Failed Peacemaking: Counter-Peace and International Order (Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies) 3031300807, 9783031300806

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Failed Peacemaking Counter-Peace and International Order

Oliver P. Richmond Gëzim Visoka

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. This series is indexed by Scopus.

Sandra Pogodda · Oliver P. Richmond · Gëzim Visoka

Failed Peacemaking Counter-Peace and International Order

Sandra Pogodda Department of Politics University of Manchester Manchester, UK Gëzim Visoka School of Law and Government Dublin City University Dublin, Ireland

Oliver P. Richmond University of Manchester Manchester, UK Dublin City University Dublin, Ireland Ewha Womans University Seoul, South Korea

ISSN 1759-3735 ISSN 2752-857X (electronic) Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies ISBN 978-3-031-30080-6 ISBN 978-3-031-30081-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 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. Cover design by © MC Richmond This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Also by Sandra Pogodda The EU and Crisis Response (edited with Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, 2021) The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace (edited with Oliver P. Richmond and Jasmin Ramovi´c, 2016) Also by Oliver P. Richmond The Grand Design: The Evolution of International Architecture (2022) Peace in International Relations (2nd edn, 2020)

Peace

Also by Gëzim Visoka The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies (edited with Oliver P. Richmond, 2022) Normalization in World Politics (co-authored with Nicolas LemayHébert, 2022)

Contents

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1

Introduction

2

Conceptualizing the Counter-Peace

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Locating the Counter-Peace

29

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The Stalemate Pattern

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The Limited Counter-Peace Pattern

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Unmitigated Counter-Peace

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The Rise of the Counter-Peace on the International Stage

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Transitions in International Order and the Tools of Peacemaking: Back to the Future?

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Impact on the IPA and International Order

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Conclusion

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103

References

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Index

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About the Authors

Sandra Pogodda is Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Department of Politics, University of Manchester, UK. Oliver P. Richmond is Research Professor of IR, Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of Politics, University of Manchester, UK. He is also International Professor at Dublin City University, Ireland; and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea. Gëzim Visoka is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, Ireland.

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Abstract This introduction outlines the book’s main argument that peace processes across the world have become systematically blocked in the post-Cold War era, indicating the emergence of proto-systemic counter-peace processes. Indeed, the dominant trend towards stagnation, reversal and collapse of internationally-sponsored attempts to create peace shows that peacemaking is failing. The chapter sketches the international peace architecture (IPA), which the subsequent analysis shows as being entangled with counter-peace processes. Subsequently, some preliminary examples of failed peacemaking and some initial reflections on tactical blockages hint at the scale, scope and effectiveness of contemporary counter-peace processes. The chapter concludes by introducing the structure of the book and its research questions. Keywords Failed peacemaking · International peace architecture · Peace process

Failed Peacemaking? The long-standing attempts to create peace after war, to reform and refine domestic political order, and to build regional and global systems of multilateral order to prevent and end war appear to have reached an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3_1

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impasse. The history of post-Cold War peacekeeping, international mediation, peacebuilding and statebuilding, as well as the engagement of civil society has been fraught with difficulty, controversy and ‘back-sliding’. Over a long period of time, we have observed that political agency aimed at peacemaking, liberal political reform, self-determination, human rights, social emancipation and revolution, has faced substantial obstacles. Despite concerted efforts, the international peacemaking interventions of the post-Cold War era have often led to stalemates, authoritarian regimes, frozen conflicts, and resurgent conflicts. Peacemaking in such cases can be said to have failed. The reasons for these various failures need to be better understood in order to enable the development of innovative responses and better methods and tools, given the centrality of effective peacemaking for conflict-affected societies. A second foundational reason for peacemaking appears to be at the heart of its current contestation: peace interventions have traditionally sought to maintain the international order, whose ongoing transformation has thrown up new challenges to established peace praxis. The failure of peacemaking has inspired research into the blocking tactics used against peace praxis, which in turn prompted a realization that there may be patterns of blockages emerging in conflict-affected areas around the world.1 Ultimately, this also pointed to deliberate strategies where peacemaking is both captured and blocked. This phenomenon could be described as ‘counter-peace’, which follows the logic of counterrevolution, where the ‘ancien regime’ strives for a return to power after being banished in a revolutionary situation or obstructs the rise of a revolutionary movement. In the case of failed peacemaking, counter-peace represents an attempt to overturn a wide set of checks and balances imposed by peace processes. The latter have checked and balanced domestic and international power as well as interests of states and empires, while foregrounding rights, democracy, welfare, and multilateralism over exclusionary modes of governance and nationalist politics, which so often have led to war.

1 Over a three-year period (2019–2021) the authors commissioned reports on ‘block-

ages to peace’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Colombia, Ethiopia, Kosovo, Burma, Sierra Leone, Southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, Timor Leste, and Tunisia. These reports form the basis of the theoretical analysis this study develops. They were generously supported by grants from the University of Manchester, the Global Challenges Research Fund and the ECPR.

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In the following study, we sketch out this argument, starting with the realization that scholarship and peacemaking praxis have tended to ignore blockages and counter-peace strategies. Yet rather than continue to dismiss the latter as scattered opposition to peace, reform, and justice, this book elaborates patterns of blockages that have emerged across different case studies. Subsequently, this research examines the implications of counter-peace for peacemaking in a multi-polar, rather than multilateral form of international order, where nationalism, imperialism, and authoritarianism compete with democracy, rights, and justice as the basis for peaceful political order after war. A first brief step involves an outline of the international peace architecture (IPA), its tools and systems, in order to juxtapose it with our exploration of blockages to peace and counter-peace.

The Emergence of a Fragile International Peace Architecture Over the last century or more, an international peace architecture has emerged.2 It represents a convergence of different multi-level and multidimensional frameworks to end war, violence, and conflict. It functions through a range of different strategies embedded in systems of military intervention, international institutions, law, constitutional design, statesociety relations, as well as development. The IPA is now embodied in the current transnational, multi-lateral and inter-governmental UN, donor, IFI, regional, legal, and NGO system. It is relatively well-known even if not widely recognised as an ‘architecture’.3 This study explores how the IPA has become systematically blocked by a series of smaller tactics and larger strategies over time. We argue that counter-peace processes have 2 Oliver P. Richmond, The Grand Design: The Evolution of International Peace Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 3 The narrower term ‘peacebuilding architecture’ is more well-known, however. In the UN system, the Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) refers to the Peacebuilding Commission, the Peacebuilding Fund, and the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) which function under the UN Secretariat. In a wider UN context, the UN peace architecture covers also the department of political affairs, peacebuilding, and peace operations. See, Report of the Secretary-General, “Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace,” A/72/707– S/2018/43, 18 January 2018, para. 6: Fernando Cavalcante, Peacebuilding in the United Nations (London: Palgrave, 2019), 222. See also: Cederic de Coning and Eli Stamnes, eds., UN Peacebuilding Architecture: The First 10 Years (London: Routledge, 2016).

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become increasingly sophisticated, particularly since the 1990s. Moreover, we endeavour to outline different counter-peace patterns and their wider implications. To understand these processes, we also have to understand the historical development of the IPA and its broad dimensions. The international peace architecture can be described as a grand but flawed design for peacemaking. Roughly it comprises of six stages of development. In prototypical form it dates back at least as far as the Duc de Sully’s ‘Grand Design’ in the seventeenth century.4 It has slowly encompassed the local, state, regional, and global scales of international relations. But what does this peace architecture entail and how has it been created? Every political system requires complex systems to maintain its legitimacy, including knowledge, power, the ability to innovate, provide inter-generational maintenance, and reflect everyday political claims for order, progress, and sustainability.5 The international peace architecture was formed through parallel processes to combat war and violence, through global, regional and state frameworks, and in local and transnational processes involving a complex development and expansion of rights.6 Stage one emerged from the balancing system of nineteenth century geopolitics, which allowed limited progress to be made on the basis of a fragile, imperial balance of power. This laid the basis for stage two, after the First World War, when the American backed liberal internationalist system was built. International law, new forms of diplomacy, democracy, and growing multilateralism, consolidated the international peace architecture during the twentieth century. Stage three incorporated the Marxist challenge to imperialism, capitalism, and liberalism, drawing on socialist revolutionary philosophies, the Soviet Union’s vision of international peace, as well as the growing demands made by newly decolonised states in the 1960s (including the Non-Aligned Movement). Stage three

4 Duc De Sully, Sully’s Grand Design of Henry IV : From the Memoirs of Maximilien De Béthune (Wentworth Press, 2016 [1638/1662]), cited in F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge University Press, 1963), 25–29 and 33. 5 Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 36; Michael Pugh, “Peacekeeping and Critical Theory,” International Peacekeeping 11, no. 1 (2004): 39–58. 6 Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in and Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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resulted in the Cold War balance of power and an ideological, developmental stalemate. It also provided a platform for global networks focused on matters of peace and justice to expand into civil society, science and technology, trade, law, conventions, and treaties by the 1970s. As multilateral and regional institutions developed over the latter half of the century, an important convergence arose with the Helsinki Accords of 1975. They connected foreign policy, human rights, and the constitution of a European and potentially global order, which capitalised on the international peace architecture. These dynamics led to stage four after the end of the Cold War. This stabilised the existing layers of the architecture while enormously expanding its overall scope. It required a much higher set of standards. The ‘Agenda for Peace’, published by the UN Secretary General in 1992, linked “…social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” with prevention, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding as well as disarmament, drawing stages one to four together.7 The international peace architecture now included the UN, NATO, the EU, AU, and other regional organisations, as well as the international financial institutions, various international courts and law, the donor system, social movements, and a multiplying range of peace-related NGOs. In addition, it supported a constitutional model, a system of international law, and inter-governmental institutions in a complex web of interdependence, norms, and standards. By this point, the international peace architecture was becoming aligned with social claims for security, rights, welfare, and justice, as well as more complex identities. This process positioned a layer of liberal internationalism upon the nineteenth century ‘balance of power’ system, creating the possibility for the mitigation of imperial and state-centric war, as well as civil war. Through this process, critical, everyday, subaltern claims were represented in several waves through stages two, three and four. Yet, their influence has been constrained by existing knowledge-power structures. Public goods emerged to maintain peace and order through institutions, law, development and legitimacy, their effects spilling across local to global scales. Stage four enabled claims for rights and justice to

7 Boutros Boutros Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Preventative Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (New York: United Nations, 1992).

