Post‐conflict Statebuilding and State Legitimacy: From Negative to Positive Peace?

This article is concerned with the potential that statebuilding interventions have to institutionalize social justice, in addition to their more immediate ‘negative’ peace mandates, and the impact this might have, both on local state legitimacy and the character of the ‘peace’ that might follow. Much recent scholarship has stressed the legitimacy of a state's behaviour in relation to conformity to global governance norms or democratic ‘best practice’. Less evident is a discussion of the extent to which post‐conflict polities are able to engender the societal legitimacy central to political stability. As long as this level of legitimacy is absent (and it is hard to generate), civil society is likely to remain distant from the state, and peace and stability may remain elusive. A solution to this may be to apply existing international legislation centred in the UN and the ILO to compel international organizations and national states to deliver basic needs security through their institutions. This has the effect of stimulating local‐level state legitimacy while simultaneously formalizing social justice and positive peacebuilding.     

Beyond Hybridity to the Politics of Scale: International Intervention and ‘Local’ Politics

The evident failures of international peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions (PSBIs) have recently prompted a focus on the interaction between interventions and target societies and states. Especially popular has been the ‘hybridity’ approach, which understands forms of peace and governance emerging through the mixing of local and international agendas and institutions. This article argues that hybridity is a highly problematic optic. Despite contrary claims, hybridity scholarship falsely dichotomizes ‘local’ and ‘international’ ideal‐typical assemblages, and incorrectly presents outcomes as stemming from conflict and accommodation between them. Scholarship in political geography and state theory provides better tools for explaining PSBIs’ outcomes as reflecting socio‐political contestation over power and resources. We theorize PSBIs as involving a politics of scale, where different social forces promote and resist alternative scales and modes of governance, depending on their interests and agendas. Contestation between these forces, which may be located at different scales and involved in complex, tactical, multi‐scalar alliances, explains the uneven outcomes of international intervention. We demonstrate this using a case study of East Timor, focusing on decentralization and land policy.     

Everyday peace capture: Nationalism and the dynamics of peace after violent conflict

Nationalism is arguably one of the most detrimental peace‐breaking factors in conflict‐affected societies. This article examines how ethno‐nationalist elites, subterranean movements, and ordinary people can become blockages to sustainable peace and reconciliation after violent conflict. It argues that peacebuilding and state‐building imposed from outside as conflict transformation approaches without acceptable peace settlement and resolute solution of the disputes among parties in conflict risk enabling the co‐optation of power‐sharing arrangements by ethno‐nationalist elites, contestation of peace and reconciliation by subterranean mono‐ethnic movements, and the occurrence of vernacular peace‐breaking acts. This negative mutation of nationalism not only harms peace, justice, and development but also undermines the rights and needs of distinct identity groups. Under these conditions, escaping the nationalism trap in conflict‐affected societies requires seeking political change through post‐ethnic politics and reconciliation through everyday pacifist acts undertaken by the affected communities themselves. The article draws on Kosovo to illustrate empirically the dynamics of peace‐breaking and practices of everyday nationalism. It seeks to bridge debates on nationalism and post‐conflict peacebuilding and offer alternative pathways for rethinking strategies of peace in divided societies.     

Social Capital and Post‐Conflict Reconstruction in Burundi: The Limits of Community‐based Reconstruction

Using an examination of three NGO interventions in post‐conflict Burundi, this article questions community‐based reconstruction as a mechanism to rebuild social capital after conflicts, particularly when direct livelihood support is provided. The authors demonstrate a general shortcoming of the methodology employed in community‐based development (CBD), namely its focus on ‘technical procedural design’, which results in what may be termed ‘supply‐driven demand‐driven’ reconstruction. The findings suggest the need for a political economy perspective on social capital, which acknowledges that the effects on social capital are determined by the type of economic resource CBD gives access to. Through the use of a resource typology, the case studies show that the CBD methodology and the potential effects on social capital differ when applied to public and non‐strategic versus private and strategic resources. This has particular consequences for post‐conflict situations. A generalized application of CBD methodology to post‐conflict reconstruction programmes fails to take adequate account of the nature of the interventions and the challenges posed by the particular post‐conflict setting. The article therefore questions the current popular ‘social engineering’ approach to post‐conflict reconstruction.     

