Oliver P. Richmond

The local turn in peace building: A critical agenda for peace

Abstract This article unpacks the renaissance of interest in ‘the local’ in peace building. It pays increased attention to local dimensions of peace in a wider context of increased assertiveness by local actors as well as a loss of confidence by major actors behind international peace-support actors. The article sees the ‘local turn’ in peace building as part of a wider critical turn in the study of peace and conflict, and focuses on the epistemological consequences of the recourse to localism in the conceptualisation and execution of peace building. The local turn has implications for the nature and location of power in peace building. This article is largely conceptual and theoretical in nature but it is worth noting that the local turn is based on reactions to real-world events.

A post-liberal peace

Introduction Part 1: The Romanticisation of the Local 1. Civil Society, Needs, Welfare 2. The Culture of Liberal Peacebuilding 3. Critical Perspectives of Liberal Peacebuilding: Cambodia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Timor Leste 4. De-Romanticising the Local: Implications for Post-Liberal Peacebuilding Part 2: Hybridity and The Infrapolitics of Peace 5. Everyday Critical Agency and Resistance in Peacebuilding 6. De-romanticising the Local, De-Mystifying the International: Aspects of the Local-Liberal Hybrid. Conclusion: The Birth of A Post-Liberal Peace

Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace

This article discusses what an IR and peacebuilding praxis derived from the ‘everyday’ might entail. It examines the insights of a number of literatures which contribute to a discussion of the dynamics of the everyday. The enervation of agency and the repoliticisation of peacebuilding is its objective. It charts how local agency has led to resistance and hybrid forms of peace despite the overwhelming weight of the liberal peace project. In some aspects this may be complementary to the latter and commensurate with the liberal state, but in other aspects the everyday points beyond the liberal peace.

A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday

The ‘liberal peace’ is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy at the level of the everyday in post-conflict environments. In many such environments; different groups often locally constituted perceive it to be ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive towards its subjects. It is tied to Western and liberal conceptions of the state, to institutions, and not to the local. Its post-Cold War moral capital, based upon its more emancipatory rather than conservative claims, has been squandered as a result, and its basic goal of a liberal social contract undermined. Certainly, since 9/11, attention has been diverted into other areas and many, perhaps promising peace processes have regressed. This has diverted attention away from a search for refinements, alternatives, for hybrid forms of peace, or for empathetic strategies through which the liberal blueprint for peace might coexist with alternatives. Yet from these strategies a post-liberal peace might emerge via critical research agendas for peacebuilding and for policymaking, termed here, eirenist . This opens up a discussion of an everyday ‘post-liberal peace’ and critical policies for peacebuilding.

The problem of peace: understanding the ‘liberal peace’

To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace. Pope John Paul II, 1 1981 Pax Invictis2 Virtue runs amok. Attributed to G.K. Chesterton This essay examines the development of the liberal peace, identifying its internal components and the often-ignored tensions between them. The construction of the liberal peace, and its associated discourses and practices in post-conflict environments is far from coherent. It is subject to significant intellectual and practical shortcomings, not least related to its focus on political, social, and economic reforms as mainly long-term institutional processes resting on the reform of governance. It thereby neglects interim issues such as the character, agency and needs of civil society actors, especially related to the ending of war economies, and their replacement with frameworks that respond to individual social and economic needs, as well as political needs. The resultant peace is therefore often very flimsy and at best ‘virtual’, rather than emancipatory.

Peace in international relations

Introduction Part 1: Towards an Orthodoxy of Peace - and Beyond 1. Peace and the Idealist Tradition: Towards a Liberal Peace 2. A Realist Agenda for Peace: Survival and a Victors Peace 3. Marxist Agendas for Peace: Towards Peace as Social Justice and Emancipation 4. Beyond a Idealist, Realist, or Marxist Version of Peace 5. The Contribution of Peace and Conflict Studies Part 2: Post-Positivism and Peace 6. Critical Contributions to Peace 7. Post-Structuralist Contributions to Peace. Conclusion: An Agenda for Peace in an Inter-Disciplinary IR

UN peace operations and the dilemmas of the peacebuilding consensus

What is the nature of the ‘peace’ that is being installed in conflict zones through UN peace operations? It tends to be assumed that UN peace operations contribute to the construction of a liberal international order made up of democratic states. In practice this has often resulted in a ‘virtual peace’ based upon contested attempts to import liberal democratic models. This essay argues that much of the impetus for this type of thinking arises from a liberal desire to ‘resolve’ conflict – to reproduce a positive peace through contemporary peace operations rather than the negative peace that was supported by more traditional peacekeeping. ‘Peace’ in some cases now legitimates and rests upon long-standing and deep interventions in conflict zones via a ‘peacebuilding consensus’. This lies in a peace constituted by a specific form of external governance. Understanding these developments clearly shows how important peace operations are in creating forms of peace as a contribution to the remaking of the global order.

Liberal Hubris? Virtual Peace in Cambodia

The article examines the nature of the peace that exists in Cambodia by critiquing the ‘liberal peace’ framework. The authors claim that, despite the best efforts of international donors and the NGO community, liberal peacebuilding in Cambodia has so far failed in many of its key aims. The liberal peacebuilding project in Cambodia has been modified by a combination of local political, economic and social dynamics, international failings, and the broader theoretical failings of the liberal peacebuilding process. There have been some important successes, but serious doubts remain as to whether this project has been or can be successful, not least because of the ontological problem of whether the liberal peace is at all transferable. This raises the question of what type of peace has actually been built. The authors argue that the result of international efforts so far is little more than a virtual liberal peace.

De-romanticising the local, de-mystifying the international: hybridity in Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands

Abstract Many actors involved in peacebuilding and statebuilding are acutely aware of the different roles of the ‘local’ in peacebuilding. Increasingly, this realisation has opened up tensions between the liberal peace and the realm of customary forms of politics and social structure. Peacebuilding may now be seen as a site of international assistance and local acquiescence, co-option or resistance. To understand these dynamics, the ‘infrapolitics of peacebuilding’ need to be uncovered. This article presents these dynamics in the cases of Timor Leste and the Solomon islands.

Liberal Peacebuilding in Timor Leste: The Emperor's New Clothes?

A critical examination of the effort to build a liberal peace since 1999 in East Timor illustrates that to a large degree the liberal peace model has failed the East Timorese people. There are two aspects to this: the first is the failure to construct a social contract between society and its institutions of governance. This is related to the broader issue of the social legitimacy of, and contract with, international actors derived from society and its complex groupings. The second is the failure, at least in the transitional period, to respond to the experiences of everyday life and welfare requirements of the new states citizens.