A Requiem for Peacebuilding? [1st ed.] 9783030564766, 9783030564773

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RETHINKING PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES SERIES EDITORS: OLIVER P. RICHMOND · ANNIKA BJÖRKDAHL · GËZIM VISOKA

A Requiem for Peacebuilding?

Edited by Jorg Kustermans Tom Sauer Barbara Segaert

Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

Series Editors Oliver P. Richmond University of Manchester Manchester, UK Annika Björkdahl Department of Political Science Lund University Lund, Sweden Gëzim Visoka Dublin City University Dublin, Ireland

This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a decade old, provides an interdisciplinary forum aimed at advancing innovative new agendas for peace and conflict studies in International Relations. Many of the critical volumes the series has so far hosted have contributed to new avenues of analysis directly or indirectly related to the search for positive, emancipatory, and hybrid forms of peace. Constructive critiques of liberal peace, hybrid peace, everyday contributions to peace, the role of civil society and social movements, international actors and networks, as well as a range of different dimensions of peace (from peacebuilding, statebuilding, youth contributions, photography, and many case studies) have been explored so far. The series raises important political questions about what peace is, whose peace and peace for whom, as well as where peace takes place. In doing so, it offers new and interdisciplinary perspectives on the development of the international peace architecture, peace processes, UN peacebuilding, peacekeeping and mediation, statebuilding, and localised peace formation in practice and in theory. It examines their implications for the development of local peace agency and the connection between emancipatory forms of peace and global justice, which remain crucial in different conflict-affected regions around the world. This series’ contributions offer both theoretical and empirical insights into many of the world’s most intractable conflicts, also investigating increasingly significant evidence about blockages to peace.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14500

Jorg Kustermans · Tom Sauer · Barbara Segaert Editors

A Requiem for Peacebuilding?

Editors Jorg Kustermans Department of Political Science University of Antwerp Antwerpen, Belgium

Tom Sauer Department of Political Science University of Antwerp Antwerpen, Belgium

Barbara Segaert University Centre Saint-Ignatius Antwerp Antwerpen, Belgium

Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies ISBN 978-3-030-56476-6 ISBN 978-3-030-56477-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Peacebuilding’s Predicament: A Dark Mood Among the Experts Jorg Kustermans, Tom Sauer, and Barbara Segaert

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Part I Why Peacebuilding Appears Moribund 2

Peacebuilding’s Origins and History Michael C. Pugh

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Revisiting the Local Turn in Peacebuilding Filip Ejdus

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Domestic Religion: Why Interreligious Dialogue in Kenya Conserves Rather Than Disrupts Power Atalia Omer

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Part II How Peacebuilding Takes Shape in the Margins 5

The Missing Link in Hybrid Peacebuilding: Localized Peace Trajectories and Endogenous Knowledge Aura Liliana López López and Bert Ingelaere

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CONTENTS

Old and New Peace in El Salvador: How Peace Strategies Emerge, Disappear and Transform Chris van der Borgh Land and Peacebuilding: The Case of the Peacebuilding Process in Colombia Through the Peasant Reserve Zones Cinthya Carrillo Perdomo Peacebuilding and Resistance: Inequality, Empowerment, Refusal Birgit Bräuchler

Part III 9

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Can Peacebuilding Be Recreated at the Centre?

Achieving a Feminist Peace by Blurring Boundaries Between Private and Public Nina Wilén

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The Fraught Development of an International Peace Architecture Oliver P. Richmond

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Chris van der Borgh is a lecturer, researcher and consultant with the Centre for Conflict Studies at Utrecht University. He specialises in issues of peace and security, political order and international intervention. Recent publications focus on the politics of security provision in Kosovo and El Salvador. Birgit Bräuchler (Ph.D.) is senior lecturer in Anthropology at Monash University. Her research interests include peace and conflict studies and media anthropology. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited/authored a number of books, including The Cultural Dimension of Peace (2015) that was awarded the Ernst-Otto-Czempiel price 2016. Cinthya Carrillo Perdomo holds a master’s degree in Political Science (Osnabrück University). Her research and work have focused on women’s rights, land rights, transitional justice and peacebuilding in Colombia. Since 2014 she works at Sinestesia ONG, an NGO founded by her and colleagues from different professions to protect and promote human rights in the country. Filip Ejdus is Associate Professor at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade. His most recent book is Crisis and Ontological Security: Serbia’s Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession. He is Board President of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy and (co)Editor in Chief of Journal of Regional Security. vii

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Bert Ingelaere is lecturer at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp, Belgium. He studies the legacy of mass violence, co-edited Genocide, Risk and Resilience and authored Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts. Seeking Justice After Genocide. His work was awarded the Auschwitz Foundation Prize and 2017 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize. Jorg Kustermans is an associate professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He does research on the conceptual history of peace and on the shifting sources of international authority. Aura Liliana López López is an independent M&E and learning consultant. She holds a M.Sc. in Governance and Development and was awarded the Prize for Development Cooperation of the Province of Antwerp, Belgium, for her dissertation Local peacemaking trajectories and hybrid peace: Tracing knowledge, capacity and agency on conflict-driven areas. Atalia Omer (Ph.D. Harvard University 2008) is a gion, conflict and peace studies at the University of Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2017), she is the author of books including Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

professor of reliNotre Dame. An many articles and in Solidarity with

Michael C. Pugh is Professor Emeritus, University of Bradford. He served as Honorary Professor, School of International Relations, St Andrews and Visiting Professor Radboud University Nijmegen. He was editor of International Peacekeeping. He writes extensively on peace and conflict, recently focusing on political economies of peacebuilding particularly in Southeast Europe. Oliver P. Richmond is Research Professor in IR, Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. He is also International Professor at Dublin City University. His publications include Peace Formation and Political Order in Conflict Affected Societies (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Failed Statebuilding (Yale University Press, 2014). He is editor of the Palgrave book series, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, and co-editor of the Journal, Peacebuilding. Tom Sauer is Associate Professor in International Politics at the Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium). He is specialised in international security, and

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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more in particular in nuclear arms control, proliferation, and disarmament. He is a former BCSIA Fellow at Harvard University (US). Sauer received the 2019 Rotary International Alumni Global Service Award. Barbara Segaert holds a master diploma in Oriental Studies, Islamic Studies and Arab Philology (KU Leuven, Belgium) and a master in the Social Sciences (Open University, UK). She is project coordinator at the University Centre Saint Ignatius Antwerp where she develops academic programmes on various topics of contemporary relevance to society. Nina Wilén is Research Director for the Africa Programme of the Egmont Institute and Assistant Professor at Lund University. She has published widely on topics related to gender, peace operations and the military. She is the author of Justifying Interventions in Africa, (De)Stabilising Sovereignty and the Editor-in-Chief of International Peacekeeping.

List of Figures

Chapter 5 Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Dimensions and elements of a peace trajectory (Source López López, A. L., & Ingelaere, B. [2019]. The missing link in hybrid peacebuilding: localized peace trajectories & endogenous knowledge) Location of the city of Cali on the map of Colombia (Left). Location of the District of Aguablanca in the city of Cali (Right) (Source Author’s adaptation from Wikipedia [Colombia Map] and Alcaldía de Cali [Aguablanca]) The peace trajectory in the District of Aguablanca, Colombia (Source López López, A. L., & Ingelaere, B. [2019]. The missing link in hybrid peacebuilding: localized peace trajectories & endogenous knowledge)

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Chapter 7 Fig. 1

Articulation of the PRZ as an instrumental method of peacebuilding in Colombia (Source Own elaboration)

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Chapter 10 Fig. 1

The international peace architecture

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CHAPTER 1

Peacebuilding’s Predicament: A Dark Mood Among the Experts Jorg Kustermans, Tom Sauer, and Barbara Segaert

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Introduction

This volume collects nine chapters about peacebuilding as a global practice. The chapters were first presented at a workshop on peacebuilding that we, the editors of this volume, organized. That workshop was the third in a series of three workshops on various understandings of war and peace in the present era. The first workshop examined the continuing relevance of pacifism as a politico-ethical doctrine (Kustermans et al. 2019). The second workshop revolved around the notion of non-nuclear peace and investigated a ‘possible future’ (cf. Patomäki 2006) world

J. Kustermans (B) · T. Sauer Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] T. Sauer e-mail: [email protected] B. Segaert University Centre Saint-Ignatius Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_1

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without nuclear weapons, exploring more particularly whether and how peace could be maintained in such a context (Sauer et al. 2020). As organizers of this series of events, we had originally thought that the workshop on peacebuilding would be the more self-confident one. After all, peacebuilding has secured for itself institutional footing. The United Nations has had a Peacebuilding Commission for some 13 years now and its Secretariat now also—since 2019—has a Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (which used to be named rather more simply Department of Political Affairs [1992–2019] and before that Department of Political and Security Council Affairs [1952–1992]). To the extent that meaning can be read in such a change of names, it suggests an increased commitment to peacebuilding on the part of the international community and thus, enough reason for self-confidence among its practitioners and its observers. However, that was not the impression that we got during the workshop, where, quite on the contrary, a dark mood reigned. Admittedly, we did not invite field practitioners nor U.N. civil servants to the event. The workshop was a scholarly gathering and it is to be expected that scholars will critically assess whatever phenomenon they decide to engage with. That is, after all, the scholarly vocation. We do not celebrate; we examine. We do not champion; we question. And yet, more appeared to be going on. The two other workshops that we organized were scholarly workshops much in the way that the third one was, but the same kind of generalized skepticism did not animate the discussions there. In spite of pacifism and nuclear elimination having rather less institutional support than peacebuilding does, the tone was rather more hopeful then than it was in the deliberations about peacebuilding. Obviously, this could be due simply and exclusively to the selection of participants, but we do not think so. We think there is more going on and we call this ‘more’ peacebuilding’s predicament. Interestingly, peacebuilding’s predicament may imply that peacebuilding—as a global practice, but also more particularly as an international project—will outlive our qualms about it and our sense of its moribundity. Peacebuilding’s future may be more secure than we think. Our singing, or even our composing, its requiem may be rather premature. We do admit to advancing these claims as outsiders looking in. We (the editors) ourselves are not involved first-hand in the study of peacebuilding. We organized a workshop and are now introducing the volume that was ‘birthed’ during that workshop. What we will do in the remainder of this introductory chapter, therefore, is to explain how

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our claims emerged from the workshop (and thus from the chapters that comprise this volume). In a first section, we document the ‘dark mood among the experts’ as it transpired from the workshop and as we also see it evidenced in the broader literature on peacebuilding. We obviously recognize that not every expert shares in this mood and we give ample space to more hopeful voices in the second part of this volume. It is significant, though, that these more hopeful voices typically draw attention to forms of peacebuilding that are developing outside of the reach of capital I and P ‘Internationalized Peacebuilding.’ Peacebuilding persists as a global practice—as an all but spontaneous, human practice, that is—even if it is being challenged as an international project. At the same time, it is unmistakable that peacebuilding is being challenged as an international project and this needs to be addressed. At the end of the first section of this chapter, we reflect on the reasons for this dark mood. What explains it? In a second section, we turn toward the future. Here we introduce the idea of peacebuilding’s predicament and we explain why scholars sounding its requiem may be acting prematurely.

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A Dark Mood Among the Experts 2.1

The Dark Mood Documented

A mood is by definition intangible, but to say that a mood is intangible is not to say that it is fleeting. Quite on the contrary. While emotions are experienced in immediate response to a particular event, moods develop more slowly and, once in place, are more difficult to shake off. One easily imagines the expression of disappointment at the failure of this or that particular peacebuilding initiative in the 1990s, but the overall mood, at that time, remained one of optimism or even triumphalism (Hobson 2015, p. 3). By now the mood has swung like a pendulum, and disappointment has become pervasive. Assessments of the failures of peacebuilding become ever more radical, with a leading scholar recently coming to the conclusion that the ‘liberal peacebuilding framework [was] an accident of the historical moment and liberal overconfidence in the 1990s. A policy blip that was always destined to fail based as it was more on our naïve idealism than any understanding of the world’ (Chandler 2017, p. 12; Chandler is paraphrasing Lake 2016). Very similar sentiments are being expressed in some of the chapters in the present volume. For example, in what was originally meant to be a somewhat hopeful

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reflection on the future of peacebuilding, Oliver Richmond diagnoses the current predicament of international peacebuilding as one of ‘increasing moribundity.’ Chandler (2017, pp. 6–9), it might be noted, pushes the idea further and claims peacebuilding has come to its end already, citing a number of United Nations documents announcing that the U.N. will no longer do peacebuilding. Chandler appears to be documenting the euthanasia of peacebuilding. Our contributors do not appear to agree with that radical assessment, although their diagnoses, like that of Richmond, are often sobering. Michael C. Pugh, a veteran observer of the international peacebuilding project, expresses severe doubt with respect to the possibility of ‘salvaging’ the practice and he ends his chapter with a disabusing observation, when he suggests that ‘peacebuilding, like King Lear, is becoming senile.’ In a similar vein, in the conclusion of his chapter on the so-called local turn in peacebuilding (and in development policy), Filip Ejdus wonders whether ‘the local turn still provides a progressive avenue for the future of peacebuilding,’ but immediately adds the possibility that it may have been ‘only a swan song of the declining liberal order.’ Similarly skeptical is the assessment of Cynthia Carrillo, who, in her chapter on the peace-fostering role of Peasant Reserve Zones in Colombia, presents ‘the decline of international peacebuilding’ as though it were an obvious fact. We are well aware that our emphasis on these quotes and the words that appear in them—historical accident (Chandler), moribundity (Richmond), senile (Pugh), swan song (Ejdus), decline (Carrillo)—do not do justice to the complexity of their argument. Actually, we do not even think that any of them would totally agree with David Chandler that peacebuilding is definitively on its way out. But at the same time, it would be a mistake to dismiss the use of these words as mere rhetorical flourish, as the kind of expressions that academic authors will occasionally use to give slightly more rhetorical punch to their otherwise overly nuanced arguments. We think that rhetorical flourish has considerable significance insofar as it serves to indicate a mood. The (somewhat) poetical words chosen by our authors are signals of the intellectual mood in which they find themselves operating. A dark mood reigns among the experts indeed. 2.2

The Dark Mood Qualified

If we are well aware that the arguments of scholars cannot be reduced to the intellectual mood that suffuses those arguments, we are equally aware

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that not everybody in the field of peacebuilding is experiencing the same mood. Plenty of scholars and practitioners of peacebuilding are soldiering on courageously. It is not difficult to find relatively recent research articles, published in the more prominent journals, which express a belief that international peacebuilding, as instituted and organized by the United Nations, can indeed be successful. It may have to be remodeled a bit here and there, but, on this view, nothing should be assumed intrinsically to stand in the way of its ultimate success (e.g., Gizelis 2009). An important, and still relatively recent, book by Peter Wallensteen (2015) exemplifies the position too. Wallensteen introduces the concept of quality peace and argues that we should evaluate any situation of peace and any plan for peace in light of this notion. If one bears in mind that other scholars are arguing in favor of increased recognition of the inevitability of ‘compromised peacebuilding,’ the significance of Wallensteen’s championing of such notion as ‘quality peace’ is all the more obvious. It signals a refusal to give up on the promise of peacebuilding. That Wallensteen ends his book with a chapter discussing different ‘paths to peace’ and that here he summons the great powers of the moment not to turn their back on international organizations signals more specifically his continued commitment to peacebuilding as an international project. Cognizant of the many challenges that international peacebuilding faces, Wallensteen nonetheless keeps the faith. His last lesson learned thus states (somewhat understatedly and somewhat enigmatically): ‘Unorthodox forms of cooperation between international organizations may further the ability of the international community to succeed in building quality peace.’ Similarly optimistic voices can be heard in some of the contributions to this volume. A prominent example is Nina Wilén’s chapter on the possible achievement of a feminist peace. Wilén recognizes that ‘some of [her suggested] reforms are difficult to implement in a post-conflict context where resources are scarce and institutions are fragile,’ but then adds, in what other contributors might experience as an unduly optimistic way, that this problem can probably be overcome because in that same post-conflict context, ‘many states enjoy strong support from external organizations, both in terms of human and financial resources. […] external organizations [can] play a role conducive to gender equality by earmarking some of the budget to ensure that services such as healthcare and child care facilities are affordable and accessible to all.’ A bit of remodeling here and there, but, Chandler and other radical critics aside, no

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reason to think that international peacebuilding is necessarily doomed. On the contrary, as per Wallensteen, it is called for more than ever. No one mood marks the study of peacebuilding, but while there are always multiple moods, it seems fair to argue that, at least in our case, one mood is dominant and the other recessive. Judging by the chapters of this book, the optimistic mood is clearly the recessive one and the more pessimistic mood the dominant one. 2.3

The Dark Mood Explained

If we agree for the moment that a dark mood reigns among the experts of peacebuilding, this invites the question why this would be the case. Settling that question with some degree of confidence would demand proper research into it. Scholarship such as that of Catherine Goetze (2017; on the habitus of peacebuilders) should be a helpful starting point in this regard. Within the confines of this introduction, and bringing back to mind that we are outsiders looking in (or perhaps looking on), we can do no more than offer a few possible explanations. There are three that we want to mention. One could argue, somewhat counterintuitively, that the very institutional prominence of peacebuilding explains the dark mood that now marks it. Compare pacifism and the championing of a future non-nuclear peace. Both stances remain minority positions (Kustermans et al. 2019; Sauer et al. 2020). Both stances, that is, can assume a posture of resistance. They oppose dominant approaches to war and peace. Pacifism opposes the hegemony of just war thinking and anti-nuclear activism pits itself against widely accepted notions of nuclear deterrence. And while continuing resistance can create a sense of fatigue, it also creates a sense of solidarity and worthiness, and hence also of (moral) certainty, which is more difficult to sustain for those in a position of institutional prominence. What is more, because they remain in the minority and because they are opposing dominant frameworks, pacifism and anti-nuclearism also enjoy the comfort of remaining aspirational. As long as an ethicopolitical approach is not tested by reality, it is so much easier for it to retain a sense of youthful enthusiasm (cf. Mill 1879, ch. 2; referenced in O’Meara 2015, p. 13). It is with this kind of reality check that most people explain the dark mood that suffuses the literature on peacebuilding. The dark mood, this account holds, simply reflects a realistic appraisal of the achievements of

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international peacebuilding. Peacebuilding failed and the documentation of its failures will, understandably, not give occasion to celebratory prose. What defines the argument, more particularly, is the assumption that the failure of peacebuilding is due to its DNA, namely that peacebuilding had to end in failure because it was ill-conceived from the start. It was a topdown project and top-down projects cannot possibly work (cf. Ejdus). It was a neoliberal project from the start and neoliberal projects cannot possibly work (cf. Pugh, Omer). It is this kind of idea, we think, that leads people—such as David Lake (2016) and David Chandler (2017)— to argue that peacebuilding was an ‘historical accident’ and no more than a ‘policy blip’—a mistake, the failure of which was predictable. Notice, in this context, that the argument is increasingly that peacebuilding did not simply fail, but that it often exacerbates the problems. Recent analyses of how peacebuilding ‘enables autocracy’ (von Billerbeck and Tansey 2019) (rather than promotes democracy) illustrate this more radical interpretation of peacebuilding’s intrinsic and all but inevitable failure. A third possible explanation of the increasingly dark mood vis-àvis peacebuilding would make reference to changed circumstances. In her chapter, Carrillo (drawing on Chandler 2017, p. 1) hints at the impact of technological innovation on the organization of peacebuilding, expressing doubt that sustained, on-the-ground—i.e., meaningful (cf. Duffield 2010)—peacebuilding action will continue to happen. However, the change of context that receives by far the most attention in the contemporary literature on peacebuilding (and in the study of global governance more generally) is that of emerging powers. What consequences will the emergence of non-Western, non-liberal powers have on the international community’s commitment to the practice of peacebuilding (cf. Call and de Coning 2017)? It is interesting to note, in this context, that Filip Ejdus strikes his most pessimistic note about the future of peacebuilding when he reflects on this change of context. He appears to discern a chance for redemption, for retooling and remodeling, in the practice of peacebuilding, but then appears to fear that it will ultimately be overwhelmed by a changing geopolitical landscape. ‘One is left to wonder’, he writes, ‘what we can make out of the “local turn” in a world of rapid democratic backsliding, surge of populism, revival of nationalism, return of geopolitics and rise of authoritarian powers. Does

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the “local turn” still provide a progressive avenue for the future of peacebuilding? [Or] was it only a swan song of the declining liberal order [?]’

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What Does the Future Hold in Store?

There is a touch of the dramatic to the title of this volume—A Requiem for Peacebuilding?—which is only partly balanced by the question mark at its end. And yet we would insist on the importance of that question mark, because we—let us repeat: three outsiders looking in—are far from sure about the future of peacebuilding. Singing its requiem may be rather premature. There are reasons to believe that we may have to rethink the precise nature of peacebuilding’s predicament. While its current predicament is that it is in rough waters, that it is experiencing a crisis of confidence, its more general predicament may well be that it is bound to stay afloat. Whenever there is political authority, there will be peacebuilding (of some kind). Peacebuilding will have to adapt to changed circumstances, but unless we are witnessing the total disintegration of (international) political order, there will be peacebuilding. It will evolve, but it will not die off. In the paragraphs that follow, we try to clarify these claims. 3.1

An Afterlife for Peacebuilding

The contributions to the second part of this book discuss a number of case studies. All of these chapters share, to a greater or lesser extent, a pessimistic diagnosis of the project of International Peacebuilding. Yet all of them also show, more or less deliberately, the naturalness of peacebuilding as a human practice. This intuitive commitment on the part of the majority of human beings to the containment of conflict and the (re)establishment of a condition (or at least moments or spaces) of peace has been thematized in the scholarly literature in terms of ‘everyday peace’ (MacGinty 2014). In situations of protracted violent conflict, and notwithstanding the consuming nature thereof and thus the likelihood of the development of toxic emotions in such situations, some people— oftentimes women (Ring 2006)—will be investing time and effort in building peace. What this means is that even if International Peacebuilding with capital I and P were to come to an end, other forms of peacebuilding—of building peace—would most certainly emerge. People

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understand the benefits of peace (and will work toward its achievement) without having to be told by the international community and certified peacebuilding experts. The global practice of building peace will survive the demise—were it to occur—of the international project of Peacebuilding. The danger here, as a number of scholars have warned, is to want to romanticize such developments (e.g., Holanda Maschieto 2016). While some of the chapters (Lopez and Ingelaere; Bräuchler) do put emphasis on the promise of locally grounded forms of peacemaking, some of the other chapters (van der Borgh; Carrillo) strike a more sober note. Van der Borgh’s account of the so-called Pax Mafioso illustrates the danger of romanticization. The Salvadoran government negotiating a truce with and among gangs represents a clear case of pragmatic, locally grounded peacebuilding, but at the same time, many of us would hesitate to name it that. We tend to think of it as a false peace, but then we should be aware that in many cases the (spontaneous, intuitive) practice of peacebuilding will lead to the achievement of (what peace activists would call) false peace. True peace, as Saint Augustine (2004) taught us a long time ago, cannot possibly be achieved within the earthly city. True peace, as he saw it, belongs to the city of God. Therefore, whether it materializes as a locally grounded global practice, or as a top-down international project, peacebuilding will always have its critics. In other words: we expect that peacebuilding will continue after the demise of International Peacebuilding, but then we also expect it to continue to disappoint. Critics of Peacebuilding with a capital P will become critics of locally grounded peacebuilding. The concept of ‘peace’ fosters expectations in them (true peace, positive peace), which the reality of ‘peacebuilding’ cannot possibly live up to. 3.2

A Continuing Story of a Death Foretold

It was an assumption of the previous paragraph that Peacebuilding as an international project might well be on its way out. However, there are reasons to assume that International Peacebuilding will remain an institutional reality—after all, the fact that the United Nations now has a Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs suggests as much. Earlier signs proved deceptive, like the U.N. documents that questioned the validity of the practice, to which David Chandler attributed a lot of significance in his analysis of the crisis of peacebuilding. It should further

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be noted, in this context, that many of the more critical authors in this volume recognize the contribution that the international community (i.e., international discourses, international networks, international resources) can make to locally grounded efforts at peacebuilding. They are careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. However, this is not the point that we want to make here. Rather, we wish to argue that there are reasons to think that International Peacebuilding will remain an institutional reality even if nobody thought that it was a good idea. The clearest such argument occurs in Michael C. Pugh’s opening chapter. Pugh ends his contribution with the warning that ‘peacebuilding [might be] becoming senile.’ But these concluding words reflect mood more than argument, and if one looks carefully at the argument itself, it is about ‘persistence’ (in spite of failure) rather than about ‘demise.’ Pugh points to the political-economic embeddedness of International Peacebuilding and he clearly expects that the vested interests that dominate the global political economy will continue to dominate and that International Peacebuilding (in spite of its failures) will continue as long as those vested interests benefit from it. Pugh recognizes the threat of right-wing nationalism, but one nonetheless gets the impression that he expects that global political-economic elites will be able to weather this storm too. A slightly different argument is developed in Oliver Richmond’s concluding chapter. His is in essence an evolutionary argument with a progressive twist. He documents the historical development of peacebuilding from before International Peacebuilding (capital I, capital P) and projects its future form onto an increasingly digital age. Richmond recognizes, in proper evolutionary fashion, that every form of peacebuilding, which emerges as a ‘solution’ to particular types of problems, creates its own problems and thus fosters the further development of ever new forms of peacebuilding. The process does not stop—indeed, it cannot stop, because no solution is ever definitive. Michael Barnett (2009) has made a similar argument about humanitarianism as an international practice, depicting an evolution from ‘emergency’ to ‘alchemical’ humanitarianism as a result of the increasing interference of states in humanitarian action. Again, humanitarianism changed but did not disappear. But then biological evolution has witnessed the disappearance of species. If environmental conditions become too inhospitable, a species can actually go extinct. This is the fear that people articulate when they point to the effect of non-Western, emerging powers on the persistence

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of peacebuilding. It is a common assumption that emerging powers will change shared understandings of the ‘moral purposes’ (Reus-Smit 1999) of the international community to such an extent that the commitment to practices such as peacebuilding will wane. This is ultimately an empirical question, however, and at least in the case of China, it has been argued that the country has such a rich history of humanitarian thought and policy (Krebs 2014) that its emergence does not necessarily herald the end of humanitarian international practices, although it will probably entail a shift away from ‘liberal’ peacebuilding. The ultimate reason for us hypothesizing its persistence, which encompasses both Pugh’s argument about vested political-economic interests and Richmond’s and Barnett’s evolutionary argument, is that we are in a time in which authority is increasingly situated at the international level (whether it is the authority of great and emerging powers, of global elites, or of international organizations) and all authority must legitimize itself (Zürn 2018). Historically, by far the most common way for political authority to legitimize itself is to argue that it ‘brings peace’ (cf. Orford 2011). To the extent that power has internationalized, and to the extent that international power wishes to be considered authoritative, it will therefore want to associate itself with the promise of peace (also Sending 2015, Ch. 3). This is what ‘authority’ does at whatever scale it develops. Hence our prediction that peacebuilding will remain an institutional reality also at the international level. 3.3

A New Ethos for Peacebuilding

We have made two predictions thus far. A first prediction held that peacebuilding will always lead to disappointment, whether it materializes as an international project or as a global practice. The second prediction held that peacebuilding will continue to exist as an international project, although it is likely that the international project of peacebuilding will undergo important transformations. In conclusion to this introductory chapter, it may be useful to insert a reflection on whether those transformations can or should be goaded in a certain direction. Change is inevitable and the direction of change is largely determined by changing circumstances—whatever those turn out to be. But ‘largely determined’ does not equal ‘totally determined’ and there is always some room for agency in processes of change. Scholars can make clear what they consider

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to be desirable directions for change and thus potentially influence the course that change will take (Sauer et al. 2020). So what might we propose? In the conclusion to our volume on pacifism, we observed that twenty-first-century pacifism had developed into a ‘chastened pacifism’—a pacifism that showed itself rather less cocksure than its twentieth-century predecessors. In the wake of increased recognition of the limits of liberal triumphalism, the articulation of this chastened pacifism chimes with recent calls for more ‘humility’ (Hobson 2016) and more restraint (Steele 2019) in Western international policy-making and could serve as an inspiration for the future development of peacebuilding as well. This is not the place to elaborate what ‘chastened peacebuilding’ would look like. It is a notion (and at this point it is not more than that: a suggestive notion) that recommends the cultivation of an alternative ethos for peacebuilders. Brent Steele (2019) ends his recent book on restraint in international politics with a discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.

As readers read the chapters in this volume, it may be useful for them to keep Reinhold’s prayer in mind. It may help them better understand some of the failures of peacebuilding that our authors identify and discuss. It should also help them assess the suggested directions for future forms of peacebuilding that are included in the chapters of the third part of this book. With their authors, we remain committed to the practice of peacebuilding (even if only because it will persist anyway), but more explicitly than them, we would insist on the importance of tempering one’s expectations about the kind of world, the kind of peace, that peacebuilding will bring about. If a chastened peacebuilding does not develop, then the practice risks continuing to do more harm than good—and continue it will.

References Barnett, M. (2009). Evolution without progress: Humanitarianism in a world of hurt. International Organization, 63(4), 621–663. Call, C., & de Coning, C. (Eds.). (2017). Rising powers and peacebuilding: Breaking the mold. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Chandler, D. (2017). Peacebuilding: The twenty years’ crisis, 1997–2017 . Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Duffield, M. (2010). Risk-management and the fortified aid compound: Everyday life in post-inventionary society. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4(4), 453–474. Gizelis, T.-I. (2009). Gender empowerment and United Nations peacebuilding. Journal of Peace Research, 46(4), 505–523. Goetze, C. (2017). The distinction of peace: A social analysis of peacebuilding. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Hobson, C. (2015). The rise of democracy: Revolution, war, and transformations in international politics since 1776. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hobson, C. (2016). Responding to failure: The responsibility to protect after Libya. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 44(3), 433–454. Holanda Maschieto, R. (2016). Problematizing the “local” in peacebuilding. International Peacekeeping, 23(3), 505–512. Krebs, H. (2014). Responsibility, legitimacy, morality: Chinese humanitarianism in historical perspective (Working Paper). London: HPG. https://www.odi. org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/9139.pdf. Accessed 5 March 2020. Kustermans, J., Sauer, T., & Segaert, B. (Eds.). (2019). Pacifism’s appeal: Ethos, history, politics. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Lake, D. (2016). The statebuilder’s dilemma: On the limits of foreign intervention. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. MacGinty, R. (2014). Everyday peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflictaffected society. Security Dialogue, 45(6), 548–564. Mill, J. S. (1879). Utilitarianism. London: Longman, Green and Co. http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/11224/11224-h/11224-h.htm. Accessed 5 March 2020. O’Meara, W. (2015). The Aristotelian principle in Mill and Kant. Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts, 2(1), 9–18. Orford, A. (2011). International authority and the responsibility to protect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patomäki, H. (2006). Realist ontology for future studies. Journal of Critical Realism, 5(1), 1–31. Reus-Smit, C. (1999). The moral purpose of the state: Culture, social identity, and institutional rationality in international relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ring, L. (2006). Everyday peace in a Karachi apartment building. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Saint Augustine. (2004). City of God. London: Penguin. Sauer, T., Kustermans, J., & Segaert, B. (Eds.). (2020). Non-nuclear peace: Beyond the nuclear ban treaty. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Sending, O. J. (2015). The politics of expertise: Competing for authority in global governance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Steele, B. (2019). Restraint in international politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Billerbeck, S., & Tansey, O. (2019). Enabling autocracy? Peacebuilding and post-conflict authoritarianism in the Democratic Republic of Congo. European Journal of International Relations, 25(3), 698–722. Wallensteen, P. (2015). Quality peace: Peacebuilding, victory and world order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zürn, M. (2018). A theory of global governance: Authority, legitimacy, and contestation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART I

Why Peacebuilding Appears Moribund

CHAPTER 2

Peacebuilding’s Origins and History Michael C. Pugh

Lear: Dost thou know me fellow? Kent: No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master. Lear: What’s that? Kent: Authority. Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1 Sc. IV

1

Introduction

In order to debate where peacebuilding as a policy and practice could be heading, this opening essay’s purpose is to excavate where it comes from and discuss where it has been. One approach to tracing the past is to ask why peacebuilding has survived to date. Peacebuilding entered the lexicon a quarter of a century ago, a significant time. Indeed, policy elites and commentators find it valuable to interpret, conserve and amend peacebuilding as if to guard a historical process. On the demand side,

M. C. Pugh (B) Plymouth, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_2

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the modern notion of building peace from the outside gained impetus from conflicts within states and attendant humanitarian crises in the 1990s that both ruptured notions of post-Cold War global harmony and made space for a re-ordering of market-state relations. Atrocities and refugee emergencies outraged publics and alarmed politicians and international institutions. Interventionism and peace promotion arising from humanitarian emergencies had ethical legitimacy as well as instrumental leverage in UK domestic politics—much as the massacres in Bulgaria had done in 1876 and in Biafra in the 1960s. Analysts should not underestimate the moral and spiritual spurs, religious and secular values that galvanized United Nations (UN) and state responses to suffering, and by peacemaking groups such as the Mennonites and Peace Brigades.1 In some cases, a willingness to host refugees (though often conditional), such as Bosnians fleeing to Italy or Albanian Kosovars to Macedonia, can be said to have antecedents in Homer’s praise for hosts who respected Zeus’s rule of civilized behaviour in providing hospitality to strangers (xenia). It is unclear, however, whether as an authorized work programme— an industry, so to speak—peacebuilding has been a success. Certainly, it attracts critique on grounds of performance. It is also an essentially contested concept. The main source of institutional internationalism was not politically neutral (Pugh 2012). As Florian Kühn contends (2016, pp. 21–38), it sprang from western thinking and experience of state sovereignty, imperialism and war to yield a Weberian epistemology of international governance. Mark Mazower notes, for example, that the League of Nations and the United Nations promoted an ‘education in international deportment’. ‘Western states’, he also argues, ‘see in their liberalism only the benign face of a universal aspiration. Yet the states they target are generally those that have emerged recently from out of the rubble… of empires’ (Mazower 1998, p. 57; 2009, p. 201). In fact, the main locations of unrest attracting peacekeepers and peacebuilders were former colonies struggling with the pressures of globalism and the principle of uti possidetis (the decolonization sovereignty principle whereby newly-independent states inherited colonial borders, no matter how those frontiers divided tribes and ethnic groups or subsequently fostered secessionist bids, as accomplished by Eritrea). Since this input to the discussion cannot be exhaustive, it contains few details of particular cases of peacebuilding or institutional debates, the latter amply analysed for the associated concept of statebuilding by Susan L. Woodward (2017). Rather, this essay is organized around four

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interconnected facets of peacebuilding’s history that buttressed its mainstream authority and longevity: the naming of a void; the occasion for institutional expansion; the prescription of a form; and the management of contradictions. Peacebuilding has been responsive to needs in a problem-solving way. From a critical perspective, it also germinated and sustained contradictions that inhibited its stated aims. Liberal peacebuilding expressed modern western knowledge and competitive power as much as ethics. Peacebuilding arguably destabilizes peace through its potential for breeding sources of conflict, especially in the sphere of political economy.

2

Into a Void?

Although the origin of the term ‘peacebuilding’ can be claimed to lie in Johan Galtung’s work in the 1970s, his theorizing focused on structures of conflict resolution in the Cold War. Similarly, in the context of inter-state confidence-building measures, retired UK Brigadier Michael Harbottle and his wife Eirwen Harbottle established a Centre for International Peacebuilding in Oxfordshire in 1983.2 These were distinctive and rather isolated uses of the term. When it was introduced in An Agenda for Peace (1992a), there had been nothing in the UN lexicon to accompany preventative diplomacy, peace-making/mediation, humanitarian relief and peacekeeping. Peacebuilding was designated to fill a void in UN responses to intrastate conflicts. It was justified as both a reaction to increasing aid demands and as filling a gap in the suite of intervention mechanisms. In Oliver Richmond’s schema (see Richmond, this volume), peacebuilding can be treated, at least heuristically, as a phase of peacemaking. It succeeded a phase of negative peace establishment, such as arranging ceasefires, and extended a generation of positive peace in the late 1960s that had expanded mediation and reconciliation approaches to conflict. Naming a concept contributes to the making of meaning, as poststructuralists suggest. The term ‘peacebuilding’ signals an epistemology of creative and constructive progress. The prefix ‘peace’ has benign connotations, particularly for liberal internationalists. Naming, however, does not depict objective reality (Turner [in press] 2019). From a critical perspective, the naming is not simply a rhetorical signifier of idealism and destiny; it stems from structures of knowledge and power for claiming an ontological space. It entails further exercise of power to fill the named category

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with programmes that create structures and represent material interests. In reality, there was no void in the practice of non-violent relations. The targets of peacebuilding filled it with alternative epistemologies: factory workers may have called it ‘solidarity’; slum dwellers ‘neighbourliness’; rural folk ‘sharing’; former enemies ‘co-operation’. The alchemy of peacebuilding conjured a gold standard based on western liberal democratic social relations. In a foundational critique, the important questions are: who fostered this construction of authority and with what purposes, and further, what practices conform to, or contradict, peacebuilding concepts and discourses? Labelling the assumed void is commonly attributed to SecretaryGeneral Boutros Boutros-Ghali, but it was no doubt inspired by his special adviser, James S. Sutterlin, who worked on the draft of An Agenda for Peace. A senior figure in the US State Department as the Vietnam fiasco wound down in the 1970s, Sutterlin then worked for over a decade in the UN, first as Director of Political Affairs and then as Director of the Secretariat. Together with Bruce Russett he established a Yale University hub of UN Studies. Sutterlin (1995, pp. 74–76) posited peacebuilding as a group of mechanisms ‘to remove underlying causes of conflict and to prevent its recurrence should conflict break out’. Remedies included improved early warning, rule of law, human rights, development projects and the incantation of ‘freedom’ to bind populations in peaceful solidarity. Alternative designations, such as ‘post-war reconstruction’ and ‘regeneration’, either carried less ethical weight than ‘peacebuilding’ or did not signify programmes for changing behaviours. Peacebuilding in war-torn zones also undertook to transform hostile attitudes and social conduct. Two notable concepts in International Relations (IR) theory provided intellectual grounding for the project. First, from the 1950s, academics focusing on trans-Atlantic relations had pursued theories to elucidate Cold War security dilemmas. Robert Jervis and Barry Buzan, among others, worked on security ‘communities’, ‘regimes’ and ‘complexes’. This academic production transmuted into epistemologies of ‘common security’ and ‘human security’ in the investigations by think-tanks and commissions of experts. These last, starting with the Brandt Commission on Development in 1980, had interchangeable memberships of ambassadors and officials. Their reports broadly chimed with UN aspirations under Secretaries-General Pérez de Cuéllar and Boutros-Ghali (see Brandt 1982).

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Second, in spite of the fragile record of parliamentary democracy, perhaps not even deep-rooted in Europe (see Mazower 1998), liberalism occupied centre stage as a dynamic model of general applicability. Research at Michigan University on ‘Correlates of War’ enabled Michael Doyle of Princeton University to elaborate a ‘democratic peace’ thesis (see Doyle 1997a, b; Russett 1993). In bald terms, democracies did not go to war against each other—though neither did NATO and the Warsaw Pact. NATO’s links to right-wing terrorism through its Gladio organization did not count (see Ganser 2005). Violent interventions in the Third World and a switch from arms trade prohibitions against colonial subjects to supplying them and other clients with conflict merchandise were excluded by definition (see Cooper 2018). Democratic peace also denoted an inscription in the politics of capitalism to declaim its superiority over ‘undemocratic’ states with command economies; thereby justifying western rather than other sorts of intervention. Peacebuilding attempted to spread liberal political and development norms to the illiberal as a sort of spillover democratic peace, and its normative power thereby gained considerable currency. The authorization and establishment of peacebuilding owed a great deal to US East Coast knowledge production about liberal democracy and human security. Indeed, the interweaving of US and UN interests was never far from some proponents’ objectives (Russett 1995). The intellectual fervour concerning peace and security was overwhelmingly Atlanticist, civilizing, and masculine. Although women were commonly burdened and victimized by war and its aftermath and were also instigators of peace mediation, the Palme Security Commission (1981) included among its seventeen members just one woman, Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway. The knowledge habitus of designers was statist and diplomatic—with academic elites on their coattails. Many designers were born into, schooled in, or socialized into US or other western organizations. Allowing for varied national positioning of the concept ‘liberal’, internationalists could gravitate to the cause of multilateral security, including climate change and universal human rights, to present problem-solving options in international forums. Through unofficial peacemaking initiatives and privileged access to policy formation, for instance as special advisers to UN Secretaries-General, academics (overwhelmingly male) secured influence in the development of peacebuilding (Pugh 2016). The ontology can be characterized as enlightenment rationalism and humanism, driven by the notion that the project could achieve progress

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for global civilization. Its modus operandi was formed on the basis of a constellation of beliefs in the superiority of liberal knowledge about state and international governance.

3

An Opportunity for Industry and Management

Spaces for relational changes in world politics opened up in the 1980s. Opportunities for management and multilateral co-operation seemed to grow in the Gorbachev and post-Cold War environments. In the light of growing environmental and climate awareness, oil price shocks, economic meltdown in Asia and nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl, scholars highlighted transnational liquidities and diffuse networks, fractures and risks in international relations that required multilateral management and policing (see Beck 2005). The superpowers found state autonomy under threat and their ideologies less rigidly enforceable, misleadingly cast by Francis Fukuyama as The End of History (coincidentally published in the same year as An Agenda for Peace). A new world order would be interdependent, multilateral and a predominantly Anglophone Atlanticist projection of western liberalism into conflict management, in consort with a reinvigorated UN. Peacebuilding seemed to emulate the modernization drive in Eastern Europe and the former USSR guided by consultants such as Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and a UN special adviser. By the mid-1990s, however, the capacity to manage internal wars through liberal peace intervention miscarried in Somalia, Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. Commentators debated whether military interventions were sufficiently coercive, whether mediation had been exhaustive, and whether interventionists lacked understanding of varied contexts. What might be generally conceded is that international responses to such crises were riddled with competing agency and geopolitical state interests. Above all, however, the navigations between exogenous agents of liberalization and endogenous agents in co-constituting transition to peace tended to result in two linked facets of what academics scripted as peacebuilding’s ‘hybridity’ (on hybridity see the chapters here by Ejdus and by Lopez & Ingelaere). First, ‘internationals’ coconstituted peacebuilding with political and/or warrior elites who could bring their constituencies into peace deals of various kinds; with the exception of humanitarian organizations, the internationals had little engagement with grassroots society (Richmond 2014). Second, as in later sections, although internationals prioritized state capacity building

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for open economies—whereas domestic elites prioritized the protection of conflict gains—local power-holders and internationals could agree on stabilization to expand policies of private capital accumulation. The consequences were often far from emancipatory: limited distributive policies except through patronage and external aid; the failure to curb corruption; and the persistence of discrimination and rights abuse. Authoritarian rule of law and governance by clan leaders or elected strongmen and oligarchs could bring stability but not liberal governance—except in libertarian economic forms. The aftermaths of devastation presented peacebuilding activists with renewed opportunities to promote social transformations and peddle international peace hygiene in conflict zones. According to Sachs, undeveloped countries (and presumably badly governed war-affected societies) needed to attend an economic ‘clinic’ for development (Sachs 2005, ch. 4). Insofar as figurative expressions convey meaning, this implied a moral condemnation of unsavoury habits but more significantly a curative course of antibiotics. Good governance required peacebuilding and statebuilding to transform so-called failed states into entities that could then generate peaceful domestic relations (see Woodward 2017, p. 52). Significantly, too, bringing democratic practices to the poorly governed could guard against the spread of economic disorder, population movements, and diseases such as bird flu to the well-governed. A companion approach, pre-conflict prevention, created additional validity for external authority because it promised to transform states before they failed. A Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1994–1999) described its methodology as ‘comparable to primary prevention in public health’ (1997, p. 5). Policy-makers mobilized support for pre-emptive engagement through regional security communities and the Bretton Woods institutions, and through such instruments as the UN’s special partnership with NATO (2008). Indeed, in the twenty-first-century authority was further braced by employing intervention to change regimes and stifle counter-insurgency, political radicalism and terrorism (Mackinlay 2004; and critiques by Karlsrud 2019; Turner 2016). The Cold War’s exhaustion opened up opportunities for ambitious institutional scoping of humanitarian and liberal transformation goals. Peacebuilding became an epicurean feast for think-tanks, commissions, UN peace panels, NGOs, businesses and academics to advance programmes for filling the named void. The core of the 1994 Carnegie

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Commission comprised western-centric notables of impeccable professional credentials and international experience. Cyrus Vance, formerly President Carter’s Secretary of State was a co-chair, and other ‘old hands’ from earlier commissions participated (among them David Owen, UK Liberal MP). Of the sixteen members, Brundtland was one of only two women. The Commission delineated a global arc of mass atrocities, from Moldova to Angola. It recommended conflict prevention through early warning of unrest, the neutralizing of violence triggers and measures to resolve underlying causes of conflict. The Commissioners argued that, although multilateral management would work, it required leadership, as demonstrated by the US under a Chapter VII mandate in the 1991 Gulf War. Ideas flourished in a competitive environment for funds, influence and momentum. Susan Woodward provides fine-grained analysis of the scramble for relevance, authority and money among national and international institutions seeking to acquire or increase their capacity to undertake ambitious tasks. Institutionalism expanded because building peace was an open-ended commitment, enabling a managerial and coordinating role for officials and administrators. Expansion generated new funding streams, training units, outsourcing and consultancies. States built postconflict reconstruction and stabilization units for a huge range of activities from writing constitutions, to de-mining and securing payment of toxic debts. It represented, argues Woodward, a great deal of building of the builders themselves (Woodward 2017, ch. 5). In the UN itself a High Level Panel—established by UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan—recommended the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission (PBC). Inaugurated in 2007 with an advisory office and a fund to support its work, the Commission had a purpose as broad and vague as the peacebuilding concept itself—identifying challenges from terrorism to climate change, and advising the Secretary-General of priorities. In practice, the PBC articulated its purpose as twofold: identifying countries ‘under stress’ needing urgent action to prevent violent state failure, and post-conflict support. Accountable jointly to the General Assembly and Security Council, it was also linked to the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on the insistence of developing countries concerned about interventionism. The Bretton Woods bodies had seats on the PBC because the World Bank organized donor conferences and the IMF could provide standby loans to states in recovery. Despite the PBC’s supporters ranking it as one of the UN’s most valuable

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tools in sustaining peace (UN 2017b), its components had competing agendas and consequently, according to critics, the PBC contributed to peacebuilding fragmentation rather than resolving it (see Berdal 2011).3 However, international agencies, as Michael Ignatieff argues (2003), could retain authority while reducing burdens and avoiding pejorative accusations of imperialism, by distributing responsibility among so-called partners and stakeholders, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) or corporate investors and non-state democracy patrons such as George Soros. Quite separately, the UN got as far as reforming peacekeeping by fostering mission integration, by signing Partnership Frameworks with NATO and the World Bank, and by expanding management to improve coordination on crisis intervention issues. A decade later, however, the UN General Assembly’s agenda for Sustaining Peace (UN 2017a, b) remained concerned with flaws in the peace architecture and frequently mentioned system strengthening, capacity, coordination, integration and coherence. Like seagulls following a fishing boat, academics chased after projects, funds, publishing, and careers, to service the industry as well as to study it.4 Institutional collaboration bolstered peacebuilding’s clout with donors and academic economists (e.g. Paul Collier of Cambridge University who worked with the World Bank). Although much of the literature concerned problem-solving to refine peacebuilding impacts, significant conceptual critique emerged, including questioning the ontology of Liberal Peace. In general, however, policy elites who defined frameworks and operated within narrow confines of liberal institutionalism met fundamental critique with deep silence.5 Certainly, critics were hardly immune to collaborating with what they criticized and on which their livelihoods depended—just as peacebuilding institutions depended on the existence of conflict to stay in business. Nothing, however, can be excluded from academic curiosity and liberal internationalism’s archaeology presented rich layers for investigating the validity—or otherwise—of peacebuilding’s truth claims. In spite of the considerable funding streams and organizations attending to peacebuilding, the long-term results were mixed (contrast Mozambique with Burundi) and frequently regarded by conflict participants as irrelevant or actually damaging (Higate and Henry 2009). Yet the authorization of peacebuilding had become enshrined in international relations, even if, like King Lear’s masterful countenance (in the above epigraph) and the Earl of Kent’s pretence, it flattered to deceive.

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4

Prescribing a Form of Political Economy

This section focuses on a third facet of peacebuilding’s reinforcement: an epistemology of political economy prescribed for war-torn societies and states considered at risk of conflict. Economic linkage to peace certainly had antecedents in theory and practice. Kant’s idealized interstate peace included the proviso that in peace treaties all ‘existing causes for a future war’, including the ‘money power’ of international credit, had to be ‘entirely removed or annihilated’ (Kant 1795, Prelim. Art. 1). Somewhat less concerned with curbing credit, nineteenth-century empire builders rationalized free trade precepts, much favoured by states capable of enforcing them, that brought peace through global economic interactions. The British liberal publicist, Norman Angell, argued (1909) more cautiously that such interactions did not rule out warfare and wrecked capital growth.6 After the inter-war economic collapse and the Second World War, the UN—born like the League of Nations out of military supremacy and the need to manage empires—had buttressed its peace architecture with the Bretton Woods financial institutions. The IMF and World Bank recognized that the global market was not self-correcting and so pursued full employment and control of capital movements—but with countries fashioning their own economic systems. Learning from the disastrous economic settlement of the First World War, this second peace transformed the western Allies and defeated powers through state dirigisme and historically high taxation rates. These policies yielded high employment, strengthened social safety nets, and underpinned increasing prosperity (and European integration) in the 1950s. But to tackle economic problems created by US financing of the Vietnam War, all IFIs took cues from the US Treasury to shift their priorities to preventing inflation, freeing up capital movement, and requiring states to stimulate private capital accumulation (see Elliott 2018; Germain 2002). As Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Roland Kosti´c contend (2017), by the 1980s the IFI drew deeply on the ideology and epistemology of neoliberalism for economic peacebuilding. This prescribed a development system based on the deregulation of capital and the privatization of state functions to increase accumulation. So-called free markets would drive global integration, and technology and free movement of capital would bring people within the common orbits of political economy and cultural

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capitalism. Thomas Friedman (1999, p. 195) even set forth an overarching fantasy of groups avoiding fighting each other while all queuing for the same corporate fast food. The late twentieth century’s version of post-conflict recovery, then, deemed that societies lacked ‘open’ economies, as well as having deficiencies in democracy, human rights, and state security. The Carnegie Commission laid bare what was needed in addition to demilitarization: ‘democracy, market economies and the creation of civil institutions that protect human rights’ (Carnegie 1997). An Agenda for Peace (UN 1992a) had explicitly tied peacebuilding to An Agenda for Development (UN 1992b), a linkage that remained salient for the next twenty-five years. The UN revisited it in Sustaining Peace (UN 2017a, b, 2018) with a design to match and link up with the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 (UN 2015). Delegates to ECOSOC (2017) were invited to envisage sustaining peace and sustainable development as mutually reinforcing. Leaving aside problems of implementation, the ideal implied a teleology that, if realized, would produce increased international stability. The intention begs the question: What sort of development goals bring about stability? Development, writes Mark Duffield (2001), is ideologically framed. Good governance, he argues, translates into a generic model of neoliberal development that merges security and development. It entails coercion and conditionality, and top-down, donor-driven structural adjustment. Attempted alignment might be a more accurate descriptor than merger, for the management collective can have various goals. Predictably, the World Bank and IMF introduced structural adjustment to El Salvador without economic input from ECOSOC or other UN entities, though much to the benefit of ARENA’s authoritarianism in the 1980s (see De Soto and Del Castillo 1993; Moodie 2010). Institutions did have a capacity to learn from specific contexts and resistances encountered in post-conflict situations, making space, for example, for traditional justice in reformed justice systems. In this case, however, learning had limits, created by peacebuilding’s origins and the roles of its most powerful economic backers (see also the chapters by Edjus and by Lopez & Ingelaere).