State Absence and State Formation in Solomon Islands: Reflections on Agency,Scale and Hybridity

This article engages ethnographic research on perceptions of disputation, justice and security in rural Solomon Islands to reflect on issues of agency, power and scale in areas of limited statehood. Set against widespread popular perceptions of state retreat in Solomon Islands, the authors situate their study within the literature which addresses engagements with conflict‐affected and fragile countries and, in particular, literature with an interest in the spaces created by prolonged state absence as potential sites of innovation and transformation. The article examines the role of agency and power at different scales in the highly contested processes of state formation underway in post‐conflict Solomon Islands. Taking issue with the presumed privileging by local actors of non‐state over state forms that runs through much of the hybridity literature, the authors suggest that international ‘state‐building’ interventions, such as that recently experienced in Solomon Islands, require a more nuanced and historically informed understanding of local agency vis‐à‐vis the state in fragile and conflict‐affected settings.     

Respacing for Peace? Resistance to Integration and the Ontopolitics of Rural Planning in Post‐War Burundi

This article investigates the politics and social impact of post‐war ‘respacing for peace’ strategies in Burundi from within a set of contested spatial arrangements — or rather, post‐war socio‐spatial experiments — including peace villages, IDP site clearances and land sharing. The author takes a critical look at these reconfigurations, and the resistances and manipulations that result when people (or their remains) are moved or placed in the name of coexistence, integration and sharing after the war. In this way, the article contributes to a post‐conflict planning literature that is mostly concerned with overcoming segregation and cleansing through integration, by exploring some of the complexities and problems that can arise with unquestioned embrace of the latter. It shows that a very particular and problematic logic of ethnic coexistence and physical integration drives post‐war respacing in Burundi and that people resist it with strategies in both physical and reflexive space. Proceeding through a set of paradoxes — such as the refusal to return and staying put, or re‐emigration as a response to settling — the article explores how and why respacing‐for‐peace might produce, or fail to prevent, the opposite outcome: community conflict, social tension and segregation.     

Post‐Conditionality Politics and Administrative Reform: Reflections on the Cases of Uganda and Tanzania

This article contributes to the discussion of the nature of external intervention in the reform processes of indebted states. Looking at administrative reform in Uganda and Tanzania, it is argued that external involvement in sub‐Saharan Africa is becoming increasingly differentiated. For some states — including the two cases dealt with here — a key set of continuities and changes allows us to conceptualize a regime of post‐conditionality. Post‐conditionality regimes exist where extreme external dependence and economic growth produce a set of political dynamics in which external–national distinctions become less useful, in which there emerge a set of unequal mutual dependencies, and in which donor/creditor involvement in reform becomes qualitatively more intimate, pervading the form and processes of the state. Details of this dispensation are provided in an analysis of key ministries and key interventions by donors/creditors. The article finishes by considering the contradictions of the post‐conditionality regime, and its prospects.     

Seeking peace and security in the Horn of Africa: the contribution of the Inter‐Governmental Authority on Development

This article assesses the contribution that IGAD has made to regional security in the Horn of Africa since the adoption of its peace and security mandate in 1996. It describes the evolution of IGAD and its mandate in the context of regional conflict and wider African peace and security processes. It explores the local dynamics of the two major IGAD‐led peace processes, in Sudan (1993–2005) and in Somalia (2002–2004), and discusses the effectiveness of IGAD's institutional role. A consideration of the wider impact of the peace agreements highlights the way IGAD has enhanced its role by setting the agenda on peace support operations in Somalia. The article concludes that IGAD's successes are more the result of regional power politics than of its institutional strength per se. Despite the obvious need for a better regional security framework, the scope for the IGAD Secretariat to develop an autonomous conflict‐resolution capability will remain limited. However, IGAD brings a new diplomatic dimension to conflict management that locks in regional states and locks out interested parties beyond the region. With regard to Somalia, the organization has played a pivotal role in directing African and wider international responses to conflict in the region.     

