Rentier Statebuilding in a Post‐Conflict Economy: The Case of Kosovo

Kosovo has been under various forms of international administration since 1999. Although the political dimension of this international experience has been widely studied by scholars — especially those associated with the critical theory of liberal peacebuilding — the economic dimension of international rule has received less attention. This article explores the economic dimension by linking insights from rentier theory with critical approaches to liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding. The postulate informing this article is that the sources of a state's income have an impact on its institutional development. The article discusses liberal peacebuilding through the lens of rentier theory, it analyses the economic management in the early years of the international administration of Kosovo, and describes and explores some of the unintended consequences of this massive international presence in Kosovo for the local economy.     

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.     

Illiberal peacebuilding in a hybrid regime. Authoritarian strategies for conflict containment in Myanmar

The post-Cold War period has seen the rise of international liberal peacebuilding, as an overarching framework for international interventions in intrastate conflicts. In contrast, the current period is marked by decline of liberal peacebuilding, and a simultaneous rise of domestic illiberal peacebuilding. This has created a gap between the predominant theoretical and policy framework and the actual form of peacebuilding in many conflict-ridden societies. The present article addresses this challenge through a contextual case study of illiberal peacebuilding in Myanmar. The case study shows how a dominant state actor – the military (Tatmadaw) – has used both coercion and co-optation to contain armed resistance against militarized and centralized statebuilding and thereby strengthen the state's territorial control and authority. While the SLORC/SPDC military junta (1988–2011) sought to contain ethnic armed organizations through military offensives, ceasefire agreements and illiberal peacebuilding, the military based USDP-government (2011–2015) institutionalized a hybrid regime as a framework for political transformation of EAOs, and tolerated a degree of dual territorial, administrative and resource control at the local scale. These clientelist measures failed to address the substantive issues behind Myanmar's multiple and protracted conflicts. They were also combined with military offensives against non-ceasefire groups and war by other means in ceasefire areas. Moreover, the case study demonstrates that the Tatmadaw used its tutelary power to obstructs substantive conflict resolution through negotiated state reforms. Myanmar's peace initiatives during the last three decades should thus be understood as illiberal strategies for containing ethnic armed organizations rather than attempts at substantive conflict resolution.     

Reconstituting Community in Divided Society: Faith-inspired Civil Organizations and the Case of Corrymeela

Abstract

Faith-inspired civil organizations (FICOs) are growing in recognition for their relational and sustainable approaches and contributions to peacebuilding, especially in areas where religious or cultural identities have complicated contexts of violent conflict. The capacity of FICOs to penetrate the deeper and long-term obstacles to peacebuilding is largely a consequence of their underlying faith-based motivations and methods for intervention. This article explores one particular FICO: the Corrymeela Community, which has played a notable public role in the work of peacebuilding and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. In examing the theological roots and operational character of Corrymeela, this article explores possible answers to three important questions. First, as a Christian-inspired organization emphasizing an ecumenical, interfaith approach to sustainable peace, where does Corrymeela locate its theological understanding of violent conflict and purposeful intervention? Second, how does this theological understanding inform and shape its operational strategies for strategic peacebuilding in Northern Ireland? Finally, in a “post-Troubles” Northern Ireland, what is the way forward for such an organization? How might its work and lessons-learned as a FICO continue to impact Northern Ireland, while at the same time contribute to the convoluted work of reconciliation in other regions confronting religiously-fueled violence?     

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.     

The Altai Road: Visions of Development across the Russian–Chinese Border

The Altai Republic is a poor mountainous region of Russia squeezed between Kazakstan, China and Mongolia. A project to build a road connecting Russia with China through the Altai has been conceived within a quadripartite regional co‐operation project, supported by Western development organizations. Yet while at the Chinese side of the border road construction went ahead, in Russia, a coalition of globally connected ecologists, romantic ‘Eurasianists’, nostalgic conservationists and anti‐Chinese xenophobes turned the road into a political hot potato. This case study, in which production and investment are the focus on the Chinese side and environmental protection is key on the Russian side of the border, shows the inadequacy of approaches that pit global capital/international (read: Western) organizations against local (read: non‐Western) resistance or adaptation. China's entry into the politics of international development may be a setback for development critics who have helped engineer a ‘cultural turn’ in institutions such as the World Bank.     