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expand substantially, also reducing more revolutionary pressures on the international system.8 By stages five and six the IPA was suffering from growing instabilities due to its expansion, while the nature of war also evolved.9 By stage four, the international peace architecture ran on a very low margin of reserve capacity drained by its scale and its complex processes. This meant intervention (broadly defined as peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, and development), the reform of the state, and civil peace formation processes came to operate within the framework of preserving states and supporting only the most basic of rights, known as the ‘stabilisation’ approach (as in the UN stabilisation missions across Sub-Saharan Africa).10 The 2000s therefore saw the rise of an authoritarian and neoliberal peace in stage five of the international peace architecture, focused on limited statebuilding and basic regional security.11 It was supported by global capital in the hope that this would buttress the development of legitimate authority in conflict-affected environments like Afghanistan and Iraq.12 The West and emerging powers such as China and India13 supported the authoritarian and neoliberal peace for geopolitical and geoeconomic reasons: to protect trade relations and investment, as well as to extend or preserve their regional influence. Stage five was careless with the legitimacy of the existing international peace architecture, turning to neoliberal, technological, and military

8 Oliver P. Richmond, “What Is an Emancipatory Peace?,” Journal of International Political Theory 18, no. 2 (2022): 124–147. 9 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 3rd Edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 10 David Keen with Larry Attree, Dilemmas of Counter-Terror, Stabilisation and

Statebuilding (London: Saferworld, 2015), 2: See also, Stabilisation Unit, The UK Government’s Approach to Stabilisation (London: UK-FCO, 2014); International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, A New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States (New York: IDPS, 2011). 11 David Lewis, John Heathershaw, and Nick Megoran, “Illiberal Peace? Authoritarian Modes of Conflict Management,” Cooperation and Conflict 53, no. 4 (2018): 486–506. 12 Eric Herring, “Neoliberalism Versus Peacebuilding in Iraq,” in Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding, ed. Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper, and Mandy Turner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 13 Oliver P. Richmond and Ioannis Tellidis, “Emerging Actors in International Peacebuilding and Statebuilding: Status Quo or Critical States?,” Global Governance 20, no. 4 (2014): 563–584.

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hegemony. This strategy undermined the entire architecture as well as the micro-processes within it (such as peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, and mediation). Stabilisation strategies risked abandoning previous layers of the international peace architecture. They offered little in the way of a response to new modes of war, now experienced as piecemeal, disaggregated, multiple phenomena: from the complex, regional and civil war in Syria, to guerrilla and paramilitary warfare in Colombia, the convergence of ethnic insurgencies and civil war in Burma, and urban violence of the kind seen in Latin America in particular, as well as the coexistence of rebel insurgencies, secessionist conflicts and localised land disputes in sub-Saharan Africa (as in Sudan, Somalia and parts of the Sahel region). With the arrival of the peacebuilding doctrine in the 1990s, broader strategies that were expected to deal with deeper instabilities and injustices also preserved the northern dominated hierarchy. They increasingly blocked structural reform, and the expansion of rights and justice. More recently key donors and states have been flirting with dismantling much of the international peace architecture. Consequently, stage six of the architecture would inevitably require intellectual innovation, and material and geopolitical investment, support for rights expansion and subaltern claims (in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals [2015]).14 Democratising the international system would ensure that the concerns of civil society networks regarding global inequalities and ecological sustainability can no longer be ignored. From this, emancipatory global governance based on global cooperation and justice might emerge. Such a trajectory would reflect deep relationality across societies and the deep structures of the environment or commons. Stage six might reflect the long process of ‘rights-seeking’ across cultural, political, social, and economic terrains, pushing beyond a coreperiphery, neo-colonial or neoliberal political economy. It highlights two processes: one a linear process of institution and constitution building, perhaps leading to closer integration, and secondly the micro-powers that actualise subaltern political claims, via a networked, transversal process,

14 “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” A/RES/70/1, September 2015; UN General Assembly, Sustainable Development Goal 16, A/RES/70/1, “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” 21 October 2015.

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leading to more decentralised systems of governance.15 This points to complex forms of peace that support reconciliation, equality, justice and sustainability across issue areas, networks, and scales. However, retrogressive alternatives are also on the horizon. The mounting contradictions and failures of the previous layers have meant that stage six is clearly bifurcated, limiting its capacity to stabilise the existing layers of the international peace architecture or deal with the newer dynamics driving war and conflict. Its alternative path points to a ‘pax technica’:16 a hybrid of neoliberalism and new technologies of power, extending many of the older, predatory patterns of elite political power, which might be termed ‘digital governmentality’. It may refresh variants of stages one and five (geopolitics and statebuilding/stabilisation), and reject or dilute expanded rights and scientific claims about sustainability and global justice.17 The current tendency of authoritarian countries to

15 J.A. Rosenau cited in Philip G. Cerny and Alex Prichard, “The New Anarchy: Globalisation and Fragmentation in World Politics,” Journal of International Political Theory 13, no. 3 (2017): 378–394; Brent L. Pickett, “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance,” Polity 28, no. 4 (1996): 445–466. 16 Philip N. Howard, Pax Technica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), xix. Pax technica is a new empire drawing on a technical rationality that emerges from networked devices, networked power, and networked society. It undermines the statessystem and democracy, as well as the concept of the state as a self-determining unit, as such concepts are transcended by a range of networks. Ibid., pp. xx, 1 and 33–35. See also Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Sphere Books, 1968), 25, cited in Mark Duffield, Post-humanitarianism (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 41. 17 Mark Duffield, “The Resilience of the Ruins: Towards a Critique of Digital Humanitarianism,” Resilience 4, no. 3 (2016): 147–165: See also Margaret Kohn, “Postcolonialism and Global Justice,” Journal of Global Ethics 9, no. 2 (2013): 190: Fred Dallmayr, “Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political,” Political Theory 31, no. 3 (2003): 421–442; Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005): 113–147; Martha Nussbaum, “Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 176–206; Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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deploy strategies of illiberal conflict management18 and the global dissemination of surveillance technologies19 suggests that stage six may further erode the international peace architecture. Overall, the international peace architecture represents an attempt to respond to the aftermath of different types of war while maintaining western and northern hegemony, yet also supporting the construction of a social state. These goals are contradictory: the international peace architecture combines both emancipatory and hegemonic frameworks, in which ideological contestation has not been resolved. It represents a reactive architecture that mainly evolves after new dynamics of war and violence threaten the international system. Yet, each stage is also a vehicle for the expansion of subaltern and human rights claims across the international system, which has influenced the development of the social contract, the nature of the state, and international order itself. This is reflected in the UN’s recent Sustaining Peace agenda. The international peace architecture now connects peace with scientific positions far beyond those suggested by geopolitics, the nation state, or western-dominated elite multilateralism. It is perhaps for these reasons—as this preliminary study proposes— that counter-peace retrenchments, combined with new forms of conflict, have appeared to overwhelm the capacity of the international peace architecture as it is currently constituted. This raises a contemporary policy and intellectual question for those working in and on international relations: how might reactionary forces connected to the newer dynamics of war be tamed by another layer of the international peace architecture, while at the same time stabilising the entire, complex, and fragile edifice?

Blockages and Counter-Peace in Practice: Some Preliminary Examples This section draws on our case study reports to provide some empirical illustrations of counter-peace processes to give the reader a clearer sense of the phenomenon of the counter-peace before its tactics, patterns

18 Lewis et al., “Illiberal Conflict Management”; Constantini and Santini, “Power Mediators”. 19 See for instance: Darren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (London: Atlantic Books, 2022).

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and international strategies are examined in more detail in the subsequent chapters. In the stalled peace process and UN peacekeeping and mediation in Cyprus, concerns about sovereignty have been used by political elites to block civil society-level accommodation and undermine international mediation.20 This has turned peacekeeping into a status quo-oriented framework shoring up a cease-fire but little more. As International Relations has shifted from post-WW2 decolonisation and geopolitics to post-Cold War international political economy issues, the peace process has been undermined by contradictory interests: liberalism has been eroded by territorialism, by power-sharing issues, and most recently by the problem of dividing the spoils of hydro-carbon discoveries in the East Mediterranean. In the case of Cyprus, the UN Peacekeeping force has long been accused of stopping fighting but removing the incentive for a political agreement simultaneously. Negotiations have been continuously stalled since 1964, indicating the closely entwined nature of peace and counter-peace processes. In the 1990s such failures were seen as the exception rather than then the norm. However, in hindsight, with the regressive tendencies now apparent across a range of cases, it looks like something more significant. Within the contradictions between peacebuilding and statebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, top-down interventions in ethnically-divided societies have resulted in patronage and elite peace capture. This has obstructed social reconciliation and thus, led to a fragile negative peace.21 Elite peace capture has emerged from the protection of power relations within the state framework and is now increasingly feeding regional geopolitics. The current lack of international political will to tie progress in the peace process to material benefits has created a vacuum, in which geopolitics gains purchase. This is a dominant and obvious starting point for counter-peace, and probably its most well-known dimension. Less obviously, the peace process in Columbia has been undermined by micro-politics that provided the basis for a more top-down and formal

20 Oliver P. Richmond, Mediating in Cyprus (London: Frank Cass, 1998). 21 James Ker-Lindsay, EU Accession and UN Peacemaking in Cyprus (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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political rejection of the peace process to arise with the remarkably reactionary stance of the government.22 Disconnecting grassroots activism for rights and equality has allowed government actors, political and economic elites to formalise their resistance to the liberal framework of the peace settlement. This elite resistance stands in strong contrast to significant civil and some indigenous support for liberal peace or local accommodation and strong international support.23 The rejectionist stance appears to be drawn from a growing alliance between state elites, capital, and some external actors also invested in more authoritarian or neoliberal solutions to war. Such tactics and strategies have blocked the main tools of peacekeeping, peacebuilding and peacemaking, and they have begun to creep into the fundamentals of the model of state and international architecture itself. This brings us to the heart of counter-peace: in the past it has often been assumed that obstacles to a peace process were the residue of pre-settlement politics, were uncoordinated, and unlikely to return if civil society, the state, and the international community were united in their support of the peace process. In fact, what we are beginning to see is the emergence of a coordinated, multi-level and multi-dimensional system of opposition to the various dynamics of peacebuilding and peace processes, mirroring to a significant extent the debates about counterrevolutionary networks and their capacity to cement pre-revolutionary power structures and exclusions through elements of the liberal peace (as has been argued in Egypt and in other parts of the MENA region).24 This is echoed in the ‘virtual’ peace in Cambodia, where local and international conditions gave rise to new authoritarianism (or illiberalism) under Hun Sen in Cambodia especially after the apparent coup of 1997.25 Elite, capitalist, cultural, and social forces came together to support Hun 22 See: Blockages Project: Colombia Report, 2020; Jasmin Hristov, Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism: Violent Systems of Capital Accumulation in Colombia and Beyond (London: Pluto, 2014), 4. 23 Kristian Herbolzheimer, “Innovations in the Colombian Peace Process” (Oslo: Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center, 2016). Online at: https://www.c-r.org/res ource/innovations-colombian-peace-process. 24 Sandra Pogodda, “Revolutions and the Liberal Peace: Peacebuilding as Counterrevolutionary Practice?,” Cooperation and Conflict 55, no. 3 (2020): 347–364. 25 Amitav Acharya, “Cambodia, the United Nations and the Problems of Peace,” The Pacific Review 7, no. 3 (1994): 297–308; Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, “Liberal Hubris? Virtual Peace in Cambodia,” Security Dialogue 38, no. 1 (2007): 27–48.

