHAEL PUGH is reader in international relations at the University of Plymouth and editor of International Peacekeeping. He thanks Gemma Collantes Celador and Neil Cooper for their useful comments. Some elements of this article appeared in Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper with Jonathan Goodhand, War Economies in a Regional Context: Challenges of Transformation (Boulder: Lynne Rienner for the International Peace Academy, 2004). Rubbing Salt into War Wounds Shadow Economies and Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Kosovo

Peacekeeping and IR Theory: Phantom of the Opera?

The article identifies a gap in peacekeeping studies. Scholars have not explicitly related peace operations to theories of knowledge that inform debates in International Relations about the nature of world politics. Peacekeepings hybridity in IR theory was perhaps related to its Cold War exceptionalism and marginalization. Further, as a curiosity in military affairs, soldiers and scholars were chiefly concerned about whether it did any good and how it could be improved upon. Deference to policy prescription also accompanied the steady militarization of peacekeeping and its transformation into peace operations after the Cold War. Signs of change have begun to emerge with studies of peace operations as simulacra of peace, and with critical theory that portrays peace operations as essential to the ideology of ‘liberal peace’.

Civil-Military Relations

What is the relationship between civilians (“people without arms”), the society at large, and the military (“people with arms”) established as a separate armed body in order to protect a society? This question has a long history that goes back to antiquity, to the very beginnings of military organization in civilian societies.1 In each country the answer to this question is deeply influenced by national history, sentiments, and traditions. It depends on the role of the army as a state institution in the given country, subordination of the military to political authorities as defined in laws and constitutional arrangements, and so on. Public perceptions of military personnel, the prestige of the military officer’s profession, public opinion toward defense and foreign policy of the regime and certain actions of the army, and so on, determine it. The very nature of the problem is permanently changing because both society and the military are constantly changing as well.

Towards a new agenda for transforming war economies

An interest in peacebuilding among academics and policymakers has grown exponentially since UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali broadcast the concept in An Agenda for Peace, in 1992. However, conceptualising post-conflict reconstruction, and its economic dynamics, has a long pedigree in liberal thought. Since the first world war, if not before, post-conflict transformation projects have had an ideological purpose, to spread the values and norms of dominant power brokers. A nexus between ideology, economic precepts and security became particularly evident in the Cold War, the Marshall Plan, for example, being the reconstruction element linked to a much broader drive to eliminate left-wing parties in Western Europe. This special issue has explored some of the assumptions and practices of institutions and agencies that promote the liberal peace in the context of the post-Cold War phase of globalisation. Our research has included analyses of the reformist project to replace the Washington Consensus, the sort of peace(s) being introduced, the discourses of governance and regulation of war economies, the sequencing and purposes of reconstruction aid and the largely self-regulation of corporate business. Such a focus is justified because dominant security narratives tend to be written from the perspective of those who securitise issues, rather than the concerns and discursive practices of those who are engineered. It is thus essential to understand what lies behind the spread of liberal peace norms and values in order to frame a new agenda that addresses deficits in research and policy. This also means, however, that the transformation of war economies, whether in an advanced stage in Bosnia or precariously balanced in Afghanistan, is viewed from perspectives, critical or orthodox, that reflect the priorities and concerns of the international agents of transformation. Articles in this issue have also analysed some of the silences that tend to surround the discourses of liberal peace. In particular, we have examined the role of labour markets, of women in trading, of the economic centrality of