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.     

Epistemic justice and everyday nationalism: An auto‐ethnography of transnational student encounters in a post‐war memory and reconciliation project in Kosovo

This contribution introduces an exercise in epistemic justice to the study of everyday nationalism in post‐conflict, transnational (local and international) encounters. It explores how everyday nationalism, in often unexpected and hidden ways, underpinned a cocreational, educational project involving several local (Albanian) and international (British based) university students and staff collaborating on the theme of post‐war memory and reconciliation in Kosovo. The set‐up resembled a microcosm of transnational social encounters in project collaborations in which the problem of nationalism, typically, is associated with one side only: here, the Kosovars. Guided by Goffman's (1982) social interactionist framework, the study employs selected participants' paraethnographic and auto‐ethnographic reflections of their project experiences and practices after the event in order to trace the everyday workings of mutual assumptions and constructions of a national self and other for all sides involved. In this, it explores how the project participants' asymmetric positioning within a wider, global context of unequal power relations shaped their vernacular epistemologies of belonging and identity. It thereby excavated what otherwise taken‐for‐granted criteria can become relevant in such local/international social encounters as reflected upon and how the enduring power imbalances underpinning these might best be redressed.     

The Strength of Weak States? Non‐State Security Forces and Hybrid Governance in Africa

In this article, I explore the recent revalorization of non‐state forms of order and authority in the context of hybrid approaches to governance and state building in Africa. I argue for a more empirical and comparative approach to hybrid governance that is capable of distinguishing between constructive and corrosive forms of non‐state order, and sharpens rather than blurs the relationship between formal and informal regulation. A critique of the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding hybrid governance perspectives sets the scene for a comparative analysis of two contrasting situations of hybrid security systems: the RCD‐ML of eastern DR Congo, and the Bakassi Boys vigilante group of eastern Nigeria. In each case, four issues are examined: the basis of claims that regulatory authority has shifted to informal security systems; the local legitimacy of the security forces involved; the wider political context; and finally, whether a genuine transformation of regulatory authority has resulted, offering local populations a preferable alternative to the prior situation of neglectful or predatory rule. I argue that hybrid governance perspectives often essentialize informal regulatory systems, disguising coercion and political capture as popular legitimacy, and I echo calls for a more historically and empirically informed analysis of hybrid governance contexts.     

Aid Conditionality as a Tool for Peacebuilding: Opportunities and Constraints

Over the past decade, aid donors have pledged billions of dollars to support peacebuilding efforts in collapsed states and war–torn societies. Peace conditionality — the use of formal performance criteria and informal policy dialogue to encourage the implementation of peace accords and the consolidation of peace — could make aid a more effective tool for building peace. In Bosnia, for example, donors have attempted to link aid to the protection of human rights, co–operation with the international war crimes tribunal, and the right of people displaced by ‘ethnic cleansing’ to return to their homes. Yet the conventional practices and priorities of aid donors pose constraints to the exercise of peace conditionality. This article examines several of these constraints, including the reluctance of donors (particularly the international financial institutions) to acknowledge responsibility for the political repercussions of aid; the competing foreign–policy objectives of donor governments; the humanitarian imperative to aid people whose lives are at risk; and the incentive structures and institutional cultures of donor agencies.     