South Sudan: a volatile dynamic of accountability and peace

Since the warring parties to South Sudan's civil war (2013–15) signed a peace agreement in August 2015, South Sudan has endured a series of setbacks and clashes that have threatened the fragile peace process. This article examines many key factors affecting the peace process, including rampant corruption, military factionalism, gross human rights abuses and ineffective foreign intervention/pressure. It shows that the past and present failure to structure accountability at the institutional level drives the instability and distrust that has limited the political dialogue and consensus needed to implement the peace deal. To frame this issue of accountability, the article distinguishes between core (essential) and peripheral (self‐serving) objectives of promoting accountability. In doing so, it seeks to devise and apply the logic of this dynamic of accountability and to explain the unexpected outcomes of South Sudan's conflict. It argues that, rather than transforming the conditions and hostile relations of South Sudan's situation, international demands for accountability continue to fuel the volatile tensions between international authorities and the various factions inside the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The central conclusion the article draws is that instead of signifying the official beginning of the end of the conflict, the peace agreement has wedged itself between the core and peripheral objectives of accountability, thereby setting the stage for further stalemate and increasing distrust among domestic and international authorities.     

Female and National Self‐Determination: A Gender Re‐reading of ‘The Apogee of Nationalism’

Abstract. This article offers a gender re‐reading of the international history of the post‐First World War peace process, a period when nationalism is said to have reached its ‘apogee’, when national self‐determination and mutual cooperation between nations in the form of a League of Nations defined liberal aspirations for a democratic new world order. It was also a period when international women's organisations emphasised female self‐determination as both a national and international issue. Juxtaposed, these two aspects of the history of the peace of 1919 shed light on the importance of sex difference to the idea of national self‐determination and to the overlapping constitution of the national and the international as spheres of political agency and influence in the early twentieth century.     

Liberalism and cultural claims in Central and Eastern Europe: toward a pluralist balance†

ABSTRACT. This article relies on cases from new EU member states in postcommunist Europe to integrate two overlapping debates about majority–minority relations. Since the Second World War, political theorists and international institutions have tended to discourage group‐rights approaches in favour of individual rights; meanwhile, policy‐makers who achieved interethnic peace in postcommunist Europe have often opted for group‐rights approaches. On the basis of political theory, international norms and the conduct of political elites in this region, we argue that both the individual‐rights and group‐rights approaches can be differentiated internally along the dimension of pluralism – that is, their willingness to accommodate multiple processes of cultural reproduction. Moreover, both group‐rights and individual‐rights approaches can offer justifications for restricting minority cultural opportunities; furthermore, restrictive group‐rights approaches sometimes cloak their efforts behind ‘Western‐sounding’ individual‐rights rhetoric. Likewise, both group‐rights and individual‐rights approaches can permit group accommodation that can lead to political integration. We find that de facto pluralist approaches to minority accommodation – often spearheaded by moderate parties of the majority in coalition with minority‐group parties – encourage ethnic peace, regardless of their foundation in individual or group rights.     

Try Again,Fail Again,Fail Better? War,the State,and the ‘Post–Conflict’ Challenge in Afghanistan

This article investigates the challenges currently facing Afghanistan. It argues that ‘post–conflict’ peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan may depend on a dramatic expansion of institutionalized economic interdependence: this will not necessarily require obeisance to standard international policy paradigms and it will have to draw on existing patterns of interdependence, even though many of these are rooted in brutally exploitative war economy conditions. The authors argue further that neither peace nor economic development will hold without a centralized, credible and effective state, that the emergence of such a state is a political problem more than a technical problem, and that it will depend on a monopolization of force by the state. Such developments cannot be envisaged without policy being based on a close reading of the long and decidedly non–linear, conflictual experiences in state formation and failure in Afghanistan, a history whose patterns and implications are summarized in this article.     

Global multipolarity,European security and implications for UK grand strategy: back to the future,once again

The international system is returning to multipolarity—a situation of multiple Great Powers—drawing the post‐Cold War ‘unipolar moment’ of comprehensive US political, economic and military dominance to an end. The rise of new Great Powers, namely the ‘BRICs’—Brazil, Russia, India, and most importantly, China—and the return of multipolarity at the global level in turn carries security implications for western Europe. While peaceful political relations within the European Union have attained a remarkable level of strategic, institutional and normative embeddedness, there are five factors associated with a return of Great Power competition in the wider world that may negatively impact on the western European strategic environment: the resurgence of an increasingly belligerent Russia; the erosion of the US military commitment to Europe; the risk of international military crises with the potential to embroil European states; the elevated incentive for states to acquire nuclear weapons; and the vulnerability of economically vital European sea lines and supply chains. These five factors must, in turn, be reflected in European states’ strategic behaviour. In particular, for the United Kingdom—one of western Europe's two principal military powers, and its only insular (offshore) power—the return of Great Power competition at the global level suggests that a return to offshore balancing would be a more appropriate choice than an ongoing commitment to direct military interventions of the kind that have characterized post‐2001 British strategy.     