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Sen’s illiberal state, indicating a range of core blockages to peace. Strategies to overcome them, from donor pressure (including from the US and EU), formal political opposition, and civil society have not been able to disentangle the counter-peace framework in Cambodia’s case so far.26 Indeed, the international community appears complicit insofar as ‘stabilisation’ rather than rights and needs have become its goal. This also contributes to the consolidation of the counter-peace. In the case of the complex and protracted conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a similar mix of entrenched authoritarian structures of political, social, and economic power, combined with exclusionary forms of development have eroded prospects for peace based upon human rights and communal needs.27 Co-opting, rebuffing, and rejecting peace interventions, but perhaps not ending them, is part of the counterpeace system. Similar dynamics have been playing out in frozen peace processes from the Balkans to the post-Soviet sphere. This affects not just cases of peacemaking and reform, but the integral mechanisms of the international peace architecture. As with peacekeeping in Cyprus, international mediation is also subject to similar ‘devious objectives’, contributing to a counter-peace system.28 Based on a genealogy of international mediation, the case studies of failed peacemaking in the Syrian and the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts29 suggest that the fatal flaw of peace negotiations lies in their very design: the entangled counter-peace framework now controls the liberal peace architecture rather than the other way around. This can also be seen in the peace and state formation processes, revolution, and counterrevolution in Tunisia and Egypt. Reforms, even when agreed have been uneven and lacked engagement with economic 26 See: Blockages Project: Cambodia Report, 2021; Mneesha Gellman, “World Views in Peace Building: A Post-conflict Reconstruction Challenge in Cambodia,” Development in Practice 20, no. 1 (2010): 85–98. 27 Rachel Sweet, “Peacebuilding as State Building? Lessons from the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” in The State of Peacebuilding in Africa, ed. Terence McNamee and Modne Muyangwa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 28 Oliver P. Richmond, “Devious Objectives and the Disputants’ View of International Mediation: A Theoretical Framework,” Journal of Peace Research 35, no. 6 (1998): 707– 722. Richmond, 2018. 29 Sara Hellmüller, “Peacemaking in a Shifting World Order: A Macro-Level Analysis of UN Mediation in Syria,” Review of International Studies 48, no. 3 (2022): 543–559.

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grievances. In both cases, democratisation has been emptied of its transformational potential.30 Development policies meanwhile, continue to erode socio-economic rights and reinforce the grievances of a restive population.31 Hence some elements of the liberal peace helped to disguise old regime interests, while international intervention appears as a counterrevolutionary force.32 Elements of the liberal peace, which could have helped to achieve further revolutionary objectives (in particular accountability of the old regime, security sector reforms and social justice), by contrast, have not been applied in Egypt or Tunisia. This collaboration between old regime elites’ and international interests demonstrates why revolutionary societies challenge the international peace architecture on multiple levels. It also explains why progress has remained elusive. Everyday claims for expanded rights often point to social forms of state formation, which are in turn constrained by elite resistance and international deficits in capacity, understanding and political will. Thus, national and international blockages may undermine civil, social, and revolutionary aims to dismount hegemonic power-structures and reverse marginalisation in order to establish more just social and political orders. Opposition to grassroots notions of post-dictatorial justice is thus not fragmented and ill-coordinated, but in fact constitutes an institutional network of power in itself, residing in the state and the international system.

Tactical Blockages and Strategies of Counter-Peace Internal tensions in the different elements of the international peace architecture ensured that it became more entrenched and difficult to reform as it expanded. This chapter provides some background for this analysis of blockages and counter-peace. The IPA became strongly associated with Enlightenment theories of peaceful politics as well as with Western hegemony in the global order. It therefore simultaneously addressed and provoked revanchist forces associated with systems of geopolitics, nationalism, race, class, gender, and capital. The IPA’s practices involved confronting and challenging existing vested power 30 Blockages Project: Tunisia Report, 2019. 31 Ibid. 32 Pogodda, “Revolutions and the Liberal Peace.”

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structures in conflict-affected countries. Its capacity is very much reactive given the power-relations peacemaking confronts. This general framework is further outlined in Chapter 2. Peace is always formed after conflict and is subject to a mix of social and elite forces. International interventions and domestic social orders that emerge are not able to anticipate the nature of future wars because of their limited capacities. Stage four’s global scale, as noted above, also meant that a convergence of peacekeeping, mediation, democratisation, and development strategies would often face the charge of inconsistency in maintaining a common, normative order. This is often illustrated with the contrast between the cases of Syria since 2011 and Rwanda in 1994 compared to Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 1990s.33 This convergence was soon to be opposed by traditional power alignments (class, capital, state, and geopolitics), by the emerging ‘great powers’ of the twenty-first century.34 This array of blockages hindered peace processes and constituted a substantial counter-peace framework, as becomes clear in the later chapters of this book. Post-colonial and decolonial critiques, by contrast, aim to open the international peace architecture up to a pursuit of global justice and equality, eroding great-power dominance in international relations.35 The example of peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina is illustrative. Since the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, ethno-nationalist power structures have been revived.36 These seemingly ad hoc dynamics have blocked reforms, stopped the expansion of civil society, and pushed back the rule of law. They have also limited the scope for action of the Office of the High Representative. With both the democratic pathway to reconciliation and the blockage-breaking Bonn powers being obstructed, the conflict has not moved beyond the negative peace established by the Dayton Peace Accords. Bosnia’s progress towards EU accession has stalled

33 Lidén Kristoffer, “Building Peace Between Global and Local Politics: The Cosmopolitical Ethics of Liberal Peacebuilding,” International Peacekeeping 16, no. 5 (2009): 616–634. 34 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 35 Amitav Acharya, “Studying the Bandung Conference from a Global IR Perspective,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 70, no. 4 (2016): 342–357. 36 Roberto Belloni, The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans (London: Palgrave, 2019), esp. chapter 8.

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because offending power structures were supported by rents received from ethno-nationalism, territorialism, secessionism, militarism, as well as gains made from unregulated capital. The UN, EU, and other organisations supported stabilisation policies as a result. This enabled continuity in public office and institutions, reflecting elite power. These counter-peace dynamics neutralised the already weak liberal peacebuilding framework. Reconciliation has been replaced by entrenchment, which may slide back towards conflict without decisive regional and international engagement. This reiterates a familiar, contemporary story: that conflict requires peacemaking systems to be embedded in social, state, regional and international frameworks, as indicated in the Introduction. If they become derailed or collapse because of ad hoc blockages or more purposive counter-peace challenges, the international peace architecture may need to be reinvented or reinvigorated, starting the cycle once more. This is why it is important to understand the tactics and strategies of counterpeace as this study further outlines. Chapter 2 defines the concept of the counter-peace, the utility of the concept and offers an initial macropolitical analysis of its modus operandi. Chapter 3 locates the counter-peace in the existing literature. It provides the theoretical framing of the counter-peace as a concept, developed by drawing on the literature on counter-revolutions. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 outline the key patterns of blockages that have perpetuated or escalated the conflict. Moreover, these chapters identify the respective epicentres of the conflict, the role of international peace architecture and the possibility of popular backing for domestic counter-peace processes. By identifying stable sets of blockages, these chapters provide evidence for the existence of a coordinated effort to sabotage international peacemaking. Chapter 7 outlines how small-scale counter-peace tactics are combined into strategies at the international stage. Chapter 8 investigates different trajectories that are leading revanchist or revisionist actors from cooperation with the international peace architecture to sabotage and rivalry. Chapter 9 examines how the rise of the counter-peace on the international stage impacts the IPA and the international order. Through this investigation, the book aims to answer the following questions: what explains the current stagnation, collapse or reversal of peace processes worldwide? Which patterns of blockages have emerged and what are the driving forces that produce these counter-peace processes? What does the rise of revanchist and revisionist forces in the emerging multipolar mean for the viability of the IPA?

CHAPTER 2

Conceptualizing the Counter-Peace

Abstract This chapter conceptualises the counter-peace in three important ways: firstly, it defines the concept and outlines its uses. Secondly, it briefly introduces its emerging patterns, which will be further elaborated in Chapters 4–6. Moreover, it offers a macropolitical analysis of the modus operandi of the counter-peace. This in turn provides the reader with a more concrete understanding of what this concept contribution to the analysis of contemporary conflicts. This chapter builds on the understanding of the international peace architecture previously presented and explains how the counter-peace has benefitted from the IPA’s flaws and internal contradictions. Keywords Counter-peace · Peace spoilers · Stalemate conflicts · Fragile peace · Unmitigated conflicts

Understanding Counter-Peace It is little understood why peace processes supported by the international peace architecture (IPA) have so frequently failed. Indeed, the past three decades have witnessed the collapse of many peace processes (e.g. in Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Burma and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3_2

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El Salvador), the inability of long-standing international peace interventions to resolve conflicts (e.g. in the DRC, CAR, Mali, Bosnia, Kosovo and Cyprus) and access to ongoing conflicts being blocked (e.g. Syria, Ethiopia). The existing international peace architecture (IPA) thus appears weak and ineffective. This multi-layered framework of interventionary practices, international law, multilateral institutions, donors and civil society appears increasingly unable to effectively support peace processes, peacemaking tools, and local peace activism. As explained in the previous chapter the IPA represents an awkward and unstable synthesis of state power, interests, pragmatism, internationalism along with science, transnational ethics, and transversal emancipatory claims. In practice, illiberal and authoritarian outcomes are not unusual (as in Guatemala, Cambodia, El Salvador or Afghanistan).1 In some cases, peace processes have become more important than a settlement (e.g. Cyprus),2 or almost as loathed as open conflict (e.g. Palestine and Colombia), while reform processes have been halted or reversed (e.g. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya Yemen and Bosnia3 ). Across different regions, the inability of domestic actors to resolve disputes peacefully and the failure of external interventions point to the crucial importance of common tactical blockages and their capacity to spur conflict escalation by connecting spoiling dynamics and actors. A first step is to understand complex stalled peace processes in relation to each other, rather than merely as isolated phenomena that arise from tactical reactions to political reform, the exclusion of violence as a political tool, and commensurate shifts in power relations after a peace agreement or during a peacebuilding processes. The concept of blockages to peace offers a critical heuristic primarily concerned with producing a clearer understanding of actors, tactics, factors, and internal and external 1 Council on Hemispheric Relations, “Guatemala’s Crippled Peace Process: A Look Back on the 1996 Peace Accords,” May 10, 2011. Online at: http://www.coha.org/ guatemalas-crippled-peace-process-a-look-back-on-the-1996-peace-accords/; Report of the Secretary General, United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala, General Assembly, A/58/262, 08 August 2003, §34; Pierre P. Lizée, Peace, Power and Resistance in Cambodia: Global Governance and the Failure of Conflict Resolution (London: Macmillan, 1999); Diana Villiers Negroponte, Seeking Peace in El Salvador (New York: Palgrave, 2011), x–xi. 2 Richmond, Mediating in Cyprus. 3 Belloni, The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans, 73: Oliver P. Richmond and

Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

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dynamics that impede peacemaking, while preserving the façade of an agreement or political reform. Blocked peace processes impact on the broader international peace architecture. The latter has sought to regulate war between states, build regional and international systems of governance, trade, and development, reform conflict-affected states, introduce checks and balances, human rights, democracy, and build a social contract. It has also tried to expand and reform its toolkit as the nature of conflict and violence shifted from total industrial, to anti-colonial, post-imperial, identity-based, and resource conflict over the last century. Impeding the IPA, even at the tactical level and in isolated contexts, allows for a more substantial counter-peace framework to emerge. There is much evidence that tactical blockages are disseminated across and between conflict-affected societies, in other words. The tactical and strategic dimensions of counter-peace help explain the weakness of the international peace architecture, and clarifies how we might define the concept of the counter-peace: i. proto-systemic strategies that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational); and ii. tactics that exploit structural blockages as well as unintended consequences of peace interventions in order to block peace processes and reforms. Counter-peace processes may mimic a watered-down version of a peace process, in which the hierarchies, inequalities, and forms of marginalisation that fuelled the conflict are preserved, but where stability is restored through pacification. They may also constitute parasitic processes, in which spoilers subvert peace interventions supported by the IPA in order to erode their emancipatory potential. This line of thought draws on concepts such as authoritarian conflict management,4 ‘illiberal peacebuilding’,5 and from earlier work, on

4 Lewis et al., “Illiberal Peace? Authoritarian Modes of Conflict Management.” 5 Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, “Illiberal Peacebuilding in Angola,” The Journal of Modern

African Studies 49, no. 2 (2011): 287–314.