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5

Managing Contradictions

Stressful contradictions inevitably arose to disturb institutional authority. The ability to manage contradictions has been another facet of peacebuilding’s persistence. Conflict management and recovery could be treated pragmatically, solving issues as they emerged or treating them incrementally, as the UK NGO, Conciliation Resources, claimed for Afghanistan (Larson and Ramsbotham 2018). Management techniques might also include burying problems, paying cosmetic lip-service and masking ambiguity. Just as peacebuilders might declare assaults on injustice, they also pursued primary roles as managers of macroeconomic stability and globalization which could incubate it (Pugh 2020). At a time of huge humanitarian demands in the mid-1990s, the OECD– Development Assistance Committee (Guidelines on Conflict, Peace and Development, 1997) and World Bank (1997 World Development Report ) acknowledged that unemployment, cheap labour, poverty and inequality damaged social solidarity and stability. A study for the UN Development Programme (UNDP 2008) also made livelihood and welfare recommendations for post-conflict recovery by building on local initiatives. International peace activity in the 1980s and 1990s could be credited with a waning in global violent conflict to its nadir in 2005 (Human Security Centre 2005). Peacekeeping wound down in the late 1990s, but the decline in conflict did not last and taxing contradictions re-emerged. A swell in the number of violent deaths, average conflict duration, armed groups participating and the internationalization of conflicts, especially in Africa and the Middle East disfigured liberal institutionalism (UN-World Bank 2018, pp. 11–20 citing Uppsala Conflict Data). The upward conflict trends correlated both with increasing economic inequalities within and between states since the 1980s, and with marked concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few (Piketty 2014, pp. 560–570). The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 2004) exposed the brutal realities of neoliberal political economy (see also Flassbeck et al. 2013). From an analysis of 12 cases in Africa, M. A. Mohamed Salih (2009) confirms that ‘multilateral global political and economic governance’ was directly or indirectly involved in perpetuating a ‘poverty-conflict trap’. With supremely ironical timing, Management Systems International (2007) made a USAID–UNDP study of neoliberal reform relevant for post-conflict states, just as the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 demonstrated ignorance and incompetence in the institutions of the

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developed world for managing the top rungs of the ladder—towards which the developing world was—figuratively speaking—supposed to be climbing (see Chang 2002; Tooze 2018).7 The surge in political violence and unsustainably high costs of responding to it prompted the UN, its agencies and partners, to turn back to prevention approaches and a ‘people-centred’ phase of engagement with peace and conflict. Expenditures on dealing with violence reached almost US$10 trillion or 11 per cent of the world GDP in 2012, whereas prevention costs were estimated to be only half to a third of that (UN 2018; UN-World Bank 2018, pp. 26,34). In 2014, the Security Council passed its first resolution specifically on prevention (UN 2014). Furthermore, the Sustaining Peace agenda developed between 2016 and 2018 (see UN 2018, para. 5) was wedded to the Transforming Our World: Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030 (UN 2015), which stressed the need to tackle structural inequalities and also featured labour rights and ‘decent’ employment (Goal 8). A new version of the UN– World Bank Partnership Framework (2017) sought to ‘[b]uild resilience of the most vulnerable people, reduce poverty, enhance food security, and sustain peace’. The amended epistemology referred to integrated solutions appropriate to country contexts; recognition of all social needs; and accountability to vulnerable societies. Furthermore, a 300-page report by a team from the World Bank and key UN sections (Peacekeeping, the PBC, Development, Political Affairs) focused on prevention strategies. Chapter 4 of the report examined conflict stimuli deriving from horizontal and vertical injustices, group grievances and social exclusions (see also Stewart 2000). The report, entitled Pathways for Peace (UNWorld Bank 2018, henceforth Pathways ) proposed to address grievances through inclusive and ‘people-centred’ prevention, ‘not solely focused on elites but “partnerships”’ that would include women peacemakers. Inclusiveness discourse did not, however, disrupt the ideas and practices arising from the often conflicting mandates of peacebuilding partners. The World Bank could facilitate its main profile by supporting social resilience and addressing a commitment to ‘leaving no one behind’ in the neoliberal globalization project. As Woodwood (2017, pp. 41–43) shows, however, this apparent duality served to mask the priority of neoliberal good governance, as evidenced by the use of an International Management Group and Joint Assessment Missions, which, among other tasks, surveyed obstacles to private capital accumulation. The international administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina required the privatization of

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state enterprises, including the agricultural veterinary services; and the UN Mission in Kosovo established the Kosovo Trust Agency to privatize socially owned property. The IFIs continued to define good governance according to structural adjustment benchmarks that probably made little sense to populations disciplined by them.8 As decoded by Mark Duffield (2007, pp. 228–230), identifying the ‘resilience of the most vulnerable people’ meant isolating a welfare category rather than providing universal coverage, and would end up emphasizing self-insurance against risks rather than employment contributions towards welfare. Self-help, he argues, paradoxically generates shadow economies, network welfare, and spatial and social discriminations that weaken state performance. Like Janus, the mythic gatekeeper facing more than one direction, the international agencies could use ambiguity about their roles as regulatory/disciplinary mechanisms on the one hand, and supporters of social justice and domestic initiative on the other (Kühn 2016). In essence, Pathways underwrote the role of corporate capital in prioritizing marketized social relations over state-controlled development. Above all, peace would be maintained by phasing action ‘within political and investment cycles’ (UN-World Bank 2018, p. 276). Since the IFIs and corporations had long promoted capital mobility and required states to seek foreign direct investment (FDI), the international funders would not regard making peace on the one hand, and advancing capitalism on the other as contradictory, and were not diverted from their core business. The Bank of International Settlements, a vigorous defender of globalization and macroeconomic discipline, could only lamely admit that ‘distribution of gains from globalisation should be more even’ and recommend increased spending on education, training, and infrastructure—though who would invest without prospects of monopoly rents is perhaps hard to see (Carstens 2018). In addition, Pathways recommended incentives to support those local leaderships who took advantage of conflict stalemates and adopted policies of inclusion. Addressing concerns about social inequalities and local ownership of peace processes doubtless facilitated collaboration between external agencies and local interest groups. Specific implementations of international stability management varied according to host resistances and deals with local power-holders. Encounters with hosts produced fluidity, blending and volatility that could, according to some critics, subvert prescriptions and entail a crisis for liberal peace practice (e.g.

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Mac Ginty 2011; Nadarajah and Rampton 2016). Leaders in postconflict countries could negotiate assistance and sign up to good governance without relaxing their grip on political systems or their control over resources (Pospisil and Kühn 2016). They accommodated external requirements, such as the Governance and Economic Assistance Program in Liberia, to secure political advantages and international funding. However, mutually constitutive processes forged by peacebuilders with local leaders and business interests (often the same), were unlikely to guarantee outcomes that would protect populations from political disempowerment and economic exclusion. The report praised ruling classes who shared power, as illustrated by Northern Ireland (NI), for example, except that the Good Friday Peace Agreement was jeopardized from early 2017 by allegations of corruption in the devolved NI government, the reintroduction of direct rule from Westminster, and the UK government’s Brexit policy. Pathways also applauded Abed Rabbo Hadid in Yemen (UN-World Bank 2018, p. 190) for halting a slide into civil war. Tragically, his subsequent austerity policies reignited a devastating conflict, which he had to flee (and which continued at the time of writing in 2019). The asymmetric power of investors, rentiers and political bosses often assisted in establishing oligarchic or authoritarian rule (see Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2014; Lemay-Hébert and Murshed 2016; Lewis et al. 2018). Revealingly, the Pathways document ‘questioned the long-standing assumption that peace will accompany income growth’. It did so on the grounds that although violence was entrenched in low-income countries, it had also affected some middle-income countries with functioning institutions (Iraq, Syria, Ukraine). Violent extremism, terrorism, the Arab Spring and power-contests in Africa and Latin America were said to be the main causes of the post-2005 surge in violence. Referring to ‘crises faced by our clients ’ [my italics], the World Bank suggested that ‘preventing fragility and conflict and violence is central to reducing poverty and achieving shared prosperity’ (UN-World Bank 2018, xi–xii, xvii, 11). Silence reigned on IFI-sponsored structural adjustment and austerity. Disproportionate effects of austerity on women—who bore welfare cuts and costs associated with multi-functional life roles—were not mentioned. A recognition, in the Pathways report (p. 185) that managing macro-fiscal stability constituted a problem, starkly illuminates the contradictory roles of the IFIs in peacebuilding and globalization. Still, Pathways claimed the problem could be resolved by smart timing of welfare cuts and the

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provision of safety nets to avoid harming the most needy (UN-World Bank 2018, p. 185). Such declarations would have fallen on deaf ears in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A celebrated success in its 23 years of peacebuilding had been the formation of a multi-ethnic army, yet by 2018, disillusioned soldiers were leaving in droves because of very small salaries and low living standards (Laki´c and Kovaˇcevi´c 2018). Moreover, insistence on policies of macroeconomic stability stimulated more Bosnian emigration in the years since the war than during it. The IMF warned (2018) that flight from Bosnia and Herzegovina (and Macedonia) would adversely affect economic growth. Peacebuilding management worked in more than one direction, but always keeping in line with capitalism’s corporate, investment-friendly globalization. The dominant narrative had scripted the poor as sources of violence, masking the mainsprings in capital’s restructuring of social relations.

6

Concluding Observations

As Antonio Gramsci explained, hegemony entails normalizing particular beliefs, values and cultural modes to frame discourse in order to model, educate, persuade and coerce in accordance with ideological goals. Identifying a need and space that required naming was a key facet in the peacebuilding project. Whereas fieldworkers simply addressed refugee returns, disarmament, structure repairs and health issues, claiming a new name and space also required peacebuilding institutions to enlist stakeholders and forge momentum. This essay has also argued that peacebuilding’s persistence lay in the hegemonic authority of a liberal ideology with Enlightenment roots. When the theorist Max Horkheimer depicted the Enlightenment’s collapse into irrationality he meant, according to Stuart Jeffries (2016, pp. 365–366), that it ‘was devoted to determining the means to an end, without reasoning about the ends in themselves’. Peacebuilding institutions managed contradictions arising from problem-solving and ideology (such as incompatibilities between promoting democracy and privatizing political economy) through the exercise of financial power. From a critical perspective, however, instead of modelling bottom-up civil society, it underpinned exclusionary nationalism and oligarchic authority. Instead of subscribing to post-colonial principles, it colonized with economic instruments. Instead of setting forth liberal models for the illiberal, it facilitated authoritarianism and corruption.

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A first additional observation may strike an incongruous note: violence is not only destructive. Capitalism itself would not have flourished without the violence of primitive accumulation. Development is not solely dependent on peace, and development of all kinds creates social tensions with the potential for violence. In civil war, various economic purposes and rationalities are at play, as Christopher Cramer shows (2006). Furthermore, who can assert that human rights would have been achieved without struggle, or that violent struggle has not led to greater distributive justice and political accountability? Second, the need to address root causes was a mantra in virtually every discourse about peacebuilding. An Agenda for Peace (UN 1992b, I) sought to address ‘the deepest causes of conflict: economic despair, social injustice and political oppression’. It is not clear, however, what this aporia amounts to ontologically: how do we come to know the root causes? The literature about the root causes of fascism, for instance, fills many shelves. Interpretations of root causes can even incite aggression: the supposed ‘lessons’ from appeasing dictatorship in the 1930s peppered rhetoric that supported interventions in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, justifying regime-change wars and then redesigning the ruins. As Kant noted (1795, Def. Art 2), ‘every nation is the judge of its own cause’. However, critics are justified in subjecting truth claims to interrogation, to reveal contradictions, expose neglected aspects of reality and query the rationales of peacebuilding. It is not simply that international agencies lack understanding of the particular social roles and epistemologies of pre-war and war-affected economies (Lai 2017; Woodward 2017, pp. 64–66). Their own ontological foundations are exhibitions of dominant power. Indeed, the history of peace indicates that it cannot be divorced from imposition, as illustrated by multiple examples: Britain’s naval enforcement of free trade when it commanded the seas; the post-1918 disarmament of Germany and its division post-1945, the World Bank’s strategy for the economy of Kosovo; and the US role as ‘facilitator’ in the peace process between Israel and Palestine (Turner and Hussein 2015). Third, if the modern origin of peacebuilding occurred at a specific moment in history, namely when the number of democracies increased after the end of the Cold War, then in democratic peace theory one would not anticipate the surge of violence that took place from 2008 onwards. In reality, as David Lewis, John Heathershaw and Nick Megoran contend (2018), authoritarian alternatives challenged liberal peace through nonnegotiated elimination of oppositions and repressive management of

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social relations. Allowing for varieties of context, military outcomes and liberal intervention installed elected authoritarians, from Rwanda to Kosovo, who could control media and resources, and treat opponents as enemies of the state. Liberal institutions, unaccountable to inhabitants, selectively tolerate authoritarian stability and support rentiers with whom the world financial and trading systems can transact business, not least in the arms trade. As the authors argue, however, populations may regard such coercive orders positively. Fourth, the ideological premise of capitalism is that competitive individuals and states irrigate progressive development and distribution of wealth. Capitalism is thus by definition a Darwinian process for achieving international harmony, even while undermining social solidarities (and the earth’s ecology and environment) and spawning inequalities and injustices that contribute to conflict. The contradiction regarding social stability is inherent in this principle because neoliberal economics has been particularly injurious for people who need income from labour to survive. Competitive cheap labour helps to drive profitability. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, inhabitants used the term ‘Africanization’ to describe the country’s free-market transformation. Although states and international bodies regulate competition, neoliberal governments simultaneously protect accumulation from transfer costs and provide subsidies. Furthermore, as Ulrich Beck points out (2005, pp. 52–56), the diffuse power of corporations, especially the leverage of decisions whether to invest or not, requires no democratic consensus. Corporate peace is distanced from accountability—to put it metaphorically, isolated by algorithms and the Master of the Universe: [email protected]. Perhaps in 2020, peacebuilding’s relevance and authority faces a threat from right-wing nationalism and will likely have to confront an ongoing crisis of neoliberalism. Whether it can be salvaged remains an open question. In the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, Shakespeare deconstructs power: although banished from King Lear’s Court, the Earl of Kent engages in pretence and deception as a grovelling servant. For readers who welcome provocation, this chapter ends by asking whether the same can be said about the history of peacebuilding’s power to persist in the face of capitalism’s contradictions. Were contradictions inherent in the construct from the very beginning, and is peacebuilding becoming, like King Lear, senile?

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Acknowledgements While I am deeply indebted to participants at the UCSIA Antwerp University workshop, Mandy Turner, and Florian Kühn for their generous and perceptive comments, the essay is entirely my responsibility.

Notes 1. By contrast, political and geostrategic priorities of external states inhibited intervention in many ‘hard cases’ exemplified by Palestine, Tibet, and later the Rohingya genocide. 2. Author’s discussion with Eirwen and Michael Harbottle, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, 11 April 1995. 3. Monitored countries have been mainly in Africa. 4. Collections on peacebuilding debates include: Diebel et al. (2016), Mac Ginty (2013), and Newman et al. (2009). 5. A typical instance was a 300-page report (UN-World Bank 2018), which referenced numerous academic sources. It mentioned a single work by Roger Mac Ginty, and none at all by many other prolific critical scholars, among them Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Volker Boege, Bruno Charbonneau, Neil Cooper, Philip Cunliffe, Mark Duffield, Aidan Hehir, Roland Kosti´c, Florian Kühn, Edward Newman, Alpaslan Özerdem, Oliver Richmond, Astri Suhrke, Mandy Turner, Gëzim Visoka, Susan L. Woodward, and Laura Zanotti. 6. Angell (1912) also characterized Turkish imperial rule as the economics of conquest for exploitation in contrast to the superiority of Christian Europe’s interests in peace, industry and commerce. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933 and received a knighthood. 7. A decade after the crash, UNCTAD reported (2018, p. 27) that government ‘austerity measures and unchecked corporate rentierism have pushed inequality higher and torn at social fabric’. 8. Woodward writes (2017, p. 57) that in 2006 World Bank indicators for determining effective public management numbered 140 data sets with thousands of metrics.

References Angell, N. (1909). Europe’s optical illusion. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton & Kent. Angell, N. (1912). Peace theories and the Balkan war. London: Horace Marshall & Son. Beck, U. (2005). Power in the global age. Cambridge: Polity. Berdal, M. (2011). The UN Peacebuilding Commission: The rise and fall of a good idea. In M. Pugh, N. Cooper, & M. Turner (Eds.), Whose peace?

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Critical perspectives on the political economy of peacebuilding (pp. 358–374). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bliesemann de Guevara, B., & Kosti´c, R. (Eds.). (2017). Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention: Finding ‘facts’, telling ‘truth’. Abingdon: Routledge. Bliesemann de Guevara, B., & Kühn, F. P. (2014). The political economy of statebuilding: Rents, taxes and perpetual dependency. In D. Chandler & T. D. Sisk (Eds.), Routledge handbook of international statebuilding (pp. 219–230). Abingdon: Routledge. Brandt Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues. (1982). Common security, a blueprint for survival (with prologues by Cyrus Vance/David Owen). New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. (1997). Preventing deadly conflict, final report. New York: Carnegie Corporation. Carstens, A. (2018, August 5). Global market structures and the high price of protectionism. Speech at Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas symposium, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. www.bis.org/speeches/sp180825.pdf (p. 5). Accessed 25 December 2018. Chang, H.-J. (2002). Kicking away the ladder: Development strategy in historical perspective. London: Anthem Press. Cooper, N. (2018). Race, sovereignty, and free trade: Arms trade regulation and humanitarian arms control in the age of empire. Journal of Global Security Studies, 3(4), 444–462. Cramer, C. (2006). Civil war is not a stupid thing: Accounting for violence in developing countries. London: Hurst. De Soto, A., & Del Castillo, G. (1993, Spring). Obstacles to peacebuilding. Foreign Policy, 69–83. Diebel, T., Held, T., & Schneckener, U. (Eds.). (2016). Peacebuilding in crisis: Rethinking paradigms and practices of transnational cooperation. Abingdon: Routledge. Doyle, M. (1997a). Kant, liberal legacies and foreign affairs. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 12(3), 205–235. Doyle, M. (1997b). Ways of war and peace. New York: Norton. Duffield, M. (2001). Global governance and the new wars: The merging of development and security. London: Zed Books. Duffield, M. (2007). Development, security and unending war: Governing the world of peoples. Cambridge: Polity. ECOSOC (Economic and Social Council). (2017, January 24). Building sustainable peace for all: Synergies between the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and sustaining peace. Chamber’s, draft concept paper for high level dialogue of the President of the General Assembly for the 71st session. www.un.org. Accessed 31 October 2017.

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Elliott, L. (2018, April 22). Could Donald Trump’s lone ranger approach provide the silver bullet. The Guardian (London). Flassbeck, H., Davidson, P., Galbraith, J. K., Koo, R., & Ghosh, J. (2013). Economic reform now: A global manifesto to rescue our sinking economies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedman, T. (1999). The Lexus and the olive tree. London: Harper-Collins. Ganser, D. G. (2005). NATO’s secret armies: Operation Gladio and terrorism in Western Europe. London: Frank Cass. Germain, R. D. (2002). Reforming the international financial architecture: The new political agenda. In R. Wilkinson & S. Hughes (Eds.), Global governance: Critical perspectives (pp. 17–35). London: Routledge. Higate, P., & Henry, M. (2009). Insecure spaces. London: Zed Books. Human Security Centre University of British Columbia. (2005). Human security report 2005: War and peace in the 21st century. New York: Oxford University Press. Ignatieff, M. (2003). Empire lite. London: Vintage Books. IMF (International Monetary Fund). (2018, February 13). Bosnia and Herzegovina: 2017 Article IV Consultation, First Review …. Country Report 18/39. Jeffries, S. (2016). Grand Hotel Abyss: The lives of the Frankfurt School. London: Verso. Kant, I. (1795). Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch. Königsberg: Nicolovius. Karlsrud, J. (2019). From liberal peacebuilding to stabilisation and counterterrorism. International Peacekeeping, 26(1), 1–21. Kühn, F. P. (2016). International peace practice: Ambiguity, contradictions and perpetual violence. In M. Turner & F. Kühn (Eds.), The politics of international intervention: The tyranny of peace (pp. 21–38). Abingdon: Routledge. Lai, D. (2017). Transitional justice as redistribution: Socioeconomic (in)justice and the limits of intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina (PhD thesis). Royal Holloway University of London. Laki´c, M., & Kovaˇcevi´c, D. (2018, May 11). Disillusioned soldiers quit Bosnia’s army in droves. Balkan Insight. https://balkaninsight.com. Accessed 25 December 2018. Larson, A., & Ramsbotham, A. (Eds.). (2018, June). Incremental peace in Afghanistan. Accord, 27. Lemay-Hébert, N., & Murshed, S. M. (2016). Rentier statebuilding in a postconflict economy: The case of Kosovo. Development and Change, 47 (3), 517– 541. Lewis, D., Heathershaw, J., & Megoran, N. (2018). Illiberal peace? Authoritarian modes of conflict management. Co-operation and Conflict, 53(4), 486–506.

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Mac Ginty, R. (2011). International peacebuilding and local resistance: Hybrid forms of peace. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Mac Ginty, R. (Ed.). (2013). Routledge handbook of peacebuilding. Abingdon: Routledge. Mackinlay, J. (2004). Opposing insurgents during and beyond peace operations. In T. Tardy (Ed.), Peace operations after 11 September 2001 (pp. 160–178). London: Cass. Management Systems International. (2007, February 23). First steps in postconflict statebuilding: A UNDP–USAID study. Final Report. Washington DC. Mazower, M. (1998). The dark continent: Europe’s twentieth century. London: Penguin. Mazower, M. (2009). No enchanted palace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mohammed Salih, M. A. (2009). A critique of the political economy of the liberal peace: Elements of an African experience. In E. Newman, R. Paris, & O. P. Richmond (Eds.), New perspective on liberal peacebuilding (pp. 133–158). Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Moodie, E. (2010). El Salvador in the aftermath of peace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nadarajah, S., & Rampton, D. (2016). The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace. Review of International Studies, 41(1), 49–72. NATO. (2008, September 23). Joint declaration on UN/NATO secretariat cooperation. Annex to DSG (2008)0714 (INV). www.nato.int. Accessed 14 July 2009. Newman, E., Paris, R., & Richmond, O. P. (Eds.). (2009). New perspectives on liberal peacebuilding. Tokyo: UN University Press. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twentieth century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press. Pospisil, J., & Kühn, F. (2016). The resilient state: New regulatory modes in international approaches to statebuilding. Third World Quarterly, 37 (1), 1– 16. Pugh, M. (2012). Liberal internationalism: The interwar movement for peace in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pugh, M. (2016). Lineages of aggressive peace. In M. Turner & F. Kühn (Eds.), The politics of international intervention: The tyranny of peace (pp. 78–93). Abingdon: Routledge. Pugh, M. (2020). Normative persistence in distributive justice: Labour rights. In C. Stahn, J. Iversen, & J. Easterday (Eds.), The justice of peace and jus post bellum (ch. 17). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richmond, O. P. (2014). Peace: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Russett, B. (1993). Grasping principles of the democratic peace in a post-cold war world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Russett, B. (1995). Foreword. In J. S. Sutterlin (Ed.), The United Nations and the maintenance of international security: A challenge to be met. Westport, CT: Praeger. Sachs, J. (2005). The end of poverty: How we can make it happen in our lifetime. London: Penguin. Stewart, F. (2000). Crisis prevention: Tackling horizontal inequalities. Oxford Development Studies, 28(2), 245–262. Sutterlin, J. S. (1995). The United Nations and the maintenance of international security: A challenge to be met. Westport, CT: Praeger. Tooze, A. (2018). How a decade of financial crisis changed the world. London: Allen Lane. Turner, M. (2016). Securing and stabilising: Peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in the occupied Palestinian territory. In M. Turner & F. Kühn (Eds.), The politics of international intervention: The tyranny of peace (pp. 139–162). Abingdon: Routledge. Turner, M. (2019). Fanning the flames or a troubling truth? The politics of comparison in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Civil Wars, 21(4), 489–513. Turner, M., & Hussein, C. (2015). Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping transformations and alternatives in a time of deepening crisis. Conflict, Security and Development, 15(5), 415–424. UN. (1992a, June 17). An agenda for peace. Doc. A/47/277. www.un.org. Accessed 1 November 2018. UN. (1992b, December 22). An agenda for development. Doc. A/47/181. www. un.org. Accessed 1 May 2018. UN. (2014). Security Council Resolution. Doc. S/Res/2150. www.un.org. Accessed 1 April 2018. UN. (2015). Transforming our world: Agenda for sustainable development 2030, A/Res/70/1. www.un.org. Accessed 1 May 2017. UN. (2017a, August 29). Sustaining peace strategy must cover entire peace continuum—UN Deputy Chief [Amina Mohammed]. www.un.org. Accessed 1 January 2018. UN. (2017b, April 24–25). Sustaining peace agenda. General Assembly. www. un.org. Accessed 26 December 2017. UN. (2018, January18). Peacebuilding and sustaining peace. Report of the secretary-general. Doc. A/72/707. www.un.org. Accessed 23 February 2018. UN-World Bank. (2017, April 22). Partnership framework for crisis-affected situations. www.un.org. Accessed 1 May 2017. UN-World Bank. (2018). Pathways for peace: Inclusive approaches for preventing violent conflict, Washington, DC: World Bank. www.pathwaysforpeace.org. Accessed 14 July 2019.

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UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and Development). (2004). Least developed countries report 2004: Linking international trade and poverty reduction. Doc. E.04 11.0.0.27. https://www.unctad.org. Accessed 31 October 2006. UNCTAD. (2018). Trade and development report 2018 overview. New York. https://www.unctad.org. Accessed 26 December 2018. UNDP (UN Development Programme). (2008). Post-conflict recovery: Enabling local ingenuity. New York: Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery. Woodward, S. L. (2017). The ideology of failed states: Why interventions fail. New York: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Revisiting the Local Turn in Peacebuilding Filip Ejdus

1

Introduction

Since the 2000s, the ‘local turn’ has decisively shaped both the study and the practice of peacebuilding. Notwithstanding fundamental differences that exist within the ‘local turn’ itself, the common ground of this theoretical and policy shift has been an increased analytical and normative value attached to local actors, processes and culture in both understanding, narrating and practicing international peacebuilding. Despite early enthusiasm about its emancipatory potential, however, recent critiques have increasingly questioned both the analytical value of the local turn, its normative underpinnings and its practical effects. The global crisis of liberalism has cast a dark shadow on the very concept of peacebuilding, although the jury is still out as to whether the local turn can save it from moribundity. In this chapter, which will be first and foremost an exercise in stocktaking, I aim to revisit this intellectual and policy development and outline the origins of the ‘local turn’, but also to shed light on the diversity within it.1 Moreover, I aim to raise some questions that I consider important for

F. Ejdus (B) Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_3

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the future of the local turn and offer some ideas on how to move forward. The rest of the chapter unfolds as follows: in the first section, I trace how the ‘local turn’ emerged in the field of international development and then traveled to the field of international peace and security. Here I will also discuss some fundamental assumptions of the local turn and how they were translated into practice. In the second section, I distinguish mainstream appropriations of the ‘local turn’ from the critical approaches and outline the key criticisms leveled against both. In the conclusion, I discuss some promising avenues for future research that could help move this intellectually rich and politically progressive research agenda forward.

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The Emergence of the Local Turn

Where did the local turn in peacebuilding come from, what made it possible and how did it evolve over the years? In short, the emergence of the ‘local turn’ is a response to the global crisis of confidence in the ability of liberal global governance to export norms and institutions of the Global North into the conflict-affected Global South. The early signs of the crisis of the liberal order started to appear already during the Cold War in the field of international development. Hence, already in the 1960s, calls for ‘participatory development’ pioneered a shift from seeing developing communities as passive recipients of aid to viewing them as active participants. These early critical voices were temporarily eclipsed when liberalism reached its historic zenith in the aftermath of the Cold War. The unprecedented self-confidence of the West was most emblematically captured by Francis Fukuyama, who wrote in 1989 that it was ‘not just the end of the Cold War […] but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama 1989, p. 4). Throughout the early 1990s, the Global North was hence elated with the idea that externally exported liberal institutions might be the panacea for a wide array of ‘new’ security challenges stemming from the chronic instability of the developing world such as migration, terrorism, crime, or disease. In a nutshell, this entailed erecting liberal institutions in conflict-affected areas even, if need be, by illiberal means such as the use of military force or the imposition of foreign rule. This was the primary task of what Michael Ignatieff called ‘empire light’, or ‘a condominium, with

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Washington in the lead, and London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo following reluctantly behind’ (Ignatieff 2003, p. 17). Parallel to this, the end of the Cold War transformed the meaning of international security and increasingly merged it with the field of international development (Duffield 2001). The UN support to peace and security was undergoing a thorough change as well. Traditionally, UN peacekeeping operations were about keeping the calm between ceasefires and peace agreements. With the Cold War hatchet buried, peacekeeping broadened to include new tasks of building peace and functional liberal states (Bellamy et al. 2010). Also, in 1992, in his Agenda for Peace the UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali inaugurated ‘the postconflict peacebuilding’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992). The aim of peacebuilding, as a logical follow-up to peacemaking and peacekeeping, was to identify and support structures that will strengthen peace and prevent fragile and post-conflict states from (re)lapsing into conflict (see Pugh 2020, this volume).2 In the background of this was the mounting evidence of failures to rebuild conflict-affected states according to the Western model. In the field of development, the earlier discussed paradigm shift toward the participatory development gained a new momentum as arguments against structural adjustment programs of the IMF and the World Bank became more vocal. The language of local ownership was hence introduced into the jargon of international development in a landmark document adopted by OECD in 1995, according to which: ‘For development to succeed, the people of the countries concerned must be the “owners” of their development policies and programmes’ (OECD 1995). A year later, OECD member states declared that ‘local actors should progressively take the lead while external partners back their efforts to assume greater responsibility for their own development’ (OECD 1996). Major international institutions soon followed suit and adopted a very similar policy language. In the field of peace- and statebuilding, the pitfalls of the liberal hubris also started to become obvious. As the 1990s drew to a close, UN’s failures in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda and its limited success in Haiti and Cambodia proved how unfounded the early postCold War enthusiasm was. Growing evidence was indicating that the Western model of governance had limited traction in conflict-affected countries. Consequently, it became increasingly clear that without a local buy-in, international support to peace could not achieve effective and sustainable results on the ground. Hence, the 2000 Brahimi Report to

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the UN Security Council fully endorsed the language of localism and made the case that the participation of local authorities is ‘critical in determining the successful outcome of a peace operation’ (Brahimi 2000, p. 5). Finally, in the early 2000s, the fiasco interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan provided another impetus for the local turn. A set of additional factors propelled the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding. First, as Mac Ginty and Richmond pointed out, it was the rise of practitioners from the Global South to the leading positions in institutions of global governance and the increased assertiveness of local actors on the ground (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, p. 776). Localism in the practice of peacebuilding was also compounded by the revival of the local traditions in opposition to globalization (Bräuchler and Naucke 2017). Finally, the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding was also amplified by the rise of localist political discourses across the political spectrum in the West (Featherstone et al. 2012; Mohan and Stokke 2000). While the new left construed the local as the site of grassroots resistance to the onslaught of the global capitalism, for the new right it has become a bulwark against big government. By privileging the local as the key site of civic engagement that fosters democracy, legitimacy, and agency, these diverse localist political discourses have also facilitated the emergence of a new agreement around the legitimacy of all things local in international affairs. So, what is the local turn all about? In a nutshell, as I argue in this chapter, the local turn has been revolving around two fundamental assumptions. The first is that local is important analytically for theorizing peacebuilding. To begin with, it needs to be taken seriously if conflicts are to be properly understood and resolved. Severine Autessere, for example, demonstrated how international peacebuilders got the conflict in the DRC wrong because, instead of focusing on the local dynamics of the conflict, they relied on their experiences from previous posts, in other conflict zones, where the national level of analysis was dominant (Autesserre 2010). However, if peacebuilding is to be accounted for, the local needs to be addressed seriously. In contrast to the liberal peace paradigm, which construes international peacebuilding as a linear process leading to the creation of states that are ‘stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive’ and with ‘extremely low levels of political corruption’ (Fukuyama 2011, p. 14), scholars of the ‘local turn’ assume that the process is rather non-linear, ‘hybrid, multiple and often agonistic’ (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, p. 764, see also Chandler 2013). In short,

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without shifting our focus to the local dynamics of conflict formation or peacebuilding we cannot properly understand either of them. The second fundamental assumption of the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding has been that the local is relevant for the practice of peacebuilding. To be more precise, the ‘local turn’ has been based on the premise that international support for peace is viable only if it relies on a certain degree of local leadership, support, resources and commitment (Donais 2012). This is most visible in the lack of local legitimacy of the international interventions that substituted for local administrations, as was the case in East Timor or Kosovo (Lemay-Hébert 2011). The degree of local ownership necessary remains contested, however, and three distinct approaches have emerged over the years. The first approach construes local ownership as a ‘top-down’ enterprise, a smallscale franchise of externally designed processes and institutions (Paris 2010). The second approach is ‘bottom-up’ and holds that peace should be indigenous (Mac Ginty 2008) and fully authored and led ‘from below’, by the locals and for the locals (Pouligny 2006). The third approach strikes the ‘middle ground’, calling for balance between the imposition of international norms and institutions and the restraint in the face of local tradition, agency and leadership (Barnett and Zürcher 2009; Donais 2012). Whatever the aspired degree of local commitment might be in any particular case, the consensus around the need for local ownership is so universal among the scholars and practitioners alike, that it has become a veritable orthodoxy in international peacebuilding thanks to the ‘local turn’. Virtually non-existent prior to 1997, the term ‘local ownership’ has experienced a meteoric rise in recent years. Between 1996 and 2015, there has been a steady rise in the number of scholarly publications containing the terms ‘local ownership’ and ‘peacebuilding’.3 To what extent have these assumptions of the local turn been implemented on the ground? Unfortunately, the track record is quite disappointing. The majority of studies have documented a wide gap between the liberal rhetoric of ownership on the one hand and peacebuilding practice on the other. The UN, which has championed the concept since the late 1990s, as Sarah Von Billerbeck notes, ‘has failed to realize local ownership in the broad way in which it is presented in discourse’ (Billerbeck 2016, p. 4). In my own research on crisis management operations of the Common Security and Defense Policy of the EU in the Balkans, Middle East and Horn of Africa, for instance, I have also identified a big

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gap between how the EU narrates local ownership in its policy discourse on the one hand and how this principle is being implemented in practice on the other (Ejdus 2017). As I demonstrate, in the policy rhetoric the EU construes local ownership as a middle ground between imposition and restraint. In practice, however, the EU has operationalized ownership as an externally driven, top-down effort, frequently leading to low degrees of local participation on the ground. In some cases, local ownership is used only as a fig leaf meant to conceal an outright imposition of priorities. A perfect example of this is the EUCAP Nestor, a maritime security mission launched by the EU in 2012. One of its flagship projects was the so-called Joint Action Plan with the Government of Somaliland. The Plan, agreed between the Republic of Somaliland and the EU in 2014, was allegedly a product of negotiation and was aligned with Somaliland’s Vision on how they wanted to develop their maritime security sector. As a matter of fact, the EU was firmly in control of the entire process (Ejdus 2018). As one of my interviewees put it: ‘The mission was based on how bureaucrats in Brussels saw the problems on the ground. Unfortunately, while designing the mandate, they were not looking into institutions in Somalia where resources are limited’.4 In other cases, the EU defines local ownership in such a narrow, technocratic and depoliticized way that it entirely excludes those who are supposed to be the end beneficiaries of the EU peacebuilding interventions. A case in point is the European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS) (Tartir and Ejdus 2018). The mission was launched in 2006 with the aim of fostering effective policing in support of an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state. EUPOL COPPS has been frequently praised for its contribution to the professionalization of the Palestinian security sector under full local ownership. In our work on EUPOL COPPS Alaa Tartir and I posited that the mission can be considered to be locally owned only if we adopt a very narrow technocratic standpoint and if we deny the political reality of the continued Israeli occupation and Palestinian Authority’s authoritarian rule. When we broadened the analysis to also bring into the picture the voices of ordinary Palestinians, a different picture was revealed. It turned out that the Palestinian civilian police and justice reforms supported by EUPOL COPPS have only led to the professionalization of authoritarian policing. Hence, the EU-assisted security sector reforms have only

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added a new layer of human insecurity without bringing about either an independent or a democratic, let alone a viable, Palestinian state. Because of such a dire implementation record, the concept of local ownership has been reprimanded as a ‘legitimizing concept’ to use Nina Wilén’s words (Wilén 2009), or even worse, as a mere ‘rhetorical cover’ (Chandler 2011, p. 87) for ‘varying degrees of local control that are typically not realized’ (Chesterman 2007, p. 20).

3

The ‘Local Turns’ and Their Discontents

This rhetoric/practice gap is to an extent also a reflection of the fact that the local turn in peacebuilding has been far from a coherent school of thought (Mac Ginty 2015, p. 846). Tania Paffenholz, for instance, discusses how the ‘local turn’ evolved through two generations of scholarship (Paffenholz 2015).5 Drawing on Robert Cox, I will here distinguish problem-solving from critical approaches to the local turn in peacebuilding (Cox 1981; Ejdus and Juncos 2018, p. 8). Problem-solving approaches such as neoliberalism and liberal cosmopolitanism take the liberal peacebuilding project for granted, together with its attachment to universal norms and its top-down and linear logic of peacebuilding, and then attempt to make it more effective by ensuring the local buy-in (Paris 2010). In contrast, critical approaches construe the ‘local turn’ as a fundamental challenge to the liberal peacebuilding project (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, p. 764). In this section, I review both approaches to the ‘local turn’ as well as critiques leveled against them. In the problem-solving camp, the most prominent approach has been that of neoliberalism. While critical peacebuilding scholars would certainly object to considering neoliberal appropriation of localism as part of the true ‘local turn’, the discursive transformation that has taken place within the liberal peacebuilding discourse is hard to dispute (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013). Neoliberals construe peacebuilding as the globalization of liberal market democracy from the West to the rest (Paris 2010, p. 638). Its objective is not only to end violence but also to lay an institutional foundation of liberal democracy as the only durable guarantee against relapse into violence. From such a standpoint, international peacebuilders are expected to design and export institutions for sustainable peace, while local elites are supposed to gradually buy into this externally conceived project (Donais 2012, p. 32).

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As this has often not worked in practice, neoliberals adapted their approach and endorsed localism as a corrective. From the point of view of neoliberalism, local ownership should be achieved through a gradual transfer of responsibility from the interveners to the local authorities. Once the seeds of liberal institutions are planted in conflict-affected societies, the responsibility to run them is gradually transferred to ‘maturing’ local authorities (Narten 2008, p. 375). This practice of international interveners to gradually hand over stewardship over the fledgling liberal endeavor—eventually making themselves superfluous—is what the former Special Representative of the UN Secretary General to Kosovo, Michael Steiner, termed the ‘art of letting go’ (Steiner 2003). ‘The local’ is here equated with liberally-minded local state elites from conflict-affected states or their western-funded metropolitan NGOs receptive to liberal ideas. Such a reductionist approach to ‘the local’, which has been a dominant view among practitioners, is often justified on pragmatic grounds (Brinkerhoff 2007, p. 118). A similar, but distinct problem-solving approach that has also attempted to appropriate the ‘local turn’ is that of liberal cosmopolitanism, as put forth, for example, in the works of David Held and Mary Kaldor (Held 1995; Kaldor 2002). This radical liberal tradition shares with neoliberals the conviction that sustainable peace can only be built on universal principles derived from Western modernity. In contrast to neoliberalism, however, these principles are not to be practiced through the strengthening of the market economy and state institutions, but rather through the respect of human rights and the activism of global civil society. To that end, liberal cosmopolitans call for stronger engagement with civil societies. In their view, local civil society is constitutive of global civil society and therefore excludes local communities uncommitted to the western concept of human rights. Moreover, liberal cosmopolitans advocate for the creation of international structures, such as the standing UN force or EU Human Security Response Force as recommended by the Barcelona Report from 2004 (Barcelona Report 2004). These supranational forces, in their view, are meant to repair the failures of the Westphalian state-system and contribute to world security via the protection of human security (Woodhouse and Ramsbotham 2005). Preventing such a force from misuse by powerful states, in the words of Woodhouse and Ramsbotham, would require ‘democratizing peacekeeping so that it has principles, mechanisms and practices that promote local ownership

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and empower civilians in conflict-affected communities’ (Woodhouse and Ramsbotham 2005, p. 153). In contrast to these problem-solving approaches, critical approaches have construed the ‘local turn’ as an alternative to the liberal peacebuilding project. Under the ‘local turn’ critical scholars are investigating the merits of non-linear (Chandler 2013) and non-liberal forms of peace (Richmond 2009, 2012) such as indigenous (Mac Ginty 2008), emancipatory (Richmond 2007; Visoka and Richmond 2017), everyday (Mac Ginty 2011) and hybrid peace (Jarstad and Belloni 2012; Mac Ginty 2010, 2011). They criticize the liberal problem-solvers for having accepted the letter but not the spirit of the ‘local turn’ (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, p. 779). The loberal peacebuilders, it is argued, have adopted the language of local ownership as a technical problem of implementation rather than design problem hardwired into the system (Cooper et al. 2011, p. 2001). Liberal peacebuilding, from their perspective, is nothing but a problem-solving exercise aimed at repairing, to use the words of Michael C. Pugh, ‘the dysfunctions of the global political economy within a framework of liberal imperialism’ (Pugh 2004, p. 39). Critical approaches have drawn extensively on post-structuralism and in particular on the work of Michel Foucault and his concept of governmentality as a liberal government of population at a distance (Ejdus 2018; Foucault 2007; Richmond 2010, 2011, 2012). Drawing on Foucault’s idea of counter-conduct as a ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’ (Foucault 2007, p. 201) but also on James Scott’s concept of infra-politics or hidden and everyday resistance (Scott 1990) the critical peacebuilding scholars have shed light on how the local actors contest, resist, co-opt and adapt internationally conceived interventions to serve their local needs, norms and interests (Ejdus 2018; Kappler and Richmond 2011; Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond 2010). Of particular importance for critical peace research has also been the concept of emancipation developed within the Frankfurt School (Patomäki 2001). For Oliver Richmond, emancipatory peace is ‘an everyday form of peace, offering care, respecting but also mediating culture and identity, institutions and custom, providing for the needs and assisting the most marginalised in their local, state, regional and international contexts’ (Richmond 2011, p. 4). Critical peacebuilding scholars have also relied on insights from postcolonialism on orientalist discourses that pervade peacebuilding (Kappler 2015; Said 1978) and its underlying colonial rationality (Jabri 2013).

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The concept of hybridity proved to be particularly fashionable for the analytical capture of the interplay between the local and the international (Bhabha 1994; Mac Ginty 2011). In the words of Mac Ginty, a hybrid approach to peacebuilding does not ‘seek to advocate a particular form of peacemaking, peacebuilding, reconstruction or development’. Instead, as he put it, ‘it seeks to describe a real-world condition and the process whereby that condition is constructed, maintained and replicated’ (Mac Ginty 2010, p. 392). Following this dictum, empirical studies have corroborated that in the course of international interventions interveners often become an integral part of domestic politics (Jarstad and Belloni 2012; McLeod 2015; Wallis 2012). Tim Donais uses hybridity to make a prescriptive argument about peacebuilding and criticizes both liberal and communitarian approaches to local ownership as ‘incomplete strategies for building stable sustainable peace’ (Donais 2012, p. 13). In his view, durable settlements require resources of both outsiders and insiders, as well as a process of consensus-building between the locals and internationals, but also among the locals, that leads to ‘negotiated hybridity’ (Donais 2012, p. 37). Drawing upon similar traditions, in my own work on EU crisis management missions, I have shown how the principle of local ownership in the contemporary peacebuilding practice, echoing the late colonial principle of indirect rule, is actually underpinned by the rationality of advanced democracies on how best to govern global insecurities at a distance, less but better and through a chain of actors ranging from the EU through local governments all the way down to local civil society organizations (Ejdus 2018). Consequently, the EU has operationalized ownership as responsibilization for externally designed objectives. No matter how skilfully it is performed, this ‘art of letting go’ is based on the rationality of the intervener and therefore frequently gives rise to local resistance that ultimately ends up undermining international efforts. Critical approaches to the ‘local turn’ have also been subjected to strong analytical and normative critiques. Hence, it has been argued not only that the key concepts such as ‘the local’ and ‘the international’ are unclear (Narten 2008), but that the entire dichotomy between the two upon which the ‘local turn’ has been premised is misleading (Paffenholz 2015, p. 862; Schierenbeck 2015, p. 1028). Such a binary reading, as Paffenholz put it, portrays the local and the international as monolithic entities, and by default essentializes them as either good or bad despite calls from the scholars of the ‘local turn’ to beware of romanticizing the

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local (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, p. 770). Moreover, the binary is said to lead to the portrayal of the international as the source of power, and the local as the source of resistance, hence obscuring the power of local elites (Paffenholz 2015, p. 864). To address these analytical problems stemming from this binary opposition between the local and the international, scholars of the ‘local turn’ have borrowed the concept of hybridity from post-colonial studies. This, in Paffenholz’s view, not only perpetuates the essentializing binary logic it attempts to overcome, but also ends up romanticizing hybridity (Paffenholz 2015, p. 863).6 Some authors, such as Hameiri and Jones, have pointed out that the binary logic preserved in the concept of hybridity obscures the politics of scale involved in peacebuilding (Hameiri and Jones 2017). Peacebuilding actors, they argue, strategically deploy different scales such as local, national or international, in order to serve their interests. Sometimes the same actors use different scales simultaneously and therefore, instead of treating the local or the international as separate groups of actors, we should in fact study them as strategies as Stephanie Kappler suggests (Kappler 2015).7 Normatively, critics have also raised a number of issues concerning the practical consequences of the ‘local turn’. To begin with, many pointed out that the fact that solutions are local does not mean that they are necessarily good (Donais 2012; Paris 2010). Donais, for instance, warns that enthusiasm for substantive and broad-based ownership stems from a naïve understanding of society as inherently progressive (Donais 2012, p. 66). Similarly, Elisa Randazzo argues that normative questions regarding who is to be emancipated have largely been ignored by the ‘local turn’ (Randazzo 2016). She particularly exposes the ‘nebulous’ concept of everyday peace—which is presented as an alternative to the linear top-down liberal peacebuilding—without offering any guidance on which everyday agency is to be privileged and why. Others go even further and warn that placing the locals in the driver’s seat may actually undermine peace. Edward Joseph, for example, contends that the assumption that locals know what’s best for them is essentially flawed. If they did, he argues, there would be no need for international intervention in the first place (Joseph 2007). Some have argued that the ‘local turn’, at least in the policy rhetoric, only pays lip service to the liberal peacebuilding. Paradoxically, this argument has been made both by liberal scholars and by those on the more radical end of the critique. Roland Paris, for instance, argues that the

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critics of the liberal peace are closet liberals, as they haven’t proposed any alternative to liberal peacebuilding (Cooper et al. 2011; Paris 2010). Mira Sabaratnam agrees that the ‘local turn’ ends up reinforcing liberal peacebuilding, albeit not because there is no alternative to it, but because such thinking stems from their Eurocentric ontology that underlines their key concepts (Sabaratnam 2013). In her view, despite its ‘anti imperial ethics’, the analytical apparatus of the ‘local turn’ only perpetuates colonial ethics (Sabaratnam 2013, p. 260). The dichotomy local/international is hence argued to carry deep-seated colonial era Eurocentric assumptions about the world as split into the rational, modern West and the traditional, indigenous local. It has also been pointed out that liberal peacebuilders adopted the language of the local turn only to salvage a failing project. This rhetorical turn, critical scholars argue, reflects only an attempt to make top-down externally driven liberal interventions more effective without unlocking the expected emancipatory potentials of what should be a veritable ‘local turn’ (Bräuchler and Naucke 2017). Mac Ginty and Richmond agree that most peacebuilders rely on the letter instead of the spirit of the ‘local turn’ (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, p. 779). However, there is no consensus among critical scholars whether the ‘local turn’ is salvageable or not. Chandler argues that post-liberal appropriation of all things local is nothing but an ‘exhaustion of the emancipatory potential of liberalism’ (Chandler and Richmond 2015, p. 4). Mac Ginty and Richmond are more optimistic and hold that the ‘local turn’ nevertheless contains emancipatory seeds that blossom quietly, through resistance (Chandler and Richmond 2015, p. 7; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, p. 773).

4

Conclusion

Where do we go from here? There are several avenues of further development which the future research of the ‘local turn’ could use to overcome what seems to be a current impasse. On the theoretical level, three directions seem to be particularly promising. The first one is to devote more effort to the issue of power in peacebuilding. The binary logic, which places the power in the hands of internationals and ascribes resistance to the local actors, has to be replaced with a more nuanced and diffused understanding of power. The second direction involves grappling with the issue of scale and space more generally and some very interesting steps have already been made in that

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direction (Vogel 2018). Insights from the human geography (Herod 2010) on the construction and production of scale, ‘scale jumping’, ‘scale bending’ and ‘the politics of scale’, that have slowly but convincingly traveled to IR (Agnew 1994; Hameiri and Jones 2017; Sjoberg 2008) could also help the ‘local turn’ to overcome the charge of essentialization. Finally, the ‘local turn’ should heed to the longstanding calls to take the notion of culture seriously by engaging more closely with anthropology in general and ethnographic methodologies in particular (Millar 2018; Richmond 2010). This will require much longer and deeper immersion of researchers in the field than usually is the case in peace and conflict studies (Bräuchler and Naucke 2017). Given the problems of access and security in conflict-affected states, this also requires a stronger engagement with methodological and ethical dilemmas (Peter and Strazzari 2017). On the prescriptive level, the ‘local turn’ needs to cope more directly with some of the fundamental questions that all too often remain overlooked. For problem-solvers, this translates into a question of how to move policy practices from the letter to the spirit of the local turn without compromising on fundamental values that could cost them domestic legitimacy to take part in international peacebuilding in the first place. Critical scholars of peacebuilding should face the same dilemma but in reverse and square another circle by constructively engaging with peacebuilding practitioners without losing the critical edge and being co-opted into the pre-existing grid of post-colonial and neoliberal institutions and practices (see Omer 2020, this volume). Lastly, the ‘local turn’ has emerged as a critique of neoliberal hubris of the 1990s and early 2000s. One is left to wonder what we can make out of the ‘local turn’ in the context of the rapid democratic backsliding, a surge in populism, a revival of nationalism, a return of geopolitics and a rise in authoritarian powers. Does the ‘local turn’ still provide a progressive avenue for the future of peacebuilding? (see Richmond 2020, this volume). Was it only a swan song of the declining liberal order or do its lessons still hold the promise of emancipation?

Notes 1. For another overview of the literature on local turn, see Leonardsson and Rudd (2015). 2. The term peacebuilding was first coined by Johan Galtung in the 1970s to denote the creation of structures that address the ‘root causes’ of violent conflict by supporting local capacities for conflict resolution (Galtung 1976).

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3. In 1996, it was mentioned on the internet only once, in 1997—8, 1998— 11, 1999—18, 2000—25, 2001—45, 2002—59, 2003—63, 2004—131, 2005—201, 2006—212, 2007—278, 2008—367, 2009—408, 2010— 480, 2011—523, 2012—551, 2013—572, 2014—601, 2015—537, 2016—515 times. The search was done through Google Scholar on 16 January 2017. 4. Interview with author, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Somaliland, Hargeisa 26 November 2016. 5. In her account, challenging peace and statebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo in the 1990s gave rise to the first generation of scholarship spearheaded by the work of John Paul Lederach (Paffenholz 2015, p. 858). The failures in Afghanistan and Iraq provided a new momentum for critiques of the liberal peace, leading to the second generation of scholarship on the ‘local turn’, led by the work of Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver Richmond (Paffenholz 2015, p. 859). 6. It should be noted, however, that some scholars of the ‘local turn’, aware of the criticisms that had been raised already within the post-colonial studies, conceived hybridization as a process that involves ‘prior hybridities’ rather than essentialized pre-existing liberal international and non-liberal local (Mac Ginty 2011, p. 8). 7. Some recent arguments in defense of keeping the dichotomy can be found in Millar (2017).