Russia resurgent? Moscow's campaign to ‘coerce Georgia to peace’

Russia's military incursion into Georgia in August 2008 and formal recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia raise fundamental questions about Russian regional policy, strategic objectives and attitudes to the use of armed force. The spectacle of maneouvre warfare on the periphery of Europe could form a watershed in post‐Cold War Russian relations with its neighbourhood and the wider international community. The speed and scale with which Russia's initial ‘defensive’ intervention to ‘coerce Georgia to peace’ led to a broad occupation of many Georgian regions focuses attention on the motivations behind Russian military preparations for war and the political gains Moscow expected from such a broad offensive. Russia has failed to advance a convincing legal case for its operations and its ‘peace operations’ discourse has been essentially rhetorical. Some Russian goals may be inferred: the creation of military protectorates in South Ossetia and Abkhazia; inducing Georgian compliance, especially to block its path towards NATO; and creating a climate of uncertainty over energy routes in the South Caucasus. Moscow's warning that it will defend its ‘citizens’ (nationals) at all costs broadens the scope of concerns to Russia's other neighbour states, especially Ukraine. Yet an overreaction to alarmist scenarios of a new era of coercive diplomacy may only encourage Russian insistence that its status, that of an aspirant global power, be respected. This will continue to be fuelled by internal political and psychological considerations in Russia. Careful attention will need to be given to the role Russia attributes to military power in pursuing its revisionist stance in the international system.     

World Justice,Global Politics and Nation States: Three Ethico-Political Problems

This paper identifies three sets of problems of a specific ethico-political type, generated by the interrelationship between ethics and politics in the areas of world justice and global politics. One instance in which this interrelationship is tested is that of the conflict of duties and values as it appears in the particular domain of the relations amongst sovereign nation states as well as between them and other social groups. Following the general Introduction, the main body of the paper contains the following three sections. (1) Without elaborating on the detailed mechanics of Kant's theory of perpetual peace, Section II discusses criticisms against the Kantian version of world peace in the context of which the first problem is encountered. The problem identified here is the ambiguity as to whether the establishment of a federated kind of peaceful co-existence between sovereign nations depends on the moral improvement of mankind or whether it is the other way round--i.e. whether ethical progress is a necessary presupposition or, rather, a consequence of political peace. That is, what is here identified as worrying is that the direction of dependence is not clear in such a proposal. Furthermore, such an approach, when applied to certain cases of inter-state differences, yields a rather alarming result as to the de-politicization of national states (Section II.2). (2) Yet such a type of international federalism requires a certain, peculiar, kind of legal enforcement of order without recourse to a supra state. So a re-examination of the notion of a legal order in general is needed. Given these requirements, Section III moves on to discuss moral conflict from the standpoint of relativism as it appears in the ethical and in the legal spheres. The second of our problems, identified in this section, is that, before discussing world justice we must first acknowledge the special relation and asymmetry between ethical standards and legal rules required by such a world order. (3) Finally, Section IV asks whether, given the above two problems, it is possible to envisage theoretically the logical possibility of moral conflict-resolution by postulating unchanging and encompassing super-norms of conduct. These special norms, if possible, would be able to direct action unequivocally when confronted with ethical or other dilemmas of duties (involving equally valid but conflicting demands among sovereign nations). This is the third problem. The Conclusion offers an evaluation of the whole discussion. These three ethico-political problems are shown to be interrelated. The overall thrust of the discussion is that it points to a number of philosophical difficulties in understanding the changing role of national states in a globalized political, economic and cultural environment. Accordingly, such difficulties have repercussions for any moral criticism of issues of world justice and global politics. I must make clear at the outset, though, that the discussion does not concern international relations theories per se.     

Transitional Justice and Political Economies of Survival in Post‐conflict Northern Uganda

This article explores the interplay between transitional justice and ‘everyday’ political economies of survival in post‐conflict Acholiland, northern Uganda. It advances two main arguments. First, that transitional justice — as part and parcel of conventional liberal peacebuilding packages — promotes a repertoire of normatively driven policies that have little bearing on lived realities of social accountability in post‐conflict settings. Second, that in transcending the epistemological and ontological boundaries of transitional justice and using concepts developed in the critical peacebuilding literature — the ‘everyday’ and ‘hybridity’ — a nuanced understanding of this dissonance emerges. Based on extensive fieldwork in Acholiland in the period 2012–14, using a range of qualitative research methods, the author examines the means through which people negotiate social and moral order in the context of post‐conflict life and analyses the tensions between these forms of ‘everyday’ activity and current transitional justice policy and programming in the region.     