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‘spoilers’6 and on ‘devious objectives’.7 Recent debates on so called ‘Chinese peacebuilding’, and their attractiveness around the Global South indicate the propensity for such counter-networks to intensify.8 Many of these analyses have pointed to smaller tactics and patterns (partly because they assume that liberal hegemony has been fundamental and unchallengeable after 1989), but they also implicitly raise the issue of strategy. From an international perspective, strategies may connect ideological contests with the proliferation of localised tactics that hollow out peace processes across different regions and conflicts. Much of the scholarly work done so far suggests that the former BRICS grouping, some Gulf States, several sub-Saharan African states, and others, have encouraged, joined and supported such practices. This has been despite some earlier, post-colonial hope that they might offer more emancipatory perspectives.9 These dynamics point to a complex constellation of blockages to peace occurring at the local, national, regional and international level, serving to counter the international and local efforts for peacemaking. Counter-norms to the liberal peace framework might be part of wider counter-peace strategies as much as counter-insurgency in the context of the diplomatic and military interventions led by the UN, regional bodies, and coalitions of states. In short, if complex sets of blockages in peace processes can be detected across a range of empirical cases then this indicates the emergence of an informal counter-peace architecture that may significantly reshape international order. This understanding allows us, we argue, to further investigate the struggle between peace and counter-peace and lays out the contours of

6 See for example, Stephen John Stedman, “Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes,” International Security 22, no. 2 (1997): 5–53; Edward Newman and Oliver Richmond, eds., Challenges to Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers During Conflict Resolution (Tokyo: UNU Press, 2006). 7 Stedman, “Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes”; Newman and Richmond, Challenges to Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers During Conflict Resolution; Richmond, “Devious Objectives and the Disputants’ View of International Mediation: A Theoretical Framework.” 8 Kwok Chung Wong, “The Rise of China’s Developmental Peace: Can an Economic Approach to Peacebuilding Create Sustainable Peace?,” Global Society 35, no. 4 (2021): 522–540. 9 Oliver P. Richmond and Ioannis Tellidis, “Emerging Actors in International Peacebuilding and Statebuilding: Status Quo or Critical States?,” Global Governance 20, no. 4 (2014): 563–584.

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the emerging counter-peace architecture in the international transitional order. In particular, it enables the pursuit of two objectives: i. elaborating prevalent counter-peace patterns that have emerged in conflicts across the world; and ii. examining how counter-peace tactics have been evolving into strategies and investigating the differences in their underlying ideologies. Hence, the concept of counter-peace may be used as a tool to critically interrogate a potentially systemic array of blockages to peace, juxtaposing peace processes with insights drawn from counter-revolutionary theory.

Counter-Peace Patterns By exploring the idea of blockages and the counter-peace framework, we aim to expand the conceptual scope of critical debates in peace and conflict studies.10 Our analysis distils the widespread failure or stagnation of attempts to make peace into three observable patterns, covering conflict-affected, revolutionary, secessionist and settler-colonial contexts. This ultimately allows for critical insights on emancipatory forms of peace connected to concepts of global justice. Distinct patterns are emerging in the blockage of peace and reform processes. The most prevalent patterns in stagnating and faltering peace processes we propose are as follows: i. the stalemate pattern; ii. the limited counter-peace pattern; and iii. the unmitigated counter-peace pattern. This framework helps to identify how reactionary processes operate to challenge peace praxis in order to preserve power, stratification, hostile identity framings and economic privileges. Furthermore, we analyse how peace interventions have become entangled with counter-peace processes and elaborate the roots of and alliances between counter-peace forces.

10 Oliver P. Richmond, A Post Liberal Peace (London: Routledge, 2011); Oliver P. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State, and the Dynamics of Peace Formation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

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Analysis of the underlying strategies and ideologies of counter-peace actors helps to understand how durable the alliances between them might be. This leads to the following questions: which factors consolidate or deteriorate emerging conflict patterns? Are blockages to peace systemic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counter-peace edifice? Does the analysis of the underlying counter-peace ideologies suggest that counter-peace tactics are merging into more durable strategies? Or is there sufficient strategic and ideological divergence between the different strands of counter-peace forces to expect that current alliances are unstable? Drawing on the concept of counter-revolution, this approach helps in the exploration of how emancipatory goals (meaning rights, democracy, law, justice, development, reconciliation, accountability, and sustainability) inherent in contemporary peace processes are resisted. Existing research in peace and conflict studies tends to examine peace processes, peacebuilding, and statebuilding as if they were processes that need to be refined, centred upon a liberal democratic state and the liberal international order.11 Due to their dysfunctionality, conflict-affected societies are removed from the international order and lack a peaceful social and regional order, but are required to make qualifying moves in both directions. This points to the need to instead examine the possibility that conflicts and peace processes are the result of connections across scales and networks rather than phenomena that arise in locales. Hence, neither analysis of the international, state or sub-state level can adequately capture the dynamics leading to conflict or peace. Focusing on the levels of analysis model for local, state, and international dynamics thus omits crucial elements of peace and war. Contemporary peace processes partly rest on connecting domestic peace agency with networks of international actors within a supportive structural environment, allowing synergies to overcome conflict dynamics and to rebuild peaceful social orders. Counterpeace processes equally require trans-scalar connections between local spoilers and their international backers, which can exploit conflict-fuelling structural forces and unintended consequences of peace interventions.

11 See: Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Roland Paris, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 337–65; Richmond, A Post Liberal Peace.

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Separate analysis through an anthropological, politics or IR lens— covering respectively the local, national or international level—would thus obscure the multi-dimensional nature of counter-processes, which are blocking the possibility of peace, justice, and reform. This means that peacemaking operates in a blind spot without a clear idea of how counter-peace processes work and how to contain them. In other words, the state and international approaches to peace and war overlook the fact that local conflicts are partly global, and global conflicts are partly local, when placed in a networked and scalar mode of analysis. This allows blockages to be perceived as minor and scattered, and counter-peace to remain disguised. Accordingly, the IPA has not developed any strategies to ward off the systematic disruption of its peace processes. What does this imply for the concepts and practices associated with peace, reform, justice, and social or civil political agency? There is an emerging consensus in the literature that a concerted push back from authoritarian elites around the world against such emancipatory practices has developed in conflict-affected societies and in regional politics.12 We argue that counter-peace pre-dates contemporary peace processes. Yet, stalled peace processes may strengthen counter-peace actors, who have learned to exploit the flaws and unintended consequences of the IPA as well as structural obstacles to peace. Gains made by previous peace interventions can be reversed, if spoilers attract the sponsorship of international actors in stagnating peace processes. Domestically, counter-peace actors can broaden such alliances by exploiting structural violence and dissent against unpopular types of peace interventions in their recruitment efforts. Since the IPA is riven with uncertain compromises, it has itself become compromised. Some of its elements contradict each other and provide opportunities for systematic blockages of peace processes as this book demonstrates: top-down statebuilding and peacebuilding interventions in ethnically-divided societies have resulted in elite peace capture which exploits power-sharing arrangements to obstruct reconciliation.13 Elites’ or identity groups’ control of state institutions and resources has survived 12 Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Christopher Walker, eds., Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 13 Christine Wade, Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016).

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the attempts of peace processes, social and revolutionary movements to redistribute.14 Hence, civil society struggles with these (often externally supported) power structures, everyday nationalism within and outside institutional settings, unresolved legacies of the conflict, and with socioeconomic impoverishment reinforced by neoliberal statebuilding. The failure of international statebuilding to respond to local culture, needs, and interests, as well as questions related to global justice, has empowered unstable neoliberal, criminalised power structures, and warlords.15 This undermines conciliatory forms of peace, and has given rise to even more narrowly based ‘stabilisation’ approaches.16 In this process, rights and material gains that should be associated with peace and reform, especially from an ethical and scientific basis, have been eroded. Meanwhile the networked, scalar, and mobile elements of a ‘digital’ shift in international relations have been ignored, especially where this shift countermands rights and global civil society campaigns and supports authoritarian forms of power. Consequently, the concept of counter-peace helps to map out the formal and informal structures and processes that resist and reshape peace processes in relation to political order (including through mediation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding or statebuilding). This in turn points to the relationship between scientific and ideological knowledge about peace and order. Hence, Chapters 7–9 of our book examine the underlying ideological contestation of peace in the emerging multipolar order. By identifying the strategies of different counter-peace actors and their engagement with the IPA, this helps in understanding how different epicentres of the counter-peace with their distinct approaches to conflict-affected societies mobilise resistance against the liberal hegemony of the unipolar order. In particular, this points to the strategies pursued by Turkey, China and Russia, and the related ideological implications for peacemaking in a multipolar environment.

14 John Brewer, Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach (London: Polity, 2010). 15 Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State, and the Dynamics of Peace

Formation; Susan Woodward, The Ideology of Failed States: Why Intervention Fails (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 16 David Keen with Larry Attree, Dilemmas of Counter-Terror, Stabilisation and Statebuilding (London: Saferworld, January 2015), 2; see also, Stabilisation Unit, The UK Government’s Approach to Stabilisation; International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, A New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States.