LAND USE POLICY AS AN INTERNATIONAL ISSUE

Land use is not an end in itself; it is a means to the realization of a broad range of human objectives – social, economic and political. Few public issues appear to be more strictly national. In environment-related United Nations conferences, Third World representatives in particular have asserted the absolute control of nations over their land and natural resources. Nevertheless, international concern over land use has been growing. This concern is both scientific and political and derives from the perception that use and misuse of land may have international repercussions. Developing countries facing disastrous consequences of unwise land use practices (e.g., soil erosion, desertification, water logging and salinization, laterization, and loss of agricultural land to urbanization) have appealed to international organizations for aid. FAO, UNEP, IUCN, ICSU, and the UN Economic Commissions have undertaken land-use related research and assistance programs. Political sensitivities preclude external involvement in national land use policy except in dire circumstances as, for example, in the drought-stricken African Sahel. Thus legitimate international concerns must find indirect strategies to influence governments from among their own national constituents. The IUCN World Conservation Strategy suggests a route that might lead toward concerted action among nations in the formulation of genuine international land use policy.     

From local turn to space-relational analysis: Participatory peacebuilding in a Colombian borderland

This paper offers a space-relational extension to the local turn in peace studies. We argue that unflattening the local in research on peace and conflict has the potential to explain why multi-modal participatory peacebuilding produces tensions, disappointments, and adaptations across a volatile and fluid state-society interface. Our analysis focuses on three space-relational dimensions: contested claims to territorial representation; the scalar organisation of the state; and the dynamics of extensive uneven urbanisation in peripheral regions. Catatumbo, a conflict-affected borderland region of Colombia, constitutes the empirical focus of our study, which covers both the protracted negotiations leading to the 2016 national peace agreement and its ongoing fraught implementation. Drawing on mixed-methods research, our findings show that despite vibrant forms of pro-peace participation, a regional consensus failed to emerge amidst ongoing violence, unfulfilled state promises and new threats to the economy and environment. Yet, grassroots peacebuilding continues to be reinvented and includes innovative forms of socio-territorial dialogue. Concluding remarks reflect on opportunities to broaden space-relational analysis of socially and geographically complex peacebuilding efforts across and beyond Colombia.     

On National Heritage,Grand Narratives,and ‘Making History Fun’: Founders’ Hall,Prince Edward Island and the Story of Canada

Cities in developed countries are increasingly challenged by the advent of a global economy that mandates generating creative images of their cities. Meanwhile, it is argued in this study that globalisation, and its Arabic version of Dubaisation, is affecting the sustainability of cities as distinguished destinations because urban representation is influenced not only by ‘standardised global cliché’ but also by ‘standardised local images’ that transforms local cultures into contested heritage as it intensifies an official and civic nexus. The paradox is examined in Jordan, specifically the famously branded ‘city of mosaic’ – Madaba, where the state government is currently competing for attracting international investments and tourism development to achieve neoliberal urban restructuring. Urban heritage representation has been subject to passive dominant official discourse that rests upon orthodox mosaic practices of remote past – a praxis that is not necessarily endorsed by civic Ahl elbalad. The local mosaic heritage has hitherto been transformed into a competing culture that fosters heritage dualities and challenges the internal implications of heritage representation with its elevated feelings of alienation, disempowerment, gentrification and socio-cultural exclusion. A theoretical framework has been suggested for an alternative civic-orientated heritage revival that allows reconciliation between the official/civic nexus yet meanwhile stimulates creative urban images and identities. Other insights are also considered in the study.     

The Shady Side of Consultation and Compensation: ‘Divide‐and‐Rule’ Tactics in Bolivia's Extraction Sector

The rights to prior consultation and compensation have been established within the framework of international indigenous peoples’ rights. However, in practice these processes have often gone hand in hand with adverse social consequences for local populations, such as the exacerbation of conflicts, the division of communities and the weakening of indigenous organizations. These phenomena have received little attention, despite their great relevance for these populations. This article sheds light on the use by the Bolivian state and extraction corporations of exclusionary participation and negotiation processes, on the one hand, and ‘carrot‐and‐stick’ techniques on the other, which have together accounted for negative social impacts on the ground. The article is based on recently conducted field research, focus group discussions and semi‐structured interviews in Guaraní communities in Bolivia. The findings extend the existing literature by providing a fine‐grained and systematic analysis of divisive undertakings and their sociocultural and sociopolitical consequences in neo‐extractivist Bolivia. The broader implications of the study add to academic debates about participation in development, about ‘divide‐and‐rule’ tactics and about the practice of indigenous peoples’ rights.     