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Mcleod, L. (2015). A feminist approach to hybridity: Understanding local and international interactions in producing post-conflict gender security. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9(1), 48–69. Millar, G. (2017). For whom do local peace processes function? Maintaining control through conflict management. Cooperation and Conflict, 52(3), 293– 308. Millar, G. (2018). Ethnographic peace research: The underappreciated benefits of long-term fieldwork. International Peacekeeping, 25(5), 653–678. Mohan, G., & Stokke, K. (2000). Participatory development and empowerment: The dangers of localism. Third World Quarterly, 21(2), 247–268. Narten, J. (2008). Post-conflict peacebuilding and local ownership: Dynamics of external–local interaction in Kosovo under United Nations administration. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2(3), 369–390. OECD. (1995). Development partnerships in the new global context. Paris: OECD. OECD. (1996). Shaping the 21st century: The contribution of development cooperation. Paris: OECD. Omer, N. (2020). Domestic religion: Why interreligious dialogue in Kenya conserves rather than disrupts power. In J. Kustermans, T. Sauer, & B. Segaert (Eds.), A requiem for peacebuilding?. London: Palgrave. Paffenholz, T. (2015). Unpacking the local turn in peacebuilding: A critical assessment towards an agenda for future research. Third World Quarterly, 36(5), 857–874. Paris, R. (2010). Saving liberal peacebuilding. Review of International Studies, 36(2), 337–365. Patomäki, H. (2001). The challenge of critical theories: Peace research at the start of the new century. Journal of Peace Research, 38(6), 723–737. Peter, M., & Strazzari, F. (2017). Securitisation of research: Fieldwork under new restrictions in Darfur and Mali. Third World Quarterly, 38(7), 1531–1550. Pouligny, B. (2006). Peace operations seen from below: UN missions and local people. London: C. Hurst & Co. Pugh, M. (2004). Peacekeeping and critical theory. International Peacekeeping, 11(1), 39–58. Pugh, M. (2020). Peacebuilding’s origins and history. In J. Kustermans, T. Sauer, & B. Segaert (Eds.), A requiem for peacebuilding?. London: Palgrave. Randazzo, E. (2016). The paradoxes of the ‘everyday’: Scrutinising the local turn in peace building. Third World Quarterly, 37 (8), 1351–1370. Richmond, O. P. (2007). Emancipatory forms of human security and liberal peacebuilding. International Journal, 62(3), 459–478. Richmond, O. P. (2009). A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday. Review of International Studies, 35(3), 557–580.

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Richmond, O. P. (2010). Resistance and the post-liberal peace. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 38(3), 665–692. Richmond, O. P. (2011). De-romanticising the local, de-mystifying the international: Hybridity in Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands. The Pacific Review, 24(1), 115–136. Richmond, O. P. (2012). Beyond local ownership in the architecture of international peacebuilding. Ethnopolitics, 11(4), 354–375. Richmond, O. P. (2020). The fraught development of an international peace architecture. In J. Kustermans, T. Sauer, & B. Segaert (Eds.), A requiem for peacebuilding?. London: Palgrave. Sabaratnam, M. (2013). Avatars of eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace. Security Dialogue, 44(3), 259–278. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon. Schierenbeck, I. (2015). Beyond the local turn divide: Lessons learnt, relearnt and unlearnt. Third World Quarterly, 36(5), 1023–1032. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sjoberg, L. (2008). Scaling IR theory: Geography’s contribution to where IR takes place. International Studies Review, 10(3), 472–500. Steiner, M. (2003). Speech delivered by SRSG Michael Steiner at the London School of Economics and Political Science: Seven principles for building peace. https://reliefweb.int/report/serbia/speech-delivered-srsg-michael-ste iner-london-school-economics-seven-principles. Accessed 2 July 2019. Tartir, A., & Ejdus, F. (2018). Effective? Locally owned? Beyond the technocratic perspective on the European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian territories. Contemporary Security Policy, 39(1), 142–165. Visoka, G., & Richmond, O. (2017). After liberal peace? From failed statebuilding to an emancipatory peace in Kosovo. International Studies Perspectives, 18(1), 110–129. Vogel, B. (2018, January 22). Understanding the impact of geographies and space on the possibilities of peace activism. Cooperation and Conflict, first published online. Wallis, J. (2012). A liberal-local hybrid peace project in action? The increasing engagement between the local and liberal in Timor-Leste. Review of International Studies, 38(4), 735–761. Wilén, N. (2009). Capacity-building or capacity-taking? Legitimizing concepts in peace and development operations. International Peacekeeping, 16(3), 337– 351. Woodhouse, T., & Ramsbotham, O. (2005). Cosmopolitan peacekeeping and the globalization of security. International Peacekeeping, 12(2), 139–156.

CHAPTER 4

Domestic Religion: Why Interreligious Dialogue in Kenya Conserves Rather Than Disrupts Power Atalia Omer

When religious actors engage in constructive work measurable in terms of development indices such as increased literacy rates, school retention of children, and reduction of child marriage and sexual abuse, the same interreligious peacebuilding practices and mechanisms that they employ reinforce neoliberalism and deplete religiosity of its prophetic edges and decolonial and postcolonial emancipatory potential. By ‘prophetic’ I mean the resources within the religious tradition that foster the capacity to disrupt and reimagine social and political scripts. By ‘decolonial emancipatory’ I suggest that such disruption and rescripting need to tackle the long-term ramifications of coloniality, a technical concept denoting the constitutive relation of modernity to its darker legacies, as I explain below.

A. Omer (B) South Bend, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_4

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Examining the case of interreligious work in Kenya, the focus of this chapter is on what conceptions of religious or cultural tradition emerge from and constitute interreligious peacebuilding and development practices that spur interreligious or intercultural engagements to accomplish measurable actions as one collaborating sector (i.e., the ‘religious sector’) among others. I use ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ interchangeably sometimes to denote that ‘religion’ as a category of analysis and identification functioned as one taxonomic device together with racialization and gendering in the western Christian domination over colonies that has been ongoing since the age of ‘discovery’. In this historical context, Indigenous communities and cultural practices were either diminished by being labeled as animistic, cultish, fetish, and pagan, or forcefully shaped to fit into a definition of ‘religion’ born in Christian Europe but projected outward as a universal anthropological category (Asad 1993; Chidester 2014; Masuzawa 2005). The use of the category ‘culture’ (itself carrying a colonial baggage) denotes an effort to convey the uneasiness of some Indigenous peoples to fit themselves into the ‘religious’ category expected of them as participants in intercommunal engagements that define communal boundaries through religious categories, regardless of degrees of observance or theological facility. Some Indigenous people I met, however, especially in the Philippines, feel decidedly more comfortable with the designation ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’ rather than ‘religion’ because the latter implies a set of beliefs or a worldview not easily translatable (without a form of epistemic violence) into their own traditional practices. My focus on what conceptions of tradition emerge in the context of intercultural peacebuilding engagement is decidedly not about approaching the discussion from the perspective of development and policy circles. The latter are often animated by the question of how to engage religions and religious actors better in order to more effectively accomplish a spectrum of objectives, measurable indices employing conventional development, and/or peacebuilding metrics.1 This set of questions certainly has its place, but my intention here is to ask how the transformation of religion in peacebuilding and development efforts, through the various mechanisms of NGOization, reflects back on the study of religion, modernity, and coloniality. My interest in identifying the conceptions of religious traditions that emerge from on-the-ground interreligious peacebuilding engagements signals a particular attention to how people represent their religious and cultural traditions in the context of interreligious peacebuilding, and how such conceptions are reproduced in

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this distinct historical moment that reveals patterns of instrumentalizing religious and traditional actors and resources. The religious traditions generated through interreligious and intercultural engagements and their emphasis on unlocking constructive and peace-promoting potential of religious resources and actors and then branding them as ‘most authentic’ are nothing but a historical construct deeply embedded in a modernist story that defines religion as a universal and ahistorical essence. I argue that interreligious peacebuilding projects and engagements in sites in the Global South where I conducted my research rely on thin and ahistorical accounts of religious and cultural traditions reflective of the enduring epistemic violence of coloniality. Let us turn to a preliminary definitional work before moving forward with the analysis. Coloniality denotes and foregrounds the dark sides of modernity as manifested in gendered classificatory schemes employing ‘religion’ and ‘race’, which posit certain categories of humans as ‘less than’ human and thus subject to slavery, dispossession, domination, control, and genocide also authorized through appeals—depending on which period since the late fifteenth century—to Christendom, cosmopolitanism, or economic globalism. (Dussel 1993; Mignolo 2000, 2009; Quijano 2000; Lugones 2007). Indeed, the very concept of ‘development’ assimilates into a critique of coloniality as a contemporary reconfiguration of the earlier efforts to eliminate through conversion. This time the ‘good news’ comes in the form of epistemic expertise and donors’ domination. ‘Development’ denotes secular temporality and continuously treads upon orientalist and white settlers’ landscapes (Grosfougel 2013). Henceforth, I will mark ‘development’ with scare quotes to convey this critical outlook. In using the related term of ‘NGOization’, I refer to the professionalization process by which religious actors intervene in multiple ‘development’, peacebuilding, and policy practices and agendas by conforming to and immersing themselves in the protocols, vocabularies, fundraising, reporting, monitoring, and evaluating mechanisms that frame and characterize civil society action. The NGOization of religious actors also sectoralizes such actors or turns them, as noted, into a differentiated sector. Ironically, even if their sectoralization facilitates their increased relevance in public life, such a ‘postsecular’ turn is highly consistent with a secularist paradigm that isolates the ‘religious’ from other facets of social organizations, as a distinct sector with a particular sphere of function and influence that can be channeled toward accomplishing multiple agendas.

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The NGOization and sectoralization of ‘faith actors’, as they are often called, reflects the spread and deepening of neoliberal rationality that Wendy Brown identifies as an antipolitical force (Brown 2015).2 Accordingly, communal meanings are no longer shaped through democratic virtues and practices; instead, the concept of ‘social cohesion’, central to ‘development’ and peacebuilding undertakings, translates into the task of ‘problem solving’, which requires a multi-sectoral ‘buy-in’. It is within this context that the concept of ‘interfaith dialogue for action’ emerged, diminishing the complexity of ‘faith traditions’ to problem-solving and thereby exposing interfaith dialogue of action as enhancing rather than disrupting global and local historical injustices and structural modalities of violence. I therefore seek to extend the discussion of religion and the practice of ‘development’/peacebuilding beyond the instrumental capacity of official and nonofficial religious actors to influence outcomes and move toward an analysis of how religiosity is (re)shaped through the mechanisms of interreligious dialogue of action. The latter denotes an interreligious dialogue to the degree that diverse faith and cultural communities engage collaboratively in action to enhance the ‘common good’, a concept that, once again, I surround with scare quotes because what is meant by ‘common’ is often telegraphed as ‘secular’ or different than ‘religious’ or bounded communal belonging. The proliferation of such efforts, both on grassroots and formal levels, signals the postsecular turn of various ‘development’ and policy circles, manifesting in an increased attention to the ‘religion factor’. Examining how religious traditions, specifically, are employed—by whom, and to what purpose—emphasizes the need to scrutinize the concurrent and mutually reinforcing processes of neoliberalization, securitization, and depoliticization/domestication of religious traditions. Such processes foreclose internal hermeneutical innovations and critiques from the margins and privilege abstracted, ahistorical, and conservative accounts of tradition. In what follows I first provide a brief exposition of interreligious peacebuilding and ‘development’ work in Kenya. Second, I examine a specific case study in Kenya’s coastal region and apparent efforts to transform gender norms therein. The accounts of tradition that emerge from these processes and activities are relevant to the study of religion and coloniality because they illuminate the degrees to which religiosity conserves or disrupts multiple forms of violence and injustice. This will be the focus of the final part of the chapter.

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Interreligious Peacebuilding Efforts in Kenya

My fieldwork in Kenya, a part of a broader research agenda in the Global South, stretched from 2017 to 2019 by way of repeated trips to the region. I interviewed 150 people, conducted six focus group discussions with women, youth, and religious leaders or clerics. The interviews focused on multiple actors in the religion field, including practitioners of intra- and inter-religious dialogue, intercommunal peacebuilding, and participants in securitizing manipulative religious expressions under the label of Preventing Violent Extremism policies and programs. I also engaged civil society actors working on questions of corruption, devolution, gender justice, poverty and marginalization and other key concerns. Furthermore, I had access to additional Focus Group Discussions with key participants in interreligious dialogue of action conducted by colleagues from the University of Notre Dame office for internationalization. NDI followed up with some of the same communities and partners in Malindi on the Coast of Kenya, with which CRS engages, some of whom I likewise encountered in my own fieldwork. The research team from NDI, however, also reached out to other key interlocutors to avoid overlap with my interviews. This resulted in the fruitful expansion of my analysis of dynamics on the ground in the Coast as regards the intersection of peacebuilding and ‘development,’ precisely on questions around the reduction of child marriages. I also triangulated the empirical research with the extensive body of interviews with religious actors in peacebuilding and ‘development’ curated by Katherine Marshall of the Berkley Center based in Georgetown University in Washington, DC. This invaluable resource offers a cumulative and a critical mass of testimonies attesting to the global relevance of religion to peacebuilding and ‘development.’ The empirical research I conducted, the interview database, and the multidimensional evidence-based research conducted by CRS and other key organizations who ‘do religion’ all contribute to my effort to cultivate a decolonial prism through which to refract our analysis of religion, violence, and the practices of peacebuilding. To examine the scope, meanings, and capacity of interreligious peacebuilding engagements in Kenya, one needs to first comprehend the historical relevance of religion to conflict and violence as well as to patterns of marginalization, dispossession, and colonization. A deeply religious and diverse landscape (sketched below), Kenya exemplifies the relevance of engaging religion, religious institutions, and leaders, as well

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as other religious actors in an effort to effect change, mitigate violence, and implement ‘development’ and humanitarian objectives. As in other cases, the exceedingly reductive category of the ‘religious actor’ is highly complex and occasionally veils more than it reveals. It assumes a categorical distinction between religious and non-religious types of actions and actors3 —a distinction that does not capture the complexities of motivations, actions, and ways that a multiplicity of actions and engagements become subsumed under the (intra/inter)faith rubric. Hence, my typology of religious actors includes official religious leaders, non-official leaders, international and local organizations explicitly identified as ‘religious’ or ‘faith inspired’, as well as those people for whom communal identity is defined through religious lines in ways that illuminate the intersections and elective affinities between religion and other categories, such as ethnicity, nationality, and culture. The latter category of communal actors where the ‘religious’ delineates communal identity markers is critical for the analysis of interreligious engagements and actions as peacebuilding and ‘development’ mechanisms because interreligious peacebuilding and ‘development’ activities are often ‘interreligious’ by virtue of the communal identifications of the ‘beneficiaries’ (as they are called within neoliberal ‘development’ parlance) of such activities.4 Kenya’s religious landscape—which is majority Christian (over 80 percent), but with sizable Muslim communities (11 percent) as well as small percentages of traditionalist, Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Baha’i traditions5 —is rooted in colonialism and missionary activism, which sliced up the territories that became Kenya in 1920 under the British into distinct spheres of influence.6 Christian missionaries from Europe targeted specific geographic regions for their conversion activities, which explains why tribal and ethnic identities often associate with particular religious traditions. Yet, as many Kenyans underscore, tribal identities can remain the most salient form of self- and other-identification.7 The spheres of religious or, rather, denominational influences were closely sanctioned and monitored by colonial authorities, with a strong Anglican and Presbyterian presence in central Kenya due to its climate and agricultural potential (Throup 1995; Nthamburi 1991). However, even while missionaries competed for targets of evangelization, Christian denominations attempted to cooperate and to coordinate their missionary objectives—a legacy present in contemporary ecumenical associations such as the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) and the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya (EAK). The coastal area of East Africa, populated

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mostly by Muslims, proved harder to colonize and missionize. This was reflected by the agreements with the Sultan of Zanzibar (1886 and 1895), assuring the protected status of Sharia law and the integration of the coastal Muslim governance infrastructures into the colonial administration, before a final annexation agreement in 1963 (Oded 2000). Within the British colonial apparatus, Muslims were blocked from non-madrasa educational channels and thus barred from governmental positions, with long-term ramifications in terms of contemporary experiences and perceptions of Muslim social exclusion and marginalization. While Muslims invoke a historical narrative of injustice and marginalization,8 peacebuilding and ‘development’ actors often bracket or altogether dismiss engagement with the long-term ramifications of historical and structural violence in a landscape permeated by a host of stereotypes that depict Muslims of the coast as ‘lazy’ and uninterested in education. This attributes a simplistic causality to culture that fails to illuminate complex patterns of religio-cultural causality as they sustain systemic forms of violence over time.9 The coastal regions have historically comprised a diverse Muslim population, including Swahilis (descendants of Indigenous communities who intermarried with Arab traders), ethnic Somali Kenyans, and Ismailis (with roots in Asia). Muslim communities often associate with different African ethnic groups that are predominantly Christian and vary geographically (Oded 2000). The British colonial administration, as elsewhere in the empire, capitalized on the internal stratification of Muslims where Arab Muslims were perceived as superior to African converts, with Swahilis occupying an ambiguous space. The legacy of this colonial discourse therefore underpins ethnic-political divisions between Arabs and African Muslims as well as between Christians and Muslims more broadly. Meanwhile, ethnic Somali Kenyans in the northeast sought secession from Kenya in a 1959 referendum, but their desire to unite with Somalia was ignored, resulting in the formation of armed Somali Kenyan groups (shiftas ) and the Shifta War (1963–1968). Later, in 1984, the Kenyan security forces executed, at Wagalla near Wajir, over 300 Somali Kenyans, further alienating this particular Muslim community. The violence in Somalia later generated massive refugee waves, which, combined with Kenyans collaborating with the U.S. counterterrorism approach, prompted the Kenyan government to securitize both Kenyan and non-Kenyan Somalis through special identification cards and profiling (Anderson 2014; Stoddard 2015).

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From the early resistance of the African Inland Church (AIC) to the Kikuyu-led Mau Mau Rebellion (1952–1959),10 the colonial and missionary splicing of Kenyans carries enduring legacies of violence, often marked by and manifesting along ethnic, tribal, and religious lines. Indeed, the force and ubiquity of religious overtones explains the relevance of religious actors’ interventions in both divisive and cohesive actions.11 Critically, patterns of colonial ‘development policies and investment’ persist ‘in the sharp inequalities that mark Kenya’s contemporary geography’ (Berkley Center 2017, p. 40). As noted, these inequalities are at the heart of the Muslim experiences of marginalization, which is only further reinforced by the Christian domination of the political landscape.12 In a reckoning after the post-2007 election violence, for instance, it became clear how most religious leaders, organizations, and institutions were implicated in the eruption of violence, taking sides and failing to offer moral leadership that transcended partisanship. In the background, one can identify long histories of engagement with political leaders and platforms as collaborators, but also occasionally as critics.13 Consequently, an entire spectrum of religious actors and organizations committed themselves to active participation in a National Cohesion and Integration Commission, which also examined pathways for implementing devolution policies resulting from the constitutional reform process of 2009–2010. Some of the obstacles for effective devolutionary policies revolve around historical injustices and their implications in terms of land rights and related ethnic tensions as well as poverty, regional inequality, climate change, educational disparities, gender-based violence, and a high number of orphans and vulnerable children (Berkley Center 2017, pp. 26–27). Other obstacles involve the constitutional provision for kadhi courts to adjudicate personal and family law disputes according to Islamic law when all plaintiffs identify as Muslim—a provision with deep roots in British colonial practices as well as Christian-grounded objections to the legal protection of abortions and homosexuality (Cussac 2008, pp. 289–302). Partly in the background of the explosiveness due to a sensationalized misrepresentation and misinformation campaigns surrounding the kadhi courts is the consolidation of an influential narrative, with global promulgators and supporters, but also local advocates,14 about Christian persecution and a Muslim takeover strategy, amplified and cross-fertilized with the securitizing religion discourse associated with counterterrorism efforts.

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Since religiosity in one form or another predominates in Kenya and a majority reports attending religious services on a regular basis (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2010), it makes sense to examine the ways in which religiosity and religious institutions, organizations, and communal engagements might facilitate and influence peace and justice promotion. An important facet of this examination is religious institutions and actors’ long colonial but also indigenous histories as service providers as well as their active involvement in various manifestations of microfinancing as well as relative legitimacy and traction within the communities, even though they, too, eroded due to corruption and involvement with the post-election violence (Berkley Center 2017, p. 31). The latter signals the increased expansion of neoliberal rationality, a point to which I will return below. For now it suffices to highlight the growth of charismatic Christianity and prosperity gospel churches (Gifford 2009; Kasomo and Maseno 2011) as well as persistent indigenous spiritual practices and the Africanization of Christianity (Smith 2008; ter Haar 2009). In addition, as Cecelia Lynch argues, the ‘do good’ ‘religious actors’, especially Muslim organizations, need to be interpreted as being in tension with the global securitizing discourse and the importation of orientalist lenses that aim to counter and prevent violent extremism (C/PVE). The latter also manifest through a rigid NGOs registry (Lynch 2011). C/PVE mechanisms, accordingly, reinforce Muslim marginalization of the premise of confronting al-Shabaab (among other groups), which claimed responsibility for multiple terrorist attacks in Nairobi and Garissa and other locations as well. The links between the ‘soft’ power of ‘development’ and a ‘strong’ security agenda are articulated plainly in reflections on evidence-based research with former recruits in African contexts, broadly, and in Kenya, specifically.15 According to these reflections, an investment in livelihood projects or various programs targeting youth and women can help reduce recruitment to violent groups. In other words, enabling people to have a reason to live through a small enterprise or vocational training in prison can increase security more than bombing and killing them. This is the line I heard from a Kenyan researcher working for a European-headquartered organization and sponsored by the U.S. Department of State to come up with research-based policy recommendations for the Kenyan government. The focus on livelihood projects, regulation of Islamic schools (madrasas), stricter approaches to the criminal system, as well as communal resources to ‘problem solve’

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were all articulated as ways to mitigate the threat of recruitment.16 Therefore, the analysis of ‘good’ religious action and involvement in various facets of ‘development’ and peacebuilding cannot bracket the securitizing and neoliberal discourses that define good religion’s own sphere of operation as a distinct sector. As such, the religion sector, as commented by a key person associated with the Interreligious Council of Kenya, can be operationalized for its established networks and institutions of care and services, its capacity to reach and mobilize people who congregate voluntarily, and its apparent potential for moral clarity and non-partisan interventions.17 Kenya’s rich religious tapestry also comes through in multiple ecumenical and interreligious organizations,18 such as the already mentioned NCCK (established in 1913 under a different name), which focuses its activities on capacity building for governance and social services, which include activities with and for refugees, public health, economic empowerment, and a host of other focus points. The Organization of African Instituted Churches is also involved with what might conventionally be classified as ‘development’ projects, such as a ‘livelihood and HIV’ program (since the 1990s), savings and credit associations for microfinancing, as well as work with orphans and vulnerable children, especially helping them navigate their inheritance rights. The Evangelical Alliance Kenya (established in 1975) focuses on evangelism, but also partakes, like the other umbrella organizations, in capacity building and conflict resolution. On the Muslim front, the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims (established in 1973) aspires to enhance the political input of Muslims, overcome internal discord among the Muslim communities, and facilitate the harmonization of Muslim NGOs and their capacity to promote Muslim interests politically on a national level. The Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya (established in 1977) coordinates input from Muslim scholars and religious leaders of Kenya and, like the Supreme Council, seeks to cultivate the capacity of the Muslim community to influence and promote Muslim communal interests on the national level. The organization is involved with interreligious peace work, activating existing Muslim networks to facilitate capacity building, advocacy, and education initiatives. Finally, the Aga Khan Development Network, associated with the Ismaili community in Kenya, has a long history of investing in social welfare and ‘development’ initiatives. The Aga Khan Foundation is one of the ‘RINGOs’ or royally sponsored international NGOs, which, due to their close ties with western donor communities,

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suffer less scrutiny from the securitizing discourse that has shaped perceptions, spheres of activities, and opportunities for Muslim organizations in Kenya (Lind and Howell 2010; Lynch 2011, pp. 25–28). These umbrella organizations illuminate various dimensions of religious agency in the Kenyan landscape where interreligious engagements also thrive. Interreligious dialogues of action, as they are framed in a conscious effort to redress multiple crises broadcast on the dominant peace and ‘development’ registers characteristic of the umbrella organizations. This mirroring, of course, is also a function of donors’ dynamics and the global structural imbalance underpinning them. The Interreligious Council of Kenya (established in 1984) was formed during the urgency of the AIDS crisis to address the needs of vulnerable children and orphans. In the early 2000s, the organization shifted its focus to peace and conflict transformation; at this point, it changed its name from the original World Conference on Religions for Peace Kenya and directed its attention to deepening interreligious dialogue (Berkley Center 2015). One of the first interreligious actions in Kenya was the Ufungamano Initiative, established in protest against the exclusion of civil society from the parliamentary deliberations over the constitutional reforms in 1999, the Initiative encompassed 54 different human and women’s rights organizations, religious groups, youth, and oppositional parties (Berkley Center 2015, p. 48; Mati 2012, p. 65). The initiative eventually resulted in the passing of the Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill in 2000 and the addition of 10 members of the Unfangemano’s People’s Commission to the official Constitution of Kenya Review Commission (Berkley Center 2015, p. 48; Chesworth 2009). However, the discussions surrounding the aforementioned kadhi courts and the Christian opposition eventually resulted in the disengagement of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims from Ufungamano’s steering committee and a complete withdrawal from the initiative in 2003. While the Ufungamano declined, other efforts to include the ‘religion sector’ emerged, such as the ‘Framework for National Dialogue’ stewarded, among others, by the Inter-Religious Council of Kenya.

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Child Marriage and the Transformation of Gender Norms Along Kenya’s Coast

It is within this context of religion work that I zoom in on the Coast Interfaith Council of Clerics’ (CICC) participation, as a sector, within a broader multi-sectoral effort called the ‘Dialogue and Action Project’

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(DAP) to reduce child marriages and sexual abuse and to mitigate some of the dangers associated with rampant sexual tourism and human traffickers.19 The Coast region of Kenya, as mentioned, carries long historical scars of marginalization, especially as regards the internally plural Muslim community. The CICC partnered with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and, with the support of a U.S.-based foundation,20 focused on the constructive capacities of faiths in a multi-sectoral effort where, as religious authorities within the affected communities, they see themselves as a key to contesting communal accounts of traditions as sanctioning harmful practices against girls and women. During focus groups and personal interviews, the clerics shared with me their analysis that the roots of the epidemic proportion of child marriage and sexual abuses are found in poverty and hopelessness and the perception of a lack of opportunities, which also leads to disengagement from and devaluation of the educational system.21 Their specific location within the community positions them as instrumental stakeholders, not only in facilitating reporting mechanisms of sexual abuses and in cultivating— among children, parents, and teachers—an awareness of children’s rights to education and bodily integrity. Most specifically, they situate themselves as key interlocutors in discussions about whether their religious traditions condone or condemn harmful practices, such as female genital mutilation and the commodification of women’s and girls’ bodies. This process involves an internal engagement with traditions. The clerics, who are also involved in various conflict resolution efforts, produced a document,22 which they employ in peace and justice club meetings with children and teachers in the schools where, according to teachers I met, almost all children have experienced sexual abuse of one kind or another.23 The document involves an exposition, through the methodology of proof texting, of the multiple ways in which scriptures and the textual traditions support a basic commitment to human rights and are consistent with internationally ratified declarations and conventions pertaining to the rights of children, including the right of young girls to an education.24 For example, a general rule is said to derive from the Sharia, as the prophet was recorded saying ‘there should be neither harming nor reciprocating harm’ to establish a prohibition against violence against children, including of the sexual variety, but also neglect of their moral and ethical formation. Likewise, the Muslim clerics underscored that the Qur’an does not condone early marriage, but rather indicates maturity—physical and mental—of the child as the threshold.25

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Similarly, to bolster Christianity’s consistency with the legal framework for child protection, the Christian interlocutors cited a variety of verses from the Bible, including Luke 18:16, to stress that ‘care of children was central to the work of Jesus’,26 Genesis 1:27 to affirm the dignity of the child as a human made in the divine image, Deuteronomy 6:4–9 to highlight the communal responsibility for the spiritual development of the child, and a few other carefully selected proofs. Shifting from this discussion of a general commitment to the education and formation of children, the Christianity-focused segment of the document turns to the problem of child marriage, identifying this practice as one that ‘disrupt[s] education, limit[s] girls’ economic potential, and correlate[s] with high levels of sexual abuse and violence… [and] is also associated with increased rates of maternal and infant mortality’.27 These ramifications, in turn, ‘[perpetuate] the cycle of poverty, reinforcing it, and making it hard to escape, and ultimately contributing to regional instability’.28 The Christian clerics affirm their rejection of the practice of child marriage as both harmful to the child herself, but also to the community, doing so by citing Genesis and other verses that suggest that women, like men, were created in the image of God, thereby implying one must treat girls and boys equally. The African Kaya traditionalist section cites rites of passage and initiation and conveys an oral narrative from the Mijkenda society, told by an elder from the Malindi District Cultural Association, according to which children were protected and formed in such a way that they would know their responsibilities as men and women. Child marriage was only allowed under the condition of famines and even then the girl ‘would not be given to the ‘husband’ until she reaches maturity age…The man entitled for that girl was warned to wait until he got permission from the older women’.29 They underscore that the fact that Muslims and others have practiced child marriage is therefore a matter of cultural norms, and is not necessarily condoned by the tradition. Intended to facilitate ‘interfaith child protection’,30 involving multiple stakeholders, including members of the Parent Teacher Association and community-based child protection groups, this approach to hermeneutics reflects important links between the need to change cultural norms as a mechanism for attaining regional stability and religious or tradition-specific literacy. Connecting child insecurity with political insecurity, the document and the multisectoral effort intend to redress deeper issues related to poverty, marginalization, and the breakdown of social fabric about which the clerics talked with great pain.

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They related the devaluing and ‘selling off’ of girls and their education to the perpetuation of the cycles of poverty and marginalization, which in turn contribute to harmful practices and violent conflicts, as well as to an environment ripe for recruitment to violent groups such as al Shabab and Da’esh.31 The securitizing prism, therefore, targets various ‘at risk’ or ‘target’ sectors such as women, youth, and the ‘religious’, all of which are accordingly interpreted as potential conveyers of belligerence but likewise targets for harnessing and promoting good capacities conducive to regional and sociopolitical and economic stability. Social locations and scripted roles illuminate certain demographics as particularly ripe to partner in peacebuilding/‘development’ efforts that require soft power. Access to, authority in, and facility with religious traditions thus become relevant peacebuilding and ‘development’ tools. ‘Targeting’ sectors for their potential capacities as instruments of sociopolitical transformation reveals the neoliberal logic of the engagement with religion for peacebuilding and ‘development’. It also reveals that ‘religion’ is engaged reductively in terms of its functionality rather than substantively for its own sake, including highlighting internal pluralities, marginal voices, feminist perspectives, and decolonial critique. Women, for instance, are ‘targeted’ as a key sector of influence due to their roles in traditional social scripts and roles in the social reproductive fields as mothers, wives, daughters, and teachers. The case of Malindi and the CICC exemplifies this point because it foregrounds the intersection of peacebuilding with conventional ‘development’ foci such as girls’ education and the promotion of human rights discourse, in this case of the right of the child. It also shows that, in an effort to change harmful practices seemingly sanctioned by tradition, there is a need to engage interpretively within the tradition. The hermeneutical work, however, does not involve a deep theological analysis of the androcentrism of scriptural traditions. Thus, its focus on changing sexual and gender norms remains within a patriarchal frame that underpins the very norms that the clerics seek to transform as a part of their broader analysis of the ways society can overcome the cycles of poverty and marginalization. One cleric was asked to reflect on how moral and religious teachings affect questions of poverty. He commented that religion can be a contributing factor when unauthorized and homegrown religious leaders misinterpret the tradition in order to devalue education.32 Other clerics

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confirmed the problem of the increased presence of ‘religious leaders who are not formed [and] do not work under [institutional] umbrellas’.33 Speaking about the challenge of battling cultural norms conducive to girls’ commodification, another cleric talked about the difficulties of addressing misinterpretations and the need to engage in men-only or boy-only forums ‘to sensitize [them] to stop looking at girls as incomegenerating activity’.34 Yet another cleric, during a focus group with community clerics in Malindi, responded to a question that probed whether working on the issue of reducing child marriage led to theological reflection, specifically about the strengths of and gaps in religious teachings related to gender roles, marriage, and so forth. He responded that ‘theology contributed to [the] protection of [the] child’, once again retrieving Quranic proof texting.35 A focus group with male caregivers who participated in DAP for a variety of reasons—including for the financial incentives built into the program that facilitate parents to generate income—conveyed the sentiment that social ills in their communities relate to a departure from authentic religious teachings. When asked whether they always agree with their religion’s views of gender roles, the clerics responded in the affirmative, assigning blame only to those unauthorized religious leaders who depart from interpretations of their tradition in condoning harmful practices.36 When another focus group was asked about the relation between culture and religion as pertaining to child marriage and other harmful practices, they responded: ‘This is cultural. According to religion, all children are equal’.37 Hence, the effort to stop harmful practices of epidemic proportions such as child marriage and incest—which happens through hermeneutical engagement with religious and cultural traditions, along with the other mechanisms such as children’s rights, literacy opportunities in the schools, and income-generating activities—is not attentive to the harm that the textual and non-textual traditions themselves have inflicted on girls and women. The limited roles women can assume—as daughters, mothers, whores, widows, nuns, and saints—reduce their possible roles to merely supporting scripts. Indeed, the argument is that better-educated women can be both economically productive and more capable of fulfilling the obligations of daughter, wife, and mother and subsequently influence broader societal change. Such an argument, as I argue above, reflects more neoliberal rationality than theological intervention.

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Because of the links articulated between instability, underdevelopment, and recruitment of youth (framed as a risk demographic) to violent organizations, it is important to zoom out to some broader child-centric interfaith efforts focused on reducing violence, where the apparently selfevident and universal commitment to the health, education, and security of the child is what underpins partnerships among faith actors. Prominently, in this field, the Japanese Arigatou International’s Global Network of Religions for Children (formed in 2000, with its General Secretariat relocating from Tokyo to Nairobi in 2013) involves over 200 interfaith projects in 70 countries, with over 34,000 religious leaders and child-rights advocates and almost 50,000 participating children.38 Two points present themselves with particular relevance. First, the responsibility to care for children constitutes a common ground to commit to common action, generative of partnership and commitment across multiple divides. Second, the insecurity of children and youth (usually ranging from teenage years to late 20s) is a contributing factor in their recruitment to violent groups. The latter purportedly manipulate religious traditions and their teachings—a process possible in the first place due to religious illiteracy, which, in the case of Kenya, is often sarcastically captured by the phrase ‘sheikh google’.39 To redress the second point pertaining to religious illiteracy in the Kenyan contexts, BRAVE (Building Resilience Against Violent Extremism), an intra-faith or intra-Muslim movement, as it refers to itself, developed with major conceptual input from Mustafa Ali who is also the General Secretariat of Arigatou-International in Kenya. This illuminates the deep societal ramifications for faith-framed, child-centric interventions that connect the dots between deprivation, displacement, marginality, abuse, hunger, and other scandalous vulnerabilities that millions of children endure and their susceptibility to manipulation and violence. BRAVE (which was formed in 2011 during a time of rampant al Shabab recruitment and violence in Kenya) conceptualizes itself as a ‘movement’ to counter, from the grassroots, the narratives of Islam employed by violent extremism.40 It does so through training sheikhs and teachers, capacitating them to respond effectively at the intra-faith level to misinterpretations about Islam as well as to cultivate mechanisms, including through intentional work with women (i.e., mothers), to identify warning signs of religiously inflected ‘radicalization’. BRAVE also operates at the interfaith level through media and other channels to dispel misperceptions

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about Islam in the broader Kenyan community and to imagine alternative narratives of friendship and coexistence.41 Throughout its work, BRAVE accepts the vocabulary of the global C/PVE discourse, including the concepts of ‘deradicalization’ and ‘counter-messaging’, which another organization oriented toward peacebuilding rejects as overdetermined, reductive, and overly prescriptive, foreclosing the hermeneutical space. This also denies the validity of an underlying ‘sympathy’ a whole spectrum of people may experience in relation to the root causes of which violent groups such as al shabab may be symptomatic.42 At the same time, the focus on youth vulnerability and suffering similarly generates appeals to locate the unique capacity of ‘religion’ to intervene constructively through accessing spiritual and religious traditions’ moral responsibility and infrastructural capacity to reach communities. This unique capacity or ‘capital’ is apparently located in the more ‘authentic’ or ‘correct’ interpretations of the tradition. Such appeals to authenticity, I argue, preclude openness to internal contestations and historically grounded engagements with faith traditions. First, a few additional clarifications are in order. I marked movement above in scare quotes to denote that this self-characterization is either a misnomer or an aspiration but not an accurate account of BRAVE’s activities even if it frames itself as a ‘grassroots’ approach to religion and violence. The latter exemplifies what it means to broadcast on the same registers as global peacebuilding discourse in its postsecular phase, involving a recognition of ‘religion’ and ‘religious actors’ as potential partners in peacebuilding and ‘development’ discourse. The language of manuals for ‘deradicalization’ and various intentional efforts to engage in counter-messaging echoes C/PVE policy approaches based in the Global North even if in personal interviews teachers and shaikhs involved in BRAVE’s activities cite their strong sense of their religiosity as the motivating force behind their often risky engagement in counter-messaging and ‘deradicalization’. They cite their desire to defend their faith from its perversion by ignorant, self-proclaimed authorities. They also cite their responsibility as people with a privileged authority vis-à-vis tradition to be on the frontlines of this struggle against the perversion of faith and its reinterpretation to authorize violence.43 This authentic form of religious peacebuilding agency notwithstanding, BRAVE’s countermessaging activities do not constitute a movement—if by ‘movement’ we mean, together with the social movement scholars such as Sidney Tarrow, ‘collective challenges, based on common purposes and social

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solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities’ (Tarrow 1998, p. 4). Notably, social movements are not the same as lobbyists, interest groups, or isolated sectors’ interests and manifest in often contentious and sustained collective disruptive action against elites sometimes through subverting symbolic and semiotic fields, articulating a common purpose that overrides concerns with individual sacrifice for participation in collective actions, and consolidating social solidarity. Social movements also generate, often through contentions and other mechanisms, alternative public narratives and conceptions of the good. In contrast, programs of deradicalization operate, together with elites and forces that seek stabilization, within a securitizing discourse that aspires to contain ‘bad religion’ through harnessing ‘good religion’, both of which draw upon a discourse of authenticity. In the one case, claims of authenticity are deployed as sacred warrants to authorize violence against multiple ‘infidels’ and perpetuate an apocalyptic vision, often through promises of paradisiacal existence in Somalia that never materialize. In the other case, reclaiming the ‘true’ meaning of Islam (in this case) brackets and historicizes violence in the sacred sources and cultural practices while also seeking ways to redress contributing factors for radicalization such as poverty, lack of education, and marginalization. This is not the same as a ‘social movement’ but rather a peacebuilding/‘development’ framework entirely consistent with the status quo and entirely content with diminished accounts of religious traditions as, in essence, about peace. Indeed, often counter-messaging is channeled through mainstream media platforms with BRAVE and other partners working in tandem with the securitizing discourse to broadcast a domesticated account of Islam as in the ‘my jihad’ campaign that seeks to deescalate the fearful misunderstanding of the principle of jihad by branding it as anything one strives for. For example, one woman looks at the camera and tells viewers that her jihad is to cook and care for her family, while another woman states that hers is to serve as a medical doctor. The point here is not to challenge efforts to deescalate intergroup animosities and stereotyping in Kenya—especially in the context of occasional explosive violence—but rather to highlight that the turn to religious hermeneutics as a peacebuilding/‘development’ mechanism relies upon domesticating and bureaucratizing ‘religious actors’ and religious peacebuilding agency. Based on July 2019 conversations with key people in the PVE space in Nairobi, it is clear that the ‘my jihad’ campaign is not unique but rather symptomatic of a broader investment in messaging

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through media. Another example is Somali Voices-Kenya. This program was launched in December 2018 in Kenya, targeting youth (15–35 years old) from the Somali-speaking communities to enhance their resilience against transnational violent groups (especially al-Shabab). This program, an initiative of US-headquartered Equal Access International, focuses on generating a messaging hub through participatory media (radio, social media, and customized app). Youth are particularly encouraged to attend alternative messaging trainings, which are highly incentivized. Accordingly, contesting the self-ascribed use of ‘movement’ is important, because a global framework of religious engagement operates more like AstroTurf than grassroots, mainstreaming (through grants and other forms of support and incentives) peacebuilding practices that depend upon functionalist approaches to cultivating religion as a form of capital for the purpose of stabilization, securitization, and economic ‘development.’ While the requirement to cultivate a degree of religious literacy and cultivate partnership and relationships with ‘religious and traditional peacemakers’44 signals a departure from unreconstructed secularist approaches to international relations, the increased interest in religious literacy and religiously literate actors consolidates rather than disrupts global structural violence or what the scholar of decoloniality Walter Mignolo refers to as ‘global designs’ (Mignolo 2012). The utility of religious authorities as a sector particularly equipped to combat ‘bad religion’ and its AstroTurf qualities allows for a rather narrow interpretive or hermeneutical space vis-à-vis appeals to religious and cultural traditions. I referred above to this narrowness in terms of the discourse of authenticity even when more complexly synergizing peacebuilding and ‘development’. Arigatou International’s Panama Declaration on Ending Violence Against Children, signed at the 5th Forum of the Global Network of Religions for Children in Panama on May 2017, reaffirms appeals to authenticity. The ‘moral imperative’ of religious actors is, it reads, ‘to protect children from harm, as enshrined and protected in the teachings of all of the world’s religious and spiritual communities and in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’ as well as their understanding of the transformative capacity of interfaith cooperation (Arigatou International 2017). However, the Panama Declaration also opens the door for grappling with the violence that religious traditions and faith communities have historically been implicated in multiple settings, including the family. ‘While our religions have been actively engaged in the service of children’, the declaration

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continues, ‘we also grieve that every religion at times has been misused to legitimize, justify and even perpetuate violence against children’.45 Accordingly, the globally and religiously diverse participants committed to working together and with U.N. agencies, other international and multilateral bodies, governments, civil society, the private sector, and media, among others, to redress the root causes of harm and violence against children. These include ‘identify[ing] and challeng[ing] patriarchal structures and practices that perpetuate violence against and sexual exploitation especially of girls’.46 The mention of the word ‘patriarchal’ was controversial in the negotiating phase of the declaration,47 but the decision regarding its explicit mention prevailed as a site of deepening engagement. However, at the time of writing this, it is not clear whether the commitment to deploying all resources possible to work across sectors to end violence against children also includes theological resources. Traditions-specific feminist theological expositions, for example, and engagements such as the commitment to cultivate a counter-narrative to violent extremist manipulation of religion, demand intra-faith contestations, as does BRAVE. Indeed, it is less controversial and unsettling to facilitate a hermeneutical contestation of the deployment of tradition in the service of obvious violence, such as the targeted killing of Christians and those Muslims deemed ‘inauthentic’, by retrieving and telegraphing peaceful and violence averse Quranic commands and reclaiming jihad from its murderous applications.48 Such hermeneutical counter-narrativity is generic, which means ‘male’ in terms of its theological register, even if BRAVE’s activities very intentionally involve women and female teachers as critical agents in the mechanisms of identifying and reporting warning signs of ‘radicalization’. As noted, to the degree that women are ‘targeted’ for ‘deradicalization’, this targeting utilizes women’s social scripts in the same way in which ‘engaging’ with ‘religious actors’ operationalizes a secularist and reductive script about religion. Adding a critical gender lens to this volatile complexity appears both unpractical and explosive, which is often how gender analysis and hermeneutics become excluded from ‘real’ world engagement with religion. If the patterns of engagement and hermeneutics are confounded to realpolitik, then such engagement consolidates rather than disrupts the status quo. It offers resources to routinize and bureaucratize ‘religious actors’ in terms of sector rather than illuminating pathways for religion’s potential role in the formation of broad social solidarities and a sustained interaction with elites and other authorities who generate alternative narratives of the common good.

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Ghettoizing religion as a sector domesticates it even if ‘religious actors’ within this frame self-represent their work as a ‘grassroots movement’. Hence, I highlight the Panama Declaration as an innovative global example of what transpired locally in Malindi: it involved identifying consistencies between U.N. conventions and religious and spiritual (or non-scriptural) traditions and it recognized the interrelations between violence against children in its multiple forms, including poverty and the deprivation of education and violence of both social and political dimensions. By naming patriarchy, however, the declaration illuminates the not-yet realized possibility of intra-faith challenges, not only to the complicity of religious traditions with direct violence, but also to how they are implicated in structural and cultural forms of violence. Such an analysis and hermeneutical horizons will emerge through a gender analysis of patriarchal norms. Indeed, critical theory is pivotal to broadening interpretive theological and religio-cultural meanings. As ecofeminist theologians have stressed, using religious and cultural traditions as emancipatory semiotics demands that traditions themselves contend with their own marginal epistemologies and patterns of domination and dehumanization.49 However, interreligious interfacing, driven by the demands for urgent collaborative action or statement, is not conducive to disruptive, feminist, and innovative accounts of tradition. Therefore, the focus on how religious actors participate through multisectoral efforts in the reduction of child marriages and sexual abuses as well as the increase in literacy and education levels—especially for girls, but also for boys in a context of marginalization, poverty, and a culturally sanctioned dowry economy—constitutes a ripe case for the analysis of gender, religion, and ‘development’. In practice, it appears that religious leaders, such as the clerics involved with the CICC in Malindi, Kenya, employ their status, their organic connection to the community, their facility with tradition, and their authority as interpreters of tradition to enhance gender justice, increase literacy and education, and reduce cases of sexual abuse through their work with other stakeholders and sectors, including teachers and legal structures for litigations of sexual abuse cases. On the other hand, their conceptions of tradition rely on a discourse of authenticity and their interpretive work thus forecloses feminist religious hermeneutical engagement as constituting pathways for social, cultural, and political change. The inability of the clerics to disrupt the underlying patriarchal normativity, even while appealing to U.N. human rights conventions concerning the rights of the child, the discourse of equality,

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as well as scriptural resources that appear to support the rights discourse as they read it, indicates once again the limits of faith-inspired and interfaith work. These clerics do not imagine women’s capacity for bodily autonomy nor their flourishing outside the scripted roles as daughters, mothers, and wives. Such scripts, the clerics claim, can be better actualized with education and a capacity for generating income. Importantly, the various sessions in the peace and justice clubs and other communal engagements with children, including the Pope Francis Rescue Center for children who were sexually abused and/or married off as young as 8 years old in the Malindi area, convey the inconsistency of religious and cultural traditions with child marriage and the frequency of violations of the right to education. But the possibility of using contraceptives to prevent child pregnancies or education on reproductive health and rights is nowhere discussed in this interfaith and multi-sectoral framing, nor in coordinated efforts to resist and overcome such conditions of hopelessness.50 The point to stress here is that even in this instance, when the instrumentalization of religious leaders required intra-traditional and inter-traditional debates about gender norms, through the urgency of the widespread violation of children’s rights, and even when male clerics appear to affirm the obligation to treat boys and girls equally, the underpinning theology remains patriarchal and androcentric. Likewise, the hermeneutical mechanisms they employ and the methodology of proof texting operates on claims of authenticity grounded in modernist literalism, constituting a form of religious illiteracy, which forecloses the depth and plurality of traditions, abstracts them from their contextuality, and domesticates the ‘religious sector’ within a broader neoliberal framework. Indeed, the inclusion of the ‘religious class’ does not constitute a departure from neoliberal peacebuilding and ‘development’ agendas, but is instead highly consistent with its local turn. The so-called local turn (see Filip Ejdus’ chapter in this volume) that animated discussions within peace research converges with and is mutually reinforced by yet another ‘turn’ to the religion factor: the ‘post-secular’ turn.51 In its better manifestations (Autesserre 2014; Hughes et al. 2015; Lederach 1995; Mac Ginty 2015; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Maiese 2004; Richmond 2010; Richmond and Mitchell 2012), the former denotes the need for facility with historical contextuality, indigenous mechanisms for conflict resolution, elicitive rather than top-down prescriptive methodologies, and critical engagement with global structural and historical injustices as ways of identifying local critical peacebuilding agency. The latter, by contrast, signals

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the erosion of an unreconstructed secularism informing peacebuilding and ‘development’ policy circles and their recognition that engaging religious actors in multiple efforts is sometimes instrumental, even if religion is not identified mono-causally as a driver of conflict, marginality, or poverty. The outcome of these convergences reveals the sectoralization of religion, according to which, as I traced above, the ‘religious’ is added as a sector or a ‘partner’ along with others invited to cultivate ‘buy in’ and ‘ownership’ of various policies. The notion of ‘invitation’ is key to distinguish such public religion from disruptive manifestations that may unsettle power structures and public narratives. Such manifestations of public religion are not invited but rather claimed through social movement mechanisms and contentions. Sectoralization also reveals a focus on the ‘religious actor’ as constituting a key to unlock the ‘local’ (Appleby 2015), a position that reinforces secularist and modernist presumptions rather than disrupts them. Sectoralized and NGOized religious actors undergo neoliberalization not only in and through their enculturation into the language of ‘best practices’, ‘benchmarking’, and ‘lessons learned’. This diminishment also depends on devolution, governance, and responsibilizing individuals to ‘problem solve’ sustainably. It is not, as in the operative definition of social movement discourse, a sustained interaction with elites and other authorities in order to transform the status quo. The operative theory of change within the sectoralization discourse overburdens the individual to self-transform as the main engine of social transformation, overemphasizing the role of the individual religious leader’s agency, and thereby overlooking a more sociological analysis and/or a social movement’s focus on mapping and disrupting power. Religious spaces, symbols, meanings, texts, and people have long histories of participating in propelling social movements that challenge the status quo and the operation of power through coalition building work and formation of crosscutting grassroots solidarities. The logic of sectoralization and with it the sectoralization of religion, however, domesticates religious actors and institutions and with them, their prophetic potentialities. Responsibilizing individuals facilitates, in some cases, their capacity to navigate and survive the system by problem solving. This is resiliency not as a world transforming self empowerment but rather as sustainability and adaptability to ever entrenched marginality within a neoliberal frame. To the degree that religion, through various intra- and inter-faith mechanisms, participates in poaching and problem solving, it functions in its

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conservative rather than its prophetic and disruptive registers. This localized problem solving and responsibilizing permeates interreligious peacebuilding and ‘development’ practices in the Global South and relies upon and even generates neoliberal modalities of piety, which likewise interweave into the spread of the prosperity gospel as well. Neoliberal piety reflects compatibility between religious piety and business rationality and explains the proliferation of faith-inspired organizations’ engagements with multiple income-generating and microfinancing projects, including in Malindi.52 I hone in on the coalescing of economic productivity and sustainability with the cultivation of neoliberal piety and subjectivities as well as their intersections with the discourse of religious authenticity for a reason. It is because once again such an analysis exposes the need to think intersectionally about religion, gender, and ‘development’, as highlighted above with respect to tackling the patriarchal underpinnings of violence against children as complexly related to the horizons of peacebuilding. Appeals to authenticity and apparent literal facility with the textual traditions as consistent with the demands of human rights, equality, and gender justice inverts equally fervent literalist employments of the ‘authentic’ by violent religious actors who similarly employ claims to authenticity in their own rereading of tradition. It is important to note, together with Lynch, that any examination of constructive intra- or inter-religious interventions, including at the level of counter-narrativity, unfolds within the discourse of securitizing of religion (specifically Islam) and that the very nature and logic of the programs of interreligious engagement on a local level disseminates neoliberal rationality (Lynch 2011, 2015). Now, let me again anticipate an argument from ‘development’ and peacebuilding actors. Examining the flattening of religio-cultural traditions and their authoritative interpreters as instruments for advancing multiple ‘secular’ agendas as a problem from the perspective of gender, race, and feminist theoretical frames as well as from theological reflections attuned to postcolonial and feminist interventions does not signify a merely impractical academic exercise, out of touch with real demands and urgencies on the ground. On the contrary, foregrounding feminist and postcolonial theological interventions and critiques of coloniality and neoliberalism, particularly as they pertain to the mainstreaming of religion over the past two decades, first shows how this instrumentalization of religion diminishes religion’s prophetic capacity to ‘move’ power, in the language of community organizing. Instead, religion or rather the religious actor/leader is invited to a multisectoral table as one sector that ultimately contributes to entrenching power structures through

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the capacity of religious actors to participate as domesticated actors in problem solving at a communal level, without necessarily redressing structural and historical violence as the social justice lens mandates.