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Conclusion Foregrounding the analysis of scales, networks, and structures, rather than levels of analysis enables an understanding of how counter-peace agency has created complex systems of heterarchical networks. A transversal and trans-scalar analysis allows us to examine the different dimensions of the counter-peace without reducing complex dynamics of conflict to narrow state-centric, problem-solving, internationally driven interventions.17 This opens up a range of areas of concern, from issues of historical and redistributive justice, to power relations, structural-material matters, identity and everyday agency, as well as rights, justice, and institutions. Deficits in such areas have combined to substantially undermine the IPA. This has created space for counter-peace tactics and strategies to emerge. Beyond providing a definition of the concept of counter-peace, this chapter outlines the entanglement of the IPA with counter-peace processes. Within the IPA, “peace capture” has been facilitated by politics of identity, formalised political unsettlements,18 centralised forms of governance, elite diplomacy, security-oriented interventions, failed state reform, and neoliberal development strategies. The prospects for sustainable peace and ethnic reconciliation, meanwhile, are undermined by elite co-optation of power-sharing arrangements, subterranean and networked movements, as well as vernacular acts of ethnic violence.19 The quality of peace in most conflict-affected societies today is not “emancipatory”20 because it only offers its dividends selectively: security, justice, empowerment, support to partake in public affairs, socio-economic needs satisfaction, and support to exercise individual rights while embracing political obligations are not accessible to many. Combining security, human security, rights, democracy, development, welfare, and global justice21 in a 17 Richmond, A Post Liberal Peace. 18 Christine Bell and Jan Pospisil, “Navigating Inclusion in Transitions from Conflict:

The Formalised Political Unsettlement,” Journal of International Development 29, no. 5 (2017): 576–593. 19 Severine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of

International Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 20 Oliver P. Richmond, “What Is an Emancipatory Peace?,” Journal of International Political Theory 18, no. 2 (2022): 124–147. 21 UN 2018; Kohn, “Postcolonialism and Global Justice,” 190; Dallmayr, “Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political”; Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World; Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice”; Nussbaum, “Duties of Justice,

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global framework of comparison, on the other hand would mean peace processes and agreements might maintain their legitimacy in the longer term (even if this leads to elite opposition and attempts at revisionism). Modern peace settlements have, by contrast, been appended to neoliberal versions of state and rights, rather the global forms of justice. Thus, the territorial state and related international architecture are no longer the sole fulcrum around which the dynamics of conflict can be dealt with and the liberal peace is not the only available strategy. Liberalism with its identity pluralism, centralisation, economic model, resort to power-sharing, and its territorialism has produced inescapable contradictions. These have also led to a countervailing architecture, which by now appears to be more effective than the IPA. These dichotomies may well indicate that a much grander peace dividend needs to be considered in complex global justice terms, not merely in terms of security, rights, and institutions, something which increasingly appears to underlie UN policy and doctrine (see the Sustainable Development Goals and the Sustaining Peace Agenda of 2015 and 2016). Yet, to move beyond mere discourse, it can only be achieved materially, if powerful actors and international institutions in peacebuilding, understand the blockages that have caused the failure of the IPA (in terms of legitimacy and peace). There is little sign of this, partly because the institutional and policy language is not yet available for notions of peace to advance upon liberalism and the somewhat limited focus on peacekeeping, peace processes, and peacebuilding or statebuilding, even if scholarship has pointed to hybrid, post-liberal versions, and technological and environmental dynamics that are increasingly present. The subsequent analysis starts with a positioning of patterns of counter-peace blockages within the existing literature. In particular, we will focus on the question how scholarship on counter-revolutions can inform our understanding of counter-peace processes. The subsequent three chapters elaborate three counter-peace patterns: the stalemate, the limited counter-peace and the unmitigated counter-peace. Distilling blockages to peace into counter-peace patterns that reflect the stagnation or reversal of peace processes may help explain why the IPA has

Duties of Material Aid”; Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights; John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, The Politics of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 67.

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become systematically obstructed and whether an international counterpeace framework has emerged in its shadow. Our analysis in the second part of the book investigates the rise of strategies and ideologies on the international stage that fluctuate between operating within the IPA, or challenging it and attempting to build an alternative international order. Here, the book projects our three patterns onto three global actors that have had a complicated relationship with the IPA, at times supportive and at other times openly confronting it. Elaborating the ideologies that inform their behaviour further informs our understanding of the counter-peace.

CHAPTER 3

Locating the Counter-Peace

Abstract The literature on the stagnation or failure of peace processes has rapidly grown in the past three decades. While there are many good studies on various aspects of peacemaking failures, there is not a single study which examines conceptually, empirically, and comparatively the various blockages to peace, or distils them into counter-peace patterns. Neither has there been much attempt to investigate the international dynamics behind failed peace processes. This chapter reviews some of the relevant background literature. It then distinguishes the counter-peace from other concepts before drawing on the literature on counterrevolutions to see what analysis of blocked peace processes can learn from it. Keywords Civil wars · Blockages to peace · Counterrevolution · Counter-peace actors

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3_3

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Background Literature and Concepts It has long been observed that local elites obstruct international efforts to build an effective and legitimate polity,1 giving rise to neopatrimonialism as a key blockage to peace. Local and international actors are often complicity in such dynamics.2 Yet, such studies neither distil blockages to peace into patterns, nor do they analyse the ideologies that underpin the formation of smaller blocking tactics into larger strategies. Domestic obstacles to the implementation of peace agreements after civil wars have been connected with ‘spoilers’.3 Our epistemological interest also goes beyond the literature on spoilers, however.4 The spoiler debate provided a rich conceptualization of peace spoiling actors, goals, tactics and actions, but less on their connections across all scales. For instance, Stephen Stedman’s typology of peace spoilers focuses mostly on the elite level and only briefly touches on the role of global and regional actors. It does not examine transnational blockages to peace (such as the role of political economy factors), nor local and grassroots counterpeace movements beyond organized politics.5 Crucially, due to its focus on intentionality, the spoiler debate neglects structural factors, historical pathways and unintended consequences. These limitations have prevented the spoiler debate from delivering a fuller assessment of what we consider an emerging counter-peace architecture, which connects blockages to peace across conflict spheres and cases. Such analyses do not connect blockages systematically nor contemplate the possibility of a counterpeace architecture that systematically obstructs peace processes. Often economic issues are at the heart of blockages and counter-peace.6 Some

1 Naazneen H. Barm, The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-conflict States (Oxford University Press, 2017). 2 Wade, Captured Peace. 3 Stephen J. Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens, eds., Ending

Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002). 4 See for example, Stedman, 1997; Newman and Richmond, 2006; Richmond, 1998. 5 Newman and Richmond, 2006. 6 Graciana del Castillo Obstacles to Peacebuilding (London: Routledge, 2017).

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analyses focus exclusively on spoilers with links to criminal networks and a heavily security-focused and policy-oriented outlook.7 Blockages may arise from the failure to recognise the importance of local context, needs, and culture. The question of blockages to peace has also attracted the attention of policy-oriented scholars,8 who tend to focus on geopolitical and socio-economic obstacles to building stable states and durable peace in a wide range of conflict-affected countries. Blockages may also emerge as a result of technocratic approaches used by the international community to resolve complex conflicts.9 At first glance, Johan Galtung’s negative peace might appear to be a similar concept since some empirical manifestations of the counter-peace are also characterised by a combination of surface stability and underlying violence. Both negative peace and counter-peace try to analyse why peace processes are often unstable and prone to reversal. Yet the two concepts rest on divergent assumptions and drive towards different epistemologies: Galtung’s negative peace explores different types of violence that had escaped our understanding of peace, especially structural and cultural violence.10 However, his concept essentially follows a ‘curative rationality’, which prescribes ‘a road from war to positive peace’.11 Hence, Galtung is looking for connections between different actors’ needs and ideals with the aim of moving our understanding of peace from a confrontation of unbridgeable differences (in which the realisation of one peace vision only occurs at the expense of other actor’s aspirations) to one of interconnectedness. Counter-peace, by contrast, is a diagnostic

7 Michael Dzidzic, ed., Criminalised Power Structures: The Overlooked Enemies of Peace (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 2016). 8 James Dobbins et al., Overcoming Obstacles to Peace: Local Factors in Nation-Building

(Washington: RAND, 2013). 9 Jasmine-Kim Westendorf, Why Peace Processes Fail Publishers, 2015).

(Boulder: Lynne Rienner

10 Johann Galtung, “An Editorial,” Journal of Peace Research 1, no. 1 (1964): 1–4; Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–191; Johan Galtung, “Towards a Grand Theory of Negative and Positive Peace: Peace, Security and Conviviality,” in A Grand Design for Peace and Reconciliation: Achieving Kyosei in East Asia, ed. Yoichiro Murakami and Thomas J. Schoenbaum (Cheltenham, UK and North Hampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2008), 90–106. 11 Johan Galtung and D. Fischer, “Positive and Negative Peace,” in Springer Briefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, ed. Johan Galtung (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2013).

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tool to explore the links between systemic challenges to peace. Here, the assumption is that blockages to peace might be connected in ways that have hitherto been overlooked. Hence, rather than identifying new types of violence, the counter-peace investigates the connections between already known blockages. The concept goes beyond the negative peace by searching for patterns in the tactics and strategies that block peace across different conflict spheres as well as cases. Scholarship in different theoretical and disciplinary fields has produced a large range of counter-concepts, which usually position themselves towards power: concepts such as counter-conduct,12 counterhegemony13 and counterpower14 challenge dominant forms of power, while counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and counter-revolution aim to restore them. Counter-law,15 counter-rights16 and counter-justice17 invert the principles, procedures and standards of law, rights and justice. While this book has been informed by these literatures, they lack an indepth engagement with the concept of peace. Indeed, peace requires more than rights or democracy and has a complex relationship with power: different types of power contaminate, obstruct or enable peace in various ways.18

12 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collage de France 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart and trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 13 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1973). 14 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Tim Gee, Counterpower: Making Change Happen (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications Ltd, 2011). 15 Richard Ericson, Crime in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). 16 Christoph Menke, Critique of Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). 17 J.G. Hansen, “Decolonizing Indigenous Restorative Justice Is Possible,” in Horizon North: Contact, Culture and Education in Canada, ed. Sue Matheson and John A. Butler (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 117. 18 Oliver P. Richmond, “The Paradox of Peace and Power: Contamination or Enablement?,” International Politics 54, no. 5 (2017): 637–658.

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Counter-revolution and Counter-Peace The most insightful analysis for this study among the various counterconcepts is the literature on counter-revolutions. Its utility lies in its focus on elaborating the ways in which actors try to erode, contain or eliminate emancipatory agency. The following reflections approach the concept of counter-peace by contrasting it with the critical-historical concept of the counter-revolution in order to elaborate a set of assumptions for the subsequent empirical analysis of counter-peace patterns in Chapters 4–6. In their broader outline, counter-revolution and counter-peace are similar in that our understanding of both processes is derived from what they oppose: broad security, rights, justice and equity as the hallmarks of a positive, hybrid and everyday peace19 running parallel to the emancipatory objectives of freedom and equality in revolutions.20 Accordingly, the most obvious tactics to thwart emancipatory movements involve mobilizing coercive state institutions, media, and other influential social and political structures. However, counter-revolution and counter-peace both cover a spectrum of political responses to societal and international pressure for change, which expands well beyond oppression, restoration and war. Instead, both processes are most effective, if they do not constitute the opposite of revolution and peace processes, but represent watered-down alternatives to them. They may maintain some of their benefits, such as basic security, whilst rejecting human rights as well as socio-economic and political transformations, for example. In other words, counter-peace and counter-revolution are characterised by continuity in power structures. In order to avoid fundamental transformation, counter-revolutionary or counter-peace elites may be forced to implement substantive reforms. The 1848 revolutions for instance, showed that even after the military defeat of revolutionary movements, counterrevolutionary governments might be compelled to enact fundamental political or social reforms if deep structural changes can no longer be

19 Johan Galtung, “Peace,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol. 17, (2017), 618; Oliver P. Richmond, Peace in International Relations, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2020). 20 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990 [1963]).