Decolonizing branded peacebuilding: abjected women talk back to the Finnish Women,Peace and Security agenda

This article interrogates the sexual ideology of Finnish peacebuilding, the country's foreign policy brand and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda by examining the experiences of women ‘written out of history’. Using the method of ‘writing back’ I juxtapose the construction of a gender‐friendly global peacebuilder identity with experiences in Finland after the Lapland War (1944–45) and in post‐conflict Aceh, Indonesia (1976–2005). Although being divided temporarily and geographically, these two contexts form an intimate part of the abjected and invisible part of the Finnish WPS agenda, revealing a number of colonial and violent overtones of postwar reconstruction: economic and political postwar dystopia of Skolt Sámi and neglect of Acehnese women's experiences in branding the peace settlement and its implementation as a success. Jointly they critique and challenge both the gender/women‐friendly peacebuilder identity construction of Finland and locate the sexual ideology of WPS to that of political economy and post‐conflict political, legal and economic reforms. The article illustrates how the Finnish foreign policy brand has constructed the country as a global problem‐solver and peacemaker, drawing on the heteronormative myth of already achieved gender equality on the one hand and, on the other, tamed asexual female subjectivity: the ‘good woman’ as peacebuilder or victim of violence. By drawing attention to violent effects of the global WPS agenda demanding decolonialization, I suggest that the real success of the WPS agenda should be evaluated by those who have been ‘written out’.     

The state and internal conflict

Research into the causes of contemporary international conflict faces a number of conceptual limitations, which in turn limits the effectiveness of international conflict resolution efforts. Typically, today's internal conflicts are conceived of as irrational outbursts of 'ethnic' hatred, or the breakdown of normally peaceful political systems. In this paper, I argue that the causes of internal conflicts are, in fact, located in the structures of weak states and the actions of weak state elites, who may deliberately engender conflict as a rational response to the internal and external demands brought on by the intrusive processes of globalisation. In this sense, internal conflict is a 'normal' aspect of weak state politics. The weak state framework not only provides a more satisfying explanation of internal conflict, but it has profound implications for conflict resolution. It suggests that conflict resolution must be focused on state reconstruction activities, rather than on saving failing states. It also suggests that there are likely to be many more internal conflicts which demand international action in the future.     

The UN and the African Union in Mali and beyond: a shotgun wedding?

The United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) have collaborated in building a viable African Peace and Security Architecture and have worked together in a number of armed conflicts over the past decade. Examples include the peace operations in Burundi and Somalia, and the hybrid peace operation in Sudan's Darfur region which is perhaps the most prominent illustration of this collaboration. Although the UN Security Council authorized the intervention in Libya, which was approved by leading regional organizations (the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Gulf Cooperation Council), it was opposed initially by the AU although the three African states in the Security Council voted for it. Relations cooled as a result and have grown colder still as the UN snubbed the AU and its initial efforts to engage in post‐conflict stabilization in Mali. While the AU sought to prove itself as a capable security provider and partner on the continent with its operation AFISMA, France's Opération Serval and the UN's peace operation for Mali, MINUSMA, bypassed the African Union. This article explores the underlying fault‐lines between the two organizations by examining interactions between the UN and AU since the latter's launch in 2002, but focusing on the Mali case. The fault‐lines emerging from the analysis are different capabilities, risk‐averse vs risk‐assuming approaches to casualties, diverging geopolitics and leadership rivalry.     

Building from Scratch: The aesthetics of post‐disaster reconstruction(Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article looks at the visual character of post‐conflict and post‐disaster settings, and shows how states of physical ruin can help to produce an ‘aesthetics of post‐disaster reconstruction’. With examples primarily drawn from the author's field site in Timor‐Leste, the article shows how ruins, ashes and demolition may be perceived as enabling particular kinds of agency and opportunity. Thus, some of the most hopeful of international‐intervention dreams of recent decades have been produced out of sites of mass‐scale destruction.