3

Religion and Coloniality

Colonialism depended on diminishing the humanity of people, particularly through their enslavement, genocides, and exploitation for labor. That this dehumanization bears a complex relation to religion as an anthropological taxonomy and theological hegemonic underpinnings remains relevant to our effort today to offer an analytic account of the meanings of the religion industry and how it gets employed for advancing peacebuilding and ‘development’. In line with other scholars of coloniality, Nelson Maldonado-Torres correctly underscores that the subontology or the cultural production of ‘alleged differences in the degree of humanity…would survive the formal elimination of colonialism, and would continue to define relations among people in the modern world up to the present’ (Maldonado-Torres 2014, p. 653). MaldonadoTorres importantly nuances accounts of the relationship of Christianity to modernity/coloniality while opening up paths for bringing the critical study of religion into the intersectional and critical study of global systems of racialization. What remains curious is why the study of peace and conflict does not examine the roots of the global and international system in the cultural production of racial difference. Instead, peace studies operate within the liberal myopia that conceals the complex intersection between religion and race in the production of enduring global racialized relations (of course, we need to add gender to this intersectional outlook as well). To the degree that scholarship in peace studies critiques its eurocentricity, this critique does not expand to a robust engagement with ‘religion’ as a critical category in the construction of subontology or non-being because religion is read as Christianity is interpreted primarily as an underpinning grammar for globalizing imperial schemes (Sabaratnam 2013). Without dispelling this myopia (Omer 2020), the practices of religion in peacebuilding as designed in the Global North/West likewise persist in their usefulness in consolidating hegemony by other means. Any analysis of the contemporary practices of religion and peacebuilding/‘development’ that myopically engages with the intricate role of religion in coloniality is implicated in its enduring force regardless

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of how well meaning and at times even religiously motivated the pursuit of religious engagement may be. That religion is implicated in coloniality is not news (Tayob 2018). Nor is it news that religiosity and theological interventions can disrupt the logic of violence. Prophetic disruption or the cultivation of decolonial ethics and conceptions of the common good and crosscutting solidarities, however, is not what religious actors do when they submit to the logic of NGOs, even if this enables them to contribute to improving individual lives, if not redressing long-term historical root causes of marginality and human insecurity. Religious actors that succumb to their sectoralization instead of an intersectional coalition building work and religious actions that bracket the critical edges of liberation and postcolonial theological insights persist in their complicity in coloniality’s neoliberal stage that undergirds ‘development’ discourses. As Paul Farmer argues in his dialogue with Gustavo Gutiérrez, ‘Developmentalism not only erases the historical creation of poverty but also implies that development is necessarily a linear process: progress will inevitably occur if the right steps are followed’ (Farmer 2013, p. 44). Insights of liberation theology and their disruption of exploitative capitalist frames through the preferential option for the poor and marginalized stand in contradiction to ‘development’. The latter, as Agenda 2030 stresses, relies on partnerships with the private sector, appealing to a business logic of profitability that is usually also couched in concepts like ‘prosperity for all’, as in the case of the Kenyan private sector discourse.53 If the ‘religious’ operates within the neoliberal developmentalist schemas, often through NGOization without disrupting it, its authority, institutions, networks, and access to people become instruments of the developmentalist outlook. Developmentalism, for Farmer, Gutiérrez, and other postcolonial theological interventions (Donaldson and Pui-lan 2002; Keller 2005; Keller et al. 2004; Pui-lan 1995, 2005; Rivera 2003; Rivera and Moore 2011), is not and cannot be confused with a social justice lens that requires us to interpret ‘the conditions of the poor not only as unacceptable but as the result of structural violence that is human made’ (Farmer 2013, p. 44). Indeed, often the issue is not ‘development’ at all, but rather redistributive justice (Farmer 2013, p. 44). A preferential option for the poor is decidedly not about turning the poor into sustainable and self-sufficient micro-entrepreneurs. Rather, it is about redressing the historical depth of structural, cultural, and direct forms of violence that a concept such as coloniality touches

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upon and that emancipatory theologies and decolonial praxis and scholarship likewise illuminate, especially through their critiques of capitalism and epistemic violence. The emancipatory theological intervention is also (eco)feminist insofar as it challenges the violence that is hardwired into the traditions, doing so through hermeneutical work within the traditions themselves (Puilan 2005). If Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ offered a critique of exploitative colonialism and a plea for the interlinking of environmental and socioeconomic justice, the document left intact the heteropatriarchal normativity of tradition, thereby revealing the lack of internal feminist contestations.54 The conception of tradition emerging from this intervention, in other words, conserves and fortifies androcentrism, not unlike the theological training document that the clerics developed in Malindi. This is not uncommon to interreligious and single-tradition interventions in the intersections of developmentalism and peacebuilding. Indeed, the logic of ‘partnership’ and sectoralization operates against what I referred to as the prophetic potential of the social movement’s coalition building and its contentious engagement with multiple identities and visions through a sustained interaction with authorities. To the degree that religion operates within capitalist and patriarchal premises as well as neoliberal developmentalist frames, it is rooted in and thus ultimately advances coloniality rather than disrupting the very conditions underpinning the human suffering that they claim to want to alleviate. This results in intra- and interfaith peacebuilding, through its employment of weak and abstract accounts of religious traditions, more often than not, also perpetuating global structures of violence, developmentalist logic and secular temporality, as well as and through neoliberal rationalities. Such practices of religion and peace reveal the postsecular bureaucratization of religion which occludes religious people’s capacity to hermeneutically innovate, reimagine, and reclaim emancipatory scripts. Such re-scripting is prophetic if it emerges as epistemologies from the margins rather than through co-opted and domesticated infrastructures of religion programming.

Notes 1. There is a plethora of works on the effectiveness question. See, for example, Karam (2014).

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2. See also Nancy Fraser’s discussion of the democratic crisis of late capitalism (Fraser 2015). 3. For a critique of the ‘religious actor’ reductive deployment see, for example, Lichterman (2013). 4. The word ‘beneficiaries’ is in quotation marks to indicate the neoliberal business rationality that permeates NGO universes, in which members of communities engage in a variety of projects designed to increase livelihood, social cohesion, water and sanitation, conflict resolution methods, and so forth. 5. For census data, see Kenya Open Data Survey (2009). 6. The Church Mission Society played a pivotal role in facilitating colonialism in Africa and vice versa. See, for example, Strayer (1978). For the expansion and consolidation of Christian missions, see also Gifford (2009). 7. This point repeatedly came up in my interviews with key people involved in peacebuilding and development work, as well as participants in focus groups and religious leaders I interviewed over the course of my research in Kenya. 8. Interview conducted with a key actor in a Kenyan-based Christian professionals’ Forum, November 2018. 9. A reflection affirmed in an interview conducted in November 2018 with a pivotal Kenyan researcher in a Nairobi-based office of an international organization focusing primarily on livelihood projects, trauma healing, advocacy, and policy. 10. Importantly, resistance to western Christian missionary and colonialist undertakings manifested all around the Kenyan topography and were articulated in local terms by, for example, the African Inland Church. See Hoehler-Fatton (1996). For analyses of the Mau Mau Rebellion, see Berman (1991) and Gatheru (2005). 11. For an ethnic breakdown, see ‘Ethnic Affiliation’, Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. 12. For a discussion of Muslim protests against the British colonial administration and discrimination in economics, education, and other spheres and the mainstreaming of Christian culture and values through education as well, see Salim (1973, pp. 165–166). For an examination of the bolstering of Christian identity by political leaders, see Berkley Center (2017), Deacon (2015), and Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (2008, p. 124). See also Gettleman (2008). 13. See, for example, Orobator (2009, p. 183) and Ranger and Karanja (2006, pp. 81–83). Notably, religious leaders in NCCK and the Catholic Church were often vocal critics of the Moi government, advocating for legalizing the multi-party system in 1991, and actively monitoring and training for the 1992 elections.

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14. Interview conducted with a key actor in a Kenyan-based Christian professionals’ Forum, November 2018. The global dimensions of this narrative about Christian persecution include various mechanisms and research institutions associated with the global religious freedoms discourse, reflective of domestic and US-centric (in particular) cultural wars. Such institutions and mechanisms include the Office of International Religious Freedom under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State. 15. For a broader analysis of the African contexts of recruitment, see United Nations Development Programme (2017). 16. Interview with a researcher who oversaw this policy-producing research in Kenya. The UNDP report (‘Journey’), for its part, does warn against the danger of securitizing aid. 17. Interview with author conducted in November 2018. 18. Here I follow closely the mapping produced by the Berkley Center (2017), especially 42–49. 19. The CICC is composed of leaders representing the Catholic Church, the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya, The Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, the Hindu Council of Kenya, the National Council of Churches, the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, and the African Traditional Religions. 20. The GHR Foundation (http://www.ghrfoundation.org/). 21. Focus Group Discussion with the author in February 2018 in Mombasa and Malindi, Kenya. 22. Coast Interfaith Council of Churches, ‘They Need Your Care…An Interfaith Approach to Child Protection’, n.d. an unpublished document shared with the author in February 2018 during a visit to Malindi. 23. Interviews and focus groups in three elementary schools in the Malindi area were conducted in February 2018 by the author. 24. They cite the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child that specify that a child is any human under the age of 18. They also refer to the specific Kenyan legal framework, stressing the Children’s Act (2001), the Sexual Offense Act (2006), the Gender Policy in Education (2007), the Disability Act, the Kenyan Constitution of 2010, and the Penal Code as relevant for the defense and articulation of the rights of the child. 25. They cite the Qur’an 4:21. 26. CICC, ‘They Need Your Care.’ An internal unpublished document shared with the author upon a visit to Malindi in February 2018. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Author’s focus group discussion with CICC, in Mombasa, February 2018.

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32. Focus Group Discussion with the CICC conducted by Tom Purekal, August 2018, Malindi Kenya. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. FGD with community clerics conducted by Tom Purekal, August 2018, Malindi, Kenya. 36. Focus Group Discussion with male caregivers, Malindi, August 2018. 37. A focus group discussion with the Local Area Advisory Council of CICC, April 2018. 38. Arigatou has been central in multiple international faith-based forums, affirming the commitment and special responsibility of faith actors to end a scandalous reality where, in 2018, 28 million children were vulnerable and displaced. In a gathering of Faith Action for Children on the Move Global Partners Forum in Rome, Italy, in October 2018, the vast number of participating faith-inspired or -based organizations and entities identified the ways in which faith actors can ‘promote peace and sustainable development among displaced families’, which include spiritual support. See Mazzarelli (2018). Other similar global faith-framed fights include Arigatou’s Moral Imperative to End Extreme Poverty, which stresses the instrumentality and resourcefulness of faith institutions and services in building resilience and coping with adversity and which further underscores the need for ‘strategic partnership with faith communities and their agencies in the design, production, provision and valuation of policy and services to children.’ See Arigatou International (2018). 39. This phrase is not unique to Kenya. I heard it used multiple times in my fieldwork in Mindanao, the Philippines as well as in Bosnia Herzegovina. 40. Author’s interview with key sheikh associated with BRAVE. Nairobi, Kenya, November 2018. 41. The model’s successful outcomes then generated interest in other countries. In particular, BRAVE’s conceptualizers assisted the translation of their model to Nigeria. 42. An interview with the Office of the Institute of Life & Peace Nairobi, Kenya, November 2018. 43. This point came especially strongly in an interview with a sheikh involved with BRAVE in July 2019 in Nairobi, Kenya. 44. For one example of a concentrated effort in the centres of power in the global North and the circle of donor countries to harness and cultivate ‘partnership’ with previously overlooked sectors and leaders for development and peacebuilding, see The Network for Religious and Traditional peacemakers that was initiated in 2013 but dates historically back to an initiative by the foreign ministers of Finland and Turkey in 2010. By its own narrative, the Network emerged ‘as a response to the growing awareness among peace mediation organization and the United Nations, that

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

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religious and traditional authorities are vital, but underutilized, actors in peacemaking processes (italics mine)’. See The Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers (n.d.). Ibid. Ibid. Author’s interview with a pivotal participant in the deliberations in Nairobi, November 2018. For example, see BRAVE’s production of the viral ‘my jihad’ clip. For a classic account, see Gebara (1999). The issue of contraception, of course, is contested and often bracketed in the field of religion and development while constituting a key focus in the broader field of gender, development, and peacebuilding, along with changing gender norms and the structural redressing of the cultural effects of patriarchal normativity. It is important to note the persistent influence of global American Evangelical mission and their exportation of local American ‘culture wars’, the consolidation of the discourse of religious freedoms as key to an American foreign policy, and the attendant narrative about worldwide persecution of Christians upon global policies on contraceptives, sex education, and abortion. See, for example, McAlister (2018). For another critique of the ‘post-secular’ turn in peacebuilding, see Shakman Hurd (2017). For a signature engagement with the concept of neoliberal piety, see Atia (2012). See also Rudnyckyj and Osella (2017). Author’s interview with key individuals central to the private sector in Kenya, November 2018. For examples of feminist critiques of the encyclical, see Carbine (2017) and Toldy (2017).

References Anderson, D. A. (2014). Remembering Wagalla: State violence in Northwestern Kenya, 1962–1991. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 8, 658–676. Appleby, R. S. (2015). The new name for peace? Religion and development as partners in strategic peacebuilding. In A. Omer, R. S. Appleby, & D. Little (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding (pp. 183– 211). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arigatou International. (2017, May 9–11). The Panama Declaration on ending violence against children. Panama City. https://gnrc.net/en/component/ zdocs/document/download/1173. Accessed 6 April 2020. Arigatou International. (2018, October). Results for children: The moral imperatives. Core message for action to secure wellbeing outcomes for

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Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez (pp. 35–70). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Fraser, N. (2015). Legitimation crisis? On the political contradictions of financialized capitalism. Critical Historical Studies, 2(2), 157–189. Gatheru, R. M. (2005). Kenya: From colonization to independence, 1888–1970 (Chaps. 17 & 18). Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Gebara, I. (1999). Longing for running water: Ecofeminism and liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Gettleman, J. (2008, January 2). Mob sets Kenya Church on fire, killing dozens. The New York Times. Gifford, P. (2009). Christianity, politics, and public life in Kenya. London: Hurst and Company. Grosfougel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in westernized universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides of the long 16th century. Human Architecture, 11(1), 78–89. Hoehler-Fatton, C. (1996). Women of fire and spirit: History, faith, and gender in Roho religion in Western Kenya. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, C., Öjendal, J., & Schierenbeck, I. (2015). The struggle versus the song—The local turn in peacebuilding: An introduction. Third World Quarterly, 36(5), 817–824. Karam, A. (2014). Religion and development post 2015: Report of a consultation among donor organizations, United Nations development agencies and faith-based organizations. http://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/ pub-pdf/DONOR-UN-FBO%20May%202014.pdf. Accessed 6 April 2020. Kasomo, D., & Maseno, L. (2011). The factors behind the formation of independent churches in Kenya. International Journal of Current Research, 2(1), 163–169. Keller, C. (2005). God and power: Counter-apocalyptic journeys. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Keller, C., Nausner, M., & Rivera, M. (Eds.). (2004). Postcolonial theologies: Divinity and empire. St. Louis, MO: Chalice. Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. Ethnic affiliation. https://www.knbs.or.ke/ ethnic-affiliation/. Accessed 6 April 2020. Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. (2008, August). On the brink of the precipice: A human rights account of Kenya’s post–2007 election violence. Kenya Open Data Survey. (2009). Population by religious affiliation. Census, Volume 2, Table 12. http://www.opendata.go.ke/datasets/2009-census-pop ulation-by-religious-affiliation. Accessed 6 April 2020. Lederach, J. P. (1995). Preparing for peace: Conflict transformation across cultures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Lichterman, P. (2013). Studying public religion: Beyond the beliefs-driven actor. In C. Bender, W. Cadge, P. Levitt, & D. Smilde (Eds.), Religion on the edge:

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De-centering and re-centering the sociology of religion (pp. 115–136). New York: Oxford University Press. Lind, J., & Howell, J. (2010). Counter-terrorism and politics of aid: Civil society responses in Kenya. Development and Change, 41(2), 335–353. Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186–209. Lynch, C. (2011). Local and global influences on Islamic NGOs in Kenya. Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 6(1), 21–34. Lynch, C. (2015). Religious communities and possibilities for justpeace. In A. Omer, R. S. Appleby, & D. Little (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding (pp. 597–612). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mac Ginty, R. (2015). Where is the local? Critical localism and peacebuilding. Third World Quarterly, 26(5), 840–856. Mac Ginty, R., & Richmond, O. P. (2013). The local turn in peace building: A critical agenda for peace. Third World Quarterly, 34(5), 763–783. Maiese, M. (2004). Elicitive training. In G. Burgess & H. Burgess (Eds.), Beyond intractability. Boulder: University of Colorado, Conflict Information Consortium. https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/prescriptive_ elicitive_training. Accessed 6 April 2020. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2014). AAR centennial roundtable: Religion, conquest, and race in the foundations of the modern/colonial world. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 82(3), 636–665. Masuzawa, T. (2005). The invention of world religions: Or, how European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mati, J. M. (2012). Social movements and socio-political change in Africa: The Ufungamano initiative and Kenyan constitutional reform struggles (1999– 2005). VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 23, 63–84. Mazzarelli, S. (2018, November 2). Faith communities across the world commit to end violence against children on the move. https://gnrc.net/en/news/ 3949-faith-communities-across-the-world-commit-to-end-violence-against-chi ldren-on-the-move. Accessed 6 April 2020. McAlister, M. (2018). The kingdom of God had no borders. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Coloniality: The darker side of modernity. In C. S. Breitwisser (Ed.), Modernologies. contemporary artists researching modernity and modernism catalog of the exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona, Spain (pp. 39–49). MACBA.

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Mignolo, W. (2012). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nthamburi, Z. (Ed.). (1991). From mission to church: A handbook of Christianity in East Africa. Nairobi, Kenya: Imani House. Oded, A. (2000). Islam & politics in Kenya. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Omer, A. (2020). Decolonizing religion and the practice of peace: Two case studies from the postcolonial world. Critical Research on Religion: 205030322092411. Orobator, A. (2009). Church, state, and Catholic ethics: The Kenyan dilemma. Theological Studies, 70(1). Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. (2010). Tolerance and tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa. http://www.pewforum.org/dataset/ tolerance-and-tension-islam-and-christianity-in-sub-saharan-africa/. Accessed 6 April 2020. Pui-lan, K. (1995). Discovering the Bible in the non-Biblical world. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Pui-lan, K. (2005). Postcolonial imagination and feminist theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580. Ranger, T., & Karanja, J. (2006). Evangelical attitudes toward democracy in Kenya. In T. Ranger (Ed.), Evangelical Christianity and democracy in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Richmond, O. P. (2010). Resistance and the post-liberal peace. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 38(3), 665–692. Richmond, O. P., & Mitchell, A. (Eds.). (2012). Hybrid forms of peace: From everyday agency to post-liberalism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Rivera, M. (2003). En-gendered territory: U.S. missionaries’ discourse in Puerto Rico (1898–1920). In B. Valentin (Ed.), New horizons in Hispanic/Latino(a) theology (pp. 79–100). Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press. Rivera, M., & Moore, S. D. (2011). A tentative topography of postcolonial theology. In S. D. Moore & M. Rivera (Eds.), Planetary loves: Spivak, postcoloniality, and theology (pp. 3–14). New York: Fordham University Press. Rudnyckyj, D., & Osella, F. (2017). Religion and the morality of the market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sabaratnam, M. (2013). Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace. Security Dialogue, 44(3), 259–278. Salim, A. (1973). The Swahili-speaking peoples of Kenya’s Coast 1895–1965. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Shakman Hurd, E. (2017). Beyond religious freedom: The new global politics of religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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PART II

How Peacebuilding Takes Shape in the Margins

CHAPTER 5

The Missing Link in Hybrid Peacebuilding: Localized Peace Trajectories and Endogenous Knowledge Aura Liliana López López and Bert Ingelaere

1

Introduction

Peacebuilding and its scholarship have taken a local turn (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Ejdus, this volume). This turn was informed by a questioning of the goals and methods of the so-called liberal peace. One of the consequences of this examination of the local in relation to the liberal peace agenda is the growing awareness that there is no such thing as a ‘purely’ local or liberal type of peacemaking. Instead, a growing body of research within governance and development scholarship has embraced the notion of ‘hybridity’ in the post-liberal peace era.

A. L. López López (B) Bogotá, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] B. Ingelaere Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_5

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Case studies using the hybrid lens (i.e. Afghanistan [Debiel et al. 2009], Somaliland [Wiuff Moe 2011], Congo [Autesserre 2010; Raeymaekers 2013], Timor Leste [Wallis 2012]) unveil aspects of the flux of interactions and forms of cooperation, negotiation and resistance, between ‘local’ and liberal peace agents. In the field of peacebuilding, development and post-conflict recovery, the actors ‘labeled as local, indigenous, liberal, exogenous or international’ are indeed composites, resulting from long-term processes of social bargaining and power settlements in post-war environments (Mac Ginty 2011; Wiuff Moe 2011; Zaum 2012). But what should we look for when trying to understand the hybridization of peace? How do we make existing relationships between a variety of actors and networked processes more legible and operational in peace governance? The objective of this chapter is to trace how hybrid peace practices actually come into being. This is needed, since much emphasis is placed on the understanding of that moment in which the merging of actors, interests and practices actually occurs, or in other words, the time and space where state and international actors interact within a local context. The analysis is focused on the local in relation to the external at a given point in time in a particular place. Consequently, hybridity in peace is seen as something that happens once a conflict ends, or during the post-settlement period, and that is located in the responses of the local to interactions with the liberal agents. The forward-looking and problem-solving approach to peacebuilding risks ignoring the importance of the peacemaking trajectories found in historical constellations and societal undercurrents that developed during the time of conflict already. It tends to ignore the prior coexistence of different forms of statehood and governance that usually develop as a response to violent conflict. It also perpetuates the state-centric or elitecentric views of the local in hybrid peace, superficially considering the existing cumulative infrastructures for peace by taking mostly formal, or, at times, informal deals made between warring parties and elites as the point of departure. Such a perspective misses a great deal. The dominating view presents hybridity as a constant antagonism between the ‘local’ and liberal peace agents and their agendas, taking the focus away from the fact that people affected by violent conflict have been navigating this conflict as part of their daily lives (Richmond 2015), for example, refers to a prior hybridization of the local and advocates for an

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examination of the process of ‘peace formation’ that occurs in the social responses to violent conflict. However, it is not at all clear how such a process of hybrid peace formation takes shape. This chapter aims to fill this gap by operationalizing the notion of peace trajectories. In doing so, we propose to look at the ‘abilities’ of the local in their interaction with state actors and international liberal peace agents, by identifying what we refer to as peace trajectories and the cumulative experiences and knowledge that construct them. Central to our analysis is the notion of endogenous knowledge, which we define as the accumulated learnings of the people in a locale. Endogenous knowledge is generated from an amalgamation of dimensions that interact in the construction of social life in a (post-) conflict setting. It includes, but is not solely shaped by, the influence of ‘outside’ intervention. The notions ‘peace trajectories’ and ‘endogenous knowledge’ are conceptually closely related to ‘peace formation’ and ‘local knowledge’ but we consider them more useful in terms of the concrete operationalization of the tracing of the emergence of hybridity. We propose a close-up analysis of the heterogeneity that the local entails in the tradition of ‘critical localism’ (Mac Ginty 2015). This means examining the existing forms of agency and decision-making powers internal to social processes without resorting to oversimplified or romanticized versions of the communal as homogenous, pristine and subjugated (Leonardsson and Rudd 2015; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Paffenholz 2015; Pugh et al. 2016; Richmond 2010). This requires a bottom-up approach that does not overlook power dynamics nor interactions with top-down actors. Neither should it ignore the interplay of vertical and horizontal power relations. We illustrate our attempt to clarify the formation of hybrid peace through the operationalization of peace trajectories with a case study on Colombia and the peace trajectory of a specific locale: the District of Aguablanca. In December 2017, the Government of Colombia signed a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army (FARC-EP), ending with this a 52-year conflict. Running through the four chapters of this comprehensive accord, the idea of a Territorial Approach to Peace (TAP) emerges as a cross-cutting approach, and is central to many arguments that have shaped the path to the ‘construction of stable and lasting peace’, which the parties had agreed to pursue. The TAP includes a set of administrative and political measures designed to address local development and the consolidation of state

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presence in a regionalized manner, implying a re-engineering of state institutions, such as the newly created Rural Development Agency (ADR in Spanish) and the Agency for the Renovation of the Territory (ART in Spanish). The ART implements the Development Plans within the Territorial Approach in the 234 municipalities prioritized as most affected by conflict, and grouped into sub-regions based on shared development indicators. The Development Plans will include the implementation of the provisions of the Peace Agreement (i.e. Comprehensive Rural Reform and alternatives to illicit economies) and ‘[…] will begin with an action plan for regional transformation, which will strive to include ample participation from the relevant sectors of the community, in the plan’s formulation, execution and follow-up’ (Alto Comisionado para la Paz 2016, p. 9). Hence, territorializing peace, as framed in the agreement, can be equated with Colombia’s own version of the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding, underpinning efforts to reach out to those locales left behind for decades. The Territorial Approach to Peace (TAP) represents an acknowledgement of the State’s asymmetrical control of the territory, or the existence of what Mann, cited by Brenner et al. (2008), calls a ‘spatial matrix’. Alternative forms of governance developed in areas affected by violent conflict: in the absence of the state, illegal armed actors used their coercive power and war economies to craft rules and enforce them. Additionally, a plethora of donors and social organizations acted in parallel to provide public services, thus becoming the main stand-ins for the government for citizens in these zones (Salas Salazar 2015). Currently, the government is attempting to make the ‘local’ legible, namely to develop the reach of the state towards ungoverned and thus unknown social terrain. In doing so, as part of the construction of sustainable local peace, the objective is to build a renewed civic trust in the state’s capacity to provide services and security. The emphasis here seems to be on ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of people, as localism is ‘[…] hardwired into conflict transformation as it emphasizes the need to address relationships between antagonists […] [and to] address the identities, attitudes and the systems that underpin conflict’ (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, p. 771). Even if mainly for instrumental reasons, the TAP shows an interesting shift in governance, a window of opportunity for contextualized policymaking in peacebuilding and the collaborative type of peace that could take the diversity of a regionalized country like Colombia and create peace infrastructures, in which the local peacemaking practices are part of

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operational hybrid institutions and civic-led communal efforts to sustain peace. The question is, therefore: How is this framework able to connect with what already exists and has developed over time? This indicates a need to examine the available innate resources that nurture existing localized peace trajectories. The findings of this study are based on a total of 92 days of fieldwork spent in the four communes of the District of Aguablanca, spread over a six-month period.1 Data were gathered using a range of qualitative methods, but maintaining a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach throughout.2 Exchanges with children, youth, their families, tutors and the community were conducted within the framework of participant observation and dialogues occurring in situ during the daily activities. In addition, several interviews were conducted with actors operating in formal government and state institutions as well as with representatives of local and global peace agencies. The information was recorded extensively in field notes and interview transcripts, and further analysed and assigned to pre-existing or emerging theme categories for data analysis and triangulation. The first part of this chapter develops the conceptual notion of ‘peace trajectories’. We illustrate how this concept emerges from a critical reading of three established frameworks in the study of peace: everyday peace, peace formation and hybrid peace. Of central concern for our conceptualization of the nature and importance of ‘peace trajectories’ is what is known as ‘endogenous’ knowledge. Subsequently, the second part of the chapter discusses the case of the District of Aguablanca in Colombia in order to illustrate the operationalization of a peace trajectory and show how it can clarify the development and outcome of peace processes. After explaining the methodological approach, we discuss how emerging responses evolve into systematic or structural responses and ultimately result in the hybridization of peace policy. In doing so, we provide concrete examples of how endogenous peace infrastructures have their foundations in everyday responses to the experience of violent conflict and how these infrastructures strengthen collaboration amongst various actors, both inside and outside the community.

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The Missing Link in Established Frameworks

We draw on three established frameworks in peace studies to develop an approach that aims to identify and unravel local peace trajectories: everyday peace, peace formation and hybrid peace. These notions are considered to be interrelated and complementary within the examination of local peace dynamics. Below, we discuss these three notions, aim to clarify their linkages and each time identify the need to further develop a missing link, namely the need to operationalize local peace trajectories. Subsequently, we discuss the notion of endogenous knowledge, which we consider to be crucial for the understanding of these local peace trajectories. 2.1

Everyday Peace, Peace Formation and Hybrid Peace

The first notion central to the local turn in peacebuilding is ‘everyday peace’. Peace, or its potential, resides in the search for ‘[…] routinized practices used by individuals and collectives’ as they ‘[…] navigate their way through life in a deeply divided society or prone to episodic violence in addition to chronic or structural violence’ (Mac Ginty 2014, p. 549). Everyday peace is a mostly unstructured social practice; an ongoing, heterogeneous and fluid set of interactions that maintain a form of social order through tolerance and coexistence. Mac Ginty (2014) typifies everyday peace as ‘people to people activities’ and even suggests a typology of social practices that can be seen as everyday peace, including avoidance, ambiguity, ritualized politeness, telling and blame deferring. These micro-mechanics of violent conflict navigation and the manufacturing of coping mechanisms by individuals and collectives reveals how human agency works for everyday peace. People make choices based on opportunities found within their context and decide whether and how to exploit them. These choices are represented, inter alia, in the realm of group affiliation, interactions and exchanges; transgression of or compliance with social norms, unspoken social pacts, selective speech moderation or ostracizing practices that have the potential to alter and transform the dynamics of conflict (Scott 1989). Case studies exploring the empirical understanding of everyday practices in, for example, India, Somaliland or Palestinians in East Jerusalem have shown how forms of agency in conflict settings drive human inventiveness (Williams 2013; Wiuff Moe 2011) or enact ‘agential projects with

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a more or less intentional transformative purpose’ (Selimovic 2018, p. 1). In the quotidian, there is an ‘[…] extensive repertoire of conflict avoidance and conflict minimizing skills used by people […], that point towards a diffuse expertise that does not come from diplomatic training academies or workshops by conflict resolution gurus’ (Mac Ginty 2014, p. 551). The idea that local peace practices carry with them autonomous capacities challenges the established views embedded in the ‘capacity development’ approach, namely the idea that something needs to be built, such as peace, for instance. This often positions people as powerless and non-autonomous actors in (post-) conflict settings and settlements. Instead, the everyday lens requires us to take the micro-level interactions developed before and during conflict as existing capacities and as points of departure to ‘read’ the local from the bottom-up. However, these everyday social interactions also point to existing processes that lie beyond the everyday: peace formation. Peace formation processes can be defined, according to Richmond (2016, p. 34), ‘as relationships and networked processes in which indigenous or local agents of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, or development, acting in customary, religious, cultural, social, or local political or local government setting, find ways of establishing peace processes and sustainable dynamics of peace’. Beyond the structural institutional arrangements of post-conflict settings, the pre-infrastructures that communities create in response to conflict—whether hidden or public, formal or informal—inform a type of peace formation that is not subject to the external influx of international institutional agents, norms and practices. ‘Making peace’ has already occurred and often with more success than when the process is prescribed ‘from the outside’. This requires the acknowledgement of a type of peace formation that precedes the signing of a peace deal. Within a trajectory, and herein lies the crux of our contribution, peace practices gradually emerge in response to, and parallel with, the violent conflict hindering everyday life in a given locale. These forms of agency constitute a genuine alternative to the type of peace that is merely consultative or participatory. The latter is the type of peace introduced by liberal agents in (post-) conflict settings. Identifying and understanding these trajectories could bring more legitimacy via contextualized interventions, while contributing in the long run to the creation of a positive type of hybrid peace.

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This brings us to hybridity, the third concept closely linked to the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding. A wide spectrum of experiences, norms and practices emerges as an intrinsic part of settlements when the focus shifts away from a dichotomous view of the interactions between international actors and local realities and dynamics. Consequently, peace interventions and conflict resolution activities engage the deeper layers of the local as well as the non-visible forms of agency by local actors rooted in the everyday. The local actors ‘renegotiate, ignore, engage with, disengage from and exploit the liberal peace’ (Mac Ginty 2010). Scholars agree that the concept resists neat categorization: ‘[…] everything is the result of hybridity, everything is a hybrid, there can be no certainty, and all discussions must be smothered in caveats’ (Mac Ginty 2010). Mac Ginty (2011) suggests that hybridization of liberal peace results from the juncture of four interactive elements: on the one hand, the (a) compliance and (b) incentivizing powers of liberal agents, networks and structures. On the other, the ability of local actors, networks and structures to (a) resist, ignore and adapt the liberal peacemaking, or (b) to present alternatives and maintain their own forms of peacemaking. While Richmond (2013, 2016) presents a case for peace formation that is more dialogical in terms of local knowledge, capacity and agency, less is said with regard to the way in which this could be done. What should we look for when considering local knowledge for peace and opportunities for collaboration? How do we make existing relationships and networked processes more legible and operational in peace governance? Answering these questions requires an engagement with that which lies beyond what can be found in short periods of assessment where pictures of the present are constructed. The latter lacks historical depth. A move towards a broad and deep understanding of existing peace trajectories in a social fabric is needed. This entails the (re-)historicization of everyday life during (post-)conflict in order to reconstruct the accumulated learnings embedded in a locale, or what we refer to as endogenous knowledge. 2.2

Peace Trajectories and Endogenous Knowledge

The local turn in the study of peacebuilding is inevitably connected to what is generally referenced as ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ knowledge. The study and use of ‘indigenous knowledge systems’ has a long and contested history in a related field: development studies. Proponents explain how ‘indigenous-knowledge research sets out explicitly to

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make connections between local people’s understandings and practices and those of outside researchers and development workers’ (Sillitoe 1998, p. 224). This trend went together with the introduction of participatory approaches in development aiming to facilitate a dialogue between the ‘local’ and a wide range of intervening actors (Alejandro Leal 2007; Somesh 2002). The objectives are to expand what constitutes ‘valid’ knowledge beyond the technocratic, scientific or state-centred spheres (Powell 2006). The ‘indigenous’ is often used as a proxy for a know-how that is culturally, socially and geographically rooted, often framed in traditional systems and worldviews.3 Scholars have examined a variety of areas such as traditional ecological, justice and productive systems and political knowledge and power, with a predominantly ethnocentric focus (Bicker et al. 2003; Chambers 1994; Cohen and Uphoff 1980; Gilbert 1997; Michaud et al. 2009; Mosse 2001; Powell 2006). Yet, in spite of the currency of the ‘indigenous knowledge’ research agenda, its scope seems restrictive and insufficient for the purpose of this study for two reasons. Firstly, the ‘indigenous knowledge’ framework tends to cast ‘local’ knowledge as predominantly ‘archaic’, ‘ahistorical’ and ‘primitive’, the antithesis of scientifically or technically manufactured knowledge or, in the best case, ‘isolated’ in a sociocultural bubble. Such a perspective is reifying and thus untenable. Secondly, related to the first and acknowledged in the literature, an excessive ethnocentrism lurks behind the ‘indigenous knowledge’ framework (Sillitoe 1998). Namely, the danger that the exploration of local forms of knowledge risks to become decontextualized from the sociocultural life in a setting. Given this, the concept of ‘endogenous knowledge’ appears more useful and comprehensive. The distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘endogenous’ is not purely semantic since although ‘the term indigenous might well comprise the site-specific character of knowledge indicated here, it does not comprise that all-important nuance borne by endogenous: development determined by innate resources’ (Crossman and Devisch 2002, p. 99). Other important characteristics of endogenous knowledge are its ‘essentially longstanding, cumulative, and adaptive’ character (Gilbert 1997). This is of crucial importance in our attempt to operationalize peace trajectories. The term endogenous encompasses the experiential and the traditional dimensions of the local, including situated knowledge and localized ways of social organization, but also sees

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these as further complemented by exogenous knowledge and resources (Crossman and Devisch 2002). We cite Crossman and Devisch (2002, p. 110) at length to capture the meaning of endogenous knowledge. Endogenous knowledge refers, in speech or normal conversation, to a community’s distinctive resources and capabilities (its modes of understanding, values and institutionalized practices) for both shaping and filtering, concealing and revealing both sensory and cognitive experience, as well as for understanding and encoding, storing and communicating a meaningful and tacitly self-validating or paradigmatic construction of knowledge. A knowledge-based and knowledge producing community may, at least tacitly, be aware of its actual lived experience in historically or socio-culturally specific circumstances. It may also at times re-appropriate, re-orient, or re-embrace its basic culture-specific postulates or presuppositions, or its projects of knowledge production. Marriage negotiations, funerals or various notions (such as ‘honour’, ‘ancestor’, ‘authority’, ‘misfortune’, ‘parenthood’ and ‘motherhood’, or even ‘future’, ‘industrial revolution’, ‘migration’, ‘urbanisation’ and ‘progress’) may underpin and act as a primary orientation for the collective imagination and activity.

It is not unimaginable to add ‘social harmony’ or ‘peace’ to this list of primary orientations. In addition, it is necessary to think of endogenous knowledge in dynamic terms as an evolving trajectory that ‘reappropriates’, ‘re-orients’ or ‘re-embraces’. Tracing local trajectories is thus a search for how the interactions of different peace agents, norms and practices that are at work or put in place to strengthen the capacity for peacebuilding can coalesce to create a peace that is legitimized by all actors, local and international. Consequently, we define a local peacemaking trajectory as the account of the history of the actors, networks , events and social practices determining the attitudes, norms, values and organizational infrastructures of a community in response to violent conflict over time, leading to the formation of sustained and more systematic forms of peace and conflict governance that combine endogenous and exogenous inputs. Figure 1 visualizes a peacemaking trajectory. The endogenous dimension is always at the centre of the trajectory analysis: the history of conflict, the agents in peacebuilding, forms of organization and peace governance, and the milestones of action and change in their peace practice. However, with the objective of understanding the forms of collaboration and possible

Fig. 1 Dimensions and elements of a peace trajectory (Source López López, A. L., & Ingelaere, B. [2019]. The missing link in hybrid peacebuilding: localized peace trajectories & endogenous knowledge)

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avenues for hybridization, the aim is also to identify the inputs from the ‘outside’, the exogenous. This is the second dimension. There is a wide diversity of what could be considered as inputs, which is why it is important to track the historical turning points (milestones) and drivers of action within the trajectory. These are the defining moments and events shaping the nature of the interactions of endogenous and exogenous knowledge into comprehensive forms of joint action. The third dimension of the analysis is what results from the interactions between exogenous and endogenous knowledge in the trajectory, defined as peace outputs. These are the structured forms of peace practice as a product of the evolving application and adaptation of response, in the vertical and horizontal interplay of actors shaped by the timeline of the evolution of violent conflict. Peace outputs encompass the knowledge and resources of the local and non-local, the state and non-state actors in liberal peace, and possible forms of hybrid peace formation reflecting the agency of the local in their exchange with these agents. Finally, with the aim of articulating nuances in the progression of the trajectory and the transitioning periods, three segments were established on a continuum: from responsive everyday peace mechanisms, to elaborated and sustained collective responses, up to the possible converging point of exogenous and endogenous resources that suggest a hybridization of peace mechanisms and infrastructures. Therefore, the findings in the trajectory analysis are presented in the following sequence.

3 Local Peacemaking Trajectories in the District of Aguablanca, Colombia The District of Aguablanca is a settlement located southeast of the city of Santiago de Cali (Cali), formed by the communes 13, 14, 15 and 21 (see Fig. 2).4 According to the last census, it has a population of approximately 630,000, 30% of the city’s total (Alcaldía de Cali 2017). The District was populated during the 1970s and 1980s by a series of migratory waves of internally displaced persons from different towns along the Pacific Coast who were fleeing violent conflict or the long-term and ongoing extreme poverty and marginalization of towns in this region. Afro-Colombian citizens are the majority, at 72%, followed by a minority mestizo population (Giraldo and Cruz 1999). In the 1990s, the informal settlement was formally annexed to the territorial organization of city of Cali. However, economic growth and

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Fig. 2 Location of the city of Cali on the map of Colombia (Left). Location of the District of Aguablanca in the city of Cali (Right) (Source Author’s adaptation from Wikipedia [Colombia Map] and Alcaldía de Cali [Aguablanca])

inclusion did not transpire and socio-economic asymmetries between this area and the rest of the city remain highly pronounced. The District gradually became a hub of violence. This started with the emergence of gangs and territorial boundaries established between contesting groups, known nowadays as invisible borders, which act as barriers that set limits on the free movement of people within the communes. The population dynamics of the District created a form of socio-spatial segregation of the territory. In the absence of the state the communities developed forms of selforganization and regulation of the locale. This happened in coexistence with armed actors. There were several external actors, such as religious missionaries living within the communities, as well as researchers, donors and philanthropists, whose intervention played an important role in the organization of the territory. They contributed to the construction of social infrastructure (schools, health centres), and the provision of basic services in the absence of state institutions. A report by the Municipal Ombudsman (Lasso Toro 2013) refers to about 134 gangs in the city, of which 104 are active in the communes 13, 14, 15, 16 and 21 of Aguablanca. Most of the members of these groups

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are children and youth. In 2014, 43.6% of total violent deaths in the city occurred in that District and 75% of these were youngsters.5 The proliferation of organized armed groups in the city and the department of Valle del Cauca is imposing a new order in the monopoly of violence in the District. The so-called Bacrim groups serve drug cartels and guerrillas without distinction, as part of a larger illegal network operating around the micro-trafficking of drugs (urban) and drug production (rural). Different sources refer to the association of gangs and the Bacrim groups, Rastrojos and Urabeños, for activities of micro-trafficking6 and for-hire assassinations, increasing the complexity of the gang phenomenon in the city and, in general, urban violence (Álvarez et al. 2017; Prieto, n.d.). Furthermore, this process of cooptation of the gangs by criminal organizations has exacerbated the fight over territorial control and the delimitation of zones for criminal activity, along with the forced recruitment of children and youth for illegal activities. Conversely, the hardships of violence, poverty and social segregation have given rise to a number of social and civic organizations that have developed counternarratives to those of violence, through interactions with a web of external actors (institutions, NGOs, development organizations). This has resulted in a variety of responses that seek to transform conflict and deprivation competing with criminal networks for the engagement of youth, by providing alternatives in order to deter them from joining these groups. One of these grassroots alternatives is The Youth Restorative Houses (YRH)—spaces provided within conflict-ridden neighbourhoods for youth involved in the conflict. Currently, there are eight houses distributed throughout the communes of the District, operated by Fundación Paz y Bien (FPB), the most recognized grassroots organization in the District. This practice, and the organization itself, was created by a group of local women as a response to and mitigation of the outbreak of conflict involving their children and youth in illegal activities and armed conflict. Both the YRH and the FBP are important community referents of organization in the District, shaping in turn other forms of collective action and social interaction amongst its citizens. The Youth Restorative Houses implement a model that draws on restorative justice pillars, focusing on the encounter between victims and offenders, reparation of harm caused through an acknowledgement of responsibility and agreement amongst these parties as to what constitutes a good measure of such restoration (Maschi et al. 2014). The

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model encompasses five main formative components, implemented with participants over a two-year period: autonomy, alterity, political empowerment and citizenship, restorative justice and life-project. Throughout the process, restorative justice practices are used to strengthen participants’ capacity to solve conflicts without the use of violence, such as sentencing circles, family group conferencing and reparative boards. The extended community is also involved in some cases (López 2015). In what follows, we operationalize the peace trajectory of the District of Aguablanca as defined in the first part of this chapter. Figure 3 provides an overview of the different dimensions, critical events, turning points and the hybridization at work over time in this specific locale. We describe this trajectory and its different phases in the following sections. 3.1

Participatory Action Research, Participant Selection and Data Collection Tools

Adopting an actor-oriented analysis, actors were classified into four groups. Two of them can be classified as ‘endogenous’ and two can be considered ‘exogenous’. The endogenous and exogenous perspectives used as criteria for the analysis of actors helped to maintain the spatialterritorial dimensions of the practice and uncovered initial tensions in the way the ‘local’ related to others, especially in the state-society dimension of the analysis. Furthermore, the information obtained in the dialogue with exogenous actors provided the ‘external’ perspective of the trajectory and relation to the external framework of peacemaking. Research techniques were adjusted according to the characteristics and varying ‘ways of knowing’ of people belonging to these different groups. In addition, secondary data were gathered to complement the perspectives of these respective actors. We discuss each group and the respective techniques in turn. Those classified as endogenous included the children and youth attending the YRH at different stages, their families, and the people in the communes that hosted a House.7 The second ‘endogenous’ group was categorized as ‘organizational actors’, associated with the Fundación Paz y Bien. They occupied leadership roles or acted as community liaisons with the participants in the YRH. Focus groups were used to observe different perspectives within the setting of intra-group dialogue and the interactions between participants concerning the topics discussed. In the case of the youth,8 the

Fig. 3 The peace trajectory in the District of Aguablanca, Colombia (Source López López, A. L., & Ingelaere, B. [2019]. The missing link in hybrid peacebuilding: localized peace trajectories & endogenous knowledge)

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methodology was adapted, constructing the dialogue around a ‘social cartography’ exercise. The design of the cartography oriented these reflections around perceptions of space and territory, the dynamics of violence, and the meaning attached to places considered as safe or ‘allowed’. Their reflections were deeply intertwined with conflict dynamics, uncovering relevant aspects of their everyday peace and conflict practices and the respective social constructions of this phenomena. Those classified as exogenous had interactive significance or incidence with the practice but did not relate directly to its spatial or social context. A first group of exogenous actors were individuals and organizations identified as the ‘support network’ of the practice. They included donors, scholars, philanthropists, universities and others that influence the trajectory of the YRH. Finally, the fourth group included institutional actors related to the practice, especially those implementing policies related to youth crime and the institutional framework for transitional and restorative justice. These included key informants from the local police and the judiciary. In this group classified as exogenous, key informants were identified that could provide information relevant to the understanding of how the community and the organization create, negotiate, adapt and sustain points of connection with actors beyond the pure locale itself. Others were added to the sample based on their relevance during the dialogue with local participants, thus following a strategy of snowball-sampling. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the leadership of the organization Fundación Paz y Bien, as well as with others in the ‘support network’ and those operating at the ‘institutional’ level. The interview guides were designed to allow for the triangulation of the information in the data clusters of the inquiry, identifying the main points of agreement, cooperation and friction. However, with respect to the organization Fundación Paz y Bien, most of the data obtained came from periodic in-depth interviews that took the forms of extended dialogues and participation in the organization’s dayto-day activities. This allowed for an understanding of the interplay of actors and power dynamics, the human fabric of the organization, their constructed notion of peacemaking and resistance to conflict, and the different dimensions of the inner-outer world of their social practice. Secondary data were collected mainly through documentary sources. Official and nonofficial contemporary and historical records were

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consulted for the elaboration of the territorial context of the peace practice: the demographics, the formation of the territory, the migratory waves, the ethnic dynamics and the official accounts of violent conflict in the District. Another important set of secondary data was the one obtained for constructing a comparative framework of analysis of the transitional and restorative justice institutional framework vis-à vis the local restorative practices in the YRH. This included statistics on participation in the institutional programme, methodological aspects, actors involved, and the analysis of possible frictions between a local approach versus the broad scope of policy initiatives. The data from government sources were contrasted with a documentary review of records of the YRH’s programme, as well as with the narratives of change and life stories of participants in the four stages of the programme. The data and findings underwent a rigorous process of coding, analysis, triangulation and comparison. In view of the distinctive character of the practice, comparison was made using proxies such as the use of restorative justice in the institutional framework, in order to find elements of contrast or transferability in a policy setting. The breadth of the research covered the four communes where the YRH are present. However, the unpredictability of violent incidents in some of the research sites during fieldwork was a factor in determining adaptations to the research design. As a result, more days of observation and a higher number of in-depth interviews occurred in the places where security issues were minor. Notwithstanding, all communes and YRHs were represented in the sample. Furthermore, the findings were presented in different forums in order to validate the accuracy of data and the analysis. Most importantly, in line with the PAR approach, the results were shared with representatives from all the communes to validate the accuracy of, for example, the statistics and facts, but also as a way to enable a reflexive exchange around the findings and recommendations that the document offered (López 2015). The document is used by the Fundación Paz y Bien to present a thorough account of their practice to donors and institutions.

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Emerging Responses: Everyday Peace Mechanisms in Conflict Navigation

The appearance of violent conflict in Aguablanca at the end of the 1980s coincided with the intensification of drug trafficking and the expansion of drug cartels into the secluded areas of urban centres (Giraldo and Cruz 1999). In the accounts of the informants, there is a vivid memory of the gradual proliferation of gangs connected to larger criminal groups, and their further evolution into organized groups, each dominating different parts of the District. The divisions established became ‘invisible-borders’. Intra-territorial conflict posed a greater challenge for the inhabitants of an already marginalized territory, disconnected from most forms of statehood and development. This altered quotidian life prompted people to liaise with each other in order to preserve a form of order and functionality in social life. Everyday practices are here identified as a departing point in a peace trajectory, relating essentially to the possibility of coexisting with violence, and mitigating the impact it has on people’s daily life. Thus, the initial connections between individuals are established based on interactions within routinized practices to navigate the ‘safer’ parts of the territory and access communal spaces; inter alia, schools, local churches, health services, local food markets and economic activities inside and outside the District. These interpretations of the territory are rooted in people’s experiential knowledge and the re-signification of spaces and places as ‘safe’ or ‘allowed’. Locals share information about violent confrontations between groups or related rumours (Mac Ginty 2014), establish places of encounter and safe corridors, and create identity markers to recognize those participating in violence in any form. Such exchanges and dialogical forms of protection have resulted in micro-networks established at the neighbourhood and communal levels. However, with the increased intensity of conflict and violent episodes, these everyday mechanisms and interactions appeared to be insufficient, leading to the transformation of hidden transcripts into legible forms of organized action led by women in the District, as one of the informants recalls: A group of youngsters entered our Commune shooting, looking for their rivals. They used the daycare to hide and we tried to protect the children locking them in a room […]. Afterwards we [women working in

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the daycare] talked about the impact this had in our lives and how there were no limits in that conflict anymore […], so we decided to attack the problem, working with the moms in our Commune about the risks our children had and how to better protect them […]. That is how the Family Counselors project started, we went house by house, talking about our issues, providing each other support and guidance to prevent more children from entering this groups. We became a community.9

Relationships within the progressive construction of networks of solidarity are of critical importance in post-conflict interventions. Therefore, we seek the knowledge that nests in these networks and to identify the milestones within the dynamics of association of the local. In this particular trajectory, local women are positioned at the forefront of action in peacemaking via inter-reliable networks with other women within their communes. The historical process reveals the evolution and underlayers of trust and forms of power deemed as ‘legitimate’ by the locals in the absence of the state amidst violent conflict. In a peak moment of conflict in 1991, the women’s strategy of acting as peer counsellors and inserting themselves into the homes of young offenders or at-risk youth steered social mobilization. Going from house to house and speaking the ‘same language’ in relation to the struggle of conflict and the ‘shame’ of being the mother of a gang member ended up inviting the active engagement of other women. […] at first women did not feel comfortable talking about their child’s behaviour. They knew they had done bad things and they felt ashamed to discuss it with others. Single mothers struggling to meet ends every month. But once they understood that we were all in one way or another affected by this, and that there was no judgment […] they were very excited to have a group of women to talk to about the best ways to help their children and cope with the many difficulties we as women have in a place like this.10

Being endogenously formed, there is an observable correlation between trust built amongst women in the Districts and a collective identity constructed upon shared concerns about individual and social order in the District. The association of women as ‘family counselors’ marks the first milestone identified in the historical progression of conflict resistance in Aguablanca. Micro-level interactions and exchanges enabled the agency

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of women to address conflict based on their own knowledge and experiential perspectives on its causes, features and elements of affinity in search of ways to mitigate the impact. Following Mac Ginty (2014, p. 560), we observe how peace formation occurs through a series of ‘micro-solidarities’ and networked processes as individuals engage in cooperation and accommodation of the conditionalities that violent conflict imposes upon communal life. This also fits the author’s description of the everyday as dialogical, in the sense that it relies on interaction, social recognition and social responses (2014, p. 554). 3.3

Systematic and Sustained Response: From Everyday Peace to Endogenous Peace Infrastructures

Gilbert (1997) highlights the cumulative and adaptive character of knowledge. These features are observable as we dissect the forms of peacemaking created in Aguablanca. The non-linear patterns of violence in this protracted conflict, and the aggregate of events and interactions that occur beyond what is observable, stimulate the constant adaptation of response beyond the everyday. The resources and capabilities of the local to respond to violence with practices like the family counselors developed into a form of conflict mediation and resolution applied in different areas of the District, as local leaders of the initiative realized that youngsters were more likely to approach someone outside their family circle or accept intermediation from one of the counsellors. The Fundación Paz y Bien (FPB) appears at this point in the trajectory as a turning point in the consolidation of institutionalized peace infrastructures that channel the peace mechanisms used by the local. While created by the counsellors and other local leaders, it had a visible centre of power embodied in the leadership of a female religious missionary who registered the organization and mobilized women to join it. With no apparent direct inputs from exogenous actors, the organization gained recognition and support from the local, which allowed continued action within the District and adaptations to cope with the changing conflict dynamics. We observed in the historical accounts of informants how the creation of the FPB had set another important milestone. Not only did the FPB provide a point of reference for organized collective action, but it also seems to have enabled the consolidation of other forms of leadership and

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citizen participation in the micro-layers of the local, such as the Community Action Boards11 (CAB). Although the Community Action Boards are meant to be the drivers of citizen participation, they are often inactive, or are co-opted by local politicians. According to the accounts of the CAB Presidents, the insertion of the YRH in the neighbourhoods seemed to have created a different form of relationship and organization amongst people in these neighbourhoods, with a common goal that revolves around the need to remain in the territory and prevent the involvement of children and youth in illegal activities. In this context, the FPB is located at the surface of this layered social network that interacts around shared notions of space, (ethnic) identity and citizenship, thus producing a form of what Newman et al. (2004, p. 220) call the ‘counter-public’, namely: ‘groups or networks based on common interests, experiences and identities that have the capacity to challenge official norms and assumptions’. Such a ‘counter-public’ emerges as an option to a fractured governance system. This alternative governance system embodied by the FPB received initial inputs from exogenous actors. A group of academics conducting research (from a local psychology faculty) on conflict and security dynamics in the District liaised with the FPB and provided what we observe as the foundational exogenous inputs in the hybridization of knowledge and peace practice in the District. Their interest in the study of the behavioural aspects of conflict in the gangs led to the alliance with the FPB members and sector leaders, which then resulted in the articulation of the ‘family counselors’ practice in the form of a comprehensive written guide. Up until this point, response was rooted in people’s understanding of the territory and their innate resources, which allowed them to adapt to the new conditions of the environment. The intersection of inputs from scientific forms of knowledge with those existing in the capabilities already developed by the local contributed to the consolidation of the practice in a more systematic way. Textbooks, practitioner’s guides and training for women shaped their context-based ability in mediation and counselling, adding conceptual landmarks and alternative practices as part of the outputs from this partnership. When they [the researchers] said that they will help us write a guide for the family counselors, we gathered a group of about 40 women and worked

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with them for a year to design the activities […]. They brought their knowledge and we brought ours.12

Clear tensions in the ‘us and them’ narratives of participants interviewed were evidenced with regard to actors outside the District (particularly state agents). However, the coalescence of FPB and the university seems to be a rational quid pro quo, where the interest that exogenous actors have in conducting research on these local practices meets the interest of the people. These overt forms of negotiation and engagement between the local and exogenous (liberal) agents point to a flaw in the framing of the local as being subjugated by state and non-state liberal peace agents (Leonardsson and Rudd 2015; Richmond 2009). Agency is constantly exerted by people as they capitalize on opportunities, making the best of whatever kind of life they are allowed to live in the District. When people from the university came asking if we could connect them with the communes for their research, I said ‘yes, but what is in it for us?’ We don’t want to just be studied and have people coming to interview us. They need to give something back to the community. […] Eventually it helped us a lot, because I had heard of Restorative Justice and they knew how we could apply that here, we became familiar with restorative justice practices and that is how the Counselor’s Guide was created. They had the knowledge we were missing and we had the possibility to move within the territory as a recognized organization. Thus, we all won.13

The amalgam of external inputs and local agency in the trajectory also hints at the inter-reliable and dynamic nature of peace formation that is community-based, and forms of knowing and doing that move beyond the local-local, without necessarily undermining their agency. Thus, the first stage of hybridization of local knowledge observed is information exchange and adaptation in terms of the dialogical nature of forms of cognition. Whereas in fast-track context analysis there is a higher risk of falling for the ‘purely local’ ideal of the communal and its dynamics; in the trajectory analysis the points of intersection surface as the thread of conflict navigation is historicized. This also assists with the aim of identifying not only the peace infrastructures that could mobilize local peacebuilding, but also the composition of such infrastructures and the networks of trust established from within. Instead of positioning the endogenous in opposition to the exogenous, the factoring of external inputs in interaction with local

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capabilities reveal intersubjective entry points to the locale, and possible avenues of cooperation and trust in the construction of a positive type of hybrid peace, in the implementation of the Territorial Peace Approach in the Colombian Case. 3.4

When the Lines Get Blurred: Hybridization of Knowledge in Local Peacebuilding

Violent conflict drives state action, especially from those agents attempting to enforce law and security. Paradoxically, what the District lacks in social services it does have in police presence, with the largest police station in the city established in Aguablanca. This is perceived by the community as a repressive approach to justice, increasing tension in the narratives of state and citizenship, especially with stories that refer to police abuse of power and possible ties to illegal groups in some sectors. Violent conflict changed over time from gang and group identity dynamics into the criminal groups currently known as BACRIM, as explained above. Yet, snapshots from present-day Aguablanca and the Aguablanca of the previous years during the trajectory indicate that citizens remain distrustful of governmental initiatives. The creation by FPB of the Youth Restorative Houses (YRH) further on in the process marked the next milestone in the course of systematic and sustained response, which resulted from the efforts to spread action beyond commune 15 (where FPB operates) and establish centres of social encounter for youngsters and the community in general at the microlevel of the District. With this, space acquires greater meaning in peace formation and conflict management. The YRH are valued by the people as a ‘safe space’ for children and youngsters, an alternative use of their free time and a place that offers protection from the risks they face in the streets of the District. However, underlying these narratives are the signals of soft legitimate power that these infrastructures send to other actors, contesting to some extent their control of the territory. These long-standing connections established at this micro-level are the primary enabling factor in the consolidation of local peace infrastructures beyond the realm of the FPB. Indisputably, this displays a reinforced social organization cohesion and the expansion of the protective capacity of civil society in the locale (Paffenholz 2010). It is also identified as the pivotal point for broader endogenous and exogenous action, and a stronger presence of inputs from liberal peace agents in the District.