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postponed.21 Yet in contrast to revolutionary transformations, counterrevolutionary reforms only bow to very basic demands for change, while protecting social or political hierarchies against deep transformation.22 In contemporary peace processes, similar types of conflation occur. Peace agreements, for instance, may harbour within them the seeds of a counter-peace. While the Ta’if and Dayton agreements stopped further bloodshed in Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina respectively, they also constituted the institutional framework for peace capture. Former warlords turned into political powerholders, preserving ethnic or sectarian power structures. Like the oppressive forces that contain the emancipatory potential of revolutions, peace agreements’ initial success in ending violence soon gave way to exclusion, segregation and marginalisation. Hence, rather than leading to emancipatory peace, these agreements preempted reconciliation and preserved the pre-war power constellations (as will be further analysed below). Even without a final accord that bestows legitimacy on warlords, a peace process can become a cover for continuous counter-peace dynamics. Consecutive Israeli governments, for instance, have used peace negotiations to divert international attention away from the growing occupation of Palestine. This strategy has discouraged international solidarity with the victims of Israel’s military occupation.23 Hence, revolution and counter-revolution—as much as positive peace and counter-peace—are dialectically related.24 This understanding of the counter-revolution and counter-peace resonates with Michel Foucault’s understanding of power. Of the various factors, which make up Foucault’s notion of power, our concept of counter-peace investigates the multiplicity of dominant force relations and their institutional organisation, their mutual support and the ways in which they disconnect and

21 Arnost Klima. “The Bourgeois Revolution of 1848–9 in Central Europe,” in Revolution in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 98. 22 Eric Hobsbawm, “Revolution,” in Revolution in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11. 23 Raja Shehahde, From Occupation to Interim Accords: Israel and the Palestinian Territories (Leiden: Kluwer, 1997); Edward W. Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). 24 Hobsbawm, “Revolution,” 11.

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marginalise the struggles to transform and reverse those force relations.25 Despite the entanglement of peace and counter-peace, it is thus important to distinguish the underlying antagonistic forces. A focus on the root causes of conflicts elucidates the difference: if involvement in peace processes aims to preserve hierarchies, inequalities, and forms of marginalisation that lie at the heart of a conflict, this can be identified as counter-peace dynamics. Counter-peace in this regard mirrors the understanding of ‘restoration’ in the literature on revolutions. In their relationship with violence, counter-revolution and counterpeace cover a range of strategies. As long as revolutions were still marred by terror, war and vengeance to an extent that revolutions had been inconceivable ‘outside the domain of violence’,26 counter-revolutions may have appealed to many as a form of moderation.27 Indeed, counterrevolutionary alliances often regarded themselves as guardians of vertical (between states) as well as horizontal security (within states).28 However, in terms of their strategies of political contestation and their relationship to state power, revolutions have changed drastically over time. Due to the growth of social movements, armed take-overs of state power have largely been replaced by nonviolent, leaderless and non-ideological movements with little ambition to own the state.29 In the face of these weaker forms of revolutionary contestation, counter-revolutions have been able to refine their own strategies. Severe oppression of all forms of dissent, for instance, can be combined with democratic legitimacy as the violent reign 25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 92–93. 26 Arendt, On Revolution, 18. 27 Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Random House, 1965

[1938]). 28 Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great

Power (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 212–213. 29 Andre Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes, “Civil Democracy: Social Movements in Recent World History,” in Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the WorldSystem, ed. Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein (New Delhi: Aakar Books, 1990); Carne Ross, The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century (London: Schuster & Schuster, 2011); John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto Press, 2010); Sharon Nepstad, Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Asef Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).

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of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt has shown. External counterrevolutionary intervention can operate through aid and proxy wars as much as through direct military intervention. Equally, the counter-peace ranges from unmitigated forms (e.g. wars, dictatorship and military occupation) to the more subtle forms of political stalemate (see next section). Counter-peace and counter-revolution both capture the institutions of the state in order to change the tactics of state formation processes. Elites and their criminal networks can continue their state formation project without war by controlling state institutions. Corruption and state violence are used in this new phase of the counter-peace and counter-revolution. Since foreign governments work with and through state structures, this state capture allows aid and the counter-processes to align themselves: foreign aid after conflict builds the state (especially its coercive power)30 and thus ironically may strengthen counter-peace forces. During contemporary nonviolent attempts at revolution, a similar process tends to occur, in which external support reinforces the oppressive and exclusionary structures of the state.31 As in counter-revolutions, the mutual support of domestic and international counter-peace actors and their ability to generate support from the masses is of crucial importance to this analysis. In order to understand the connections between top-down and bottom-up forms of counter-peace, our analysis takes inspiration from scholarship on counter-revolutions by looking into the ideological, socio-economic and political connections between the masses and counter-peace elites. Ideologically, nationalism in counter-peace and traditionalism in counter-revolutions may forge crossclass alliances on similar grounds: ‘to reclaim an idealised but imperilled past and present’.32 This political project and a shared grounding in conservatism connects the counter-revolutionary elites and their mass base. Here violent state formation processes become resurgent, rather than democracy, rights, and a rule of law, and often try to counter or co-opt everyday peace formation dynamics. However, in counterrevolutions, divergent ideologies and material interests of the different

30 Richmond, Failed Statebuilding. 31 Pogodda, “Revolutions and the Liberal Peace.” 32 Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolution

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 99.

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classes have ultimately resulted in fragile alliances.33 Hence, the second part of the book will analyse whether the counter-peace indicates a similar mix of ideological unity and disunity across its various actors. The examined ideological divergence suggests that counter-peace alliances—like counter-revolutionary alliances—are unstable. In order to understand how the counter-peace can be overcome, we can draw on analysis of the defeat of counter-revolutionary alliances. The search for an institutional epicentre of the counter-peace, for instance, may give us clues about the durability of its international architecture. In revolutions, the collapse of such core institutions has often heralded the fragmentation of the counter-revolution.34 Whether a similar weakness can be detected in the counter-peace will be the subject of the following chapters.

Conclusion Drawing on the counter-revolution literature allows us to make assumptions about counter-peace processes, which systematically block peace processes. It helps to understand counter-peace as proto-systemic processes that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational), and exploits structural blockages to peace as well as unintended consequences of peace interventions. Yet counter-peace processes are not necessarily the opposite of peace processes. Instead, they can mimic a watered-down version of a peace process, in which the hierarchies, inequalities and forms of marginalisation that fuelled the conflict are preserved, but where stability is restored through pacification. They can also constitute parasitic processes, in which spoilers take over peace interventions supported by the IPA in order to erode their emancipatory potential. This leads to further questions to explore: which factors may consolidate or deteriorate emerging conflict patterns? Is the international peace architecture harbouring the dynamics of its own undoing? And are blockages to peace systemic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counter-peace edifice? In the following three chapters, we will attempt to answer these questions. Moreover, we will examine how tactical blockages to peacemaking have constituted stable patterns across conflicts world-wide.

33 Mayer, The Furies, 58–59. 34 Ibid., 57.

CHAPTER 4

The Stalemate Pattern

Abstract This chapter examines the stalemate pattern of counter-peace, which is characterised by frozen conflict, in which violence has been circumscribed and dampened down to a bare minimum but inter-group tensions persist unabated. In this stalemate pattern there is a weak alliance between civil society and international donors and multilateral actors within the IPA. The fragile peace and stalled conflict resolution processes tend to be captured by a range of legal, political, economic, and geopolitical co-dependencies, which are finely balanced but block both progress as well as the collapse of the stalemate. While stalemates have often remained in a state of negative peace for decades, shifting geopolitical power in the emerging multipolar order are threatening further destabilisation. Keywords Stalemate conflicts · Political unsettlement · Non-recognition · Geopolitical rivalry · UN peace operations

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3_4

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Key Dynamics At the heart of this pattern lies a formalised political unsettlement, in which a radical disagreement between the conflict parties cannot be resolved.1 War has been ended either through the separation of former conflict parties by continuously contested borders (e.g. territorial divisions in Cyprus, Kosovo, India/Pakistan) or through power-sharing agreements (e.g. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Burundi). While necessary to stop large-scale violence, ethnic segregation and power-sharing agreements have turned into blockages to reconciliation by reinforcing ethnic or sectarian divisions in society.2 Rather than resolving the conflict by addressing its root causes, the formalised political unsettlement only translates the war into political institutions to manage its dynamics. These institutions in turn become deadlocked and thus preserve the radical disagreement between the conflict parties.3 Indeed, the conflict parties may remain fully committed to their incompatible positions but the conflict remains ‘frozen’ as long as neither dares to attempt resolution through accommodation, withdrawal, or military conquest.4 War is thus replaced by ‘nonviolent war’ as an intense power struggle over the new state institutions ensues, in which the conflict parties maintain close alliances with violent forces.5 This dynamic has implicated peacemaking in extended deadlocks (as in Cyprus since 1963,6 or Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1995),7 which are perhaps now the norm due to a lack of political will on the part of

1 Bell and Pospisil, “Navigating Inclusion in Transitions from Conflict: The Formalised

Political Unsettlement”; Jan Pospisil, “Peace and Political Unsettlement,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, ed. Oliver P. Richmond and Gëzim Visoka (Cham: Springer, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_170-1. 2 See e.g. Andreas Mehler, “Peace and Power Sharing in Africa: A Not so Obvious Relationship,” African Affairs 108, no. 432 (2009): 453–473; Roberto Belloni, “Bosnia: Dayton Is Dead! Long Live Dayton!’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 15, no. 3–4 (2009): 355–375. 3 Bell and Pospisil, “Navigating Inclusion”; Mary Kaldor, “How Peace Agreements Undermine the Rule of Law in New War Settings,” Global Policy 7, no. 2 (2016): 146–155. 4 Louis Kriesberg, ed., Social Processes in International Relations: A Reader (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968), 553. 5 Phillippe Leroux-Martin, Diplomatic Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6 Richmond, “Devious Objectives” (1998). 7 Belloni, 2020, 73.