‘Brothers at Peace’: People-to-People Reconciliation in the Ethiopian–Eritrean Borderlands

The coming to power of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia in 2018 opened up a renewed peace engagement with Eritrea and diplomatic relations were restored. Before the political rapprochement, grassroots processes of people-to-people reconciliation in the borderlands between the two countries had been underway for years, gradually eroding officially-produced enemy stereotypes. This article explores how physical borders and boundaries of identity at a local level may be conceived differently from that at state borders or expressions of formal nationalism at an inter-state level. The local level border between the northern regional state of Tigray in Ethiopia and Eritrea has become increasingly porous over the last years, whilst the inter-state border was rigidly defended. The political rapprochement is however disconnected from the people-to-people reconciliation, as the local government in Tigray is at odds with both Ethiopia’s federal government in Addis Ababa and the Eritrean government. The formalised peace processes are elite driven, leaving no voice for the people affected in the borderlands.     

跨国迁移对农村留守妇女婚姻家庭生活的影响——基于福建省明溪县H村的个案研究

论文基于质性研究方法,以人口国际迁移现象比较突出的明溪县H村为研究个案,从家庭收支特征、家庭地位、婚姻生活状态和社会支持网络等方面考察和分析了丈夫跨国迁移对农村留守妇女婚姻家庭生活的影响。研究结果显示,丈夫出国使家庭条件和物质生活得到改善,推动了农村妇女家庭地位的改善,电话联系弥补了夫妻空间分离造成的负面影响,但丈夫缺位使留守妇女承担了多重责任,婚姻品质和社会生活也因为丈夫出国而改变。与此同时,留守妇女的消费结构和消费观念并没有因为丈夫出国而发生明显的改变,社会生活支持网络并未弱化,仍是传统的亲属网络。     

Is It Always Good to Talk? The Paradoxes of Truth-Telling by Rwandan Youth Born of Rape Committed during the Genocide

Social scientists have extensively debated the virtues, pitfalls, and practical effects of open dialogue and truth-telling versus silence and concealment in global post-conflict endeavours for justice and reconciliation. This article addresses these debates not by endorsing practices of either talk or silence, but by investigating the practical dilemmas faced by Rwandan youth born of rape committed during the 1994 genocide as they find themselves caught in dual cultural imperatives to reveal and to conceal the circumstances of their origins. On the one hand, the post-genocide moment has seen the rise of truth-telling and self-revelation through testimonial practices in settings like post-genocide trials and reconciliation or peace-building workshops. On the other hand, silence and concealment are accepted and expected modes of dealing with hardship in Rwandan cultural practice, and youth participants struggled with the stigma of having been born of genocidal rape. We argue that the youths’ ambivalent and sometimes contradictory moral evaluations of talking about versus hiding their origins highlight the challenges and complexities of identity and belonging in post-genocide Rwanda, since their very existence draws them, their mothers, and their perpetrator-fathers into ongoing relationships. These youths’ lives and experiences speak to larger and powerful conundrums at the heart of what it means to live with legacies of violence, including what should be said or remain unsaid, and how the very opposition between revealing and concealing can be confounded by social and cultural variances in the meaning of “truth.”     

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.     

Religious Transformations in the Middle Ages: Towards a New Archaeological Agenda

UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS CHANGE between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Reformation forms one of the cornerstones of medieval archaeology, but has been riven by period, denominational, and geographical divisions. This paper lays the groundwork for a fundamental rethink of archaeological approaches to medieval religions, by adopting an holistic framework that places Christian, pagan, Islamic and Jewish case studies of religious transformation in a long-term, cross-cultural perspective. Focused around the analytical themes of ‘hybridity and resilience’ and ‘tempo and trajectories’, our approach shifts attention away from the singularities of national narratives of religious conversion, towards a deeper understanding of how religious beliefs, practices and identity were renegotiated by medieval people in their daily lives.