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Representatives of the liberal peace arrived in the District on a variety of missions although mainly represented by donors from the Global North interested in the ‘successful conflict management’ practices in the District. Their inputs followed the creation of the first YRH, when the International Organization for Migrations subsidized the opening of more Houses. Certainly, the extent of action within endogenous capacity is constrained by people’s inability to make their efforts self-sustainable. Therefore, the engagement with national and international non-state actors is identified as primarily based on their capacity to obtain financial aid. The nature of this relationship involves a certain level of compliance with the regulatory frameworks of these actors and project logic, however, the roles do seem to be clear: the locals play by the donor’s rules and the donor relies on the legitimacy and existing capacity of the local to deliver results within the established framework of ‘outcomes’ expected by the liberal agents. When asked about the pros and cons of their association with donors, the members of the FPB openly criticize the burden some of the procedures and requirements associated with the projects imposed on them—the timelines, the ‘endless cycle of reporting’, and the use of language and format that often exceeds their capacity. Nonetheless, they recall that in essence the nature of their agency in decision-making within the YRH remains unchanged as they have the primary knowledge about the local conflict dynamics, and a solid network of cooperation within the communes in the District to guarantee the positive outcomes of the process within the YRH. When beneficiaries of FPB’s initiatives14 in the communes were asked about the donors’ funding of the YRH and other programmes, they showed little knowledge of the nature of these organizations or the extent of their agreements with FPB. The restrictions on free mobility imposed by conflict in these areas make it difficult for donors to reach this ‘microlevel’ in the District, often remaining at the level of direct relations with the FPB’s leadership. Without the full spectrum offered by the trajectory, one could consider this centralization as exclusionary, and thus counterproductive for the consolidation of other forms of organization and leadership in the community. Yet a triangulation of the narratives in the District related to the YRHs shows that the broad perception of FPB’s efforts and representation as legitimate, based on the perceived benefits and ‘intentionality’, creates a compact system where FPB is positioned as the focal intra-organizational linkage to the rest of the locale.

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Thus, hybridization is not defined in this practice as something that is neatly demarcated in operational terms. It appears as the product of a sustained set of inputs entering the locale, from one or more sources. These inputs interact with localized experiential knowledge, worldviews and long-term aspirations regarding life in the District. But the depth and breadth of these interactions vary, especially in terms of the capacity and abilities of the local to negotiate the scope of their cooperation with exogenous actors. In the early stages when the Family Counselors model was structured with input from the researchers, the leverage of the FPB was subtle as the organization itself was in its beginning phase. Further along, now that the YRHs have been created and the FPB has consolidated the communal networks around the Houses in these places, the organization seems to hold a stronger position from which to negotiate the adaptations, or subvert the forms of liberal peace promoted by the exogenous actors. This brief recollection of events leading to the YRH as a hybrid peace infrastructure portrays the fluidity of actors and the varying and dynamic ways in which these coalesce in pursuit of their strategic goals (Mac Ginty 2011). Such is the uniqueness of each trajectory for the construction of hybrid forms of peace activity, that the idea of a contextualized differentiation of each locale is of critical importance in the ‘local turn’ (Paffenholz 2015). Furthermore, it shows that endogenous knowledge is, as advocated by Rist et al. (2011), a construct of these multiple sources of information. The experiential knowledge of the local, the scientific knowledge brought in by the support groups, and the flux of information occurring every day between individuals that share similar interests, leads to blurred boundaries between the notion of the local-local and the non-local. 3.5

Hybridization in Peacebuilding Policy: From a Problem-Solving to a Collaborative Approach in Local Peacebuilding

The YRH has proven to be effective in addressing juvenile criminality, with a recidivism rate of only 5% of the youngsters finishing the two-year programme, according to the FPB Director,15 compared to the 70% in the government youth resocialization programme (Berríos Díaz 2011). A government official from the National Institute for Family Welfare (ICBF) in the city of Cali acknowledges the flaws in the policy and the contributions of the YRH model in the District.16

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The cooperative dynamics observed in the coalition between the exogenous actors in the ‘support network’ of the FPB and the locals interacting in the YRH contrasts with the tension in their views of the state and government agencies. As explained earlier, state absence has undermined trust in institutions, and the narratives of otherness and segregation prevail amongst the inhabitants of the District. How could we possibly fit our model within the logic of the ICBF [national family welfare system]? They want the tutors to be university graduates; they measure square footage per child and demand a bunch of impractical guidelines that we will never meet. When the woman [from ICBF] came to see the House in Potrero she looked disgusted! What did she expect, a palace? She could not understand that our main asset is not the neat space we offer, is the possibility to adapt to the reality of our communities […] to be flexible. […] We did not even bother reading the rulebook she left.17

While recognizing the capacity of the community to navigate the territory and the acquired legitimacy of the FPB to operate (which institutions lack), the respondents in this focus group discussion ruled out the possibility of cooperation due to different norms guiding their behavioural practices. FPB’s intervention has yielded important results in conflict mitigation in the District. We were working with ‘the sister’ [FPB’s Director] to support their programme, but it was impossible to make our approach and their approach match. Our intervention lasts six months; theirs can be one or two years. They do not keep safety protocols; the Houses can be available any place, no matter the conditions. The tutors are women from the community without formal training’. […] Personally, I would like to work with them, but I can’t break the rules.18

Overall, the interactions between the state and the local actors in the trajectory show continuous friction and bargaining. Friction is a constant in global connections between exogenous and endogenous knowledge, processes and practices (Tsing 2005). In this scenario, moving from restricted areas of cooperation to the creation of a hybrid peace that recognizes the capability and agency found in the communes seems elusive. While in public discourse the donors and state claim a willingness to ‘partner’ with the local, in reality communal organizations remain

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under the tutorship of those actors higher up the ladder which are considered more capable of managing the list of requirements for compliance with liberal peace interventions and the structural barriers imposed by technocratic approaches. Paradoxically, while the narratives from both sides (local and non-local) are in constant friction, the praxis of the FPB shows a rational insertion of the liberal peace paradigm in the use of restorative justice that carries with it a recognition of the importance of civic ideals, notions of state and citizenship, and compliance with the social contract.19 The addition of the technocratic perspectives and knowledge from outside actors has permeated the way in which the ideals of peace are shaped and how this translates into what is taught out in the YRH. Nowadays the model incorporates the ‘community projection’ module, where youngsters learn about both the internal communal organization as well as the functioning of the state—particularly about individual and collective rights and obligations, and accountability mechanisms. Current peace and conflict dynamics, however, are also altering the landscape of state-civic relations in the District, with the government’s attempt to reestablish order in the areas most affected by the war, which includes the shift in policy from centralization to ‘territorialization’ of peacebuilding via the TAP. The Peace Agreement signed with the FARC sets forth the guidelines of such decentralization, seeking a more inclusive, empowering and dialogical type of peace. Although the term appears broad, ‘territorialization’ in Aguablanca entails thus far a wave of new projects and public offices settling in commune 15, including those implementing truth, justice and reparation programmes. In contrast, there has been an increase in security measures amidst the surge in new armed groups or BACRIM (Álvarez et al. 2017). These groups threaten the sustainability of the settlement, which drives the State to a new form of reactive action. In this changing environment, the boundaries in interactions established by both state and non-state actors are being redefined in hybridization. For the first time, using the Territorial Approach to Peace as the umbrella policy, the Mayor’s office signed a ‘partnership agreement’ with the FPB for the opening of additional YRHs in the District, in areas where BACRIM and other forms of organized crime associated with drug trafficking are spreading rapidly. The justification of the agreement states that ‘the government admits its deficient capacity to intervene in the district, the

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lack of familiarity with the territorial conflict dynamics […], and the long trajectory of the FPB as a grassroots organization’ (Alcaldía de Cali 2017). This official acknowledgement of FPB’s trajectory, legitimacy and capacity to navigate the territory is a major shift from the narrative of the local as uncapable or unruly, towards one that shows the interdependent character of the State’s resources and power, and endogenous knowledge of the local-local. Therefore, beyond the need to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the people, the peace trajectory shows ‘[…] notions of hybridism and peace [that] encourage us to note how actors and institutions are capable of change, and become adept at managing change. Most individuals, groups and institutions will, if coerced or incentivized, act instrumentally and often tactically’. In this sense, the YRH and other peace infrastructures that channel local action are seen as drivers of collaborative forms of peacebuilding where the endogenous and exogenous converge.

4

Conclusion

Capacity development approaches are often a one-way street, where topdown actors do not seem willing to adapt their interventions in order to coalesce with local knowledge and practices. The main reason for this is that peace trajectories and similar in-depth assessments are deemed as ‘unfeasible’ and ‘impractical’ within the timelines and funding restrictions of project logic. As (Mac Ginty 2010) indicates, an ‘[…] understanding of the hybridized nature of peace can help counter such perspectives through its emphasis on the long historical pedigrees of conflict and peacemaking’. Nevertheless, hybrid peace is little understood, as are the peace outcomes of hybridity. This chapter illustrates and advocates for a dynamic approach to the study of hybridity found in the local, acknowledging the agency, forms of power and knowledge identified in the localized response to violent conflict and the everyday forms of adaptation to a restrictive context. This requires a historical analysis of the way in which response and resistance are collectively crafted into a more elaborated and sustained form of peace practice. The latter is better understood when seen as a non-linear peace trajectory in which interactions, responses and alternatives are constructed in parallel with conflict, mixing endogenous and exogenous inputs. The chain of events connecting the trajectory, the responses and the determinant moments in the timeline established—milestones—aid the

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understanding of the evolution and composition of these peace mechanisms and how they reflect and apply the different interconnections of knowledge. Here is where the analysis of ‘peace trajectories’ becomes relevant. Such an inquiry should help liberal agents to incorporate local peacemaking knowledge, trajectories and infrastructures into the ways of doing sustainable peacebuilding. Whereas in peacebuilding the approach to the local is an ‘invitation’ to participate in dialogue for policy-making and other purposes; in the search for hybrid and inclusive peace infrastructures, the trajectory analysis presupposes an inquiry guided by the need to depart from what already exists, in search of avenues of collaboration between state and civic actors. In the former, participation becomes the means to an end in an extractive relationship that seeks to obtain information and establish rapport with the people. In the latter, there is an approximation of the local with an a priori recognition of existing knowledge and capacity. The latter is a vital part of the design and sustainable implementation of contextualized peacebuilding policies. It is important to take into account both the endogenous and exogenous perspectives in the analysis of local knowledge as an evolving trajectory of events. Both dimensions shape peace practice. It is therefore necessary to identify where interaction takes place and to scrutinize the turning points in the shaping of hybridization. Such an approach moves the discussion beyond the local and the non-local as categorical opposites. This approach also contributes to the understanding of the way in which people navigate conflict and structural constraints, and how their practices and collective action shape the political order, its structures and hierarchies, ‘[…] [associating] the political arena with the forces of resistance and alternative political projects undertaken by endogenous communities’ (Rist et al. 2011). Acknowledgements This chapter was prepared with the financial support of the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp.

Notes 1. The fieldwork was conducted by the first author of this chapter. 2. As Heron and Reason (1997, p. 71) describe, PAR has two main aims. The first one is ‘[…] to produce knowledge and action directly useful to a group of people through research […]. The second aim is to empower

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people at a second and deeper level through the process of constructing and using their own knowledge’. The central focus was the practice of/for peace over time. We place less emphasis on the empowerment aspect in this chapter and focus on tracing the process of hybridization uncovered through the PAR approach. Sillitoe (1998, p. 223) explains that the indigenous is also used interchangeably with ‘rural people’s knowledge, indigenous technical knowledge, traditional environmental knowledge, local knowledge and indigenous agricultural knowledge’. Neighbouring communes 16 and 21 (see Fig. 3) are not officially part of the District; however, they share the same problematic and are informally included in both the civic and institutional narrative as part of the District. The city of Santiago de Cali has a homicide rate four times higher than the national average (National Police Web database). Retail of narcotics outside schools, bars, universities, etc. The people in the community, despite not being direct participants, were included in this category after the analysis of actors. This would help connect the results in a more cohesive way with the changes observed in social and violent conflict dynamics, and the elements of interconnectedness between the YRH, and the collective response to conflict. In the programme, youth are boys and girls between ages 14 and 18 years. In the children category, participants are between 9 and 13 years. Female participant, 44 years old, personal interview. Commune 15. April 25, 2015. Personal interview, female participant, 46 years old, family counselor in the Commune 14. May 5, 2015. The Community Action Boards (CABs) are mechanisms established in Colombia’s National Participatory System, operating at the neighbourhood level. Female participant, 44 years old, personal interview, coordinator of the YRH. April 22, 2015. Female participant, 71 years old, personal interview, FPB Director. April 22, 2015. The FPB currently has several other programmatic lines, including ‘Truth and Reconciliation Circles’ with victims of armed conflict, and microfinance projects with women in different communes. However, the YRH is the programme that receives the most funding and support from international organizations and private donors. Female participant, 71 years old, personal interview, FPB Director. May 26, 2015. Male participant, 51 years old, personal interview, Regional Director of the ICBF, Cali. May 28, 2015.

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17. Male participant, 26 years old, tutor of the YRH, Commune 14, May 25, 2015. 18. Male participant, 51 years old, personal interview, Regional Director of the ICBF, Cali. May 28, 2015. 19. One of the core components of the YRH programme is ‘political empowerment’, emphasizing aspects of citizenship such as the understanding of state functioning, participation, accountability, rights and responsibilities.

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CHAPTER 6

Old and New Peace in El Salvador: How Peace Strategies Emerge, Disappear and Transform Chris van der Borgh

1

Introduction

In 1992, a peace agreement was signed in El Salvador between the government and the guerrilla movement Frente Farabundo para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), making an end to a civil war that had lasted over a decade. The country was one of the first cases of the new multidimensional UN peacekeeping approach, which aimed to end the war through democratization and security sector reform. Initially, El Salvador

A draft of this chapter was presented at the UCSIA International Workshop on Peacebuilding, University of Antwerp, 5–7 December 2018. The author would like to thank the participants of the Conflict and Security research seminar at Utrecht University for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Jorg Kustermans, Barbara Segaert and Tom Sauer for their comments on the last draft of the chapter. I am particularly grateful to the input of the late Ralph Sprenkels. I dedicate this chapter to him. C. van der Borgh (B) Centre for Conflict Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_6

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was considered a showcase of post-Cold War peacemaking and peacebuilding, but soon it became clear that although the war had come to an end, security sector reform had stalled, and homicide rates remained high. More than two decades after the civil war, many policymakers and scholars agree that new reforms are needed and even that new international involvement may be required to make these reforms work. A particular challenge in the post-war period in El Salvador is the presence and power of street gangs, as well as the failure of Salvadoran governments to deal with gangs. In addition, other forms of organized crime have penetrated and captured part of the state apparatus, which has hampered security sector reform over the past decades. In the post-settlement period, the Salvadoran government employed different terms for its attempts to contain violence, such as violence reduction, public security, war on gangs and the fight against terrorism. The term peace gradually disappeared from the Salvadoran policy jargon after the peace agreements of 1992, but in 2012, when street gangs signed a truce with each other—with support from the Salvadoran government— the term reappeared in public discourse. Not surprisingly, the use of the word peace in the case of the Salvadoran gang problem was heavily contested. By many it was seen as an inappropriate and even dangerous term, conferring legitimacy on criminal actors who use violence and terrorize citizens. Thus, the truce was dismissed in strong terms that named it ‘fake peace’ or Pax Mafioso. The Salvadoran peace process and its violent aftermath not only remind us of the fact that many violent conflicts are indeed ‘protracted’ and continue after a peace settlement, with new dynamics, new social and political fault lines and new forms of violence. It also shows that the efforts to end conflict and to deal with violence—either through repression or accommodation—are equally protracted. This paper uses the Salvadoran experience to analyse how and why peace strategies— the efforts to forge and negotiate non-violent responses to organized violence—emerge, transform and disappear. It analyses peace strategies as a particular type of ‘practice’ that requires the support of armed actors involved, and other key stakeholders, as well as well resources, networks and frames. In highly polarized societies, the chances for consensus to emerge around peace are slim, as the questions what peace is and is not, and how it can and may be forged, remain deeply contested. Indeed, peace practices often compete with war practices, or relate to war practices in multiple ways.

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This chapter starts with a conceptual discussion of the notion of peace, the link between peace and war, and the notions of peace strategies, practices and narratives. It moves on with an analysis of how practices of war and peace transformed during the Salvadoran civil war. Next, the transformation of war practices in the post-settlement period is discussed, focusing on the growth of the phenomenon of street gangs. It discusses the clashes between gangs, the war on gangs by the Salvadoran government, as well as the later efforts to deal with gang violence through a truce (in the period between 2012 and 2014). The aim of this analysis is not to give a detailed overview of the complex history of war and peace in El Salvador, but to show how peace practices emerge, disappear and transform in two very different episodes of Salvadoran history, and how these practices relate in complex ways to war practices. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the evolution of peace strategies in El Salvador, and calls for greater attention for the local logics and politics of the combined practices of war and peace.

2

The War-Peace Nexus

While war and peace can be defined as ‘situations’ or as ‘periods’, it is widely recognized that war and violence are complex and multi-layered phenomena that are hard to categorize (Azar 1990; Cramer 2006, p. 84; Geneva Declaration 2008; Krause 2012, p. 43). For example, certain forms of violence (e.g. domestic violence) can persist in situations of peace (Keen 2008, p. 17; see also Wilén in this volume), or the order that is the outcome of a peace process can be based on new violent practices, or be violently contested or resisted. Peace is a notoriously slippery concept, as it means different things to different people (Richmond 2005). The ‘liberal peace’ became the dominant international paradigm after the Cold War (Paris 2004), but the agenda of political and economic liberalization remained highly contested, both in academia and in practice. On the one hand, liberal peace has been portrayed as an (international and national) elite peace that lacked the buy-in of local and especially marginalized constituencies, and that was rather insensitive towards local realities (Autesserre 2014; Richmond 2005). On the other hand, it has been argued that precisely the national and international elites that were signatories to peace agreements often neglected the ‘liberal reform agenda’, or resisted its implementation (Barnett and Zürcher 2009; Paris and Sisk 2009).

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The very concept of liberal peace has been called a myth (Selby 2013) and a truism (Charbonneau and Sears 2014), as ‘non-liberal agendas’ often dominate the implementation of peace accords. Moreover, research on the local and everyday realities of peacebuilding has pointed at the more hidden practices of ‘everyday peace’ (Mac Ginty 2014) and the more organic processes of ‘peace formation’ (Richmond and Pogodda 2016; Richmond 2018). These local peace practices and processes may provide an alternative to the liberal peace, by complementing or challenging it. However, local peace practices come in many different forms and are not necessarily ‘emancipatory’, while the practices can also be contested at the national and the local level (Lewis 2017; Richmond 2018). Moreover, it can be hard to tell war and peace apart (Keen 2008; Richards 2004). ‘War is inside of peace, […] war is the motor of institutions and order. [While] peace too is inside war’ (Koopman 2011, p. 193, based on Foucault 2003, p. 5). This chapter has a closer look at the logics of war and peace in protracted conflict. Instead of focusing on war and peace as ‘situations’ or ‘periods’, it seeks to understand how war and peace, as forms of strategic action, develop in a field that is characterized by instability and persistent contention about the political rules of the game (Adler-Nissen 2013; Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Kustermans 2016; Zanotti 2013). War and peace strategies are (sets of) measures that aim to deal with the threat or problem (perceived or real) of organized violence by state or non-state groups. In my definition, the fundamental difference between war and peace strategies is the choice to either use violence or coercion vis-à-vis the perceived adversary, opponent or threatening actor (war strategy), or to propose, forge and implement non-violent responses (peace strategy). This is often a fundamental choice for parties to the conflict, as well as other internal and external actors that (claim to) have a stake in these choices. In that regard, war and peace strategies often consist of ‘extraordinary’ measures that may require extra-legal means (or adaptations of the law) and that are defended as responding to fundamental threats or emergencies that need to be addressed (Balzacq et al. 2010). These measures may need to be explained or promoted to relevant ‘audiences’ or stakeholders (such as international actors, parliament, civil society), however, they may also be held out of sight, in order to hide the chosen strategy. Mac Ginty (2014, p. 553) refers to ‘everyday peace’ as the ‘practices and norms deployed by individuals and groups in deeply divided societies to avoid and minimize conflict and awkward situations at both inter- and

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intragroup levels’. Peace practices refer to the often less visible efforts to cope with violence and insecurity. The peace practices that are of interest in this paper are forms of strategic action, which look for nonviolent ways to stop different types of collective violence, and require the support of armed actors, as well as other key stakeholders, often at elite levels. In these processes, collective action (including the building of coalitions) is crucial, as well as the availability of some resources. While the everyday peace practices that Mac Ginty (2014) describes can take place in silence and do not necessarily need framing, the peace strategies explicitly combine discursive and non-discursive practices. As for the non-discursive part of peace strategies, these consist of different types of efforts, such as negotiations, dialogue and trust building (pushed by international or national actors). The objectives range from the more minimal ones to contain violence, to manage the negative effects of widespread violence, or to explore ways to do so, to more maximalist approaches that include structural solutions for the containment of violence, which is usually expressed in an agenda for peace—which includes agreements about political or institutional reform that affect the ‘rules of the game’.1 However, narratives are part and parcel of peace strategies, as the need to deal with the adversary in non-violent ways is and has to be made explicit. This means that narratives—‘stories that people create to make sense of their lives and environments’ (Autesserre 2014, p. 33)—are employed that seek to legitimize certain peace practices visà-vis particular key stakeholders or audiences. These narratives relate to social practices (e.g. dialogue) and seek to make sense of them (Autesserre 2014, p. 34). In a similar vein, war practices are about the use of violence vis-à-vis opponents with a view to suppress, defeat or eliminate them and in combination with a war narrative they constitute a war strategy. While war narratives often stress that war is necessary to reach peace (in the longer term), it aims to defeat or hinder the ‘armed adversaries’, with the use of force (Box 1). While peace strategies differ from war strategies, they need to be analysed in close connection to each other. Firstly, both can have far-reaching consequences on society and politics. While peace and especially peacebuilding are seen as efforts to rebuild societal structures (Lyons 2005), war strategies are not necessarily about the breakdown of a system, but can also create order (Keen 2008, p. 15; Richards 2004; Tilly 1985; Wood 2008). In a similar vein, Cramer (2006, p. 10) points at the developmental potential of violent conflict that ‘however destructive, may contain

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Box 1 War and peace, strategic practices and political goals

War

Peace

Strategic practice

Political goal of strategic practice

Practice: Collective and organized use of violence Strategic goal: Defeat, oppose, threaten or intimidate opponent Frame: War frame supporting the action to generate support beyond the own group Practice: Collective and organized efforts to cope with or contain violence Strategic goal: Build consensus, dialogue, negotiate with opponents or adversaries (or look for ways to do so) Frame: Peace frame supporting the action to generate support beyond the own group

Peace (war for peace) Rules of game of victor Institutions determined/controlled by victor Peace (peace for peace) Rules of the game consensual

Institutions based on consensus of both parties

dynamics that have the potential to help bring about progressive longterm change’. Thus, war strategies often have profound consequences on society and politics, and peace strategies may have to depart from these, or to deal with them. Secondly, peace and war strategies are often interconnected vessels. The failure of peace efforts to deliver can lead to ‘peace fatigue’ and a renewed support for war. The opposite, however, can also be the case; the failure to stop violence or to reach a degree of order through violence can lead to ‘war fatigue’ and raise the question about the need for ‘peace’ instead of war. Indeed, mixed forms are also possible: in a situation of protracted violent conflict, peace strategies often compete with the strategies of war, while over time these strategies and practices can intertwine and relate to each other in complex ways.

3 War and Peace Strategies During El Salvador’s Civil War The Salvadoran civil war started at the end of the 1970s and was preceded by decades of profound political and economic changes that eventually led to new crises. Until well into the twentieth century, El Salvador’s economy depended on the export of coffee, but the 1960s and 1970s

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featured strong economic growth based on import-substitution industrialization as well as some diversification of exports (Bulmer-Thomas 1987), which led to urbanization and the growth of a middle class. Economic growth created new inequalities, as a considerable part of the rural population did not benefit from economic growth (Martínez et al. 1990). Democratic reforms in the 1960s and 1970s led to the emergence of the reform-oriented Christian Democrat Party (PDC) who won the elections of 1972 and 1977. The results of both elections were annulled by the military, and after 1977 government repression grew as the country descended into war. By the end of the 1970s, the binary between insurgency and counterinsurgency started to dominate political life, with war strategies gaining importance both at the left and the right. However, at both sides of the political spectrum there were forces that still favoured change through peaceful strategies. The reform-oriented centre-left PDC had pled for a peaceful revolution and strongly opposed the armed struggle. It aimed to provide an alternative to the armed revolutionary organizations that were still rather small in the time of the electoral fraud of 1977. However, fear of conservative economic and military elites for socio-economic reform (such as land reform) led to the accusation that the Christian Democratic Party had a (hidden) communist agenda (Montgomery 1995). Increasing government repression spurred the growth of rebel movements, which eventually united in the FMLN. The FMLN claimed to fight for the interests of the lowest classes, and argued that the overhaul of the political and economic system was not possible without armed struggle (van der Borgh 2003). While the government responded with massive repression and state terror, in particular in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was still discussion about the viability of repression between different forces within and outside of the government—such as factions of the military, conservative business organizations, the USA, and the Organization of American States (OAS) (Stanley 1996, pp. 106–107). However, throughout the 1980s war strategies dominated Salvadoran social and political life, as both the guerrilla movement and the government forces claimed to fight for (a victor’s) peace, which required the defeat of the opponent. The impossibility of peace strategies in this period was not only the result of national escalation, but also of the unwillingness of the USA—who supported the government of El Salvador financially and militarily—to work towards, or even to accept, a negotiated solution (van der Borgh 2003). However, after years of extreme violence,

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including brutal (mass) killings, there was a call for the ‘humanization’ of the civil war around 1985, and it became ‘policy’ to contain and manage violence (El País 1985). A rather minimalist peace strategy indeed, which was not able to stop the still dominant war strategies. The Salvadoran civil war also shows that war strategies led to new and profound political changes. The warring parties were well aware that the war was a ‘politico-military’ conflict; it was not just about defeating the enemy, but also about changing the hearts and minds of the people (Byrne 1996). In the course of the 1980s, both the government and the guerrilla movement became involved in the construction of political orders during war that would serve both as an example of and a strategy towards peace. Whereas some of the rebel movements developed forms of rebel governance, through practices of ‘popular power’ which were based on the ideal of communitarianism in the midst of war (van der Borgh 2003), the US-sponsored counter-insurgency campaign combined financial and technical support for the military with an agenda of political reform, land reform, (and later) economic liberalization (van der Borgh 2003). The re-democratization were part of a counter-insurgency strategy. It led to a democracy with many limitations, which did not affect the position of the military, and in which the insurgents were not allowed (nor willing) to participate (Montgomery 1995). Democratization in the framework of a counter-insurgency strategy did, however, lead to more political space for the opposition, and the reform-oriented Christian Democratic Party won the presidential elections of 1984. Since that year, elections have taken place on a regular basis, and changes of government have always been the result of democratic elections. Importantly, the peace agreement of 1992 built on and deepened the war-time political (and economic) liberalization. Indeed, the ‘liberal peace’ had its roots in the war years. But while the wartime democratization complemented a war strategy to defeat the Salvadoran rebels, it later turned into part of a comprehensive peace strategy and became one of the pillars of the Salvadoran peace agreements of 1992. The peace agreements signed in 1992 aimed to integrate the FMLN in political life through a deepening of democratic reform, as well as reform of the security sector (in particular the creation of a new civil police), and demilitarization of political life (Lyons 2005; van der Borgh 2004). The strategy of peace talks had been tried during the civil war, but failed because of a perceived incompatibility of ‘peace goals’, in

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the early 1990s the parties developed a common peace strategy in a surprisingly short period of time. Different factors spurred the process. Already in 1987 the Central American presidents had signed the Esquipulas II Accord, in which they agreed, inter alia, on a framework for peaceful conflict resolution (Dunkerley 1994). The development of a peace strategy in El Salvador was also the result of intense fighting. In particular the large FMLN offensive of November-December 1989, which reached the national capital, not only led to a large number of casualties, but also confirmed that a military stalemate had been reached. In the early 1990s when peace talks started, the collapse of communism pushed the FMLN to reconsider its strategy, while the USA no longer rejected a negotiated solution and was willing to exert pressure on the Salvadoran government and military to accept a peace deal. As a result, the UN could play a more proactive role in El Salvador. But the road to peace was also paved by the parties themselves, who increasingly agreed on the need for a peace strategy. This required changes in the ideologies of both parties. Within the right-wing ARENA party, who controlled the government from 1989 onwards, certain sectors actively supported a peace deal based on political liberalization, as it could lead to stability which would enhance business (Wood 2008). Within the FMLN the possibility of revolutionary reform through (liberal) democracy was also increasingly embraced (Montgomery 1995; Sprenkels 2018). While the Salvadoran peace process had its roots in the war period, the peace strategy was not simply ‘imposed’ on El Salvador, but was the result of a repositioning of key national and international actors in a changing international context. In that process, a transnational coalition was built that defined the contours of a peace narrative in El Salvador and pushed for new rules of the game. It merged the agendas of the new-right and a large part of the left in El Salvador, matching this with the interests of the USA and the former Soviet Union, while the United Nations brokered the process. This coalition created a common understanding of peace as an intermediate goal, indeed based on hegemonic international ideas about political and economic governance. But while consensus on peace as strategy and the intermediate goals (of democratization and demilitarization) was rather strong, the parties to the conflict differed regarding the ultimate goals and what should happen once a peace agreement was signed. Indeed, support for the UN-brokered peace process was not accepted by all (e.g. parts of the military disagreed). In other words, there were still substantive differences between the parties

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about the longer-term ‘peace goals’, but there was a consensus about the need for a transition from ‘bullets to ballots’; to stop war strategies and to continue the struggle about the question of how to make peace sustainable in the electoral realm. This lacking consensus became clear after the signing of the peace agreement in El Salvador. Initially, the country was portrayed as one of the first UN-led ‘successes’ of peacemaking and peacebuilding by the UN, as the agreements effectively brought an end to the civil war (UN 1995). However, the assessment of the outcome of the peace agreements and the high levels of insecurity and precariousness that many Salvadorans experienced led to critical evaluations (Montoya 2018; Silber 2011; Sprenkels 2018). The extremely high homicide rates in the post-settlement period (as high as 164.5 per 100,000 in 1994, and between 30 and 100 per 100,000 in the decades thereafter) were an important reason for these negative evaluations (Wade 2016, p. 161). High homicide rates in the post-war years can only to a very limited extent be explained by revenge killings, and the case of El Salvador shows that (further) democratization after the peace agreements led on the one hand to a sharp reduction (if not total elimination) of political violence used by the insurgents and the military, but also to an increase in other forms of violence, which will be discussed further on.2 The Salvadoran case shows the problematic implementation of institutional reform after peace agreements, including resistance against reform. In El Salvador, security sector reform was high on the post-settlement agenda, but faced serious challenges. The militarized police was replaced by a new civilian police apparatus, but elites with ties to the old regime remained influential in the post-war years, occupying key positions in the police apparatus and blocking reform (Cruz 2011, pp. 16–17; IUDOP 2014; Silva 2014a; Wade 2016, pp. 50–51). It is also widely believed that criminal interests have penetrated the police apparatus (IUDOP 2014; Silva 2014a, b). This is largely the result of the lack of political will to build an independent and professional police force, as from the very beginning, the new police ‘included former soldiers that worked with criminal groups and preserved a closed power structure that prevented any authority from investigating them for over two decades’ (Silva 2014b). Thus, as Silva (2014b) argues, ‘It was through the police that transnational organized crime, above all drug trafficking organizations and money launderers, penetrated the political system and the social fabric of the country’.

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It should be stressed that in addition to the opposition to the peace agreement as well as problems in its implementation, it failed to address problems that resulted from profound wartime challenges in Salvadoran society. Importantly, El Salvador’s economy had radically changed during the war years. In 1989 (during the war years), a neoliberal policy package was introduced, which implied an overhaul of the development model that at a later stage also led to the ‘dollarization’ of the economy. The massive migration of Salvadorans to the USA (many of them undocumented), which increased during the war years, led to the growing importance of remittances sent from the USA.3 Contemporary violence in Central America should therefore not simply be seen as the heritage of the previous civil war, but as part of a broader crisis of governance (Rodgers 2009, p. 950). Processes of economic liberalization, incomplete democratization and intensifying globalization have undermined the state’s political authority and its ability to command a monopoly on the use of violence (Rodgers 2009, p. 950). The fact that the phenomenon of street gangs is particularly strong in ‘brown areas’ (O’Donnell 2004), the marginalized areas where state presence has historically been low, shows that rapid post-settlement demilitarization provided opportunities for armed groups, such as street gangs, to use violence and to build up a territorial power position. All in all, this short overview shows how the political system of the 1970s sparked rather than contained political violence, with war strategies becoming extremely important and dominant throughout the 1980s. Peace strategies were present even before the civil war, and also emerged during the civil war, but they complemented rather than replaced war strategies. Importantly, the democratic reforms had their roots in the civil war and were part of a counter-insurgency (war) strategy, but they were not able to curb war strategies until the peace agreements were signed, which proposed a combination of demilitarization and a deepening of the democratic reforms. The post-settlement era shows that war strategies were effectively stopped, but the high level of consensus that was reached between international and national actors to stop the war did not mean that parties shared the same ‘final goals’ and did not necessarily imply agreement about the longer-term implications of the peace that was reached. The implementation of security sector reform remained contested and was resisted within and outside the state. In addition, the sudden demilitarization of political life and society also led to unintended and unforeseen challenges, in particular the growth of street gangs that

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violently challenged the territorial control of the state. A full implementation of the peace agreement of 1992 might not have prevented all this from happening, but might at least have led to more efficient government responses to the new forms of violence that emerged in the wake of the war.

4

Post-Settlement War and ‘Truce’

After the demobilization of one armed group (the guerrillas), another type of armed group—street gangs—started to grow. Street gangs did not consist of demobilized guerrillas or soldiers; they were an already existing sub-cultural phenomenon of small and loosely organized groups that—in a new ‘demilitarized’ context—transformed into larger, stronger and more violent organizations (Savenije 2009). The use of violence and the show of being tough—especially towards other gangs, but also towards local residents—is key to gang identity (Savenije 2009), and over time, practices of extortion increased and changed the functions of gang violence. Despite the growing involvement in criminal activities, this generally has not led to a wealthy or rich gang, but rather to a mafia of the poor (ICG 2017).4 Gang presence and gang violence are strongest in marginalized neighbourhoods where state presence is low and democratic governance is weak. Today gangs exert a degree of local power, using violence, and extorting local residents and businesses in large parts of the Salvadoran territory. In the post-settlement era new war strategies emerged. Street gangs typically ‘wage war’ against one another, while the Salvadoran government also tended towards the use of force in its responses. Right after the peace agreements, the gang phenomenon was somewhat ignored by the government, but in the new century, governments pointed at street gangs as the main security threat. Repressive policies became the dominant government response, since zero tolerance ‘mano dura’ policies started in 2003 and security policies vis-à-vis gangs have become increasingly politicized and militarized. An important critique on these policies is that they contributed to the transformation rather than the abolition of gangs, with prison leaderships playing an increasingly important role, and extortion (to sustain the gang) becoming more important (Cruz 2011; van der Borgh and Savenije 2015; Wolf 2017). Repression remained an important pillar of government policies— even during the period of the truce (2012–2014) that will be discussed

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below. When the truce unravelled, even more repressive strategies to deal with gangs developed. In 2015, it was announced that El Salvador’s Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism (adopted in 2006) was to be used against gang members, and in April 2016, the government announced extraordinary security measures ‘including extended detention periods; use of the army in public security activities; increased flexibility for the execution of searches and seizures; and, the tightening of administrative measures in prisons’ (UN 2018). Moreover, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Agnes Callamard, reported after a visit to El Salvador that she had ‘found a pattern of behavior between security personnel that could be considered as extrajudicial killings’ (Reuters 2018). While gangs cause real security problems for many Salvadorans, the choice to crack down on gangs was not necessarily the result of its proven effectiveness and had other strategic reasons: gangs were used as ‘scapegoats for insecurity and draconian state responses […] which deflected people’s attention from the criminal activities of corrupt officials’ (Cruz 2011, p. 26, 2017). According to Pearce (2010, p. 289), the popularity of repressive policies is a de facto sign of the state’s weakness and the lack of a monopoly on violence. Democracy became ‘securitized’ as it ‘increasingly subject to the fears and insecurities of the population, enabling the state to build its authority not on the protection of citizen’s rights but on its armed encounters and insidious collusions with violent actions in the name of “security provision”’ (Pearce 2010, p. 289). All in all, the dominant policy response to the problem of street gangs was to crack down and repress the phenomenon in ways often framed in terminology reminiscent of war.5 It therefore came as a surprise when in March 2012 it was revealed that the government had facilitated a pacification process between gangs, which was referred to as a ‘gang truce’ and which appeared to be quite successful. It led to diminishing homicide rates and fired up the hope that a solution to the gang problem had been found. The Salvadoran gang truce started 9 March 2012 within the confines of the Zacatecoluca high security prison, when the three principal street gangs in El Salvador (Mara Salvatrucha, 18th Street Gang Southerners, and the 18th Street Gang Revolutionaries) agreed to a cease of hostilities between their gangs and called for a broader pacification process. The first public sign of this ceasefire was a sharp drop in homicides from almost 14 per day to five (La Prensa Gráfica 2012). The overall homicide rate dropped by 41%

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over 2012, to 41.2 per 100,000 inhabitants.6 After a relatively successful first year, however, the truce unravelled almost as fast as it had been implemented.7 Contrary to the often highly mediatized repressive policies, the truce was brokered in secret and initially remained hidden. The preparatory talks and negotiations between gang representatives and governmentbacked facilitators (Raúl Mijando and Mgr. Fabio Colidres) that eventually led to the intergang truce started shortly after Minister of Justice and Public Security, the retired general David Munguía Payés, took office. This process took place backstage, but a few days after the truce came into effect, it inadvertently went frontstage, provoking a complete new kind of dynamics (van der Borgh and Savenije 2019). During this phase the truce had to be explained and defended to the public at large, which proved to be problematic (van der Borgh and Savenije 2019). Although the truce led to a reduction in the homicide rates, the goal, the (temporary) outcome and the legitimacy of the strategy were constantly questioned and attacked. As to the outcome, there were allegations that the homicide rates were not really reduced, but rather that gangs had resorted to hiding the homicides. Some authors even argued that the truce was a tactical move that should be understood in relation to the alleged (and growing) involvement of gangs in organized crime (Farah and Philips Lum 2013). Still others argued that the truce was a strategic move of the government to provide a smokescreen to hide the links between organized crime and high-level police and government officials (Silva 2014a, p. 264). With regard to the strategy, the critique was that the government facilitated a truce between criminal groups and that by doing so, coercive organizations were de facto integrated in government policies (van der Borgh and Savenije 2019). The truce consisted of a deal in which street gangs promised to contain the violence, and the Salvadoran government facilitated that process, e.g. by transferring gang leaders to regular prisons and relaxing the prison regime. However, the government never took full political responsibility for the process and the Minister of Justice and Public Security had outsourced the task of dealing with gangs to facilitators that were able to broker the deal between a number of imprisoned gang leaders and keep the truce going (van der Borgh and Savenije 2019). Moreover, the end goal of the truce process was unclear. The facilitators emphasized the success to reduce homicide rates, and gang leaders

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talked about peace, but this ‘peace narrative’ never gained traction (van der Borgh and Savenije 2019). This all highlights how problematic it can be to start a peace process that is considered legitimate in Salvadoran society—particularly among gangs. However, while the truce was a unique initiative, cooperation between gangs and other actors such as the government is not uncommon. When non-state armed actors build up local power positions, micro-level armed regimes come into existence, where government actors and non-state armed actors engage in different ways with each other (Arias 2017). This engagement is rather ‘mixed’ in the case of El Salvador. Despite high levels of repression of the military and the police—both before, during and after the truce—gangs have developed informal relations with local political parties and government agencies. In particular in areas where gangs are strong, government officials have little other choice than to deal with gangs, giving rise to a situation of frequent dealings between gangs and local governments. The run-up to the presidential elections of 2014 shows clear examples and evidence of the relations between gangs and political parties, as conversations took place between high-level political leaders and gang leaders. A video tape shows that representatives of the right-wing ARENA party met with gang leaders in the municipality of Ilopango to discuss, among other things, the possibility of a new truce (Labrador and Asensio 2016). Ernesto Muyshondt, an MP for the ARENA party and one of the leaders attending the meeting who was recognized, explained that ‘If you want to be a politician you have to deal with them’ (Labrador and Martínez 2016). In a similar vein, the FMLN made their own alliance with gangs. There is evidence that Aristides Valencia, following the first round of the presidential elections, had conversations with gang members about the pact between gangs and the FMLN (Martínez and Valencia 2016). Aristides Valencia became Minister of Governance in the new cabinet after the FMLN won the elections. The former mayor of San Salvador and new president-elect of the country also ‘pacted with gangs’ (Martinez 2018). Interestingly, in an interview with ARENA member Muyshondt about his talks with gang members, he stressed that politicians, mayors and government staff need to dialogue with the local people ‘who control the situation’ (Labrador and Martínez 2016). He also emphasized that dialogue takes place almost on a daily basis. Interviews with local level government staff, NGO workers and politicians in several municipalities

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of the Metropolitan Area of San Salvador showed that there are many linkages between political parties and gangs.8 Political parties need permission in order to campaign in gang-controlled neighbourhoods. This may take the form of local ‘pacts’ between local gangs and political parties, or more ad hoc one-off arrangements between gangs and local governments. There are also reports of cases where mayors or members of the municipal board were forced to coordinate their actions with the local gang. Others reported the reluctance of local residents to run for office in the municipal elections because of the pressures that gangs exerted on local politicians.9 Local governments also need to contact gangs on a regular basis. In some cases, it was reported that local gangs had made deals with local government officials, but, due to the fragmentation of gangs, these deals often seemed to be fragile. Nevertheless, this illustrates that staff needs permission of a gang to work in gang-controlled neighbourhoods. In a number of cases, it was reported that staff residing in areas controlled by gangs had been recruited by the local government, and in a few others, it was also acknowledged that staff had very close relations with gangs. Gangs usually expect ‘benefits’ for their cooperation with the local government, which, for example, can be projects in their neighbourhood, access to government jobs, or money.10 Local neighbourhood organizations can play important roles in the communication between government staff and gangs. Indeed, these organizations also need to position themselves vis-à-vis gangs, and may be ‘de facto’ controlled by gangs.11 These everyday dealings and pacts between gangs and politicians or government officials mostly take place backstage and enable governments to work in gang-controlled areas. They are developed for pragmatic reasons: to prevent the use of violence vis-à-vis officials, to gain access to gang-controlled territories and to create the conditions to deliver services in these areas. While the term peace is only rarely used for these practices, they are responses to the capacity of gangs to deploy violence and are thus a way to contain violence. The truce did not intend to formalize these kinds of informal contacts between gangs and government staff, but the very deal was based on these forms of dealing between the central government and gang leaders that was not new to Salvador society. In fact, far from being new, this engagement between government representatives and gangs seems to be the norm.

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Indeed, it is unlikely that these informal practices will lead to a ‘peace strategy’ that can count on broader support and that will be promoted as such. For a peace process with gangs to become legitimate, it would require a clearer end goal, which includes the dismantlement of gangs or their transformation into groups that no longer use violence and coercion. While the gang truce was an interesting effort to integrate gangs into a process of violence reduction and sought to develop mechanisms to transform gangs, the lack of clarity about the future status of gangs and the consequences this would have on the local and national political order led to many concerns and was an important reason why the truce unravelled.

5

Conclusion

This article discussed peace strategies during the Salvadoran civil war and the violence that emerged in the wake of the civil war. Clearly, the gang truce of 2012 and the Salvadoran peace agreement of 1992 are different things. Nevertheless, they are related efforts. Both sought to bring an end to violence; the peace accords did so by proposing the demilitarization of society and the building of a liberal democratic state; while the truce process revealed the structural problems to realize this goal and to make the state work in large parts of Salvadoran society and territory. The truce was—at least in part—a pragmatic response to these limitations, in the form of a deal between state officials and powerful (though illegal) non-state actors without a clear political agenda. This kind of pragmatic interaction between state and non-state actors is not uncommon in El Salvador, as state agents of different types deal with the interests of powerful others outside of the state. What was new about the truce was that this hybridity came so clearly to light and was seen as an essential building block in a strategy of pacification and peacebuilding. However, the legitimacy of this process was heavily contested, as both the process and goal of the truce were questioned by political actors, civil society and the public at large. In this regard, the internationally supported peace process of the 1990s led to high levels of consensus about the road to peace and the type of legitimate order. The post-settlement period did, however, not lead to a full-fledged liberal democracy and rule of law, but rather to a rearrangement and renegotiation of the relations between (old and new)

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state and non-state actors in security governance. While security arrangements based on liberal-constitutional norms are still widely considered as legitimate and preferable, there is a lack of consensus about the road to peace today. In this regard, the case of El Salvador reveals the tensions between the ideals of state power, rule of law and liberal norms, that still underpin the public and political discourses about El Salvador’s security governance, and the de facto strategies to contain violence and provide security, both at local and national levels. The first is about a type of order that is considered legitimate but only partly functioning, while the latter is about the existing practices of (national and local) actors dealing in different ways with new power configurations and informal sovereignties. This ranges from hybrid practices at the very local level, where governments have little other choice than to deal in pragmatic ways with gangs, to a hardening of the ‘war on gangs’ (including extrajudicial killings) by the national government. This analysis shows that in protracted conflict the chances to build a coalition that supports a common peace strategy based on a common peace goal are rather slim. It also shows that the questions of what peace entails, whether and how it should be forged and what peace is (or was meant to be) once it has been established, do not disappear from the political agenda. As countries may relapse into war, destabilize or muddle through, new forms of violence, instability or insecurity often emerge. And so do questions about what are legitimate measures to deal with new violence, instability or insecurity. These discussions do not take place in a political vacuum; dominant national and international elites exert substantive influence on ‘peace politics’ that deal with the question of what measures in the name of peace are seen as legitimate. In addition, in the absence of a solution to these problems, a variety of peace practices and narratives can coexist. Clearly, the types of peace practices that emerge in a setting of civil war differ from those in a situation where illicit armed groups challenge the state. But in both cases, peace strategies need to deal with or adapt to ‘facts on the ground’, including ‘informal and illegal’ actors and the oftentimes less visible practices in which war and violence are managed on a daily basis.

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Notes 1. The idea that peace processes essentially deal with the containment of violence in the short term and create structures and rules for its longerterm management is based on Woodward (2007, pp. 156–157) and Richmond (2005, p. 3), who notes that traditionally a distinction is made between management and institutions of peace (suggesting a sequence). 2. Indeed, levels of violence were already comparatively high (long) before the civil war started (Walter 2018; Wade 2016, p. 158). 3. While around seven million Salvadorans live in El Salvador, between two and three million Salvadorans now reside in the USA. 4. The number of gang members is hard to estimate. In 2013, sources near the gangs estimated 60,000 gang members in the neighbourhoods and approximately 10,000 in the penal system. These sources also conjectured that the gangs have a social support network of some 400,000 citizens; including, for instance, family members and neighbours (van der Borgh and Savenije 2019). 5. Indeed, over the years this was complemented with more preventive and socially oriented policies. However, while these policies may be able to prevent youth from joining gangs, these could not stop the gang phenomenon as such. 6. UNOCD who reports a drop of 41% of the homicide rates in 2012, from 69.9 homicides per 100.000 in 2011 to 41.2 in 2012 (UNOCD 2014). 7. This section is based on some of my earlier work. See van der Borgh (2019) and van der Borgh and Savenije (2018, 2019). 8. Based on field research by the author in the Metropolitan Area of San Salvador (AMSS), November 2017. See van der Borgh and Abello Colak (2018). 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid.