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the international community. This also reflects the limitations of the relationship between peace, self-determination, and sovereignty at a practical level. Iniquitous north–south dynamics in international relations might also be responsible since many frozen peace processes have emerged in former colonies or post-socialist states with acute development and economic problems. In continuous disputes over territory, self-governance, sovereignty, rights and entitlements, peace interventions inadvertently supply conflict parties with valuable resources such as time to reorganise, international legitimacy, alliances, and material support. Conflicts in the stalemate category have thus become symptomatic of many internationally sponsored peace settlements. They are often characterized by protracted dependency on external aid and intervention. While this extensive involvement of elements of the IPA might raise hopes for a strong role for civil society and a more dynamic peace process, this has often not been the case. Indeed, the following analysis will identify the stalemate as a product of state capture by counter-peace elites, rendering civil society and international peace interventions unable to move the peace process forward. Power-sharing agreements are supposed to ensure that the interests of all former conflict parties are represented in the political system. This concession allows the competition between the conflict parties to move from the battlefield into the parliament. However, power-sharing institutions encourage mono-ethnic or sectarian political parties, which in turn may reinforce identity-based voting patterns. The division of power along identity lines turns ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ or former ‘warlords’ into gatekeepers of access to political influence.8 This creates fiefdoms for former conflict actors and thus inscribes corruption, clientelism and patronage into state institutions.9 For example, in Kosovo, corruption among ministers from minority communities was tolerated to preserve the multi-ethnic

8 Stephan Rosiny, “A Quarter Century of ‘Transitory Power-Sharing’: Lebanon’s Unfulfilled Taif Accord of 1989 Revisited,” Civil Wars 19, no. 4 (2015): 485–502. 9 Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption in Postwar Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Bassel F. Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State: The Political Economy of a Very Sectarian Public Sector,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 43–60.

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composition of Kosovo’s institutions.10 As a result, the state in stalemated conflict contexts has remained weak and internally divided. With neoliberalism widening the gap between the beneficiaries of patronage and corruption and the impoverished rest of the population, the political economy of sectarianism or ethno-nationalism tends to foster political instability.11 Neoliberalism’s corrosive effect on political institutions has further hollowed out the potential of democracies to secure emancipation.12 These issues have become particularly pressing since peacebuilding and development models worldwide have increasingly relied on neoliberalism over the last thirty years. Also contributing to the frequency of political crises in power-sharing polities is the veto-mechanism, which discourages compromise and stable cross-identity alliances.13 It allows some groups to block the advancement of rights of others, while asserting their exclusive political and security agendas. In the resulting antagonistic political frameworks, parties have no incentive to reach out or bridge differences. This aggravates reconciliation across ethnic, sectarian or tribal divides and thus renders conflicted-affected societies vulnerable to renewed tensions and a relapse into violence. Thus, power-sharing arrangements have allowed nationalist elites to co-opt the peace process and inscribe counter-peace processes into state institutions. Meanwhile, subterranean movements may militarise the public sphere. As Lebanon’s various socio-political crises (e.g. the perpetual garbage and electricity crises, its economic crisis reaching world historic levels14 and established parties’ neglect leading to the largest

10 Gëzim Visoka, Shaping Peace in Kosovo: The Politics of Peacebuilding and Statehood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 11 Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State.” 12 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York:

Zone Books, 2015). 13 Rosiny, “A Quarter Century”; Allison McCulloch, “The Use and Abuse of Veto Rights in Power-Sharing Systems: Northern Ireland’s Petition of Concern in Comparative Perspective,” Government and Opposition 53, no. 4 (2018): 735. 14 The World Bank diagnosed Lebanon’s economic crisis to rank among the three most severe economic crises globally since the mid-19th Century, see World Bank, “Lebanon Sinking,” Report Spring, 2021. Online at: https://documents1.worldbank. org/curated/en/394741622469174252/pdf/Lebanon-Economic-Monitor-Lebanon-Sin king-to-the-Top-3.pdf.

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non-nuclear explosion in history15 ) show, power-sharing does not imply responsibility-sharing between former conflict parties. As an alternative to power-sharing, wars in the stalemate pattern have often been ended through the establishment of borders, separating the conflict parties. This in turn led to a continuous contestation of borders and ethnic segregation in places such as Jammu and Kashmir, Cyprus, and Kosovo. Newly erected borders may terminate hostilities, but they also freeze rather than resolve the underlying conflict. Border infrastructure thus formalises a political dis agreement between the conflict parties if land claims on both sides continue to contest the territorial integrity of the new entities. In such contexts, uneven international recognition distorts the political playing field between the conflict actors in a way that makes a peace agreement unlikely. Indeed, the conflict party whose sovereignty is recognised might have little incentive to compromise.16 Once the formalisation of unsettlement has occurred, it becomes persistent.17 Further peace interventions in frozen conflicts often fail to advance the process beyond stabilisation. For instance, while the Dayton Peace Accords envisaged the return of internally displaced people to their homes, hidden strategies of ethnic cleansing have allowed ethnonationalist actors to create mono-ethnic spaces as a blockage to peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.18 This territorial consolidation of ethnicity has also supported the rise of extreme nationalist parties, which further tend to obstruct inter-ethnic reconciliation.19 The EU’s efforts to effect changes in the nature of the Bosnian state in the accession process and through the European Court of Justice have so far been resisted by the elites who benefit from the stalemate. In other cases (e.g. Cyprus and Lebanon), the UN’s long-term commitment to peacekeeping might have helped to prevent a relapse into civil war. Yet mediation attempts 15 Mariana Helou et al., “Beirut Explosion: The Largest Non-nuclear Blast in History,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness (2021): 2200–2201. https:// doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2021.328. 16 William Zartman, “The Timing of Peace Initiatives: Hurting Stalemates and Ripe Moments,” The Global Review of Ethnopolitics 1, no. 1 (2001): 8–18. 17 Bell and Pospisil, “Navigating Inclusion.” 18 Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 246. 19 Florian Bieber, Post-war Bosnia: Governance, Inequality and Public Sector Governance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 89.

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to resolve the conflict in Cyprus have remained blocked by ‘devious objectives’ on both sides since 1964.20 Such deliberate obstruction has entrapped the UN and EU in a hollowed-out peace process, while providing a platform for destabilising forms of regional geopolitics. In addition, these dynamics provide traction for geopolitical meddling in stalemates, which tends to reinforce unequal power relations between conflict parties, further reducing the possibility of conflict resolution (as frequently occurred during the Cold War). It might even facilitate a descent into new wars as Iran’s support of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement shows. Teheran’s supply of arms and aid to Hezbollah has helped the Shia movement to become a state within the state with greater military capacity than the Lebanese army. This has enabled Hezbollah’s involvement in regional conflicts such as its military intervention to shore up Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in neighbouring Syria. Selective support for self-determination is another geopolitical mechanism, which often feeds rather than alleviates conflict. In pursuit of expanded geopolitical influence, the US and western allies have supported secession in the Western Balkans and former Soviet space while withholding support for the independent statehood of Biafra, Eritrea, Kurdistan, and Palestine.21 In retaliation and to undermine the US’s dominance in the Balkans, Russia and her international non-Western allies have either opposed recognition of some of the newly established de facto states (such as Kosovo), or promoted secessionist entities within them (e.g. the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina). These geostrategic moves create protracted conflict situations by manipulating conflict and peace processes simultaneously in order to condition the latter towards the interests of pliant warlords and authoritarian elites. The final element of blockages to peace in the stalemate pattern is constituted by ethno-nationalism or sectarianism. While both types of stalemate situations (power-sharing agreements and ethnic segregation) have generated different responses in their populations, both enable counter-peace alliances between the elites and the masses through identity politics. In segregated conflict contexts, popular support for a formalised

20 Richmond, 1998. 21 Edward Newman and Gëzim Visoka, “The Geopolitics of State Recognition in a

Transitional International Order,” Geopolitics 28, no. 1 (2023): 364–391.

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political unsettlement can be secured as long as nationalism or sectarianism constitutes a cultural hegemony.22 In such cases, dissent against the political stalemate only emerges in micro-political initiatives of peace formation.23 Yet, the latter have not been able to constitute a counterweight to international counter-peace alliances or to undermine mass support for domestic spoilers. Hence, civil society demands to include economic, cultural, and social rights as well as gender equality, reconciliation, justice, and restitution in any peace process tend to be easily diverted by counter-peace alliances. In consociational democracies, alliances between counter-peace elites and large shares of the population are volatile due to the crisis-prone nature of the polities and their failure to satisfy the needs of the population. Indeed, beneath the surface, there might even be revolutionary fervour fermenting within societies affected by power-sharing agreements.24 In Bosnia and Herzegovina (in 2014) and Lebanon (in 2019), masses mobilised against power-sharing accords that allowed sectarian actors to capture the state and to camouflage exclusionary and economically damaging practices of corruption and nepotism as sectarian interests. Yet protests died down before reaching a transformational outcome. With the trauma of recent war still fresh in their collective memory, large swathes of conflict-affected societies might opt for stability over the liminality of a revolutionary situation. Hence, in this type of case, it is not ideologically-driven support for counter-peace elites but fear of instability that might keep the formalised political unsettlement in place.

Conclusion Our stalemate pattern is characterised by a radical disagreement between two or more conflict parties that has not been resolved in the peace process. Instead, a formalised political unsettlement has ended the war either through a power-sharing agreement or through the separation of former conflict parties by means of continuously contested borders. 22 Gramsci et al., Prison Notebooks. 23 Oliver P. Richmond, Peace Formation and Political Order in Conflict Affected Societies

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 24 Economic crises in particular have long been linked to the onset of revolutions, see Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 [1979]); Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (London: Routledge, 2016).

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Yet due to an array of blockages, the formalised political unsettlement could at best bring about frozen conflicts. Their initial success of ending wars through a peace agreement or the territorial separation of the conflict parties, international mediation, peacekeeping and peacebuilding has failed to achieve meaningful transitions from identity-based conflict to sustainable peace. While conflict in the stalemate pattern has moved from the battlefields into parliaments or perpetual peace negotiations, the conflict parties have remained committed to their war-time objectives. State capture by counter-peace elites combined with identity politics has created fiefdoms for former conflict actors and reinforced identity-based voting patterns. This has eroded the possibilities for reconciliation and undermined development through corruption and nepotism. In ethnically separated conflict contexts, social engineering has often been used to justify identity-based rule. Civil society is too weak and receives too little international support to challenge these counter-peace dynamics. In this state of ‘nonviolent war’,25 the conflict parties maintain close alliances with violent forces. Frozen conflicts thus remain fragile. Formalized political unsettlements have thus turned from instruments of peace into the epicenter of counter-peace dynamics. Being part of a peace process (and thus supported by the international peace architecture) gives counter-peace forces protection and allows them to compete for geopolitical and domestic support, while also exploiting the structural pressures caused by neoliberal peacebuilding. Rather than being the first step towards conflict resolution and reconciliation, formalized political unsettlements have enabled counter-peace forces to gather strength to achieve a future unravelling of frozen conflicts. However, that the collapse of stalemates has not become a major trend yet (marking NagornoKarabakh in Russia’s backyard as an exception rather than the rule), suggests that the IPA still has the power to stabilize conflict-affected societies—for now. The emerging multipolar order, which has enabled a reordering of geopolitical spheres of influence and the militarisation of foreign policies of middle powers, might change this though. Since ethnonationalism or sectarianism provide domestic support for counter-peace elites, international alliances between the latter could unravel the finely tuned balance of power that currently ensures stability in the stalemate pattern.