References Adler-Nissen, R. (2013). Introduction. In R. Adler-Nissen (Ed.), Bourdieu in international relations: Rethinking key concepts in IR (pp. 1–24). Routledge: London and New York. Arias, E. (2017). Criminal enterprises and governance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Autesserre, S. (2014). Peaceland: Conflict resolution and the everyday politics of international intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Azar, E. (1990). The management of protracted social conflicts: Theory and cases. Dartmouth: Dartmouth Publishing Company.

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Balzacq, T, Basaran, T. Bigo, D. Guittet, E., & Olsson, C. (2010). Security practices. In International studies encyclopaedia online. Denmark: Robert A. Blackwell Publishing. Barnett, M., & Zürcher, C. (2009). The peacebuilders contract: How external state-building reinforces weak statehood. In R. Paris & T. Sisk, The dilemmas of state-building: Confronting the contradictions of postwar peace operations (pp. 13–52). Abingdon: Routledge. Bulmer Thomas, V. (1987). The political economy of Central America since 1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byrne, H. (1996). El Salvador’s civil war, a study of revolution. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. Charbonneau, B., & Sears, J. (2014). Fighting for peace in Mali? The limits of international military intervention. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 8(2–3), 192–213. Cramer, C. (2006). Civil war is not a stupid thing: Accounting for violence in developing countries. London: Hurst. Cruz, J. (2017, October 23). In Central America, gangs like MS13 are bad—But corrupt politicians may be worse. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/in-central-america-gangs-like-ms-13-arebad-but-corrupt-politicians-may-be-worse-86113. Accessed 24 January 2020. Cruz, M. (2011). Criminal violence and democratization in Central America: The survival of the violent state. Latin American Politics and Society, 53(4), 1–33. Dunkerley, J. (1994). The pacification of Central America. London: Verso. El País. (1985, May 18). Duarte Afirma Que Quiere Humanizer la Guerra en El Salvador. Farah, D., & Philips Lum, P. (2013). Central American gangs and transnational criminal organizations. The changing relationships in a time of turmoil. http://www.strategycenter.net/docLib/20130224_CenAmGangsan dTCOs.pdf. Accessed 24 January 2020. Fligstein, N., & McAdam, D. (2012). A theory of fields. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: Picador. Geneva Declaration. (2008). Global burden of armed violence. Geneva, Geneva Declaration Secretariat. Instituto Universitario de Opinión Publica (IUDOP). (2014). La situación de la seguridad y la justicia 2009–2014. Entre expectativas de cambio, mano dura militar y treguas pandilleras. San Salvador, Instituto Universitario de Opinión Publica, Universidad Centroamericana ‘José Simeón Cañas’. http://www.uca.edu.sv/iudop/wp-content/uploads/libro_ la_situaci%C3%B3n_de_la_seguridad.pdf. Accessed 24 January 2020.

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International Crisis Group (ICG). (2017, April 6). Mafia of the poor. Gang violence and extortion in Central America (Latin America Report 62). Accessed 24 January 2020. Keen, D. (2008). Complex emergencies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Koopman, S. (2011). Let’s take peace to pieces. Political Geography, 30, 193– 194. Krause, K. (2012). Hybrid violence: Locating the use of force in postconflict settings. Global Governance, 18, 39–56. Kustermans, J. (2016). Parsing the practice turn: Practice, practical knowledge, practices. Millenium, 44(2), 175–196. La Prensa Gráfica. (2012, March 31). Abril cierra con promedio de 5 homicidios por día. Labrador, G., & Asensio, C. (2016, March 11). Arena prometió a las pandillas una nueva tregua si ganaba la presidencia. El Faro. https://elfaro.net/es/ 201603/video/18213/Arena-prometió-a-las-pandillas-una-nueva-tregua-siganaba-la-presidencia.html. Accessed 24 January 2020. Labrador, G., & Martínez, C. (2016, March 12). Ernesto Muyshondt: ‘Si querés ser político en este país tenés que tratar con ellos’. El Faro. https://elfaro. net/es/201603/el_salvador/18214/Ernesto-Muyshondt-Si-querés-ser-pol ítico-en-este-país-tenés-que-tratar-con-ellos.htm. Accessed 24 January 2020. Lewis, D. (2017). The myopic Foucauldian gaze: Discourse, knowledge and the authoritarian peace. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11(1), 21–41. Lyons, T. (2005). Demilitarizing politics: Elections on the uncertain road to peace. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Mac Ginty, R. (2014). Everyday peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflictaffected societies. Security Dialogue, 45(6), 548–564. Martinez, C. (2018, June 29). Nayib Bukele también pactó con pandillas. El Faro. https://elfaro.net/es/201806/el_salvador/22148/Nayib-Bukeletambi%C3%A9n-pact%C3%B3-con-pandillas.htm. Accessed 24 January 2020. Martínez, C., & Valencia, R. (2016, May 6). El FMLN hizo alianza con las pandillas para la elección presidencial de 2014. El Faro. https://elfaro.net/ es/206005/salanegra/18560/El-FMLN-hizo-alianza-con-las-pandillas-parala-elección-presidencial-de-2014.htm. Accessed 24 January 2020. Martínez, J. et al. (1990). La erradicación de la pobreza en El Salvador. Elementos para un enfoque alternativo. Cenitec, 1–4. San Salvador: CENITEC-DIES. Montgomery, T. (1995). Revolution in El Salvador: From civil strife to civil peace. Boulder: Westview Press. Montoya, A. (2018). The violence of democracy: Political life in post-war El Salvador. Palgrave: Basingstoke. O’Donnell, G. (2004). The quality of democracy: Why the rule of law matters. Journal of Democracy, 15(4), 32–46. Paris, R. (2004). At war’s end. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Paris, R., & Sisk, T. (Eds.). (2009). The dilemmas of statebuilding: Confronting the contradictions of postwar peace operations. London: Routledge. Pearce, J. (2010). Perverse state formation and securitized democracy in Latin America. Democratization, 17 (2), 286–306. Reuters. (2018, February 6). UN finds possible extrajudicial killings in El Salvador gang offensive. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-el-salvador-vio lence/u-n-finds-possible-extrajudicial-killings-in-el-salvador-gang-offensiveidUSKBN1FQ0E1. Accessed 24 January 2020. Richards, P. (Ed.). (2004). No peace, no war: An anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts. Athens: Ohio University Press. Richmond, O. (2005). The transformation of peace: Rethinking peace and conflict studies. Basingstoke: Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Richmond, O. (2018). Peace and the formation of political order. International Peacekeeping, 26(1), 85–110. Richmond, O., & Pogodda, S. (2016). Introduction. In O. Richmond & S. Pogodda (Eds.), Post-liberal peace transitions: Between peace formation and state formation (pp. 1–26). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rodgers, D. (2009). Slum wars of the 21st century: Gangs, Mano Dura and the new urban geography of conflict in Central America. Development and Change, 40(5), 949–976. Savenije, W. (2009). Maras y barras. Pandillas y violencia juvenil en los barrios marginales de Centroamérica. San Salvador: FLACSO. Selby, J. (2013). The myth of liberal peace-building. Conflict, Security & Development, 13(1), 57–86. Silber, I. (2011). Everyday revolutionaries: Gender, violence, and disillusionment in postwar El Salvador. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Silva, H. (2014a). Infiltrados. Crónica de la corrupción de la PNC (1992–2013). San Salvador: UCA editores. Silva, H. (2014b, February 21). The infiltrators. Corruption in El Salvador’s police. Insight Crime. https://www.insightcrime.org/investigations/the-inf iltrators-a-chronicle-of-el-salvador-police-corruption/. Accessed 24 January 2020. Sprenkels, R. (2018). After insurgency: Revolution and electoral politics in El Salvador. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Stanley, W. (1996). The protection racket state, elite politics, military extortion and civil war in El Salvador. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Tilly, C. (1985). War making and state making as organized crime. In P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, & T. Skocpol (Eds.), Bringing the state back in (pp. 169– 187). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations (UN). 2018. El Salvador end of mission statement, Agnes Callamard, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, 5 February. https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/

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Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22634&LangID=E. Accessed 24 January 2020. UNOCD. (2014). Global study on homicide 2013: Trends/contexts/data. Vienna: United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime. van der Borgh, C. (2003).Cooperación Externa, Gobierno Local y Reconstrucción Posguerra. La Experiencia de Chalatenango, El Salvador. Thela Latin America Series. Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers. van der Borgh, C. (2004). Triple transition and governance in El Salvador. In J. Demmers, A. E. Fernández Jilberto, & B. Hogenboom (Eds.), Good governance in the era of global neoliberalism: Conflict and depolitization in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe (pp. 116–133). London and New York: Routledge. van der Borgh, C. (2019). Government responses to gang power: From truce to war on gangs in El Salvador. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 208, 1–25. van der Borgh, C., & Abello Colak, A. (2018). Everyday (in)security in contexts of hybrid governance: Lessons from Medellin and San Salvador. Research Brief, LSE and Utrecht University. http://www.lse.ac.uk/lacc/publications/PDFs/ ResearchBriefing-FINAL.pdf. Accessed 24 January 2020. van der Borgh, C., & Savenije, W. (2015). Securitizating and re-securitizating gang policies. The Funes government and gangs in El Salvador. Journal of Latin America Studies, 47 (1), 149–176. van der Borgh, C., & Savenije, W. (2018). La tregua salvadoreña. Algunas lecciones aprendidas. Unpublished manuscript. van der Borgh, C., & Savenije, W. (2019). The politics of violence reduction: Making and unmaking the Salvadoran gang truce. Journal of Latin America Studies, 51(4), 1–24. Wade, C. (2016). Captured peace: Elites and peacebuilding in El Salvador. Athens, OH: Ohio University Research in International Studies. Walter, K. (2018). La Muerte Violenta Como Realidad Cotidiana. El Salvador, 1912–2016. San Salvador: AccessArte. Wolf, S. (2017). Mano Dura: The politics of gang control in El Salvador. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wood, E. (2008). The social processes of civil war: The wartime transformation of social networks. Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 539–561. Woodward, S. (2007). Do the root causes of civil war matter? On using knowledge to improve peacebuilding interventions. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 1–2, 143–170. Zanotti, L. (2013). Governmentality, ontology, methodology: Re-thinking political agency in the global world. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 38(4), 288–304.

CHAPTER 7

Land and Peacebuilding: The Case of the Peacebuilding Process in Colombia Through the Peasant Reserve Zones Cinthya Carrillo Perdomo

1

Introduction

The dispute on the appropriation, use, and tenure of land in Colombia is a recurring element throughout the nation’s history and the central explanation for the rise and persistence of the armed conflict that has been ravaging the country. The peasants have played a key role in the struggle to gain access to and distribute land, to improve the quality of life in the rural areas, and to consolidate a national effort to build peace with social justice in Colombia. An example of a successful step forward in this struggle was the creation and establishment of the Peasant Reserve

This paper was originally prepared for the UCSIA International Workshop ‘Peacebuilding’, 5–7 December 2018, University of Antwerp. Antwerp, Belgium. C. Carrillo Perdomo (B) Sinestesia ONG, Bogotá, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_7

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Zones (PRZ): through decades of organization and mobilization of the peasantry, a mechanism was created that guaranteed them security on the tenancy of the land and the autonomy to develop a particular economic, political, and social project on their territories. The signing of the Final Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC]) not only puts an end to the armed confrontation with the oldest guerrilla group of the world, but also opens a door to address the unsolved problem of land tenancy. The PRZ appear to be one of the most relevant peacebuilding tools in a rural Colombian context, which is characterized by high poverty rates and informal employment, social inequality, land concentration and informality, environmental fragility, lack of access to clean water, and violence (UNDP 2011, p. 16). This chapter thus seeks to evaluate the PRZ as a tool in the implementation process of the peace agreement. However, I first examine the peacebuilding model itself. This is necessary because we are witnessing a critical moment in the peacebuilding paradigm, particularly in the international liberal model in which it finds itself. Consequently, a central question that must be asked is if peacebuilding is still a valid approach or a legitimate tool for evaluating local processes such as the Peasant Reserve Zones (PRZ) in Colombia. This is an important question because even the United Nations (UN) has now shifted away from the concept of peacebuilding to instead give space to a wide range of sustainable options that every country should take up on its own (Chandler 2017, p. 7). David Chandler (2017, p. 4), who has contributed largely to the peacebuilding field, observes the end of peacebuilding ‘in a “realist” or pragmatist mode of resignation and disillusionment (…) retreat[ed] to aerial drones and crowdsourced monitoring from afar,’ and concludes that ‘the idealism of the 1990s may have evaporated but no positive vision has taken its place.’ Despite Chandler’s conclusion, one can also say that peacebuilding, as an action field, is not lost. Numerous universities still promote the subject; multiple local, national, and international organizations keep working on peacebuilding programs; and, for instance, in Colombia, it turns to be one of the main pillars for the implementation of the Peace Agreement. In this sense, the chapter suggests that there are other types of decentralized cooperation oriented to ‘build peace.’ In fact, the decline of international peacebuilding translates into the empowerment of other

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and numerous actors, the boost of a variety of approaches to peace and methods to achieve it, and the emergence of alternative paths and goals (like the inclusion of land issues). This chapter thereby suggests that with the destabilization of the international peacebuilding approach, [dormant seeds in] the peacebuilding field has [have], in fact, been able to blossom.

2

The Peacebuilding Arena

The present research traces three assumptions from which a more practical, context-related approach to peacebuilding could be constructed. The three scenarios are influenced by the new forms that peacebuilding has taken in relation with its main critiques. Firstly, the peacebuilding field has suffered a de-monopolization process of its main actors. It is relevant to acknowledge that, for some time now, the international community is not the only relevant actor in the peacebuilding field, and neither has the UN been its main exhibitor. Currently, there are numerous and diverse actors employing the basic peacebuilding concept, transposing it to their respective communities with what seem to be remarkable results (Waldman 2008). Furthermore, the actors should not be defined by binary models (e.g., local/international), since multiple interactions among different and diverse types of communities are being carried out in numerous and varied peacebuilding processes. South-south and transnational exchanges, sub-local collaborations, and individual-community relations, in which the actors are in constant flow, abound in the field. There are myriad examples of initiatives being conducted relentlessly by a wide variety of actors—noticeably led by women—at a private, grassroots-level with no international, nor even national intervention (Parra 2014; Ramsey 2000, p. 5). Multiple agents have taken ownership of the peacebuilding field through a decentralization and de-formalization process that has paved new paths toward fresh definitions, relations, and changes, making peacebuilding easier to put in practice by communities and people who are directly affected by it. As Nganje states in Peacebuilding from Below: ‘South-south peacebuilding cooperation; sub-national sharing, and local empowerment among others […] offers an adaptable and complementary framework of international development cooperation that can be

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harnessed to support context-sensitive, socially inclusive, and […] peacebuilding and state-building efforts in conflict-burdened Africa [or Latin America]’ (Nganje 2013, p. 2). Secondly, these new approaches to peacebuilding have uncovered intentionally buried issues that in turn reveal how the conflicts are rooted in the economic, social, cultural, and or political structures of a given society. The peacebuilding realm was born in a context in which the economic and political models were not questioned (see also Pugh in this volume)1 ; therefore, the former became an instrument for the imposition of the latter through hegemonic policies framed as peace interventions. Even though there are still actors who follow such approaches, those kinds of policies now lack their initial legitimacy. In contrast, there are others who are focusing not only on the how, and who, but they also look to address the why and the woven power relations that exist within conflicts (Escobar in Nerín 2016). The intention of this second assumption is to turn to the structural causes of conflict and assess if the object under analysis (in this case the PRZ) offers us tools to overcome and transform its structural roots. One might think that the relation with violent conflict is not too difficult to trace if we are referring to land-related issues (as it is the main case with PRZ), since these issues are one of the most important aspects of postarmed conflict stabilization and the source of a high percentage of violent conflicts in the world (Unruh and Williams 2013, p. 3). However, the international community has continuously ignored them, which is not a fortuitous omission since land-related issues move critical bases of the dominant economic model and core liberal conceptions. In that sense, the proposal is to consider peacebuilding within wider transformative options instead of within preconceived frameworks. This would not only diversify the understanding of what has usually been believed to be the causes of violent conflicts—which must be approached case-by-case, appreciating each conflict’s context and historical moment— but also to think of other types of tools and pathways toward stable societies. Thus, peacebuilding can be pursued beyond the notions of liberal peace and the liberal state (Boege et al. 2009, p. 600). In the same way as liberal democracy is a composite structure that can be divided, and consequently many forms of democracy can be constructed (Hobson 2012, p. 4), peacebuilding can be released from the liberal label. As Hobson proposes in relation to democracy, eradicating the liberal label implies that

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peacebuilding can create its own path; it opens a wide variety of possibilities for how peacebuilding might be implemented in diverse communities and territories in different modes in the future. A non-hegemonic engagement of peacebuilding efforts can open its doors to postcolonial, post-development, and transformative approaches (among others see Escobar 2015a). This could lead to a boomerang effect, in which actors from the Global North expand peacebuilding efforts within their own countries and territories in order to change structural problems in scenarios that were previously only found at the ‘local level’ or in the Global South. Thirdly, peacebuilding has been an expression of a certain global power structure by people who were frequently thought to be ‘neutral.’ Consequently, it is key to abandon the pretension of impartiality hidden behind some ethical obligations and identify the manifestations of power relations in the processes. For peacebuilders ‘intervention is a priori necessary to save lives and avoid suffering and death,’ but they often fail to question the why or how of their actions (Goetze 2017, p. 215). In their reasoning, it is better to interfere than to do nothing, since the actions are intended to achieve peace, and peace is an unquestionable goal. However, any type of intervention, especially in the aftermath of a conflict, is charged with high amounts of uncertainty, and each approach necessarily favors one interest over another. Even if it is peace we are talking about, it is relevant to look at what kind of peace will be endorsed, who benefits from it, and what results from this process. This implies looking at peace multi-dimensionally in all its nuances; it is unjustifiably simplistic to state that ‘peace is positive, therefore we must achieve it.’ It is important to question by whom, where, and why the peacebuilding tools were created. Peace is political, therefore, it expresses the negotiation of power relations between relevant actors and interests that are important to underline. The interventions and their aftermath in the name of peace will produce certain types of institutions, policies, and discourses that will benefit some part of the population’s interests over others (no perfect peace can satisfy the whole nation) and this raises questions that have not been taken into account by international, national, and local stakeholders until recently.

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3

Land Issues Within the Peacebuilding Field: A Historical Glance

Because the PRZ are included in the Final Peace Agreement between FARC and the Colombian government as a tool to guarantee the right to land, it is relevant to understand, firstly, how the land issue has been tackled within the peacebuilding field. Academics, activists, and policymakers have shown some interest in the relation between land and conflict and the importance of that relation for the construction of peace (Borras and Franco 2011, p. 1). However, this link has not received the same amount of attention and development that other domains, such as institutionalization or markets, have received in the theorization of peacebuilding during the past decades. Even though land issues and land reforms have been part of many peace agreements in Latin America and land tenure has been one of the main reasons for the outbreak of a great number of conflicts and the underlying factor in others (Herbolzheimer 2008, p. 53), the United Nation’s missions continuously avoided addressing it, or did so through short-term, ad hoc, and inconsistent projects with limited approaches to land and property issues. This resulted in poor and marginally successful results in many countries, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, and El Salvador (Framework Team 2012, p. 37). Leckie (2005, p. 10) underlines seven reasons why the UN approach to house, land, and property rights’ problems has been faulty and reduced mainly to the construction of camps for refugees and internally displaced people (IDP) and temporal shelter: (i) lack of knowledge on the theme by the UN staff; (ii) unwillingness on the part of local political actors to support initiatives on land and housing due to private interests; (iii) UN members’ opinion that reforms on land are way too large to embrace; (iv) the great complexity that these kind of conflicts have involved; (v) the high monetary costs of addressing the issue; (vi) the idea that tackling land rights could revive conflicts that had come to an end, and (vii) the scarcity of major donor support. The examples of international interventions that fail to address the role of land grievances in conflict reveal the limited scope of the liberal peacebuilding approach of the 90s as well as the particular agenda it tried to push. UN missions in Kosovo and Iraq arrived with democratization tools that were pre-established marketization and democratization measures constructed around the idea that liberalization promoted peace

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(Turner 2006, p. 94). The turn to the local in the later development of peacebuilding theory (see also Ejdus this volume) meant to give relevance to land grievances and issues that were particular to each context and to offer pluralist solutions inspired by the free elections and free market paradigm for reaching peace—and, in doing so, to gradually set aside the liberal approach. However, it failed to understand local elites who engage deeply with land conflicts and usually resist transforming conservative land relations, thereby obfuscating or ignoring the root causes of the conflict. With the termination of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War a series of land reforms started in many decolonized countries around the globe as a result of important debates and claims from armed groups and organizations from civil society. However, in spite of the great attention that the reforms attracted during those decades, it was short-lived and soon dissipated again. After the fall of the Soviet Union, land reforms became less and less of an international matter and were eventually dropped from global priority lists. Nonetheless, the persistence of many internal conflicts, the revival of others,2 and the latent form of many more brought back attention to the importance of including the problem of management of land tenure in conflict resolution and the possibility to regard it as a peacebuilding tool. Besides, the increase of non-military solutions to conflicts3 opened a door to negotiations in which sensible topics such as land tenure could be addressed. Moreover, the progressive attention toward climate change and natural resources safety has linked the importance of the protection of the environment, human development, and land access as an essential duty and a way to building lasting peace. Thereby the potential for land to enhance or to lighten conflicts has become more and more a matter of concern among policymakers, governments, international institutions, NGOs, and civil society, among many other relevant actors.4 At the beginning, land issues were treated from a simplified perspective, in which the main concern was the forcibly displaced persons and how to retrieve their abandoned and lost land (see The Pinheiro Principles 2005). Resettling internally displaced people, ex-combatants, and refugees and starting restitution processes are the most common concerns related with land issues that are tackled directly after conflict (Jensen et al. 2013, p. 1). However, restitution is only one of the numerous and important parts that constitute the whole housing, land, and property equation. Civil society organizations, for example, have been the ones to introduce issues such as local sustainability and special land ownership directed to develop their life projects and protect natural resources (as the PRZ show nowadays)5 (Du Plessis and Leckie 2006, p. 201).

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The General View on Land Management Challenges in Conflict and Post-Conflict Contexts

Peace agreements and their implementation bring forward many land and property rights issues, which most of the time include not only pre-conflict concerns but also others that were developed during the conflict, like land black markets, illegal drug crops, and forced displacements, among others (Unruh and Williams 2013, p. 5). Every attempt to resolve land issues and to start a peacebuilding process must encompass all the pre-conflict and during-conflict situations in order to avoid future unstable conditions that can threaten the peacebuilding process. This also means that actors should not wish to restore the status quo in situations ‘where pre-conflict land relations were unjust, inequitable, politically destabilizing, or economically unsustainable’ (Elhawary and Pantuliano 2013, p. 16). Actions undertaken in the name of peacebuilding over restricted views on land values can be counterproductive and cause a wider conflict. In this regard, it is important to find how land management configurations would decrease the likelihood of violence in order to reach ‘structures (…) that remove causes of wars and offer alternatives to war situations where wars might occur’ (Galtung 1976, p. 298). A prudent land management is crucial to economic development and the well-being of civil societies. Furthermore, it is fundamental for the sustainability of the environment and promotes good governance, which are good reasons for national and local authorities to make efforts to structure comprehensive policies throughout the country (Dale and McLaughlin 1999, p. 2). The roots of the land conflict, its development, actors, and its security features differ from context to context, which also turns into different types of solutions (FAO 2002, p. 1). In this sense, any attempt to tackle them should be ‘open to complexity’ and integrate many forms of community participation, as experience has revealed (Sachs in Unruh and Williams 2013, p. xiii). Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding (Jensen et al. 2013) is a policy brief based on the book of Unruh and Williams (2013), which gathers the main challenges concerning land in a post-conflict scenario and provides recommendations ‘on how each of these issues can be addressed and how land management can further peacebuilding objectives.’ Thus, it is a huge and, so far, almost the only effort to centralize practices and lessons learned on the topic. Eight key aspects related to land management in

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post-armed-conflict contexts are as follows: clarifying legal ambiguities; addressing legal pluralism; resolving land disputes; ensuring the right to return, restitution, and compensation; supporting recovery and restoration of productive land; reforming land policies; rebuilding the land administration; and allocating land to ex-combatants. The eight recommendations offer a general view on the type of land issues that exist in a post-conflict situation and also a common ground of possible direction to resolve them, if what is desired is to reduce the possibility to relapse into a violent conflict and to build sustainable peace. To which extent these recommendations must be applied or used should be defined according to the specificity of the context and by every actor immersed in it. Nevertheless, such policy recommendations are also deployed within specific economic and political frames. In this vein, it is relevant to point out that the aforementioned eight approaches to post-conflict land management are defined in terms of ‘assuring livelihoods, spurring economic development, and attracting investment,’ and the peacebuilding objectives related with land are geared toward ‘economic growth, poverty reduction, rule of law, and good governance.’ With that in mind and according to what was established in the first section, one cannot ignore that such objectives are established within a particular structure of a political, social, and, especially, economic order. Thus, if the idea is to engage a variety of actors in the field of land tenure and peacebuilding, other types of objectives should be taken into account that are not necessarily related, for example, with economic growth and the monopoly of law. In order to do so, it is important to also expand the prevailing assessment that exists over land. 3.2

From the Vision of Land to the Notion of Territory

There are numerous characteristics attributed to the term land. It varies depending on what needs to be tackled, who talks about it, and even the context where it is developed. For example, land and land access have been intimately related with property rights and with the way they are drawn into every country’s and territory’s context. However, since the terminology ‘property rights’ was (especially during the Cold War) and in many countries still is loaded with (undesirable) economic and political connotations, the international community opted to use the term ‘housing, land, and property (HLP) rights,’ as an ‘appropriate way of

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describing in full the relevant human rights framework affecting the place and the conditions in which people reside and live out their lives’ (Du Plessis and Leckie 2006, p. 196). In this sense, to demarcate what type of land access, land tenure, and land regulation a society desires, it is firstly important to define how to value the social, cultural, political, and economic significance of what it is understood by land, which varies according to each country, culture, and community (Sánchez 2017, p. 43). Therefore, the variety of visions, significances, and representations that a society has about land implies in the same way the variety of interests it has with regard to its use. Most of the time, the normative body of the country reflects the established arrangements (also revealed in the lack of recognition), which delineates rights and guarantees, but also has limitations and barriers on the use of the land. In other words, as we are referring to a limited and valued resource (land), the employment of one model of use means that other models’ effectiveness are at risk, which causes disputes that get exacerbated in contexts of violent conflict and volatile post-armed-conflict situations (Sánchez 2017, p. 44). Colombia’s normative construction around land is relevant to show the main and pluralist approaches that can be established over it in a multicultural and diverse society, extending its use beyond a restricted individualistic view on private property. Nevertheless, it also illustrates how conflictive, contradictory, and difficult it can turn when the approaches clash, particularly during an armed conflict. In any case, land is a social construction; consequently, it is subject to change and power. It is not only a valuable physical and economic resource, but also an important social and political process understood within the relations to the use of land. In the ‘rural world,’ there is no culture without land, but for that land to achieve its cultural significance, it also needs its eco-systemic and cultural environment (Uprimny and Sánchez 2010, p. 332). These views on land have helped to recognize the rights of communities and groups that transcend the individual and liberal rights on property and go one step forward to the recognition of other possibilities of life organization, in order to ease conflicts and possible violent situations (Oxfam and ILC 2016). Even though one can consider Colombia’s legal frame to be pretty exemplary because it tries to converge, bind, and acknowledge different types of relations between humans and land, the legal frame might nonetheless fall short with regard to ethnic-religious conflicts, border

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disputes, and even other types of recognitions that transcend humans as the only subjects with rights over land. Such a differentiation is, of course, particularly relevant in the Colombian context, even though it takes a look at the path toward non-hegemonic land management in hands of the state. The above is relevant because it gives tools to evaluate possible scenarios in which the possibility to relapse into violence can be reduced depending on which regulatory model or models are chosen. Nevertheless, just as with the eight previous recommendations, this legal setup is made within a state-building frame in which scenarios of peace are achieved necessarily through state strengthening and legitimation, hence the rule of law or good governance ideals. However, as the example of the Peasant Reserve Zones will show, there are territorial spaces where peace (or the possibility of conflict) is not defined in terms of presence/absence or strength/weakness of the state. On the contrary, the state is seen as an entity under construction, which ‘is disputed and challenged in the different scales and institutions through which it “territorializes”’ (Cristancho 2016, p. 104). This means that the land-peace field, its building process, scope, and limits transcend the state’s realm, and it is in this space where socio-territorial movements like the PRZ arise. Such social organizations base their struggle on land ownership but move toward political, social, economic, and cultural appropriations. In this sense, the land is no longer defined by its extension, productivity, material property or just seen by its economic and cultural dimensions, but as a territory where power and social relations exist, as well as historic and culturally concrete appropriation forms. Specific forms of life give birth to particular territories, thus ‘territories are formed by the conditions constructed by the subjects in their social practices in relation to nature and to each other. The multiple dimensions of the territory are produced [by] social, economic, political, environmental, cultural relations’ (Fernández in Cristancho 2016, p. 93). The latter means that the relationship between peace and land does not end with the access to it or the enhancement of its tenure, for example. As is the case in the PRZ, the relationship between peace and land is crossed by actions of appropriation for the establishment of political, economic, and social projects (Estrada et al. 2013, p. 31) that can clash with other models of life, production, and development. This results in the dominant ideas of land and peacebuilding being transformed once they interact with social movements that have the territory as an objective itself. These

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socio-territorial movements are an example that the forms that peace can take in the territory vary and are crossed by numerous actors, interests, and interactions.

4

The Peasant Reserve Zones

The Peasant Reserve Zones (PRZ) are one of the most important projects on rural development of the last decades in Colombia and the most recent expression of peasants’ aspiration for territory (Estrada et al. 2013, p. 35; Ortiz Guerrero et al. 2004, p. 21). The PRZ were legally established through the Law 160 of 1994 that creates the National System of Agrarian Reform and Peasant Rural Development, as a materialization of decades of peasants’ mobilization and as a result of the tools that the new Constitution of 1991 provided for rural workers to claim progressive access to land (ILSA and Incoder 2012, p. 10). In 1996, the figure was regulated by the Decree 1777, in which its objectives were clarified and its scope of application outlined. The Decree specifies eight purposes which can be summed up in two domains: on one side, the control of the agricultural frontier to avoid the concentration and hoarding of land, and on the other side, the boosting of small rural properties to secure living conditions of peasants and to act as a buffer zone for natural parks and reserves. PRZ are a dynamic and heterogeneous proposal with common features and identities rooted in organizational processes and the territorial aspirations of the peasantry (Estrada et al. 2013, p. 34). These organizations have recognized five main principles that gather their main objectives and program proposals for their territory in order to build, what they call, peace with social justice in Colombia: (i) a social, political, and economic recognition of the peasantry; (ii) a model of rural development that places respect for human life and nature at the center; (iii) gradual, delimited, differentiated exploitation of mineral wealth; (iv) a social and environmental land management that guarantees the balance between the use and conservation of the resources and the ecosystems; and (v) a structural agrarian reform based on the PRZ as a privileged tool (Anzorc 2012, p. 5). The five elements underpin the construction of a peasant territory where the communities wield power through the design of their economic and political proposals. This type of power goes beyond the mere possession of land, encompassing the identity, affection, and sense of belonging

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of the communities to the territory (Estrada et al. 2013, p. 35). It is a bidirectional process, bonded by the social-historic relations, in which the communities exist because of the territory and the territory because of the community. In this sense, the peace that the peasants desire to build through the PRZ goes beyond the material access to land, aiming to become a fuller representation of selfhood through the fulfillment of a variety of social, economic, politic, and cultural projects. This implies a material and symbolic ownership of the territory that may not always match the state’s understandings thereof (2013, p. 33). Nevertheless, the development of such autonomy requires state recognition through its incorporation into the national legal framework, as the fight to shape their own alternative methods finds the answer in the legal formalization of those territories (Cristancho 2016, p. 107). Thereby, the scope of the PRZ as a peacebuilding tool will be described and analyzed through two parallel approaches that at the end are supposed to function together and pave the path to more stable plural societies, especially framed in a post-armed-conflict scenario. On the one hand, the first approach only considers the implications of the PRZ within the state legal framework and in this regard addresses key items of land and peacebuilding issues that are relevant within the national enhancement of sovereignty and legitimacy of the state in order to decrease the possibilities of relapsing into a violent conflict. This view tries to position the PRZ as one of the possible tools of public policy that Colombia needs in matters of land regulation. As Sánchez (2017, p. 49) explains, one of the biggest challenges related with land management in Colombia is to find a policy that harmonizes the different collective interests on land that are regulated in the Constitution (private property, agrarian property, ethnic-collective property, environmental conservation, and public strategic interests) in order to face the historic conflict of land, the ones derived from the armed confrontation, and the new tasks of a post-conflict society. As will be explained, this does not mean that the PRZ are the only answer to the rural problem, but that they can become an important tool for building other strategies to tackle rural problems. On the other hand, the second approach analyzes the PRZ from the perspective of a continuous exercise of autonomy, cultural re-appraisal, self-management, and identity reaffirmation of the peasantry as a form of territorialized construction of peace enhanced with other forms of recognition that transcend and look to exceed the current dominant economic,

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political, cultural, and social norms. I will refer to the first approach as the instrumental, which develops within national state logics and its legal frameworks, and the latter as the auto-affirmative, which seeks to breed independent, autonomous, and contra-hegemonic practices through particular territorial struggle recognitions. Zibechi (2003) uses these two categories to differentiate the methods of the old social Latin American movements that dominated the scene till the 1970s (instrumental) from the new ones (auto-affirmative). The former are characterized by being subordinate to a state logic, which seeks transformation on a national level and falls into ‘Taylorist’ organization forms (e.g., political parties or unions). The latter are territorialized movements that use auto-affirmative methods to make themselves visible and reaffirm what constitutes their identities. They promote new forms of ‘organization of the geographical space, where new social and relational practices arise’ (e.g., indigenous people, women, peasants).

5

The PRZ Sustainable Development Plan (SDP)

The SDP aims at improving peasants’ quality of life in relationship with their territory through four main objectives (to strengthen organizational capacities; to increase household consumption; to slow down environmental deterioration; and to decrease the social and economic segregation) crossed by six axes of intervention (access to land; consolidation of the territorial economic model; enhancement of the rural physical heritage; construction of peasant autonomy; strengthening of cultural roots; and improvement of food self-sufficiency). For that matter, and taking into account the general strategies the plan contains, the objectives can be divided into productive, economic, political, sociocultural, and environmental related issues, which are intrinsically intertwined to, on the one hand, shape a rural public policy in the region, and on the other hand, create a peasant territory. To sum up, the SDP of the PRZ condenses the main historic demands that the peasantry of the region has constantly introduced before the state, from access to land, permanence in the territory, and the defense of the environment, to guarantees to protect their territorial peasant identity, establish food sovereignty, and endorse processes of autonomous organization. The aforementioned is not minor, because as was previously stated, it encompasses one of the central (if not the central) causes of the armed conflict in Colombia and the seeds of its replication all around

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the national territory. Thereby, the PRZ can be addressed as an instrumental or auto-affirmative peacebuilding tool according to the methods it uses to establish nonviolent scenarios of conflict resolution. In the first place, the PRZ constitute a relevant mechanism that seeks to eliminate ambiguous legal scenarios and establish a clear project of territorial planning and integral rural reform with the state as a central regulating body. Thereby, implementing the PRZ is an instrumental method to articulate a national model of rural policy answering to the different approaches that the Colombian Constitution guarantees (see Fig. 1). Therefore, the PRZ are, per se, a mechanism for the agrarian legal approach. With them, problems of land distribution, access, and concentration are tackled, at the same time as social justice demands and material inequalities, which in words of Unruh and Williams referred to land disputes and land policies. However, their use transcends this realm and supports, to some extent, all the other four legal approaches. In terms of environmental conservation, the PRZ fixes a limit on the agricultural

Fig. 1 Articulation of the PRZ as an instrumental method of peacebuilding in Colombia (Source Own elaboration)

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frontier and harmonizes the interaction of productive projects with the preservation of natural resources and protected areas. With respect to the private property approach, the PRZ reaffirms property rights, secures land tenure, and reduces risks of misappropriation, helps to eliminate property uncertainties, which in turn improves its productive and commercial use. In the same line, the PRZ can be of use in the context of land restitution programs, where landless peasants could access lands that are already integrated in a PRZ and secure their permanence (Verdad Abierta 2016). In the same vein, the PRZ can build cooperation bridges between peasant and ethnic territories through the demarcation of borders but also through the establishment of articulated development plans and mutual cooperation systems (Osejo 2013, p. 17). Finally, the articulation of the PRZ with the public interest approach can be disputable, especially if the state’s current economic model is taken into account. Numerous mining and touristic projects are in direct confrontation with the establishment of not only the PRZ in the capital (Sumapaz PRZ), but also almost the 80% of all the PRZ proposals in the country. However, from the autonomy and organizational power that the PRZ give to the peasant communities, alternative models of development can be reached. Alternatively, the mechanism boosts a responsible and appropriate land use, which is one of the biggest problems in the rural area of Colombia, and in turn, it can generate a more participative process in state decisions on mining and use of natural resources. To evaluate the PRZ as a peacebuilding tool from an instrumental approach makes sense for many reasons, including the intrinsic characteristic of the Colombian conflict, which is internal and confronts state forces with illegal armed groups, where the territorial sovereignty and legitimacy is constantly contested. In this regard, PRZ help to assure state power since it is through its legal authorization from which the mechanism can develop extensively. In addition, trust-bridges of confidence between the communities and state institutions can be built in areas where state presence was nonexistent or undesired, which is particularly important in a post-armed-conflict society. In the second place, the PRZ can be also considered an autoaffirmative peacebuilding method, if they are evaluated from a territorial perspective, from which peasant identities, practices, and historic processes are analyzed in relation with the space they inhabit. In this way, peasants work on daily auto-affirmative actions that promote new forms of social organization, decision-making, relation with the environment,

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commercialization, production, and development, which are not directed to an external actor, but to their internal transformation; in other words, ‘they look to build a different world from the place they occupy’ (Zibechi 2008, p. 92). They are characterized by a deeply rooted sense of belonging to recovered or conquered territories through long struggles of resistance, in pursuit of autonomy and the affirmation of their identity and culture. In the same line, they have a deep and honest concern for the organization of work and the relations with nature (Zibechi 2003, p. 187). Thereby, the peasant organizations create new interactions that produce practices of nonviolent conflict resolutions, and in turn, seek to alter hegemonic currents and reverse root causes of the armed conflict. As Osorio (2016, p. 57) states, a characteristic of rural organizations is its tendency to direct their requests from their location to the centre of power or to the urban areas, thus, even when they are geographically located and closely linked to the territory, its activities seek to transcend its frontiers and transform the imbalance of forces represented in institutions, laws, and policies through a constant interaction with state representatives. In this sense, the PRZ are not only seen as a land management mechanism in which the relevance of the soil is measured through economic approaches or state-strengthening outcomes. On the contrary, the soil is part of a territory that becomes a space where a new form of social organization is collectively constructed, new subjects are instituted, together with a material and symbolic appropriation of their space (Zibechi 2003, p. 187). Thereby, as it was mentioned before, the type of peace that communities want to achieve is one that transforms historically unequal land distributions and social and economic injustices, in which new forms of life and new relations with nature are built through collective means of organization. The latter means that the peace that the peasants of the PRZ desire is one that will be introduced via a continuous power struggle between the stability of their autonomy and the state’s sovereignty, even if there are meeting points at which some dialogues and agreements can be achieved. As Anrup (2013, p. 112) explains, ‘the peace is presented to us as a field with multiple tensions and perspectives, a scenario not exempt from conflict and confrontation.’

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6

Conclusions

Through a review of the theoretical and practical paths of international peacebuilding, its recent configurations, and its main critiques, a different framework has here been outlined in order to open the space to a variety of actors, areas of action, and objectives. In this sense, peacebuilding was understood as a process in which multiple actors come together for the purpose of ending the violent conflict, without looking at structural problems and power relations that shape the type of peace that the whole process aims to achieve. Then, the inclusion of land issues as a relevant and imperative matter in the peacebuilding arena not only expands the objective of the process itself but also creates new scenarios of struggle in which the definition of land transcends state frameworks and represents a bet on the construction of transformative forms of peace and of the appropriation of the space. In this scenario, the concept of territory and socio-territorial movements arise, and with them, the assumption that multiple forms of peace can exist in spaces crossed by numerous actors, interests, and interactions that denote the dynamic character of the state and the possibilities to create challenging social, economic, and political organizations for its institutional frontiers. Thus, the aforementioned framework serves to study the figure of the Peasant Reserve Zones (PRZ) as a peacebuilding tool within its configuration as a legal mechanism and a socio-territorial movement, from an instrumental and an auto-affirmative approach, respectively. This way, the present research sought to show two relevant approaches of the PRZ as peacebuilding tools: On the one hand, from the instrumental approach the PRZ become a site for the articulation of different types of policies toward the solution of rural issues, such as access to land, stabilization of peasant economy, and delimitation of the agricultural frontier. In the same sense, the PRZ can be used as a territorial planning tool from which legal differentiations on the use of land, such as environmental, ethnic-collective, private, agricultural, and state-strategic, are harmonized in order to eliminate conflicts in the use and vocation of land, prevent the damage of natural resources, or protect the rights of indigenous communities, among others. As briefly shown in the last section, the state gains legitimacy and expands its sovereignty through the strengthening of relations of trust with the peasants, the extension of its

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institutional presence, the formalization of the autonomy of the communities, and the reduction of ambiguities on the possession and use of land. The latter translates into the decrease in situations of confrontation and chances of relapsing into violent conflict among the citizens and between the state and the population in general. On the other hand, from the auto-affirmative approach, the PRZ could be considered as a peacebuilding tool because of their autonomous practices toward an independent political, economic, social, and cultural project within their territories. Unlike the instrumental approach, the peace that is configured here is not explicitly related to the strengthening or enhancement of the rule of law. Here, social justice necessarily traces the path toward the elimination of violent conflict, and in this sense, the peace that the PRZ seek to achieve imply a distribution of political power and wealth. This peace transcends the termination of the armed conflict and looks to the end of social conflict (positive peace), which inevitably means, the change of the economic model and a healing of the social tissue through the enhancement of new community values. This does not mean that the instrumental approach is worthless, but it cannot be stable in the long term. In this sense, the construction of alternative social orders in the territories is a form of peace tied to fairer spatial formations that challenge the conflictive and contradictory social relations that are intrinsic to a capitalist society. Thus, if we are supposedly witnessing the fall of international peacebuilding due to its stubbornness and hubris to recognize other types of social configurations, then socio-territorial processes like the PRZ can trace new paths for its redefinition toward the construction of multiple types of peace, that in this time, necessarily imply a redistribution of power. Peacebuilding is a field that has been constructing itself from mainly practical experiences. In that sense, the approach with processes like the PRZ could expand its framework of action with other streams of knowledge directed to confront the root causes of violent conflicts (Escobar 2015b). As Escobar suggests, the communities already have many answers to the numerous questions that governments and academia still struggle to find. Perhaps, the critical change goes beyond turning to the local (Leonardsson and Rudd 2015; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013). It is crucial to identify and enhance the value of territorial practices that seek to build more stable and fairer societies by strengthening their own autonomy.

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Notes 1. Pugh recounts that post-conflict recovery was linked to a need for ‘demilitarization, democracy, market economies and the creation of civil institutions that protect human rights.’ The idea of bringing peace to a nation came with a notion of development that was politically and economically framed within a neoliberal framework. 2. 90% of the new century’s civil wars occurred in countries that had already had a civil war in the last 30 years (World Bank 2011, p. 2). 3. In the 1960s, close to 80% of civil wars ended via military enforcements, however by the 1990s the percentage descended to 23%, and in 2014 the number was 10% (Fisas 2014). 4. See Jon Darrel Unruh and Williams (2013), Land and post-conflict peacebuilding; Jon D. Unruh (2003). Land Tenure and Legal Pluralism in the Peace Process; Pachecho, Fernando (2004). The land issue in the context of peacebuilding development or conflict?; Fitzpatrick, Daniel (2002). Land policy in post-conflict circumstances: some lessons from East Timor, among others. 5. By 1991, 14 years before the Pinheiro Principles, civil society initiatives were already referring not only to restitution rights but also to the right to participate in the reconstruction process, and to have adequate livelihoods, natural resources, and other services to maintain the land and dignify their living conditions (UN-Habitat 2007, p. 10).

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CHAPTER 8

Peacebuilding and Resistance: Inequality, Empowerment, Refusal Birgit Bräuchler

1

Introduction

Indonesia is a country that has made headlines both for its far-reaching democratization processes after the authoritarian president Suharto stepped down in 1998 as well as for its recent multitude of violent conflicts. With few government-induced mechanisms in place to sustainably solve such conflicts that are often triggered by continuing inequalities resulting from colonial and neo-colonial policies and human rights violations, affected people have had to come up with their own ideas of how to restore peace and fight social injustice. The international institutionalization and streamlining of what is called ‘peacebuilding’ often obscures our view of what peace actually means for a society affected by different forms of violence and how that peace can be built. This chapter thus argues for a broader understanding of peacebuilding, not as an outside intervention and short-term project, but as something growing from within—a

B. Bräuchler (B) School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_8

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long-term endeavour that does not stop once violence has ended and (a superficial) ‘peace’ has been established—and this demands critical examination of the broader structural violence underlying the physical violence. Drawing on long-term anthropological research in Indonesia, this chapter critically reflects both on local agency and creativity in peace processes in which the revival of tradition figured prominently, as well as on ensuing resistance movements against broader issues of social injustice. Power, inequality and exploitation have long been the focus of anthropological research as part of what Ortner (2016) has coined ‘dark anthropology’. However, in her 2016 article she also points at the reemergence of the study of resistance that challenges social injustices. Picking up Ortner’s concept of refusal (1995), this chapter looks at the various dimensions and uses and strategies of ‘refusal’ in processes of peacebuilding and resistance. It looks at inequalities based on the refusal of participation, access, human and citizen rights and at the resistance this triggers and how those resisting build on such inequalities as important assets for their actions. It also reflects on new inequalities that both the peace process and resistance movements engender, based on a strategic refusal of diversity and internal conflict. Such inequalities emerge through the exclusionary force of tradition and people’s diverging intermediation capabilities and networks. The analysis of the harmonization or idealization of the local that is characterizing the local turn in peacebuilding, grassroots peacebuilding and indigenous peoples’ struggles through an ‘ethnography of refusal’ (e.g. McGranahan 2016) is central to this chapter. Analysing the diverging rationales behind such simplifications, it aims to track the different kinds of refusal underlying such seeming similarity, from a refusal to do in-depth research on the causes of war and to accept the local as highly political, the refusal of governmental development plans and indigeneity policies, to the refusal to reveal internal dissonance. The chapter endorses contemporary anthropological notions of culture as something that is processual and dynamic, constantly in the making, renegotiated and contested, but not random. This allows us to look at resistance as a means to ‘unmake and remake the world through social practice’ (Ortner 2016, p. 63) and put forward ‘radical political imaginaries’ (Fenton 2016, p. 343), by drawing on local culture and the strategic merging of global rhetoric and a reconstructed local traditionality or authenticity. This chapter first provides some conceptual notes on (2) the local turn in peacebuilding and (3) the creation of inequality in more general

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terms. Drawing on the Moluccan case in Indonesia, it then outlines (4) the revival of tradition for peace and its challenges, and discusses (5) the role of brokerage and the articulation of indigeneity as important assets in recent protest movements. The chapter closes with (6) a concluding discussion on the challenges of refusal as a strategy to fight inequality and foster change.

2

Turning Towards the Local

The liberal peace project promotes peace as a product of increasing democratization, security and market liberalization. Due to its frequent failure, critics have pointed at its refusal to acknowledge, let alone include local agency into peacebuilding endeavours. As Richmond (2011, p. 94) remarks, this ‘represents the classic res nullius/terra nullius view that political and economic institutions are needed to save what there is of civil society from its incapacity’. Critics thus asked for ‘a reassessment of the liberal peace project’ through engagement with ‘local context, needs and culture’ of conflict-affected people (Richmond 2011, pp. 3, 25–26). They took up earlier calls to regard local culture as the greatest resource for sustaining peace, as well as to provide legitimacy to international peace interventions (Avruch 1998; Lederach 1997). Scholars like Lederach are targeting a positive peace that goes beyond the mere absence of violence towards profound reconciliation through relationship rebuilding and addressing the root causes of enmity, which requires a very different time frame from the one set by the usual peace interventions. ‘Local ownership’, ‘participation’ and ‘traditional justice’ have become key words in this transformation process. However, the disciplines dominating peace and conflict studies have difficulties grasping the meaning of culture, the local or ‘local ownership’—terms that are often mere strategic proposal rhetoric or accessories to top-down, interventionist models. Mainstream peace research often reifies ‘culture’ and ‘the local’ in order to be able to deal with them better, but in doing so, ends up denying their inherent flexibility and heterogeneity. The local is often reduced to eloquent representatives of local communities or decontextualized rituals; it is stereotypically depicted as inherently bad or good, disorderly or harmonious, with values and needs that are not in line with liberal standards or ethnographic complexities simply not fitting the abstract categories or normative dimensions of international peace paradigms (Bräuchler 2018b). Given such continuing

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deficiencies, some critical peace scholars began endorsing anthropology as an important partner in peace research (e.g. Mac Ginty 2014, 2015; Millar 2018; Richmond 2018a, b). Such attempts usually do not go far enough, either treating anthropology as an auxiliary science, reducing it to the ethnographic method (as yet another tool for the peace industry), or dealing with the local only as a legitimating part of larger international efforts rather than a domain with its own, inherent validity. Mainstream peace research more generally rarely receives and engages with anthropological work, despite the fact that how people deal with conflict and difference and (everyday) forms of resistance are at the heart of anthropological research (Bräuchler 2018a, b). Moreover, as proposed by Galtung (1969) five decades ago, peacebuilding needs to be seen not only as an effort to end violence and deal with its immediate aftermath, but also as an effort to deal with less visible forms of violence and social inequalities that continue to fuel structures and power relations that were, at least partly, responsible for the outbreak of violence. Universalist and interventionist approaches, however, rather reproduce power hierarchies and do little if nothing to counter structural violence (Richmond 2018a, p. 11; 2018b, p. 227); they essentially fail in locally anchoring a peace they aim to introduce from the outside. A key problem in both the liberal peace paradigm and the local turn is what Ortner calls ‘ethnographic refusal’, the refusal to commit to a thick and interpretative description of culture and dense contextualization (Ortner 1995, p. 174), which can be understood as the active non-acknowledgement of the ‘historical complexity of the local’ through ‘the ignorance and imprecision of universalist claims and universalising approaches’ (Richmond 2018b, p. 227). Such ignorance is caused by the refusal or the inability to engage deeply with the local and communicate at eye level. Part of the problem is the depiction of the local and ethnographic research as allegedly apolitical and disassociated from institutional power politics (see, e.g., Richmond 2018b, pp. 229, 230, 232). On the contrary, anthropological research—like the local agency that it is engaging with—has always been highly political.

3

Inequality, Development, Resistance

Such a refusal in mainstream and critical peacebuilding is part of a larger politics of inequality within the mainstream development industry and government policies that ignore, among others, indigenous rights. They

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build on the refusal of sustained participation, empowerment, access and control—what has become ‘feel-good terms employed to make agencies or businesses look good without engagement with their original meanings or implications’ (Gardner and Lewis 2015, p. 151). When indigenous people are part of conflict dynamics or targets of development projects, they are often homogenized to circumvent representational issues, and local knowledge is erroneously considered to be a common good, whereas it is in fact often held by specific people or traditional elders. In both cases, internal hierarchies and power struggles are ignored, and as a consequence, such interventions are prone to reproduce, reinforce or create new inequalities (cf. Gardner and Lewis 2015, p. 165; Humphrey 2012). This chapter examines inequalities that trigger conflict and resistance and inequalities that are strategically used as an asset in that resistance. Inequality always implies different kinds of access to power and resources. Rather than being inherent, inequality is produced and constructed, with states and neoliberal capitalism often playing important roles in that process (Nunn 2016, p. 481). In such contexts, difference is often used to construct non-intelligibility and incompatibility (Humphrey 2012, p. 316), which then legitimizes the othering or essentializing of, for instance, indigenous peoples as obstacles to development or as incapable of ending the violent conflicts in which they are entangled. Its constructed quality means inequality can also be deconstructed, but it can also lead to important synergies, as our case studies show. Difference can also be created or enforced to emphasize the incompatibility of values and worlds, for example the diverging ecologies underlying capitalist exploitation and indigenous people’s resource use (Bräuchler 2018c). Inequality also extends to the field of knowledge and skills. In the protest movement we will look at, intermediaries from the local and regional context are crucial for large-scale mobilization and the translation of a global human rights rhetoric into local contexts and, the other way around, of local grievances into national and international legal parlance (Merry 2006). In such intermediation processes, unequally distributed knowledge and skills are an important asset that can assist the emergence of fruitful synergies and ultimately lead to success. Intermediaries—or brokers—who know how to tap into such inequalities are crucial, as they can potentially challenge or bridge the inequalities, but likewise also (re)produce them. Brokerage implies the ‘hierarchization of actors with respect to access to material and symbolic resources, social status or power’ and thus points to its potentially inequality-producing effects

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(Faist 2014, p. 38). Brokers are ‘parts of social patterns of (in)equalities’ (Faist 2014, p. 38) and the question is to what extent they reproduce or are able to change these inequalities consciously or unconsciously, and thereby the larger mechanisms of exclusion and exploitation. It is important to look at the social practices that actually generate or challenge inequalities and social exclusion, for instance through local peacebuilding or resistance—not just to reveal the outcomes, but also the underlying processes (cf. Ortner 2016, p. 63; Sealey 2015, pp. 611–612). Within the scope of this chapter we can only look at some of these practices and we will do so through the lens of refusal, thus extending Ortner’s notion of ‘ethnographic refusal’ as something linked to the politics of the powerful to the strategies and means of resistance of those marginalized by powerful politics, such as indigenous people. In our first example, we look at a specific case of mass violence and how the revival of tradition paved the way for peace. It is about conflict and the refusal of humanity, about the traumatic impact that the violence had on people’s daily life and the refusal or rejection of outside intervention, about the revival of tradition for the building of interreligious bridges and the refusal of local citizenship rights to immigrants. In our second example, we analyse endeavours that extend such local peacebuilding processes into more far-reaching struggles for social justice. It is about the refusal of outside intrusion, this time in the form of exploitative capitalism; it is also about strategic alliances and brokerage, the embracing of a global rhetoric of indigenous rights and the refusal of ethnographic detail. In both cases, ‘refusal is social and affiliative’ (McGranahan 2016, p. 322). It produced, reproduced or restored strong collective identities and community feelings—in one case the refusal to buy into the dominant rhetoric of interreligious violence that had torn Moluccan society apart, in the other case, the refusal to accept land-grabbing in the Aru Islands for short-sighted economic gains. However, such integrative refusal can also trigger or reinforce other kinds of inequality, such as the refusal of local citizenship rights or the othering of indigenous people.

4

Inclusion and Exclusion in Local Peacebuilding

Maluku is a region in Eastern Indonesia with an approximately half Christian, half Muslim population that has always been praised for interreligious harmony in a majority Muslim country. The outbreak of mass

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violence from early 1999 thus took many by surprise and resulted in thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of displaced people and ideological and physical segregation in many parts of Maluku. Rumours, the destruction of houses of worship and the arrival of radical jihadists from Java turned religion into the main dividing line. Such framing of the conflict, however, disregards the complexity of conflict dynamics and the less visible structural violence that was crucial for the emergence of the fighting, such as economic inequalities, the politicization of religion, the government’s transmigration programmes leading to demographic imbalances, the taking sides of security forces, and colonial and neo-colonial exploitation of natural resources and traditional alliance systems—all issues covered in Ortner’s (2016) dark anthropology. The idleness and incapacity of Indonesia’s central government to put an end to the violence and the disastrous effects of the instrumentalization of religion drove people in Maluku to strengthen, revive and reconstruct culture and traditions that were there before the arrival of the world religions and are meant to become the common ground for sustainable peace. The turn to culture in Maluku was taken due to lack of other means, but also due to a rising awareness of culture as social capital that could uniquely enable reconciliation; this was one particular focus of my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the area. It is the Moluccan way to refuse outside intervention: Moluccans neither want outside intrusion to destroy their livelihoods and culture as has happened in the past and today, nor do they want those outsiders to dictate how to make peace. They endeavour to reunite against outside provocateurs through developing a unifying Moluccan identity that draws on and adapts existing cultural elements such as village alliance systems and traditional leadership—traditions that go beyond religious affiliations and short-sighted peace interventions that only superficially engage with the local. Of course, things are more complex than that and still ongoing (for an extensive account see Bräuchler 2015), but it is fair to say that bottom-up peacebuilding in Maluku has been quite successful so far. Maluku has once again become a role model in Indonesia, this time for successful local peacebuilding and the reintegration of society. These processes were legitimized by decentralization policies in Indonesia, post 2001, that allow for the restoration of local political structures that had fallen victim to former president Suharto’s unification policies. In parallel, we saw the emergence of a strong international indigenous movement that kept on pushing the Indonesian government

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to acknowledge the existence of indigenous peoples (and their rights) in their territories and we saw the establishment of an Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) in 1999. Newly granted groupdifferentiated rights or citizenships in Indonesia aim to empower groups that have been disadvantaged in political processes and have distinct needs (often determined by their particular culture) and want to include those groups into the larger society not by annihilating but by acknowledging and accommodating their difference. ‘Adat ’, the Indonesian (derived from Arabic) term for tradition and customary law, will be a central concept in this chapter insofar as it became an important asset in the peace process and ensuing struggles for broader social justice in Maluku, and in Indonesia’s decentralization more generally. Nonetheless, as our second case study shows, this does not prevent the government from discriminating against indigenous peoples and ignoring their citizen and group-specific rights. New civil rights and new degrees of autonomy provided the means to recognize and empower adat communities, but, at the same time, they had the potential to revive traditional power hierarchies and feudalism (Davidson and Henley 2007). The revival of tradition in Moluccan peacebuilding was contradictory, in that it immensely contributed to the restoration of social relations between former conflict parties, but it also triggered new or strengthened existing inequalities, inequalities not between the state and local people, but within the local context. The major issue is how adat can reintegrate an increasingly heterogeneous population. Many migrants in Maluku (or their ancestors) hail from Buton in Sulawesi, a neighbouring island of Maluku. Although some of these families had settled in Maluku several generations ago, the Butonese in Maluku are not considered citizens in adat terms. Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (2007, p. 23) call them ‘second class citizens’ who were dependent on Moluccan owners for access to land and trees and could only obtain temporary rights. The migrants have no access to adat offices and, after the conflict, they are largely excluded from reconciliation processes. During the conflict, Butonese had to flee the islands on a massive scale, with many returning once violence decreased. As markets were destroyed and the economy in Maluku collapsed, many migrants in and around Ambon City lost their means of subsistence. Some native Moluccans took advantage of their flight as an opportunity to reclaim land that migrants had used to make a living (Adam 2009). As equal citizens of the same nation state, they do have equal rights to move and own land,

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but in sub-national settings they are denied or refused those rights based on what is called group-specific citizenship (Bräuchler 2010, 2017a). What is often forgotten is that a long time ago indigenous people in Eastern Indonesia had developed ways to integrate different kinds of newcomers. Such strategies include (1) installing the outsider inside (Fox 2008) as so-called stranger kings who were accepted as leaders in the local communities to complement local authorities and/or as neutral mediators (for a variety of interpretations and analyses on the phenomenon in Eastern Indonesia and beyond, see Caldwell and Henley 2008); (2) the provision of specific spaces in the social structure of the village and the guarantee of representational rights; or (3) land rights or sharecropping arrangements between natives and newcomers. This had allowed migrants living in the area for generations to become integral parts of quite peaceful local settings—something that was thrown off balance in the last decades through the following developments: the central government’s massive transmigration programme that brought people (mainly Muslim cultural outsiders) from overpopulated islands such as Java to the periphery and thereby turned land into a contested asset; ethnic and religious conflicts that produced large numbers of internally displaced people; and current processes of decentralization. The lack of measures to adequately handle and integrate such massive flows of people has been causing conflicts between indigenous people and migrants and was actually one of the factors that led to the outbreak of violence in Maluku (cf. Platenkamp 2001, p. 7). Current governmental rules are lagging behind and decentralization laws provide no space to restore the balance between cultural insiders and outsiders. With a focus on restoring local polities, they do not sufficiently cater to equal rights on a local level and migrants are not guaranteed representational rights in adat villages. In contrast, in administrative villages where the Butonese are the majority, they may well pursue a policy that neglects the adat community and other migrants. Putuhena and Wakano (2008, p. 24) argue that the ‘cultural relationship between masyarakat adat and non-adat (indigenous people and immigrants)’ in the reformation era is immersed in a ‘silent tension’ and could lead to an unhealthy dichotomization of Moluccan society. Whereas in many places in Indonesia the ‘sons of the soil’ discourse was invoked to allow privileged access to natural resources and local and regional leadership (e.g. Hadiz 2010), in Maluku it was a life raft that many resorted to in search for common ground and to push back the importance of religious boundaries. It was not a case of cultural

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fundamentalism that proposes a radical opposition and incompatibility between locals and immigrants (Humphrey 2012, p. 308), but a reaction to and an attempt to reconcile the mass violence from which everyone in Maluku has suffered. It is thus not the privilege of external observers such as anthropologists or development workers to put forward the somewhat illusionary ideas of a uniform culture and thereby neglect internal dissonance and difference in order to better understand or control local groups (Benhabib 2002, p. 5). In both our case studies, cultural rights and indigenous identity have become important assets for local people against outside intrusion and its destructive force. Simply deconstructing and unmasking such essentializations would overlook the broader political inequalities and gaps that triggered those identity politics and does not foster a better understanding of such cultural claim-making (Trochimchuk 2011). This is not enough, however, in the long run. Moluccan activists, scholars and villagers themselves are aware of the dynamic nature of culture. In my research, I have been looking at how local actors try to overcome such limitations by adapting and extending local tradition, not only to create a pan-Moluccan identity, but also to include migrants who have been living in the area for generations into reinvented traditional alliance systems or reciprocal value and exchange systems that resonate with those migrants’ values and a more general humanity (Bräuchler 2015, 2017b). In this and our next case on the resistance to land grabbing, we need to go beyond a black-and-white argument that only differentiates between essentialism and constructivism, to look at the strategic nuances in between them, for instance when encountering what Spivak has coined ‘strategic essentialism’ (Pande 2017).

5

From Peace to Social Justice

Peacebuilding in Maluku developed into a more far-reaching struggle not only to close the societal gap within Maluku, but also to counteract social injustices that were caused by historical and recent Indonesian power politics and were underlying the recent mass violence. I am looking at the resistance movement SaveAruIslands that refuses non-consensual outside intrusion and land-grabbing by drawing on a global rhetoric, strategic essentialism and a strategic joining of forces well beyond the affected area. In this case, ethnographic refusal refers not only to the powerful (Ortner 1995), but is also indicative of ‘political action, of movements for decolonisation and self-determination, for rights and recognition, for

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rejecting specific structures and systems’ (McGranahan 2016, p. 320). As Simpson (2007) argues in her research on indigenous people’s refusals of state sovereignty, interpreting ‘refusal’ ‘might actually illuminate ethnography rather than flatten it’ (McGranahan 2016, p. 321). In our case, the emerging resistance movement not only constitutes a refusal of the destruction of their livelihoods, but also a refusal to buy into local power politics that could endanger the image of a united indigenous community’s resistance, as well as endanger its positive move towards change. The Aru Islands are at Indonesia’s eastern edge. The majority of Aruese indigenous people live in rural areas and have no easy access to markets, public transport, health and education services or telecommunication. However, historically and presently, Aru is quite important for the Indonesian state and an international market. The sea around the islands has always been a rich source of fish and pearls. People in Aru have to deal with illegal fishery, illegal trade in sea turtles and birds of paradise, plantations and land grabbing, which is often backed by the government. In this setting, a business conglomerate wanted to turn almost 80% of the Aru land mass into a sugar cane plantation, thereby threatening to destroy Aruese culture, environment and the livelihoods of its indigenous people. The scale of the project and the fact that neither the government nor investors sought the people’s informed consent triggered enormous resistance among villagers in Aru. Important features leading the SaveAru movement to success were brokerage and mediation, the articulation of indigeneity and strategic refusal. 5.1

Brokerage and Mediation

The SaveAru movement emerged to counter existing social injustice. At the same time, its success is based on inequality, that is the coming together of individuals and groups with very different sets of backgrounds, knowledge, skills, mobilities and networks who joined hands for resisting and refusing the opening up of large-scale plantations. The Internet has become an important democratizing medium, but a digital divide still exists between those who have or can afford to have access (as media activists in #SaveAruIslands) and those who do not (Fenton 2016, p. 351), with reasons ranging from missing infrastructure, financial limitations, to language issues or simply preference. Capable intermediaries possessing the relevant economic, social and cultural capital were required

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to fill such gaps and mediate between the local, regional, national and international levels. Protests and local initiatives in Aru were successfully amplified through activists in the district and provincial capitals Dobo and Ambon City (Bräuchler 2019a). They managed to tap into regional, national and international human rights and arts networks to mobilize solidarity and support. Influential peace activists from Ambon put their skills and networks, and artists their work and performances in the service of the movement. Aruese and Ambonese activists travelled to Aruese villages for mobilization. The coordinator of SaveAru in Ambon is an ardent promoter of interfaith dialogue and human rights (for another example of what role interfaith dialogue can play, or not, in peacebuilding, see Omer in this volume). At the same time, he is a reverend and director of the Moluccan Protestant Church’s Research and Development Board. He has put great effort into raising awareness in the Church about environmentalism and, in an act of ‘social appropriation’ (McAdam et al. 2001, pp. 59, 118), has managed to turn the Church with its good communication networks and infrastructure into a tool for the resistance movement. Ministers in majority Protestant Aru used sermons to raise awareness in the villages, which helped to mobilize people not only based on their local ontologies, but also as a religious responsibility. Academics talked in front of the parliament. Local, national and international mainstream media critically covered the case and sympathizers worldwide posted their photos with the #SaveAruIslands slogan in social media. National organizations such as Forest Watch Indonesia, the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of Indonesia and the National Human Rights Commission investigated the Aru case and circulated their documentation. In line with transnationally established means of protest, SaveAru combined offline action with online protest. Activists and intermediaries based in Aru, Ambon and beyond combined an enormous range of media from street art, theatre performances, concerts to flyers, posters, websites, social media with movement logo and trendy hashtags, and input into mainstream media. This makes protest visible to local, national and global audiences and increases the chances of these voices actually being listened to (Couldry 2015). In these media presentations, activists link up to and enforce global themes such as environmental issues and indigenous rights, national regulations and laws, and they visualize elements of local culture and belief systems. On top of such ideational mobility, our brokers are also physically mobile. Mobility is closely linked to power and a resource that not everybody has

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access to (Sheller and Urry 2006). The brokers’ ability to move between and interlink places and spaces, mediating between them (Bräuchler 2019a), compensates for the indigenous people’s immobility and the state’s refusal of equal citizen rights, but also creates new dependencies. However, different than in cases where unequal access to transport infrastructure creates segregation and mutual ignorance between social groups (Richardson and Jensen 2009, p. 226), such inequalities here create synergetic effects for successful resistance. This combination made the movement go viral, put pressure on the government and ultimately stopped the project despite all infrastructural limitations (for more details, see Bräuchler 2019a, b). However, it would be mistaken to claim that brokerage alone is responsible for the movement’s success. As variously emphasized by movement activists in Ambon, they could not have achieved anything without a large base in Aru and local activists, adat and religious figures were key in mobilizing the majority of Aru’s villages and uniting them across any divide, be it the traditional dispute between the two major societal groups in Aru (Urlima and Ursiwa) or the many land disputes within and between villages and clans. Putting such dissonances aside for a greater cause is another form of ‘ethnographic refusal’, with a very different thrust though as the one practiced by the international peace industry. Activists and villagers also took great care to not buy into the power politics of two more recently established adat councils in Dobo, both of which claim, not very successfully, to represent indigenous people in Aru. The scale of the plantation plans and strategic mobilization through outreach, training, preaching and protest action made Aruese people unite, which was not easy, given the enormous promises the investor had made when trying to win over certain individuals and groups in Aru. It made them take to the streets and defend their heritage and livelihoods, the forests, mangroves, fishing and hunting grounds and rare species such as the black cockatoo or the bird of paradise. As one key peace activist in Ambon emphasized, if he had not been certain that people in Aru stood behind the cause, he would not have been willing to put his resources, capabilities and networks to the service of the movement. The point is that one needs to take into account the complex web of relationships and power constellations on the local level that might prevent a movement from taking root and growing; this has all too often been omitted in studies involving contemporary protest movements (Bräuchler 2019a). In Eastern Seram, for instance, a logging company

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intruded into the ancestral domains of an indigenous group without their consent, but with licensing from the government. Up until today, local resistance has not had the desired effect. Both Seram and Aru are far away from any media conglomerates, but whereas the Aru movement was successfully mediatized by brokers and activists, such mediation and mediatization did not take place on Seram. This was not only due to the missing media infrastructure and skills, but also due to power politics and struggles among local communities about the ownership of land— the kind of struggle that makes an effective movement and a concerted media action almost impossible as this would trigger extra conflict on the ground. On top of that, people in Seram remained uninformed until late in the process, only learning about the logging plans when the company brought in its heavy machinery. Missing or ineffective intermediation on Seram was also a result of broader power politics. To provide just one example, a prominent Ambonese human rights activist, who had taken over leadership in the people’s fight against the logging intruders, who had been highly critical of the government and the military as supporters of the logging company, and who had acted as an influential broker, had passed away under unclarified circumstances and no proper replacement has yet been found. We see from the Seram case that there is an urgent need to attend to both broader power dynamics and issues of access and representation on the local level. In doing so, we also need to question to what extent such dynamics create new issues of social inequality with public attention being fixed on one case and not on others, for a variety of reasons, that thus end up being left on their own, without any effective support. 5.2

Articulation and Refusal

As indicated above, one of the SaveAru movement’s key arguments stipulates that indigenous people have been denied their rights, and this refusal calls not only upon the responsibility of the Indonesian government but also on that of the whole world. Strategically depicting Aru’s indigenous people as victims of national and international greed that disrupts their ability and free choice to live in harmony with nature, intermediaries successfully managed to translate local environmental knowledge and culture into the rhetoric of global indigeneity and environmentalism. In a way, activists apply similar strategies as outside interveners who homogenize indigenous people for quick outcomes. However, such strategies

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are not based on the refusal of ethnographic complexity, but are part of more complex processes of articulation that are less about authenticity, and more about their social, cultural and political situatedness. As Li argues, it is ‘a positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes and repertoires of meaning and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle … conjunctures at which (some) people come to identify themselves as indigenous people’ (Li 2000, pp. 1–2) and make sense of their historical situation (Hall and Grossberg 1986, p. 53). It is certain individuals or groups or their supporters that aim to (re)articulate adat in an effort to counter the challenges of outside exploitation (cf. Duncan 2009, p. 1081). As Hall points out in his theory of articulation, articulation not only stands for linguistic expression, but also for the process in which distinct parts are or, under certain circumstances, become connected to each other; ‘a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time’ (Hall and Grossberg 1986, p. 53), in our case among different elements of Aruese society, but also among the various individuals and groups affiliated with the SaveAru movement. But indigeneity and indigenous rights as the fourth generation of universal human rights are also an international construct that has neither been accepted by all national governments nor by all so-called indigenous communities. Heated debates have arisen about who is and is not indigenous; it has become a concept that can be imposed on or adopted by specific local actors to counter inequality, but also to (re)produce it. In the famous Zapatista uprising, for instance, it was activists and anthropologists that guided local communities affected by the exploitative policies of the Mexican state ‘toward the notion of establishing recognition of their indigenous identity as an alternative basis for addressing their land struggle’, thus drawing on collective cultural rights instead of universal human rights (Speed 2006, p. 72). Whereas many would find this ethically justified, the promotion of indigenous rights can also lead to the reproduction of inequalities on a local level as illustrated by the revival of tradition and the exclusion of migrants in Maluku. The question is also to what extent people manage to meet expectations and requirements to ‘qualify’ for such rights in the future. This has become an obvious issue in Indonesia, when villages that had undergone enforced change through processes of (neo)colonization had to prove somehow—in order to being (re)granted the status of adat village—that they still live their ‘authentic’ lifestyle and maintain their traditional institutions. This was certainly a

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problem with internal migrants, who cannot produce such evidence at all. Cases such as #SaveAruIslands are still too recent, actually still ongoing, to determine whether they helped to win a short-term (political) battle and also empower indigenous people in the long run or whether there is rather ‘a risk of longer-term damage’ due to the pragmatic essentialization and instrumentalization of indigeneity for ‘immediate political goals’ (Speed 2006, p. 73). This is an issue for anthropological research ethics as well: the need to maintain one’s critical analysis with an emphasis on ‘the fluid and changing nature of culture and cultural identity without ceding the critical importance of that identity in lived experience and as the basis of claims to rights’ (Speed 2006, p. 73). As Benhabib (2002, p. 8) put it, ‘we should view human cultures as constant creations, recreations, and negotiations of imaginary boundaries between “we” and the “other(s)”’. It is these very negotiation processes that can make it necessary for a group of people to depict the ‘we’ as a unified entity, for instance when facing new threats to their livelihoods. Flexibility and strategic essentialism are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, strategic essentialism is only possible because of the dynamic nature of culture and its inherent conflicts. Most activists in Maluku with whom I have engaged for many years are reflective and open about internal dissonances, but they proactively put them aside in order to focus on a higher cause. Narratives, interpretations and imaginaries of cultural practices, values and identities can shift according to changing sociocultural circumstances, new experiences and new threats. Such reinterpretations render cultures flexible and make them survive, even in situations where the state does not provide the relevant democratic institutions and means to do so. Of course, reinterpretation strategies and flexibility can also be misused, in particular in cases of polarization, where other marginalized groups become victims of such identity politics as indicated in the first case study—or in cases where cultural identities are instrumentalized for conflict purposes, as in the Moluccan conflict. All this sheds light on the importance of focusing on the movements and activists who claim to give voice to the needs and rights of the disempowered, in this case indigenous communities. This is a major commonality between SaveAru and more global movements such as Occupy, which organized protests in hundreds of major cities worldwide starting in 2011, in opposition to social and economic inequalities and corporate influence on politics. Both movements stand out for the ‘participation of a large number of people who had previously not been

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politically active’ (Juris 2012, p. 265)—as an activist in Aru put it, an unprecedented case of anarchy. Such broad involvement was triggered by the fact that injustices of corporate and government policies have impoverished or threatened to impoverish major parts of the populations and it was supported and, to a certain extent, facilitated by the strategic use of media. Other elements that incited the escalation of anarchy/resistance in Aru were the scale of the planned intervention and the recent mass violence in Maluku, in the course of which many people have become aware of the need to fight for broader social justice in order to avoid further violence. In both cases, SaveAru and Occupy, participatory communication was a major tool meant to include as many people as possible in decision-making processes through various (media) channels (Kidd 2015, p. 457). However, the wide-scale social media participation was nonetheless unable to prevent internal critique within Occupy that the representatives of the movement failed to represent the diversity of the 99% as it claimed to do. Experienced Occupiers struggled to raise awareness about internal differences and inequalities with regard to access (Juris 2012, p. 265; Juris et al. 2012, p. 436). As mobilization within SaveAru took place on various levels and through various networks, with protest in the city and social media being only two examples, action was certainly not limited to ‘privileged actors with the economic, social and cultural capital necessary to effectively operate’ (Juris et al. 2012, p. 436). However, it is always some key activists, or our brokers, that have the necessary skills and resources and that therefore end up shaping the nature of movements. In both cases, the refusal to acknowledge (Occupy) or to reveal (Aru) internal differences and conflicts must also be seen as a strategic move to build a strong base against an overpowering enemy.

6

Discussing Refusal, Inequality and Change

Our peace activists in Maluku and intermediaries in indigenous people’s resistance in Aru are clearly examples of what Faist (2014, pp. 45–46) has called ‘partisan arbitrators’: brokers who mediate between parties in a conflict but clearly side with one of them, usually the disadvantaged. Compared with non-partisan brokers or those who mediate for their own benefit, ‘partisan arbitration carries the highest potential for producing equalities instead of inequalities’ (Faist 2014, p. 50). However, Faist (2014, p. 50) also warns not to equate ‘partisan arbitration solely with equality-producing effects, since unintended effects abound’. In our

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Indonesian context, local communities facing infrastructural limitations very much depend on whether capable intermediaries pick up and support their activism and thus provide leverage to their cause or not, which creates inequalities between communities with and without such support. The outcome of brokerage is also ambiguous due to the fact that ‘brokerage can result in dependency and exploitation but also in increased capacities for the beneficiaries’ (Faist 2014, p. 45). In the Aru case, brokerage proved to be successful in helping indigenous groups to win their cause against outside intrusion, but there is no sign yet that this has changed underlying power structures, which would have rendered their brokerage indispensable. A prominent critique of the global Occupy movement was that it failed to reflect ‘the 99%’ it claimed to represent (Juris 2012, p. 272) and that it had no ‘long-term impact on Washington politics, or corporate power’ (Kidd 2015, pp. 457–458). Kidd is probably right in saying that this was not Occupy’s main goal, but rather ‘to prefigure direct grassroots democracy through the cultivation of democratic communications’ (Kidd 2015, p. 458). In the long run, however, for ‘radical politics and social change’ to take place, there needs to be change not only through the mediation or expression of political opinion; we must also seek ‘to alter the terrain of power’ through ‘concrete feasible politics’ (Fenton 2016, pp. 349, 347). Whereas ‘strategic essentialism’ seems a legitimate means given the impending threat in Aru and the disastrous implications of the proposed investment project, light needs to be shed on the dynamics developed in the long run by such rhetoric and strategies. Activists, villagers and other social movement members in Aru and beyond communicated at eye level, each one contributing one’s skills and networks, thereby acknowledging agency on all levels, which is what is usually missing in the government’s or the investor’s projection of indigenous groups. This is an important prerequisite for local activists taking over and engaging in successful brokerage. But efficacious brokerage is not the only key to success: the refusal to problematize local contentions among the disadvantaged people themselves also played an important role. As outlined in our second case study on Moluccan resistance, the willingness of local communities to join hands in their resistance against outside intervention was crucial: adversarial local power politics can nip every movement in the bud as illustrated with the Seram case. In the long run, as I have argued elsewhere (e.g. Bräuchler 2014, 2015), Moluccans need to engage not only in celebrating their shared

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traditions and joint (peaceful) identities, but also in understanding differences that were instrumentalized, among other reasons, to mobilize for violence. Ethnographic researchers’ examination of the dynamics of the refusal—or ignoring—of internal dissonances is not about co-optation or Richmond’s depoliticization of ethnographic research (2018b, p. 227), but about taking up ‘refusal in generative ways’ (Simpson 2007, p. 78) and exploring its various meanings. It is important to acknowledge that in both our Indonesian cases, both the revival of tradition and the resistance against corporate capitalism are already long-term local (grassroots) initiatives to leverage social justice and build sustainable peace in the broadest sense of the term. This provides a clear alternative vision (Ortner 2016, p. 66) for the future of Moluccan society and beyond—one based on a peaceful and self-determined life. Such initiatives are based on a deep understanding, not the refusal, of local knowledge, culture and networks. This is a prerequisite for possible future steps, such as a collaboration across regions and movements that could work towards influencing political bodies in Indonesia so as to catalyse concrete change in politics and governance, something that cannot be achieved by local activists alone. But temporary successes such as in Aru should not make us forget underlying local tensions that might flare up again when, for instance, the trend of religious radicalization in Indonesia continues, or when new neoliberal interventions are scheduled. An ethnographic ‘commitment to thickness’ (Ortner 1995, p. 174) can help to keep track both of strategies of refusal (Simpson 2007) and tensions underlying the ‘calm’ or unified surface. In this way, scholars can move beyond looking at resistance in terms of ‘the relationship between the dominant and the subordinate’, but rather include internal power relations and conflict that are side-lined for more effective resistance or by researchers sympathetic with the cause (Ortner 1995, pp. 176, 177). Here it is important to also acknowledge another kind of refusal: the refusal to depict indigenous people as passive victims, as has frequently happened in the past and is still the case in mainstream development and peace industries. Zahara (2016) conceptualizes ‘ethnographic refusal’ (by both research subjects and researchers) as a way forward, not meant ‘to bury information, but to ensure that communities are able to respond to issues on their own terms’, realizing their right to self-representation, and to redirect attention to the structures and institutions that engender the violence they experience. Rather than simply de(con)structing a reified subject, exploring such processes is crucial for better understanding local peacebuilding and resistance and their limits

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and appreciating their creativity (Ortner 1995, pp. 186, 183, 191). It is a challenge for the future to turn strategic refusal into art and activism that can efficiently change those structures and break pre-established conflict patterns.

References Adam, J. (2009). The problem of going home: Land management, displacement, and reconciliation in Ambon. In B. Bräuchler (Ed.), Reconciling Indonesia: Grassroots agency for peace (pp. 138–154). London and New York: Routledge. Avruch, K. (1998). Culture and conflict resolution. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Benhabib, S. (2002). The claims of culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bräuchler, B. (2010). The revival dilemma: Reflections on human rights, selfdetermination and legal pluralism in Eastern Indonesia. Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 42(62), 1–42. Bräuchler, B. (2014). Christian-Muslim relations in post-conflict Ambon, Moluccas: Adat, religion and beyond. In B. Platzdasch & J. Saravanamuttu (Eds.), Religious diversity in Muslim-majority Southeast Asia: Areas of toleration and conflict (pp. 154–172). Singapore: ISEAS. Bräuchler, B. (2015). The cultural dimension of peace: Decentralization and reconciliation in Indonesia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bräuchler, B. (2017a). Changing patterns of mobility, citizenship and belonging in Indonesia. Social Identities, 23(4), 446–461. Bräuchler, B. (2017b). Social engineering the local for peace. Social Anthropology, 25(4), 437–453. Bräuchler, B. (2018a). Contextualizing ethnographic peace research. In G. Millar (Ed.), Ethnographic peace research: Approaches and tensions (pp. 21–42). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bräuchler, B. (2018b). The cultural turn in peace research: Prospects and challenges. Peacebuilding, 6(1), 17–33. Bräuchler, B. (2018c). Diverging ecologies on Bali. Sojourn, 33(2), 362–396. Bräuchler, B. (2019a). Brokerage, creativity and space: Protest culture in Indonesia. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 4(40), 451–468. Bräuchler, B. (2019b). From transitional to performative justice: Peace activism in the aftermath of communal violence. Global Change, Peace & Security, 31(2), 201–220. Caldwell, I., & Henley, D. (Eds.). (2008). Stranger-kings in Indonesia and beyond (Special issue Indonesia and the Malay world). Centreville, VA: Carfax Publishing.

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Couldry, N. (2015). Alternative media and voice. In C. Atton (Ed.), The Routledge companion to alternative and community media (pp. 43–53). New York: Routledge. Davidson, J. S., & Henley, D. (Eds.). (2007). The revival of tradition in Indonesian politics: The deployment of Adat from colonialism to indigenism. London and New York: Routledge. Duncan, C. R. (2009). Reconciliation and revitalization: The resurgence of tradition in postconflict Tobelo, North Maluku, Eastern Indonesia. The Journal of Asian Studies, 68(4), 1077–1104. Faist, T. (2014). Brokerage in cross-border mobility: Social mechanisms and the (re)production of social inequalities. Social Inclusion, 2(4), 38–52. Fenton, N. (2016). Left out? Digital media, radical politics and social change. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 346–361. Fox, J. J. (2008). Installing the ‘outsider’ inside. Indonesia and the Malay World, 36(105), 201–218. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(1), 167–191. Gardner, K., & Lewis, D. (2015). Anthropology and development: Challenges for the twenty-first century. London: Pluto. Hadiz, V. R. (2010). Localising power in post-authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia perspective. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hall, S., & Grossberg, L. (1986). On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Stuart Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10(2), 45–60. Humphrey, C. (2012). Inequality. In D. Fassin (Ed.), A companion to moral anthropology (pp. 302–319). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Juris, J. S. (2012). Reflections on #Occupy everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation. American Anthropologist, 39(2), 259–279. Juris, J. S., Ronayne, M., Shokooh-Valle, F., & Wengronowitz, R. (2012). Negotiating power and difference within the 99%. Social Movement Studies, 11(3–4), 434–440. Kidd, D. (2015). Occupy and social movement communication. In C. Atton (Ed.), The Routledge companion to alternative and community media (pp. 457–468). New York: Routledge. Lederach, J. P. (1997). Building peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided societies. Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press. Li, T. M. (2000). Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: Resource politics and the tribal slot (Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics, Working Paper 7). Berkeley. Mac Ginty, R. (2014). Everyday peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflictaffected societies. Security Dialogue, 45(6), 548–564.

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Mac Ginty, R. (2015). Where is the local? Critical localism and peacebuilding. Third World Quarterly, 36(5), 840–856. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGranahan, C. (2016). Theorizing refusal: An introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 319–325. Merry, S. E. (2006). Transnational human rights and local activism: Mapping the middle. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 38–51. Millar, G. (Ed.). (2018). Ethnographic peace research: Approaches and tensions. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nunn, A. (2016). The production and reproduction of inequality in the UK in times of austerity. British Politics, 11(4), 469–487. Ortner, S. B. (1995). Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1), 173–193. Ortner, S. B. (2016). Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1), 47–73. Pande, R. (2017). Strategic essentialism. In D. Richardson et al. (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of geography. New York: Wiley. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg1170. Platenkamp, J. D. M. (2001, November 21–23). Intercultural conflicts in Indonesia. Paper presented at the symposium on ‘Integrating others: The appropriation of modernity’, Institut für Ethnologie, Westfälische WilhelmsUniversität Münster. Putuhena, S., & Wakano, A. (2008). Laporan Penelitian Pemerintahan Negeri dan Kampung di Kabupaten Seram Bagian Barat. Ambon. Richardson, T., & Jensen, O. B. (2009). How mobility systems produce inequality: Making mobile subject types on the Bangkok sky train. Built Environment, 23(2), 218–231. Richmond, O. P. (2011). A post-liberal peace. London: Routledge. Richmond, O. P. (2018a). Peace and the formation of political order. International Peacekeeping, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2018.151 1374. Richmond, O. P. (2018b). Rescuing peacebuilding? Anthropology and peace formation. Global Society, 32(2), 221–239. Sealey, C. (2015). Social exclusion: Re-examining its conceptual relevance to tackling inequality and social injustice. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 35(9/10), 600–617. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning, 38, 207–226. Simpson, A. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures, 9, 67–80.

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Speed, S. (2006). At the crossroads of human rights and anthropology: Toward a critically engaged activist research. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 66–76. Trochimchuk, S. (2011). Cultural negotiations: Examining multiculturalism and the limits of anti-essentialism. Waterloo: Canadian Political Science Association. http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2011/Trochimchuk.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2013. von Benda-Beckmann, F., & von Benda-Beckmann, K. (2007). Social security between past and future: Introduction. In F.von Benda-Beckmann & K.von Benda-Beckmann (Eds.), Social security between past and future: Ambonese networks of care and support (pp. 1–24). Münster: LIT. Zahara, A. (2016, August 8). Refusal as research method in discard studies. https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/21/refusal-as-research-method-in-dis card-studies/. Accessed 11 June 2019.

PART III

Can Peacebuilding Be Recreated at the Centre?

CHAPTER 9

Achieving a Feminist Peace by Blurring Boundaries Between Private and Public Nina Wilén

1

Introduction

In spite of increased attention to women’s sidelining in matters related to peace and conflict, women continue to be marginalized in peacekeeping missions, peace negotiations and peacebuilding processes. Between 1990 and 2017, women constituted only two per cent of mediators, eight per cent of negotiators and five per cent of witness and signatories in all major peace processes (CFR & UN Women 2018). Yet feminist research has long shown that states with higher levels of gender equality exhibit lower levels of violence during international disputes and crises (Caprioli 2009), and that the treatment of females within a society correlates with the security of states (Hudson et al. 2008/2009), thereby providing instrumentalist reasons for striving towards a better gender balance following the end of armed conflicts. In addition, newer research has found a strong

N. Wilén (B) Egmont Institute, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_9

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link between female political empowerment and civil peace (Dahlum and Wig 2018). While these arguments are instrumentalist, academics have also put forward rights-based justifications for increasing women’s participation, pointing at women’s right to not only participate but also to decide on the future of the post-conflict society. Both international institutions such as the UN and academic scholars therefore argue for women’s need to be included in peace processes to build a greater postconflict gender balance and a more inclusive and durable peace (Björkdahl 2012; Bouta et al. 2005; Council of Foreign Relations & UN Women 2018). The fact that the post-conflict period may pose more threat to women than the actual conflict period (Handrahan 2004, p. 434) underlines the necessity to involve women in creating a more gender-equal post-conflict society and ultimately a feminist peace. Indeed, after conflict it is more likely that trafficking in women is established; for women to be forced into prostitution; for domestic violence to increase; for female slavery to be organized; for honour killings and suicides to occur; and for gang rape to be prevalent (Handrahan 2004, p. 434), while in many contexts there is a spike in sexual and gender-based violence once the conflict between armed groups is stabilized (True 2012, ch. 8). This gives rise to feminist scholars’ insistence on women’s experience of a continuum of violence (Cohn 2013). The continuum of violence refers to the fact that women often experience endemic gendered forms of violence in their everyday lives, before, during and after the end of a conflict. Yet the violence women experience in the private sphere is perceived as ‘ordinary’ and as such tolerated, while within the context of conflict, the violence is understood as ‘extraordinary’ (Swaine 2010). Often, only violence classified as ‘extraordinary’ exerts a response from society (Roy 2008). How should a gender-equal, feminist peace be achieved then, and what does it entail? Drawing on previous feminist research, I define feminist peace as a peace where gender equality and women’s empowerment is a goal in itself and not a route towards something else (Duncanson 2016, p. 58), and which likewise provides for social justice and equity while recognizing women’s agency (Björkdahl 2012, p. 287). It is geared towards needs-based activity and a stronger concern for social welfare and justice and driven by both local and international actors (Richmond 2006, p. 301). While local ownership is crucial for a feminist and gender-equal peace, it does not legitimize local traditions which discriminate against

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women or other marginalized groups (see Gordon et al. 2015). The ‘otherness’ required for the creation of self-identity should therefore not imply inferiority, for example between genders, and dualisms and dichotomies should be challenged through dialogue and reconciliation (Duncanson 2016, p. 58). Clearly, such a peace is difficult to build and goes well beyond the mandate of international peacebuilders, yet if peacebuilding is to be transformative and not regress to the status quo, such challenges need to be confronted. 1.1

Aim, Method and Theoretical Perspective

The overarching aim of this chapter is to analyse necessary conditions to build a gender-equal peace. Two conditions are identified as essential for enabling feminist peace: (1) expanding the notion of security to encompass private security and thereby tackle the continuum of violence, and (2) empowering women socio-economically and moving the focus from the individual’s access to the socio-economic system to the structures which regulate and constitute it. This implies going beyond ‘letting women participate’ in a system conceived by and for men, towards transforming the system itself by addressing its discriminatory structures. To achieve these conditions, it is necessary to ‘explode the private’ (MacKinnon 1989, p. 191), and blur the lines between the public and private, the informal and the formal and trace how the two spheres are entangled and interconnected in a way that often silences and hides women’s gendered experiences. Blurring these boundaries entails addressing women’s social and cultural obligations and in particular, the structural violence that constitutes normality for many women (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011, p. 64). A critical feminist approach informs the analysis, which also means that I take a normative stance, clearly advocating the need for a more genderequal peace, which implies a stronger involvement of and for women in the creation of the post-conflict society. Methodologically, the research for the chapter comes primarily from a thorough literature review of peace—and feminist—research. A discussion about the post-conflict backlash against women’s agency sets the context of the article before a second part analyses security, violence and security actors, arguing for a need to address violence occurring in both the public and private spheres. In a third part, the link between violence against women and their socioeconomic status is unpacked, demonstrating the need for a stronger focus

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on empowering women economically and socially by reforming structures, rather than including individuals in gender-biased structures. The final part discusses how achieving both of these conditions: enlarging the concept of security and empowering women socio-economically, implies a blurring of the boundaries between public and private.

2

The Post-conflict Backlash Against Women’s Agency

Armed conflicts may promote unintended opportunities for women to take on roles that are traditionally not available to them, as conflicts produce new political, social and economic opportunities that can in turn drive social transformations (Björkdahl 2012, p. 287). They may temporarily gain freedom, responsibility and thereby elevate their socioeconomic status (Handrahan 2004, p. 435). In the absence of men who are fighting, women become the main breadwinners and heads of families: positions which nevertheless are rarely maintained in the post-conflict society. On the contrary, the post-conflict period has often meant a backlash against women’s agency, frequently intertwined with nationalist ideas that are dependent on control over women’s bodies, resulting in their confinement to the domestic sphere (Afshar 2003, p. 185; Berry 2017; Björkdahl 2012, p. 289). This post-conflict backlash is not only driven by the national patriarchy, which expects women to return to their subordinate positions, but can also be emphasized by the male international development community whose own notion of patriarchy as ‘normal’ may still be intact (Gordon et al. 2015, p. 3; Handrahan 2004, p. 435). Notwithstanding rightful feminist criticism regarding women in developing contexts being framed as victims in need of Western salvation (Kunz and Valasek 2012, p. 123), many developing states are characterized by broader patriarchal system and traditions which discriminate against women in particular. However, this does not mean that these women have not been part of and contributed to international feminist networks and organizations, nor does it mean that they are helpless or in need of salvation. It does mean, however, that it is possible that there will be a clash between traditional, conservative customs and international norms about human rights, including women’s rights (Naraghi-Anderlini 2008, p. 106; Wilén 2014). Kunz and Valasek note, for example, that customary security and justice actors have been heavily criticized for perpetrating violence and/or

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discriminating against specific groups, in particular against women (2012, p. 125). International peacebuilders are likely either to bring their own template for how to build ‘liberal peace’ or to build upon the local elites’ vision of how peace should be rebuilt. While hybrid versions of the two are the most likely outcome, both of these visions accord quite limited socioeconomic status and power to women mainly because men compose the majority of both the local elites and the peacebuilders. The post-conflict environment, just as the conflict itself, remains therefore centred around male power systems, struggles and identity formation (Cockburn and Zarkov 2002). It is, as Handrahan has framed it, a period where ‘fraternities’—both national and international—compete over power (Handrahan 2004, p. 433). Here again, the distinction between public and private results in lesser influence for women: ‘the male, public realm is where power and authority is exercised while the private sphere is the appropriate domain of women’ and by understanding peacebuilding as mainly a public-sphere activity, we limit women’s influence in peacebuilding (Björkdahl 2012, p. 290).

3

Enlarging the Concept of Security

The past few decades have seen a development of the concept of security, entailing a change in focus from a state-centric to an individual-centred focus, exemplified in the notion of human security. This development has taken place in the neo-liberal framework that dominated the post-Cold War era where women’s insecurity fits well into discourses of development and security. Yet, as Hudson has pointed out, the emphasis on the ‘human’ or on ‘women’ does not necessarily imply a shift away from the narrow security conceptualizations; rather, there is a risk that the human security discourse may be misused to ‘silence women or gloss over failures to address high levels of violence against women due to complacency visà-vis a so-called all-encompassing and therefore morally justified concept that puts “people” first’ (Hudson 2012, p. 78). The notion of a people-centred security, although representing a much-needed turn in security debates towards the individual, may therefore fail to consider the specific security concerns that women face. The narrow focus on the public sphere when it comes to violence has long been criticized by feminist researchers who have put forward the notion of a ‘continuum of violence’ (Cohn 2013, p. 21), as an attempt to erase

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arbitrary distinctions of violence as either ‘ordinary’ and often hidden, pertaining mostly to the private sphere, or ‘extraordinary’ and overt, relating to violence in the public sphere (Roy 2008, p. 216; Swaine 2010). Yet, the ‘ordinary’ gender-based violence is similar to what Bourdieu has termed ‘symbolic violence’, which is the prerequisite for maintaining and perpetuating unequal power relations (Roy 2008, p. 218). Such ordinary violence both constitutes and is constituted by the underlying premises of a patriarchal system: men’s superiority over women (Sjoberg 2014, p. 132). 3.1

Disrupting the Continuum: Addressing ‘Ordinary’ Violence

Violence that takes place in the private sphere, most clearly exemplified in the notion of domestic violence, is mostly perpetrated against women. Global estimates indicate that about 35% of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime (WHO 2017). In South Africa, extreme levels of gender inequality and patriarchal values have been linked to the existence of what has been termed a ‘rape culture’ in the country (Baugher et al. 2010; Viitanen and Colvin 2015). Research suggests that non-consensual or coerced sexual intercourse is a norm in a South African woman’s life (Jewkes and Abrahams 2002, p. 1240); South Africa indeed has the highest reported rates of violence against women than any country not at war (Peacock 2012), and as such, challenges the notion of a clear distinction between extraordinary and ordinary violence (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011, p. 71), perhaps becoming a prime example of what ‘continuum of violence entails’ (Cohn 2013, p. 21). Yet South Africa is not a unique case: intimate partner homicide accounts for approximately 40–50% of US femicides but only 5.9% of male homicides (Campbell et al. 2003). The presence of a gun in domestic violence situations increases the risk of homicide for women by 500% (Campbell et al. 2003). The fact that the presence of a gun in domestic violence dramatically increases the risk of homicide for women establishes links between male security actors and violence against females. Previous research has shown that especially for the military institution, domestic violence constitutes a social problem (Adelman 2003; Hansen 2001). Due to the presence/prevalence of violence and weapons in their public functions, male members of the military risk transferring their use of violence into the private sphere. The use of physical force and high levels of stress added

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to the military’s authoritarianism increase the risk of domestic violence, which makes female partners of male members of the military a specific risk category. Male military members are also more likely to use violence against their female colleagues than against men in other professions (Sadler et al. 2000). Murdoch et al. have shown how rates of reports of completed and attempted sexual assaults against female military members in the United States were 20 times higher than reports by other government employees and an astounding 90% of the female respondents in their study reported sexual harassment while employed in the military (Carreiras 2017; Mathers 2013; Murdoch and Nichol 1995)1 . Women in either a professional or private relationship with male members of the military therefore run a higher risk of being subject to violence and sexual harassment than others do. What do these facts, which are drawn from states that are not subject to war have to do with creating a feminist peace? The fact that women are disproportionally targets of violence, perpetrated by men in the domestic sphere even in states that are at ‘peace’ demonstrates the failure to consider violence occurring in the private sphere. Given that most of this violence is directed towards women, it also illustrates how security is gendered, implying that human security is primarily by and for men. There is therefore a need to expand the notion of security to go beyond the public and extraordinary violence and into the private sphere to encompass ordinary violence (Wilén 2019). The fact that male security actors are more prone to use violence against women, both in the public and the private sphere, also alerts us to the point that security sectors are heavily gendered and informed by a patriarchal understanding of women’s inferiority to men, a mindset that ultimately has a negative impact on women’s security. In sum, societies that are not safe for women are simply not safe (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011, p. 62).

4 Adopting a Feminist Political Economy Perspective to Empower Women Socio-Economically in the Post-conflict Period Feminist Political Economists (FPE) have long argued for the need to adopt a broader and more holistic perspective to understand the link between women’s socio-economic position and violence against women. In particular, they have singled out neo-liberal economic globalization as

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a major obstacle to achieve gender equality and eliminate violence against women (Duncanson 2016; True 2012)—the same neo-liberal framework that has guided peacebuilding efforts during the past three decades. The imposition of neo-liberal economic policies in a post-conflict society often feeds into and exacerbates the war economies formed during the war. Pugh et al. have analysed and divided war economies into three categories: combat economy, shadow economy and coping economy (2004, p. 60). While the combat economy profits the armed actors and the conflict entrepreneurs, the shadow economy tends to benefit the illicit businessmen and those who try to make a profit on the margins of the conflict. The coping economy, where the majority of women tend to be found, is not about making profit, but about surviving (Pugh et al. 2004, p. 60). Both the combat economy and the shadow economy clearly profit from a weak state and a liberal and globalized economy. Women are thus rarely present in the two profit-making categories of war economies, and as neo-liberal economic policies are likely to feed into these types of economies, they seldom benefit from peacebuilding interventions that adhere to a neo-liberal paradigm. Duncanson outlines three main reasons as to why neo-liberalism is seen as particularly damaging for women’s socio-economic positions in a post-conflict context: (1) Neoliberal policies entail cuts in public expenditure, like healthcare, education, childcare and parental leave, services that women rely upon more heavily (2016, p. 65) because of women’s informal responsibilities in the private sphere. (2) Women’s formal employment is mostly concentrated in the public sector, which means that they are more likely to lose their jobs, and (3) The liberalization of trade results in low wages in the export sector, particularly in labour-intensive industries such as garment trade or electronics manufacturing (Duncanson 2016, p. 66). These macroeconomic policies therefore situate women in precarious forms of work where they are frequently abused and exploited (True 2015, p. 556). The negative influence that neo-liberal economic policies have for women’s socio-economic positions in post-conflict states is made possible because of the patriarchal system that already exists in the conflict-affected state. Worldwide, women are seen as subordinate to men, yet some societies are more strongly entrenched in the hierarchy than others—in other words, there are differences in the extent to which a patriarchal system influences women’s status and power (Kandiyoti 1988). In many postconflict states, patriarchy deeply colours traditional customs and practices and is justified through cultural and ideological means (Epstein 2007). To

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ignore these pre-existing structures, which strongly limit women’s opportunities in the pre-conflict society, would be to overlook contextual and historical factors. So, how can women be empowered socio-economically in the aftermath of a conflict? Women need to be part of the reform of the discriminating socio-economic structures that undermine their status and opportunities. In other words, it is crucial that women are not just ‘allowed to participate’ in a gendered system that ultimately reinforces their subordination, but that they are part of deciding how the system itself should be reformed in a more gender-equal way. As peacebuilding currently is a male-dominated activity, engendering peacebuilding implies bringing in the voices and activities of women (Munro 2000). Women’s participation should, however, not be instrumentalized, as instrumentalizing often means that women are seen as having to undertake the lion’s share of the labour—only to gain the same benefits as men. Yet, if women are instrumentalized to redefine the peacebuilding conditions, it can give them an opportunity to create liberating structures that ultimately empower all women (Duncanson 2018, p. 10). More concretely, True evokes the fact that war crimes against women often tend to go unpunished, encouraging a climate of impunity for gender-based violence, just as neglect of land rights and reparations for wartime sexual and gender-based violence represent major hurdles to women’s engagement in peacebuilding (True 2012, Ch. 8). While laws against gender-based violence are important to fight against impunity, reparations, often material, may allow women greater access to the post-conflict economy (True 2012, Ch. 8). Organizational reform and restructuring of the state institutions should include an emphasis on providing services that women benefit from, such as maternity leave, day care facilities and access to health care (See Connell 2006). Reforms that include compulsory paternity leave would also benefit women by broadening their economic and professional opportunities, while simultaneously opening up the chance for new, caring masculinities to develop (Wilén 2019). Such reforms would also blur the distinction between public and private in a way that gives more opportunities for both men and women. It is clear that some of these reforms are difficult to implement in a post-conflict context where resources are scarce and institutions often fragile. Yet, in the immediate post-conflict period, many states enjoy strong support from external organizations, both in terms of human

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and financial resources. Here, external aid organizations could play a role conducive to gender equality by earmarking some of the budget to ensure that services such as healthcare and childcare facilities are affordable and accessible to all. It is important to start building a gender-equal post-conflict society at the beginning of the peacebuilding process when institutions are malleable and change is systemic, rather than pushing reforms centred on gender equality to the future, when structures are likely to already have been cemented.

5

Conclusion: Blurring the Boundaries Between Public and Private

Neo-liberal economic policies reduce the role of the state as a welfare provider in the aftermath of conflict. At the same time, the state and its security sector are often reinforced to address the extraordinary violence taking place in the public sphere. These two peacebuilding efforts, which often go hand in hand, simultaneously undermine and strengthen the state’s power, in a combination which is unfavourable to women’s socioeconomic status and security. Indeed, the neo-liberal approach risks brushing over gender inequalities or actions of people as outcomes of the ‘choices’ they have made as individuals (Connell 2006, p. 443), thereby failing to address the structural inequalities that underpin a gender-biased system. At the same time, the neo-liberal insistence on profit and business, deregulation and privatization hits women employed in the public sphere the hardest. As such, women’s roles in the public are constrained and their involvement in decision-making and peacebuilding in the aftermath of conflict is limited. At the same time, while the concept of security has been broadened to encompass individual security, and while peacebuilding efforts often entail a much-needed reform of the state’s security sector, these developments have strengthened the state’s coercive potential in the public while failing to address security and violence in the private sphere. Security sectors are traditionally heavily gendered, promoting a certain type of hegemonic masculinity, which also reinforces men’s physical power over women in the public sphere, both as protectors and perpetrators. This development is not insignificant. As the previous section has demonstrated, females in a relationship with male security actors, whether private or professional, run a larger risk of being subject to violence. Somewhat paradoxically then, there is thus both a strong incentive for women to become part of

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the security sector in order to increase their influence and power, and a strong deterrent for taking the risk of being in a professional relationship with a male security actor. In order to break the continuum of violence that women face, it is necessary to both expand the notion of security to the private sphere while at the same time empowering women socio-economically and elevate their status. For this to happen, there is need for a strong and legitimate state, which has the power to both deliver basic services to its citizens and to enforce laws against both extraordinary and ordinary violence, in the public and the private sphere. It is essential that women are part of the construction of this state in the post-conflict period, as it is the basis for changing discriminating structures and achieving a gender-equal, feminist peace.

Note 1. As a comparison, 84% of women interviewed from the Swedish Armed Forces reported experiencing sexual harassment in the past 24 months, see Estrada and Berggren (2009, p. 177).

References Adelman, M. (2003). The military, militarism, and the militarization of domestic violence. Violence Against Women, 9(9), 1118–1152. Afshar, H. (2003). Women and wars: Some trajectories towards a feminist peace. Development in Practice, 13(2–3), 178–188. Baugher, S. N., Elhai, J. D., Monroe, J. R., & Gray, M. J. (2010). Rape, myth acceptance, sexual trauma history, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 25(11), 2036–2053. Berry, M. E. (2017). Barriers to women’s progress after atrocity: Evidence from Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gender & Society, 31(6), 830–853. Björkdahl, A. (2012). A gender-just peace? Exploring the post-Dayton peace process in Bosnia. Peace & Change, 37 (2), 286–317. Bouta, T., Frerks, G., & Bannon, I. (2005). Gender, conflict and development. Washington, DC: World Bank. Campbell, J. C., et al. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal for Public Health, 93(7), 1089–1097.

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Caprioli, M. (2009). Gender equality and state aggression: The impact of domestic gender equality on state first use of force. International Interactions, 29(3), 195–214. Carreiras, H. (2017). Gendered organizational dynamics in military contexts. In C. Duncanson & R. Woodward (Eds.), The Palgrave international handbook of gender and the military (pp. 105–122). London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cockburn, C., & Zarkov, D. (2002). The postwar moment: Militaries, masculinities and international peacekeeping. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Cohn, C. (2013). Women and wars. Cambridge: Polity Press. Connell, R. (2006). The experience of gender change in public sector organizations. Gender, Work and Organization, 13(5), 435–452. Council of Foreign Relations & UN Women. (2018). Women’s participation in peace processes. https://www.cfr.org/interactive/womens-participation-inpeace-processes. Accessed 13 November 2018. Dahlum, S., & Wig, T. (2018). Peace above the glass ceiling: The historical relationship between female political empowerment and civil conflict (Working Paper Series, 77). The Varieties of Democracy Institute. Duncanson, C. (2016). Gender and peacebuilding. Cambridge: Polity Press. Duncanson, C. (2018). Beyond liberal vs liberating: Women’s economic empowerment in the United Nation’s Women Peace and Security Agenda. International Feminist Journal of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742. 2018.1518725. Epstein, C. F. (2007). Great divides: The cultural, cognitive and social bases of the global subordination of women. American Sociological Review, 72(1), 1–22. Estrada, A. X., & Berggren, A. W. (2009). Sexual harassment and its impact for women officers and cadets in the Swedish Armed Forces. Military Psychology, 21, 162–185. Gordon, E, Cleland Welch, A., & Roos, E. (2015). Security sector reform and the paradoxical tension between local ownership and gender equality. Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, 4(1), 53, 1–23. Handrahan, L. (2004). Conflict, gender, ethnicity and post-conflict reconstruction. Security Dialogue, 35(4), 429–445. Hansen, C. (2001). A considerable service: An advocate’s introduction to domestic violence and the military. Domestic Violence Report, 6(4). Hudson, H. (2012). A bridge too far? The gender consequences of linking security and development in SSR discourse and practice. In A. Schnabel & V. Farr (Eds.), Back to the roots: Security sector reform and development (pp. 77–115). Geneva: DCAF.

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Hudson, V. M., Caprioli, M., Ballif-Spanvill, B., McDermott, R., & Emmett, C. F. (2008/2009). The heart of the matter: The security of women and the security of states. Quarterly Journal: International Security, 33(3), 7–45. Jewkes, R., & Abrahams, N. (2002). The epidemiology of rape and sexual coercion in South Africa: An overview. Social Science and Medicine, 55, 1231–1244. Kandiyoti, D. (1988). Bargaining with patriarchy. Gender and Society, 2(3), 274– 290. Kunz, R., & Valasek, K. (2012). Learning from others’ mistakes: Towards participatory, gender-sensitive SSR. In A. Schnabel & V. Farr (Eds.), Back to the roots: Security sector reform and development (pp. 115–143). Geneva: DCAF. MacKinnon, C. (1989). Toward a feminist theory of the state. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Mathers, J. G. (2013). Women and state military forces. In C. Cohn (Ed.), Women and wars (pp. 124–145). Cambridge: Polity Press. Munro, J. (2000). Gender and peacebuilding. International Development Research Centre. Murdoch, M., & Nichol, K. L. (1995). Women veterans’ experiences with domestic violence and with sexual harassment while in the military. Archives of Family Medicine, 4(5), 411–418. Naraghi-Anderlini, S. (2008). Gender perspectives and women as stakeholders: Broadening local ownership of SSR. In T. Donais (Ed.), Local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 105–127). Geneva: DCAF. Ní Aoláin, F., Francesca Haynes, D., & Cahn, N. (2011). On the frontlines: Gender, war, and the post-conflict process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacock, D. (2012). Engaging men and boys in efforts to end gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. In When men stop fighting: Masculinities in post-conflict series. Vienna: Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation (VIDC). Pugh, M., Cooper, N., & Goodhand, J. (2004). War economies in a regional context: Challenges of transformation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Richmond, O. (2006). The problem of peace: Understanding the ‘liberal peace’. Conflict, Security and Development, 6(3), 291–314. Roy, S. (2008). The grey zone: The ‘ordinary’ violence of extraordinary times. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14(2), 316–333. Sadler, A. G., Booth, B. M., Nielson, D., & Doebbeling, B. N. (2000). Healthrelated consequences of physical and sexual violence: Women in the military. Obstetrics and Gynecology, 96(3), 473–481. Sjoberg, L. (2014). Gender, war and conflict. Cambridge: Polity Press. Swaine, A. (2010). Considering the continuum lens and its potential to capture the wider picture of women’s experiences of violence during and after armed conflict (Transitional Justice Institute Research Paper, n° 10-21).

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True, J. (2012). The political economy of violence against women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. True, J. (2015). Winning the battle, but losing the war on violence. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17 (4), 554–572. Viitanen, A. P., & Colvin, C. J. (2015). Lessons learned: Program messaging in gender-transformative work with men and boys in South Africa. Global Health Action, 8(10). Wilén, N. (2019, April). Achieving a gendered transformation of the postconflict military through security sector reform: Unpacking the private-public dynamics. International Feminist Journal of Politics. https://doi.org/10. 1080/14616742.2018.1559749. Wilén, N. (2014). Security sector reform, gender and local narratives in Burundi. Conflict, Security & Development, 14(3), 331–354. World Health Organization (WHO). (2017, November 29). Violence against women, key facts. http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/vio lence-against-women. Accessed 14 November 2018.

CHAPTER 10

The Fraught Development of an International Peace Architecture Oliver P. Richmond

1

Introduction

Much of the recent work on peacebuilding raises a range of long-standing questions about the evolution and integrity of what might be called an international peace architecture. This chapter proposes that there have been six main stages in this debate, often overlapping, that are also responses to the failures of the previous approach and attempts to engage with global structural change. They carry with them their own ontologies, epistemological framing, empirical examples and methods. They help us to understand the evolution of an overall peace framework and where methods and tools such as peacekeeping, conflict transformation, peacebuilding, or statebuilding might fit. The liberal peace model has been

This chapter is a preliminary outline of a forthcoming book, Peace in the twenty-first Century (OUP, forthcoming). O. P. Richmond (B) Department of Politics/IR, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_10

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by far the most dominant, but a range of concepts, methods, and theories are ontologically framed by the assumptions inherent in thinking about war and peace in these stages. They effectively represent layers, like a palimpsest1 (in which the previous text is visible under a newer, overwritten text), built up over time, over ever broadening forms of intervention created to maintain an ever more complex global peace architecture. Each layer redresses a previous set of conflict igniters and coexists (or contradicts) with the newer layers that emerged through later forms of conflict, such as feudalism, imperialism and colonialism, capitalism and industrialism, the national state, cold war, and post-cold war liberal peace, as well as through the rise of new actors. Underlying such developments is a deeper problem of whether and how human ingenuity might, after millennia of debate and effort, shape the evolution of political order in order to solve the problem of violence, historical and geographical unevenness, unwieldy power, injustice, difference and sociopolitical exclusion? Can all of these features of international order be balanced in ways that are progressive and promote solidarity in a global if not universal system directly connected to civil and subaltern claims? Considering the new theoretical and ethical insights of IR and broadly related disciplines, the work of progressive international lawyers over the past century, the evolution of peace movements and liberal or socialist political projects (Hurrell 2008, p. 69), as well as the waves of new technology and material capacity available to the world’s policymakers—is it possible to develop an ethical order of peace, emancipation, solidarity and justice, which will both stabilize and transcend those of older policies and approaches to peace, the state, and the international domain? How is the resultant international peace architecture framed, how is it evolving, and what are its deficiencies? Taking up these questions, this chapter outlines the dynamics of the evolving international peace architecture over the last century or so.

2 The Twentieth-Century Peace Architecture and Its Challenges The last century has seen the creation of a fairer, more stable, and prosperous national and international environment than ever seen so far in history, even when seen from the perspective of the subaltern. Many of the ideas now widely accepted about the qualities of contemporary

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peace and order first emerged in a long series of anti-war and humanitarian, developmental, or standard-setting conferences, workshops, and conventions, often driven by civil society actors spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Debate and pressure turned slowly into institutions such as the UN and its Agencies, NATO, the EU, AU, and other regional organizations, and the International Financial Institutions, the various international Courts and law, the donor systems, and a range of NGOs, but progress has been slow, and heavily biased towards the Global North, or worse, to the remnants of sovereign and authoritarian power. At every step along the way the development of peace and its related architecture has involved confronting and challenging existing vested power structures found in society, affiliated among others with the state, the economy, the military, and oligarchy. Its capacity is very much reactive—peace is formed in reaction to conflict and is not able to anticipate the nature of future wars because of its limited capacities. The early ‘hybrid peace’ of empire and sovereignty has given way to other forms of hybrid peace, increasingly associated with a mediated version of local and international politics (mediated by custom, identity, liberalism, neoliberalism and the influences of global networks). Elite power and social actors have been instrumental in such mediation throughout history; however, this path has not been smooth, because of western suspicion about the counter-discourses of the development world, particularly after the Bandung Conference of 1955 (Devetak et al. 2016). The West saw claims for global justice as aimed at potential revolutionary resistance to the West’s dominance, when it could and should have developed a more appropriate response to ever-expanding rights claims. The birth of international law, the emergence of new forms of diplomacy and growing multilateralism were seen as markers consolidating peace architecture in the early twentieth century (Morganthau 1940; Nicolson 1954). They were to be brought together under an expanding institutional framework throughout the twentieth century, according to an American-driven conglomeration of the development of liberal global order, to cement the peace, especially after decolonization and after the end of the Cold War. This might be called ‘liberal hegemony’, based to a large degree on popular acceptance of American exceptionalism after 1945, implying a mixture of realist and liberal approaches. It has suffered something of a ‘death of a thousand cuts’, on critical and conservative ‘counter revolutionary’ fronts (Posen 2014, p. 175). This has partly been because of the challenge of inconsistency in maintaining a common,

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normative order (see the cases of Syria since 2011 and Rwanda in 1994 as opposed to, e.g., Kosovo and Bosnia in the late 1990s), and partly because of what Michael Mann called the challenge of the autonomous power of the state: the way in which it used infrastructural power to divide and penetrate civil society, supporting the territorial centralization of state power (Mann 1984). This has in turn been undermined by neoliberalism and the digital shift. Furthermore, the relationship between post-colonial sovereignty and human rights has been uneasy, in particular with regard to the requirement of a state to enforce human rights. Indeed, as Huntington argued in the 1960s, political systems break down when they are no longer able to meet evolving or emerging challenges (Huntington 1968). The authoritarian impulse is never far away under such circumstances, especially in view of the fact that emancipation, justice, and rights claims are an inevitable challenge to entrenched and failing power structures. Even now the numbers of democratic states appear to be declining, or shifting towards authoritarian capitalism. The sensitivity of the international peace architecture can be seen in its evolution. It is built on the progress made in the nineteenth century, culminating in the International Court of Justice’s initiation at the 1899 Hague Conference and its implications for a wide acceptance of international law and institutions as a mechanism for order and progress in international society. Great progress has been made, especially since 1945 and also after US President Carter signed the Helsinki Accord in 1975, foregrounding human rights—which over the twentieth century endeavoured to mediate power in favour of the subaltern for once in human history, and in doing so, challenge existing power relations (ReusSmit 2013, p. 38). Of course, the 1945 post-war settlement represented perhaps only one quarter of the world’s population, depending on how you look at the proportion of signatory states (numbering 51) versus the world’s population, and has not really been significantly renegotiated since. It represented an elite and power- or victor-based, fairly centralized consensus, such as was epistemologically and politically possible in its era, rather than a collaborative, social and relational, ethnographic consensus for peace, which would now be more fully possible [and arguably more characteristic of the times] (Desmond 2014). Yet, though it is commonly thought that the international architecture as well as the state has been formed through war and the exercise of hegemony (as well as capital), particularly American, social forces looking for recognition, emancipation, and rights have been partially successful in challenging those systems and

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narratives, and reforming them over the longue duree (Reus-Smit 2013, p. 2). Part of the international architecture was based upon the moral purpose of the state to augment individual potential, organized around liberal versions of sovereignty, legislative justice and contractual international law, all under a multilateral umbrella that was supposed to support property rights within and of states (Ruggie 1993; Reus-Smit 2013, p. 7). US hegemony after 1945 has helped make global relations and networks even denser than multilateralism suggested might be possible. According to Burley (1993), this is partly a consequence of a transfer of American ‘New Deal’ thinking into the international sphere to create a stable national and international symmetry during the post-war era, combined with the emergence of global civil society. In this historical process, one can see—at least through liberal and progressive eyes—the social construction of the national and international systems, through which claims are represented and public goods provided to maintain peace and order over time, through institutions, law, and legitimacy from local to global scales. There are liberal and social welfarist versions of this argument, mostly now ignored (such as from the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s). They represent variations on the moral purpose of the state, even more so the international, for which resources are supposed to be functionally allocated. Practical association was to follow function and form, eventually giving rise to a hybrid international society, much of which can now be historically observed (Buzan 1993; Nardin 1983). Power-to, as in Hobbes (1985 [1651], p. 150), power over, as in Weber (1978 [1922], p. 53), and despite resistance; power in concert as in Arendt (1970, p. 44), and power’s potentiality, as in Lukes (2005 [1970], p. 69), appeared to have been hybridized in a benign and orderly view of what type of peace could be built. The emergence of the densest international system ever seen means peace and order is more resilient and perhaps more responsive to subaltern claims, but it also means it is more entrenched and difficult to reform than ever before because it has provoked revanchist and counter-revolutionary forces associated with geopolitics, nationalism, and capital. Yet the post-war UN system, in collaboration with IFIs, INGOs and NGOs, as well as many other related organizations, has provided for enormous, though unequal gains in security and human welfare. Due to a weak alliance of key states, and unable to promote law and norms regionally and globally on the same level as the UN, neither the state nor the

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locally legitimate authority would have been able to provide comparable levels of human security. An international—or perhaps even global—peace architecture has emerged as a consequence. The more successful it is, the more complex the international peace architecture is, and likewise the more fragile and risk-prone it will be. The differentials in gradations of sovereignty and agency from north to south have long been noted.2 Furthermore, the consequences of the liberal peace being centred on post-war western dominance, neo-trusteeship, and ideological preferences have not been sufficiently counter-balanced by the liberal peace’s expanded human rights, justice, law, democracy, or trade. Even so, the modern peaceful state and international system is supposed to support complex processes of security, differentiation, rights, and development, producing common projects and surpluses for membership in an unstable world, where territorial expansion is no longer able to meet the costs of increasing complexity or cover the risks of a declining population (Tainter 1988, pp. 37, 190). 2.1

The Limitations of the International Peace Architecture

This complex form of peace now runs, however, on a very low margin of reserve capacity under the conditions of global capitalism and the neoliberal state. This implies that collapse is always imminent, especially where surpluses are purposefully run down or appropriated, and adaption becomes difficult (Tainter 1988, pp. 60, 122). Intervention (in the form of peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, and development), the state, and peace formation processes are the main platforms through which reconstruction can occur, but these are reactive rather than proactive processes. They are based on the fundamental idea that material and legal inequalities are signs of injustice, which leads to conflict. Intervention and programming connected to peace must deal with underlying power structures, social practices and institutional, bureaucratic frameworks to reduce these inequalities. With the neoliberal shifts from the 1970s, the Global North’s hegemonic states and authoritarian states in the South have slowly retreated from the expansion of rights and equality as a political solution for war and violence. To some degree progress already made has helped mitigate the historical cycle of war, occupation, colonization, tribute and trusteeship, yet systems of war and violence have become increasingly complex and opaque (even despite their growing academic exploration).

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They are no longer analytically legible through the state or a liberal international states-system. In parallel, the growth of complex systems of governance designed to prevent local, state, and international conflict by redressing social, economic, and territorial grievances is now consuming vast amounts of energy, resources and political will. Much of it has also been status-quo oriented. A loss of energy and will due to a decline of marginal returns for the liberal peace, as appears to have been experienced by the UN and donor system since the mid-2000s, points to a loss of legitimacy and a concurrent increase in complexity (Tainter 1988, p. 116). The commensurate lack of understanding about why investment in intergenerational, intergovernmental, and international institutions predicated on the expansion of rights, where violence is identified in its broadest forms, risks a collapse of the international peace architecture, which invariably requires constant intellectual innovation, material and geopolitical investment. As a global framework, its global legitimacy is paramount. The ‘…undermining of the landmarks of modernization’ is well underway (Cerny and Prichard 2017). Rather than the emergence of a historic liberal peace, the post-Cold War era has seen the rise of an authoritarian and neoliberal peace, often supported implicitly by the West for reasons of security and a lack of political will to make the economic investments necessary, or by the new powers such as China, for reasons of trade and regional influence. This process has been careless with both the local and global legitimacy of the international peace architecture. What has emerged is an unstable version of the victor’s peace, mirrored by the case in Sri Lanka after the collapse of the Norwegian-backed peace process in 2002 and the rise of President Rajapaksa’s nationalist and militarist regime, or, more recently, his incursions into the state whilst in political opposition (Perera 2015, 2018). The contradictions between the Global North’s liberal peace vis-à-vis territoriality, borders, rights, and capitalism on the one hand, and its paternalistic and ideological overtones on the other have undermined its global legitimacy and progressive goals. Its capacity to build legitimacy and oversee the handover of power peacefully through elections was not in doubt, but the political agenda that dominated reform templates in conflict-affected societies was in question. As Beck argued so cogently, the international peace ‘project’ (or in his case, the European peace project) needed to address the problem of how the state might be improved and how transnational cooperation can become more democratic (Beck

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2013, p. 26). Perfecting the state means expanding rights into temporal, environmental, and thus material areas; democratizing the international implies a concern with global inequalities of all kinds, as well as promoting effective and emancipatory global governance according to what has become known as global justice. Such a trajectory challenges geopolitics and geo-economics, particularly socio- and anthro-centric versions of politics, and points both to deep relationality across societies and to deep structures of the environment or commons (Connolly 2016, p. 121). There has been an Aristotelian realization that political community— from the local to the global—comprises an association (Aristotle) of cooperative relationships vaguely aimed at the good purposes of justice, security, and rights, as well as emancipation and equality. It is not merely a Hobbesian outsourcing of self-preservation through a social contract with a Leviathan state, or a Lockean conversion of natural rights into civil rights under the state. One might point to the rapid increase in the numbers of democratic states across the world since Portugal’s ‘carnation revolution’ in 1974: from 46 to the current figure of about 114 (or about 60% of the world’s states) (Diamond 2015, p. 141), notwithstanding the failed democratization and revolutionary movements of recent times (as across the MENA region). This evolutionary view brings together realist, liberal, constructivist, and critical views of the history of IR, following Gilpin’s observations on the connection between governance and hegemony, order formation, and the foundations of international order.3 They offer different and often contradictory aspects of contemporary IR, between geopolitics, capitalism, law, rights and norms, cooperative institutional development, and the search for a deep sustainability. The history of global power relations and hegemony produces an informal and public, political, and economic architecture, which might be equated with the evolution of ‘peace’ in international relations. The so-called victor’s peace, the liberal peace, and the neoliberal peace are three recent historical forms under European and US trusteeship and tutelage, but there are now new emerging neoliberal, digital, and technological forms as well. The ‘rights of the governed’ have steadily expanded, as the subject is valorized and protected, supported, and restrained by the state and international law, and as each new step opens up further possibilities in view of the broads goals of emancipatory peace thinking (Goulder 2015, pp. 16, 20). In the twenty-first century, if such a path were to come to fruition, this would point to peace with reconciliation, equality, justice, and sustainability, across all issues, networks, and scales. The direction of peace in

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broad terms suggests a journey from the victor’s peace (imperialism), through the liberal peace (liberal democratic states, rights, and international organization), to peace with global justice, meaning peace with environmental sustainability, cultural and political alterity, distributive justice, and historical justice. This could be described as a peace governmentality of global justice. However, much more negative alternatives are also on the horizon for this century too, such as varieties of what Philip Howard called ‘pax technica’,4 a hybrid of neoliberalism, technology, and many of the older, predatory patterns of elite political power, and which I will elaborate on as ‘digital governmentality’. The state, the international architecture, and global governance are currently suffering a legitimacy crisis relating to their limited inclusiveness, their authority, and their ability to act in the interests of societies. Social consent, economic and political legitimacy, and international norms have come to be seen as disputed. Legitimacy as opposed to legality has been problematic, especially because at the international level there is no democratic voice to determine legitimacy, and though there may be popular goals for societies subject to conflict, the rule of law has also proven difficult to enforce. Hegemony at the institutional level has also been problematic. To quote Habermas, ‘One size fits all fits no one’ (Habermas 2015, pp. 32, 47–49). Rather than an alignment of power through multilateralism, global governance is now more about neoliberal, technological, and military hegemony than about human rights or social justice,5 not to mention global justice. Indeed, global governance diffuses and fragments the power needed to achieve rights and social justice from a subaltern perspective. The state has been seen as both the nexus for peace at the elite, diplomatic, and international level, as well as a key blockage for the kind of transformation necessary from the subject, individual, or subaltern perspective (Wallerstein 2002). To some degree the liberal international architecture has followed suit. Hence, the emergence of global institutions and international law, as well as democracy and human rights, as practical and normative elements of the international peace architecture as a consequence of the industrialized nationalism and warfare of the twentieth century. Transnational and local civil society has seen itself as separate from the state and the international, and vital to the development of both, especially when they are all so codependent (Wallerstein 2002, p. 4). However, we also know that civil society has a more ambiguous position, often playing the role of a stateor international-level sub-contractor to address the problems of conflict

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and development (Pyykkonen 2015, p. 11). The international system and global capital have long been regarded as the solution for both sets and levels of problems, restraining and reforming the state and using capital to foster security, trade, and development in a virtuous circle. This system is deeply rooted in the evolution of western hegemony, just as general institutions and power relations are deeply rooted in any society’s past (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 44). Yet, it is also supposed to offer a Parsonian system that produces a natural equilibrium (Reed and Harvey 1992, p. 365) between power, interests, norms, justice, history, territorial units, and so forth, under global governance and western hegemony. Often a ‘far from equilibria’ situation is therefore put down to localized cultural, social, and historical deficiencies, thus meriting externalized and interventionary practices for peace and development (Reed and Harvey 1992, p. 366). This is rather than admit to a deficit of the potential justice aligned to western modalities in the states-system. The international and capital have also begun to be regarded in the same ambiguous manner, as a bridge towards international-social transformation, and as a blockage for a long-term sustainable order. Analysing the dysfunctionality of both has been made difficult by the dominant legal and economic rationalities of modernity, which tend not to be self-reflective. With his core-periphery perspective, Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the world faced a structural crisis as a consequence. War is now experienced as a piecemeal, disaggregated phenomena: from complex war as in Syria, guerilla warfare as recently ended in Colombia, to low-level urban violence as in Latin America in particular, and the environmental and structural violence that global capital enables in its ‘misallocation of resources’ towards multinational, oligarchical, and authoritarian actors as in the MENA region or sub-Saharan Africa (say in the DRC) or SouthEast Asia (as perhaps in Cambodia). This raises the old problem that transformative movements and processes often end up close to the stance they were trying to redress (often because power is persuasive and seductive), as well as the old issue of whether transformation, reform, and progress are possible from within the status-quo system normally associated with peacebuilding, or outside (as in a revolutionary or radical social movement). Empirically, as Wallerstein pointed out, there were periods in the twentieth century when radical movements were in ascendance, but they did not manage to transform the world directly (Wallerstein 2002, pp. 3, 5). Relative egalitarianism, global transfers of resources, and the co-existence of acute political differences under the conditions

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of substantive democracy may be more discernable in today’s transitional world, however indirectly. Furthermore, more recent discursive theories discourage deep analysis of contemporary structural problems, focusing attention on communicative dynamics instead, which perceive a natural equilibrium always just over the horizon. Structural analyses, on the other hand, have since Marx suggested that power was needed to mitigate natural disequilibria which threaten social peace and order, instead maintaining elite or class power. Structural inequalities cause and feed off conflict and violence, and the role of governance, whether local, state, or international was to mitigate these but within the post-1990 hierarchy of states—now assumed to represent and advanced by natural statusquo. Mediation, peacekeeping, and peace processes were reserved from the 1950s for the most egregious examples, and with the arrival of the peacebuilding doctrine in the 1990s, broader strategies were designed to deal with broader instabilities and injustices. The international peace architecture by the 1990s was under great pressure to expand further to accommodate not just post-colonial conflicts, but post-Soviet, and developmental questions. 2.2

New Possibilities

Consequently, the transformation of the Western-global, core-periphery order, post-war, towards more de-centred forms of globalism, pluralism, and localism, is often seen within a discursive framework of politics. This is as yet a work in progress dependent upon ever broader tools and programmes of intervention (Buzan and Lawson 2015, p. 273), now often designed to produce entrepreneurial, liberal citizens within an enabling state, regional, and market framework. These forms of intervention operate beyond the eurocentric habit of ‘just war’ thinking. Many of these interventions govern consequences rather than causes,6 disguising the relationship between peace, power, and knowledge, and narrowing emancipatory practices to a minimalist level. The focus of intervention has moved from the causes of conflict to the management of its effects (Chandler 2015). This places applied research at the apogee of the knowledge production chain, but relegates everyday peace and the international order that might maintain it to the secondary aims of the maintenance rather than to the transformation of the existing order. Whilst world politics have become more relational, mobile, and

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networked, most people experience everyday life in terms of power relations which determine their material condition and national citizenship. Even so, this is a more complex structure than simple geopolitics or geo-economics would suggest, but it also maintains existing dominant sovereignties. As was made very clear in the 2014 UN Human Development Report, even this is an achievement that is not equally shared (UNDP 2014, pp. 33, 40).7 Thinking about peace now needs to come to terms with the current era of de-liberalization through authoritarian instincts, whilst a different and more inclusive basis for rights, emancipation, and social justice is being sought by peace formers and international planners over that offered by the previous version of liberal peace. Peace formers and international planners interested in further developing an international peace architecture they see as necessary for a sustainable international order argue that the state and international architecture (Richmond 2014) are no longer adequate for a twenty-first century, networked, relational, mobile, transnational, and scalar world: one marked increasingly by transversal relations. The micro-political scale, and its complexity, its ‘rhizomatic’ relationality, is currently redefining peace in international relations as being generated socio-politically, and not merely by geopolitics or geo-economics. Indeed, political subjects from left to right are increasingly challenging the viability and legitimacy of the late twentieth-century liberal order, especially its economic and environmental assumptions and the hierarchical architecture of relatively exclusive territorial states.8 As Polyani noted long ago, redistribution is the basic function of political order, by which it is measured, and the international system is no different (Polanyi et al. 1957). The theoretical and practical propositions that emerge from this insight far exceed the praxis of the current international peace architecture in IR. There is currently a large gap between the potential for, and actual experiences of violence in IR and the currently available peace architecture. The development of substantive normative, scientific, and discursive frameworks for a revised international peace architecture represents the beginning of another ‘international’, shaped by practices, emotions, and everyday spatial, historical understandings of complex agency, which is mobile and networked (Lefebvre 1991 [1947]). It is transversal, trans-scalar, post-nationalist, and concerned with long-term sustainability, foreshadowing complex frameworks of global justice. This means the

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expansion and enhancement of rights in the light of new structural global conditions, subjectivity, and political claims, and a new and broader understanding of legitimacy that has emerged especially at the social level, if not at the international or state levels.9 Mobility (instability), relationality, and networks (assemblages which cannot be defined solely as local or global) (Sassen 2006) underpin this shift, through which critical agency at the social level engages with power structures at the state or global levels whilst doing their utmost to avoid domination.10 Yet, the latter, masquerading as governance, has also taken on a much more advanced from. The former provide a relational and pluralist ontology for IR that is far more stable and sustainable than the older notions of the territorial sovereignty or cosmopolitan/eurocentric norms. State encompassment and vertical hierarchy (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, p. 988) are slowly being surpassed by the emergence of critical agency, transversal, transnational, subaltern, and mobile engagements with respect to questions of peace and justice. 2.3

Counter-Peace?

There is a ‘counter-revolutionary’ tendency inherent in this new ‘international’, which is pushing back at expanded rights and new scientific claims about sustainability and global justice. Older concerns with land and territory, as well as material resources, still represent the base of modern direct, structural, and governmental power. The newer forms of critical agency draw on subaltern claims for emancipation and some governmental support. But political institutions are unequally balanced between older power structures and the newer claims. The social content of security, peace, rights, development, and order is foregrounded under these new structural conditions, rather than the empirical nature of the state, security, or economy, these now being components of a twentyfirst-century peace rather than its main priority. This reaffirms the local, social, and micro-‘turns’ which have recently gained ground (Solomon and Steele 2016), and are actually extensions of a long process of ‘rights-seeking’ across cultural, political, social, and economic terrains by populations around the world since the nineteenth century. This process, associated with the emergence and expansion of human rights, has led to historical structural change which in the recent ‘decolonial epoch’ has been associated with the state and the mitigating role of international institutions, pushing beyond a core-periphery colonial or economic

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system. Yet, IR, with its high-level and top-down perspectives on ‘levels of analysis’ or ‘agent structure’ (Singer 1961; Wendt 1987) approaches, has had great difficulty in recognizing the significance of these long-standing processes.

3 A Framework for Understanding the International Peace Architecture: A Sketch and Disaggregation There has always been a long-standing local and international political dream of a positive peace, one that transcends co-existence and builds a new ethical framework for cooperation and equalization of widely divergent human populations. As Kant wrote, in a universal community, wrongs committed in one place are felt everywhere (Archibugi 1992; Kant 1795). In my view, this insight clarifies the ontological, epistemic, methodological, and ethical underpinnings of the International Peace Architecture. Much of the body of thinking and practice has come into view in order to deal with different types of conflict: civil wars as described by Hobbes; revolutionary wars; colonial and imperial conflicts; wars over territory, power, and resources; industrialized conflicts over ideology as in the twentieth century; wars over ethnic identity and self-determination as seen regularly since the 1960s or after the end of the Cold War. The sheer variety and scale of such direct, structural, and cultural violence indicates that there is an ontological problem with the ways in which IR is used to produce knowledge about peacemaking, constraining its capacity by anchoring it within debates about power or hegemonic norms, as with Realism and Liberalism. A much broader and multidisciplinary view illustrates this epistemological and methodological weakness. On the other hand, relationality, mobility, and networks indicate that peace requires global justice in this case more than being a defence of statehood, capital, or of liberal internationalism. This is even more relevant in the new era of instant, global communication and translation, which applies not just to functional communication, but also to the understanding of one’s positionality vis-à-vis others in justice terms. Different critical understandings of this architecture emerge from different positionalities: the subaltern points to basic needs, identity, sustainability, and mobility: the state to its interests and communitarian ethics; the international to global norms, duties, and responsibilities in

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the light of global problems. Norms, institutions, law, across the international, the state, and civil society, reflect both power and the need to respond to wrongs. Inequalities of many (but not all) sorts are increasingly being seen as ‘wrongs’, meaning the nature of political legitimacy at the global level has now irrevocably changed. Similarly, matters of social, environmental, and intergenerational legitimacy have now made their appearance on the international scene. Power cannot deal with these claims by denying them as within the legal, economic, and political (though not necessarily social) framework of actually existing liberal internationalism. The international architecture, the state, globalized capital, technology and epistemology should be aimed at the formation of social legitimacy within the constraints of progress, in order to iron out the current, and crippling, contradictions over legitimacy from these different sites, networks, and processes. In this sense, legitimacy needs to be understood in broader, social and global, intergenerational terms, not just in terms of law, process, and efficiency. Legitimacy is related to the social provision of consent through consensual systems of political decision-making, in other words.11 It connects with the broader questions of sustainability raised by the problem of global justice.

4 Six Stages in the Development of the International Peace Architecture In the light of the above analysis, I would like to propose that there are at least six overlapping stages of development in the international peace architecture, which need to be identified, theorized, and critiqued, if a new stage is to either replace or rescue the overall system in the light of new conflict dynamics in the twenty-first century. They are as follows (see also Fig. 1): i. a geopolitical balance of power designed to deal with the clash of interest in elite-led industrialized states and empires; ii. a ‘pluralist’ Westphalian system of discrete sovereign states designed to deal with nationalism caused by (i). This is embodied in the liberal democratic peace and a liberal cosmopolitan post-war architecture—run mainly by the USA, UK, and latterly the donor system

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Layers of Peace Architecture

International Peace Architecture

Conflict Type Layer 6

Inequality, lack of justice, unsustainability

21th Century Digital peace/ digital governmentality

Layer 5 Post-2000s Neoliberal Peace

Layer 4

Elite and global profit and resource extraction, fragile and collapsed states, plus risk of terrorism

Subaltern claims for equality, justice, and sustainability

Post-1960s Expanded Rights Claims

Layer 3 Domestic and international inequality 20th Century Welfare State/ Decolonisation

Layer 2

Territorial War between sovereign states and empires,

20th Century liberal internationalism

Layer 1 Territorial War between sovereign states and empires 19th Century Balance of Power

Fig. 1

Multilateral, multi-scalar, transnational, networks of NGOs, transversal, multi-vertical movements, institutions, and International Conventions; mobility, expanded rights, and global justice [Peace with Global Justice/ Methodological Everydayism] State security and the free flow of economic resources, global capital and the neoliberal state, plus the development of new technologies of power; basic rights and resilience; new technological advances [Neoliberal Peace/ Methodological Neoliberalism] Social democracy, multilateral institutions, International law and the expansion of international conventions, civil and global civil society, concepts like Human Security and sustainable development; human rights, participatory democracy, economic and social rights [Post-Liberal Peace: Hybrid/ Everyday Peace Methodological Everydayism] The welfare state, socialism, with an international framework of exchange, probably including multilateral Institutions, International Law and International Conventions; economic and social Rights [Positive Peace/ Methodological Liberalism] Multilateral Institutions, International Law and International Conventions, Development of the League of Nations/ UN system/ EU and other regional organisations; human rights and representative democracy [Liberal Peace/ Methodological Liberalism] Geopolitical balancing/ International Conferences/ Diplomacy/ Treaties/ Balance of Power [Negative Peace/ Methodological Nationalism]

The international peace architecture

and EU—designed to deal with the slow decolonization of the imperial world and its systemic clashes; iii. a Marxist-derived critique of both realist and liberal versions of peace designed to produce international equality and solidarity; iv. liberal peacebuilding in its later iterations, informed by a postcolonial and hybrid, multi-layered framework of international relations designed to expand rights whilst maintaining the previous layers of the international architecture (Brasset and Tsingou 2011, p. 2)12 ;

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v. neoliberal statebuilding, and a reversion to securitization and a focus on state security, complemented by global capital; vi. the newer ‘digital’ dynamics of international relations (as opposed to the analogue system of industrial modernity and its states-system represented by i-iv), and which offers the potential of extending the agency of global civil society and further expanding rights, as well as constraining political claims and governing more effectively in the interests of existing elites through a form of digital governmentality.

5

Conclusion

It is probably true to say that this ambitious framework, spanning the great thinkers of politics and international relations from Plato to Kant (or Plato to NATO; or the warfare state to the internationalized welfare state, the liberal peace and onwards to the globally governed neoliberal state, as is often argued to represent the history of progress in different quarters), is more plausible than ever before. Nevertheless, history, material and geopolitical structures, and human-contrived injustices still stand in the way. Their presence is obvious, responses are increasingly clear, yet political will is often lacking because of the challenge any responses pose towards long-standing and entrenched power structures: militarism, social hierarchies, international hierarchies, the control of capital and material distribution. Local knowledge, legitimacy, and context are all vital in the construction of political legitimacy but often subaltern views on peace and global justice do not concur with the state and international frameworks currently part of the international peace architecture. Yet, it has become commonplace to argue that just and stable political solutions have to be found on the local level where legitimacy is least abstract and where inequality and diversity are at their highest, though this is also where power is most ruthless. This raises the question of how to overcome power structures that anchor inequality, unsustainability, and create blockages, and how local legitimacy, power and international intervention might, by implication, ever be reconciled? Such questions have been raised in recent eras by key post-colonial states, by the Non-Aligned, by the BRICS, by transnational actors, as well as many localized organizations, all of which are united in their sense that the old international and states-system, as well as the global economy and global governance, are no longer suited to resolving contemporary issues. Though they may

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have differing perspectives and positions, as well as goals, all share a concern regarding the uncertain direction of the international, a general loss of legitimacy, and the growing use of ad hoc sovereign responses to long-standing global problems.13 This argument underlines the increasing moribundity of the current international peace architecture and the concurrent necessity to improve it significantly, perhaps by incorporating new understandings of intervention, agency, networks, mobility, trans-scalarity, sustainability, global justice, and the nature of the state and political community, among others, in order to reform, revise, reconstruct, or add new capacities to the international peace architecture. The theoretical-historical architecture this exploration of the international peace architecture above involves blending together many different layers of historical politics at different levels and locations around the world. The international peace architecture that has emerged is unstable, torn by its internal contradictions and a changing structural environment. In response to such difficulties, can justice be achieved in a progressive mode, against the grain of deep historical-material and geopolitical structures of world politics? As a first step, additions to the architecture are required at the very least: we can point to some key qualities of progressive thinking, starting with national and global material and legal equalization of society over time, which attracts the support and consent of populations in democratic scales, from local to global. It also demands pluralism, solidarity, public truth telling, and peaceful means of dispute settlement within civil society,14 across all sectors of society, and scaled up to the state, regional, and international, as well as across networks and scales of a newer framework of IR. In short, the evolution of the international peace architecture has in the past moved from a victor’s peace, through a balance of the power system, to a liberal peace, with expanding human rights, and the path it has taken points towards conceptions of global justice. This relates peace processes, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, conflict transformation, and the many other tools of peace with historical and distributive forms of justice, indicating that deep structural change is required. As one pushes this logic further, it becomes clear that the evolving concept of sustainability and its connection with peace and justice points towards a deeper ecology of peace in the context of growing relationality not just between former enemies, but across generations, across geography and scale, between human and non-human actors and their network across the full range

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of human experience. Peace now represents a complex and exceptionally fragile interlocking framework of norms, tools, institutions, laws, rights, and balances, related to the evolution of international order, often developing retrospectively after its many breakdowns. The challenge for the next phase in the evolution of the international peace architecture is to break this destructive cycle.

Notes 1. My thanks to Holger Potzsch from the University of Tromso for introducing me to this concept. 2. For a recent iteration, see Hobson (2012, p. 19). 3. Cited in Ikenberry (2013, p. 3). 4. see Howard (2015, p. xix). Pax technica is a new empire drawing on a technical rationality that emerges from networked devices, networked power, and networked society. Being a range of networks, it transcends the states-system and democracy, as well as the concept of the state as a self-determining unit. (Howard, pp. xx, 1 and 33–35). See also Marcuse (1968, p. 25), cited in Duffield (2019, p. 41). 5. See, for example, Pegram and Acuto (2015, p. 585). 6. This can be seen in numerous Research Council calls in the UK, as well as in a more general appeal for more applied research to be carried out using large data sets or new technologies. 7. Interestingly, this report points to national and global universal service provision and full employment as being necessary for peace (UNDP 2014, pp. 87, 92). 8. As incidentally illustrated by UNDP’s Human Development Index. 9. Drawing on Arendt (1951) and DeGooyer et al. (2018, p. 4). 10. See, for example, Foucault (1980). 11. For more on these debates, see Brasset and Tsingou (2011). 12. See also Bull (1977). 13. For example, see “Fortaleza Declaration” (2014). 14. See, for example, Glasius (2012).

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Index

A Adat , 188, 189, 193, 195 agency, 11, 22, 44, 45, 51, 69, 75, 76, 80, 81, 99, 102–104, 108, 116, 119, 121, 123, 125, 182–184, 198, 208–210, 226, 232, 233, 237, 238 Agenda for Peace, 19, 20, 22, 27, 33, 43, 137 anthropology, 53, 184 authenticity, 75–77, 79, 80, 82, 182, 195

B Brahimi Report, 43 brokerage, 183, 185, 186, 191, 193, 198

C capacity, 22, 24, 25, 27, 59, 62, 63, 68, 75, 77, 80–83, 85, 100, 104, 106, 111, 118, 120–126, 148, 222, 223, 226, 227, 234

Catholic Relief Services (CRS), 63, 70 chastened peacebuilding, 12 child marriage, 59, 63, 70, 71, 73, 79, 80 civil war, 31, 33, 133–135, 138, 140, 142, 143, 149–151, 176, 234 Colombia, 4, 99–101, 109, 112, 127, 157, 158, 166, 168–172, 230 Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), 45 conflict, 8, 18–26, 28–31, 33, 34, 42–45, 48, 49, 53, 63, 68–70, 72, 80, 81, 83, 86, 98–104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 113–121, 123–127, 133, 134, 136–138, 140, 141, 150, 157, 160–167, 169–175, 181–189, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 207, 208, 210, 211, 214–216, 221–223, 226, 227, 229, 231, 234, 235 violence, 63, 117, 134, 138, 208, 231 contextualization, 184

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3

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244

INDEX

continuum of violence, 208, 209, 211, 212, 217 crisis, 9, 25, 28, 30, 34, 41, 42, 45, 50, 69, 86, 143, 229, 230 culture, 41, 49, 53, 60, 64, 65, 73, 86, 106, 166, 173, 182–184, 187, 188, 190–192, 194, 196, 199 cycles of poverty, 72

D decolonial peace, 63 democratization, 133, 140–143, 162, 181, 183, 228 digital governmentality, 229, 237

E El Salvador, 27, 133–135, 138, 139, 141–143, 145, 147, 149–151, 162 emancipation, 49, 53, 222, 224, 228, 232, 233 emancipatory peace, 49, 228 endogenous, 22, 99, 101, 102, 104–108, 111, 112, 119–123, 125, 126 ethnographic research, 184, 199 EUCAP Nestor, 46 European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS), 46 everyday, 49, 51, 101–104, 115, 117, 125, 136, 148, 184, 208, 232 everyday peace, 8, 51, 101, 102, 108, 113, 136, 137, 231 exogenous, 22, 98, 106, 108, 111, 113, 117–120, 122, 123, 125, 126 expansion of rights, 226, 227

F failure, 3, 7, 10, 12, 23, 24, 43, 48, 54, 134, 138, 183, 211, 213, 221 feminist, 5, 72, 78, 79, 82, 85, 89, 207–211, 217 feminist political economy perspective, 213 Frente Farabundo para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), 133, 139–141, 147 G gangs, 9, 109, 110, 115, 116, 118, 120, 134, 135, 143–151, 208 globalization development, 30, 143 free market, 26 neoliberalism, 29, 47, 143 global justice, 223, 228, 229, 232–235, 237, 238 governance, 7, 23, 28, 31, 42–44, 65, 68, 81, 97, 98, 100, 106, 118, 140, 141, 143, 144, 150, 199, 227–231, 233, 237 good, 23, 27, 29–31, 164, 165, 167 international, 18, 22 liberal, 23 governmentality, 49 grassroots/bottom-up peacebuilding, 22, 44, 62, 74, 75, 77, 81, 110, 159, 182, 187, 198, 199 H human rights, 20, 21, 27, 33, 48, 70, 72, 79, 82, 166, 176, 181, 185, 192, 194, 195, 210, 224, 226, 229, 233, 238 hybridity, 22, 50, 51, 97–99, 104, 125, 149

INDEX

hybrid peace, 49, 97–99, 101–103, 108, 120, 122, 123, 125, 223

I indigeneity, 182, 183, 191, 194–196 Indonesia, 181–183, 187–189, 191, 192, 195, 199 inequality/ies, 28–30, 34, 35, 66, 139, 158, 171, 181–188, 190, 191, 193–198, 212, 216, 226, 228, 231, 235, 237 instrumentalization, 80, 82, 187, 196 interfaith dialogue, 62, 192 intermediation, 117, 182, 185, 194 International financial institutions (IFIs), 25, 26, 30, 31, 223, 225 International Monetary Fund, 26 World Bank, 24, 26 international peace architecture, 221, 222, 224, 226, 227, 229, 231, 232, 234–239 international peacebuilding, 4–10, 19, 41, 44, 45, 53, 158, 159, 174, 175

K Kenya, 59, 60, 62–70, 74, 76, 77, 79, 86–89 knowledge, 19, 21, 22, 99, 101, 102, 104–108, 112, 115–119, 121–127, 162, 175, 185, 191, 194, 231, 234 local knowledge, 99, 104, 119, 125–127, 185, 199, 237

L land, 139, 140, 157–160, 162–176, 188, 189, 193–195, 233 land grabbing, 186, 190, 191 land rights, 66, 162, 189, 215

245

liberal, 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 19–23, 25, 26, 28, 32, 34, 42, 43, 45, 47–54, 83, 98, 103, 104, 119, 121, 126, 141, 149, 150, 158, 160, 163, 166, 183, 214, 222, 223, 225, 228, 229, 231, 232, 234–236 liberal cosmopolitanism, 47, 48 liberalism, 18, 21, 22, 41, 42, 52, 223, 234 liberal peace, 22, 25, 30, 33, 44, 52, 54, 97–99, 104, 108, 119–122, 124, 135, 136, 140, 160, 183, 184, 211, 221, 222, 226–229, 232, 237, 238 liberal peacebuilding, 3, 19, 47, 49, 51, 52, 80, 162, 236 local, 23, 28, 30, 31, 41, 43–54, 62, 64, 66, 80–82, 86, 89, 97–106, 108, 110, 111, 113–126, 135, 136, 144, 147–150, 158, 159, 161–164, 175, 182–195, 198, 199, 208, 211, 223, 225, 227–229, 231, 233, 234, 237, 238 localism, 44, 47, 48, 100, 231 local ownership, 30, 43, 45–50, 183, 208 local turn, 4, 7, 8, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47–54, 80, 97, 100, 102, 104, 122, 182, 184

M Maluku, 186–190, 195–197 marginalization, 63, 65–67, 70–72, 76, 79, 108 media, 34, 74, 76–78, 191, 192, 194, 197 migrants, exclusion of, 195 mood, 2–4, 6, 7, 10

246

INDEX

N neoliberalism, 26, 34, 47, 48, 59, 82, 223, 224, 229 neoliberalism and religion, 82 neoliberal piety, 82, 89 networks, 10, 22, 30, 68, 84, 88, 98, 103, 104, 106, 110, 116, 118, 121, 122, 134, 151, 182, 191–193, 197–199, 210, 223, 225, 228, 233–235, 238, 239 NGOization, 60–62, 84 nuclear elimination, 2

O ordinary violence, 212, 213, 217

P pacifism, 1, 2, 6, 12 participation, 44, 46, 66, 69, 76, 100, 113, 114, 118, 126, 128, 164, 182, 183, 185, 196, 197, 208, 215 patriarchy, 79, 210, 214 peace democratic, 21, 33, 235 local turn, 4, 42, 44, 45, 47–49, 51, 53, 54, 80, 102, 104, 183 peacebuilding, 2, 5, 8, 9, 12, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 61, 83, 100, 102–104, 106, 119, 124–126, 136, 137, 142, 149, 158, 160–163, 165, 167, 174, 175, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 190 peace formation, 99, 101–104, 117, 119, 120, 136, 226 peace infrastructure, 100, 101, 117, 119, 120, 125, 126 peace trajectory, 99, 101, 107, 111, 112, 115, 125

peace agreement, 43, 100, 124, 133–135, 140–144, 149, 158, 162, 164 peacebuilding, 1–12, 17–29, 32–35, 41–47, 49–53, 59–64, 68, 72, 75–77, 81–83, 85, 88, 89, 97, 98, 100, 103, 106, 107, 112, 124, 126, 133, 134, 158–165, 169, 171, 172, 174–176, 181–184, 186–188, 199, 207, 209, 211, 214–216, 221, 226, 230, 231, 238 contradictions in, 19, 28 its history as industry, 19, 33, 34, 106 peacebuilding and development, 60, 62, 63, 65, 82, 86 Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), 2, 24 peace process, 30, 33, 101, 103, 134, 135, 141, 147, 149, 151, 176, 182, 188, 207, 208, 227, 231, 238 peace strategy, 136, 140, 141, 149, 150 Peasant Reserve Zones (PRZ), 4, 158, 160, 162, 163, 167–175 peasants rights, 157, 168–170, 172–174 political authority, 8, 11, 143 post-colonialism, 49 post-conflict backlash, 209, 210 postsecular, 61, 62, 75, 85 post-structuralism, 49 Preventing Violent Extremism, 63 private, 23, 26, 29, 78, 84, 89, 127, 159, 162, 166, 169, 172, 174, 208–217 public, 23, 35, 61, 68, 76, 81, 100, 103, 123, 124, 134, 145, 146, 149, 150, 169, 170, 172, 191, 194, 209–217, 225, 228, 238

INDEX

R realism, 234 refusal, 5, 182–186, 190, 191, 193–195, 197–200 religion, 60–64, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77–85, 187 religion and coloniality, 62, 83 religion and development, 89 religion and gender, 61, 73, 79, 82 religious peacebuilding, 75, 76 representation, 121, 166, 169, 194 resistance, 6, 27, 30, 44, 49–52, 66, 86, 98, 113, 116, 125, 126, 142, 173, 182, 184–186, 190–194, 197–199, 223, 225 responsibilization, 50 restraint, 12, 45, 46 revival of tradition, 182, 183, 186, 188, 195, 199 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 124, 158, 162 rights-based, 208 rural reform, 100, 171

S San Salvador, 147, 148 securitizing religion, 66 security, 20, 21, 23, 27, 29, 42, 43, 46, 48, 53, 65, 67, 74, 100, 114, 118, 120, 124, 134, 144–146, 150, 158, 164, 183, 187, 207, 209–213, 216, 217, 225–228, 230, 233, 237 authoritarian, 46, 227 common, 20

247

human, 20, 21, 48, 211, 213, 226 security sector, 46, 133, 134, 140, 142, 143, 213, 216, 217 social in/justice, 33, 181, 182, 190, 191 statebuilding, 18, 23, 43, 54, 221, 237 strategic essentialism, 190, 196, 198 structural violence, 65, 77, 84, 102, 182, 184, 187, 209, 230 T truce, 9, 134, 135, 144–149 U United Nations (UN), 2, 4, 5, 9, 18–27, 29, 33, 43, 45, 48, 88, 133, 141, 142, 145, 158, 159, 162, 208, 223, 225, 227 partnerships, 23 Peacebuilding Commission, 2, 24 V victors peace, 139, 227–229, 238 W war, 1, 6, 18, 20–22, 26, 32, 33, 87, 98, 100, 124, 133–141, 143–145, 150, 164, 176, 182, 212–215, 222–224, 226, 230, 234 War-Peace Nexus, 135 war strategy, 136, 137, 140 women’s empowerment, 208