25 Leroux-Martin, Diplomatic Counterinsurgency.

CHAPTER 5

The Limited Counter-Peace Pattern

Abstract This chapter explores the limited counter-peace pattern, which is characterised by surface stability in some parts of the country, dispersed by pockets of warfare. In this pattern, the state formation process remains violently contested by nonstate actors, who destabilise or govern parts of the country. At the epicentre of this pattern lie the inadequacies of the quasi-state. The state is often a vehicle for elite power and patronage, while civil society is marginalised in the face of a complex environment characterised by a diversity of localised conflicts. These dynamics are connected to international security alliances rather than the rights framework of the international community, configuring the pattern for limited peace around security and power relations. This pattern has been common in the global south, as well as in post-socialist, conflict-affected environments where deep developmental, justice, and ideological differences remained unresolved, often because of western involvement rather than despite it. Keywords Limited counter-peace · Political violence · Postcolonial states · State fragility

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3_5

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Key Dynamics At the heart of the continuous conflict in this pattern lie the deficiencies of the quasi-state.1 Imposed by empires or imported by anti-colonial movements, the nation-state model was an alien structure in most societies in the global south.2 Postcolonial leaders adopted the model as a radical form of modernisation, which promised to advance their emancipatory objectives through the rationale of citizenship. Yet inheriting borders drawn by colonial administrators burdened postcolonial governments with the need to reconcile cultural, ethnic and religious diversity beyond the capacity of the nation-state model. Integrating customary authorities into the modern state posed an irresolvable dilemma: law and rights as the tools of modernisation were bound to negate the hierarchical and exclusionary traditional institutions that they encountered.3 Worse still, many postcolonial states were saddled with indefensible borders, along with economic dependency. This turned the postcolonial state’s aspiration to provide security throughout the territory and consequently its monopoly of legitimate violence into a pipe dream. Dependent development and continued extractivism further narrowed the emancipatory options of the postcolonial state. Hence, legal sovereignty raised expectations in postcolonial societies, which the postcolonial state was bound to frustrate. Given these emancipatory impossibilities, statehood in the postcolony remained incomplete and contested. To populations living outside of major urban centres, the state appeared as an exclusionary project that failed to provide security, welfare, public infrastructure and opportunities. Irredentism, insurgencies and organised crime have been feeding off the resulting frustrations of the populations in those ungoverned spaces. Political and economic marginalisation has fuelled localised insurgencies and organised crime. In Africa, insurgencies have long been 1 Robert Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2 Bertrand Badie, The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Nazih Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006); Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Penguin Books, 2012). 3 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or How Euro-America Is Evolving Towards Africa (London: Paradigm, 2012).

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pre-dominant4 (currently most prominent in the jihadist insurgencies in the Sahel region). In Latin America, by contrast, criminal governance structures the lives of tens of millions of people in urban centres.5 While resource extraction keeps conflicts going, environmental degradation sparks new ones. As a consequence, countries may simultaneously become the site of different types of conflicts. Nigeria and Mali with their co-existence of secessionist conflict, fundamentalist insurgency and violent land disputes exemplify this trend. Hence, the limited counter-peace is characterised by surface stability in some parts of the country, dispersed by pockets of warfare. In some of these contexts, incomplete peace agreements have ended wars in the past but fell short of including all regions or conflict actors. Combined with the effects of women’s systematic subjugation in patriarchal societies, counter-peace forces find fertile breeding ground:6 femicides, the commodification of women through brideprices, and polygamy have created belligerent male surplus populations. With brideprices being a prevalent custom in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, brideprice inflation combined with misogyny have brought about organised violence and aided the recruitment of extremist insurgencies.7 Patrilineal organisations such as clans and tribes tend to subjugate not only their own women, but

4 Christopher Clapham, “Degrees of Statehood,” Review of International Studies 24, no. 2 (1998): 143–157. 5 See e.g. Hugo Frühling, Joseph S. Tulchin, and Heather A. Golding, Crime and Violence in Latin America: Citizen Security, Democracy, and the State (Princeton: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003); UNODC, Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean: A Threat Assessment (Wien: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2012). Online at: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-ana lysis/Studies/TOC_Central_America_and_the_Caribbean_english.pdf; Sabine Kurtenbach, “The Limits of Peace in Latin America,” Peacebuilding 7, no. 3 (2019): 283–296. 6 Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen, The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). 7 Valerie M. Hudson and Hilary Matfess, “In Plain Sight: The Neglected Linkage

Between Brideprice and Violent Conflict,” International Security 42, no. 1 (2017): 7–40; Melissa Johnston and Jacqui True, “Misogyny and Violent Extremism: Implications for Preventing Violent Extremism,” Monash University Gender, Peace and Security and UN Women, 2019. Online at: https://giwps.georgetown.edu/resource/misogyny-and-violentextremism-implications-for-preventing-violent-extremsim/.

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also ‘feminise’ other groups. This leads to protracted conflicts between kinship groups, locked in a continuous fight for dominance.8 Moreover, postcolonial governments often personalised power in neopatrimonial regimes and shifted the state’s modus operandi even further away from the public good.9 In response to the moral, political and economic erosion of the quasi-state, external actors felt no longer beholden to the moral justification of negative sovereignty and openly supported secessionist or insurgent movements, if it was in their geopolitical interest.10 Peace processes further contributed to the displacement of the state by levelling the playing field between insurgents and governments in mediation processes.11 The contestation of the state through insurgencies, succession movements or organised crime often fuelled authoritarian tendencies in political elites. In such cases, it depends on the response of external and domestic forces as to whether those tendencies are corrected or reinforced. If allies or peace processes support the increasingly repressive and exclusionary behaviour of quasi-state governments, the latter might turn into fierce states and slip into the unmitigated counter-peace category. This often happens if external actors prioritise regional stabilisation over democratisation. Statebuilding can reinforce authoritarian tendencies, if its financial and military support reduces the willingness of a central government to make concessions towards internal dissent and provides the capacity for repression.12 Indeed, UN peacebuilding missions in places such as Burundi, Angola, the DRC and Mozambique have abetted the oppressive behaviour of governments in order to retain access to political elites or uphold the image of an effective peace process.13 If external

8 Valerie M. Hudson, Donna L. Bowen, and Perpetua L. Nielsen, The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 136–140. 9 Michael Bratton and Nicolas Van de Walle, “Neo-patrimonial Regimes and Political Transition in Africa,” World Politics 46, no. 4 (1994): 453–489. 10 Clapham, “Degrees of Statehood.” 11 Ibid. 12 Adam Day et al., Peacebuilding and Authoritarianism: The Unintended Consequences of UN Engagement in Post-conflict Settings (Tokyo: United Nations University, 2021). 13 Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Devon Curtis, “The International Peacebuilding Paradox: Power Sharing and Post-conflict Governance

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governments make support for quasi-states conditional on democratic reforms and human rights standards, this slippage into the unmitigated peace category can perhaps be avoided. However, this solution also raises the problem of enforcement. The global war on terror has additionally fuelled many quasi-states’ transitions into fierce states. Counter-insurgency has been mainstreamed into development aid, combined with peacebuilding and resulted in the erosion of rights ambitions in development and statebuilding interventions. With its focus on capacity-building in security institutions and its neglect of the root causes of conflict, counter-insurgency mirrors the failures of international statebuilding.14 Yet counter-insurgency diverges from the centralising approach of statebuilding: ‘pragmatic counterinsurgency’ enlists local strongmen and reinforces their military and police, fostering the fragmentation of the quasi-state into mini-statelets.15 This runs counter to the original intention of statebuilding, which aimed to improve the quality of state institutions by refocusing the state’s security apparatus on accountability and human rights. In practice, however, ambitious targets for statebuilding raise issues of scale and affordability. In order to expand the infrastructural capacity of the quasi-state beyond its coercive capabilities into health, education and other types of welfare, enormous investment would be required. In the absence of adequate funding, peacebuilding and statebuilding missions have often been diverted towards achievable and measurable outcomes, related to stabilisation objectives.16 Such interventions often end up serving external interests more than the conflict context. EU-financed crisis interventions in Europe’s extended neighbourhood, for instance, have constituted little more than efforts to establish policing and border

in Burundi,” African Affairs 112, no. 446 (2013): 72–91; Sarah von Billerbeck and Oisin Tansey, “Enabling Autocracy? Peacebuilding and Post-conflict Authoritarianism in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” European Journal of International Relations 25, no. 3 (2019): 698–722. 14 Richmond, Failed Statebuilding; Louise Wiuff Moe, “Counter-Insurgency in the Somali Territories: The Grey Zone Between Peace and Pacification,” International Affairs 94, no. 2 (2018): 319–341. 15 Wiuff Moe, “Counter-Insurgency in the Somali Territories.” 16 Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, Normalization in World Politics (An

Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022).

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infrastructure aimed at the EU’s fight against illegal immigration.17 If statebuilding fails to develop quasi-states’ service infrastructure, it cannot enable the polity to ‘work with and through other centres of power in society’.18 On the contrary, the combined militarisation of the state through stability-focused statebuilding and counterinsurgency has further eroded the legitimacy of the quasi-state in the eyes of conflict-affected populations.19 Economic marginalisation and treatment as ‘collateral’ by the military as well as externally-sponsored ‘stabilisation operations’ facilitate the recruitment of conflict-affected populations into insurgencies in areas of limited statehood. In Latin America, the predominant type of limited peace is constituted by gang warfare in areas abandoned by the state. Here, the take-over of slum areas by criminal gangs poses a paradox that the quasi-state has not been able to resolve: on the one hand, criminal gangs’ violent struggle against a militarised police, other cartels as well as informants has made parts of Latin America and the Caribbean insecure.20 On the other hand, criminal gangs have established a limited form of order in the slum areas under their control.21 State policing, by contrast, tends to contain slums from the outside rather than providing security to their inhabitants. Hence, despite counterproductive crackdowns of the quasistate on criminal gangs, the former also exists in a symbiotic relationship with the latter.22

17 See: Roger Mac Ginty, Sandra Pogodda, and Oliver P. Richmond, eds., The EU and Crisis Response (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). 18 Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society un the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 449–450. 19 See e.g. International Crisis Group, “A Course Correction for the Sahel Stabilisation Strategy,” Africa Report No. 299, February 2021. Online at: https://www.crisisgroup. org/africa/sahel/299-course-correction-sahel-stabilisation-strategy. 20 Kurtenbach, “Limits of Peace in Latin America,” 283–296. 21 Marcos Allan Ferreira and Oliver Richmond, “Blockages to Peace Formation in Latin

America: The Role of Criminal Governance,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 15, no. 2 (2021): 161–180; Enrique Desmond Arias and Nicholas Barnes, “Crime and Plural Orders in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” Current Sociology 65, no. 3 (2017): 448–465; Benjamin Lessing, “Conceptualizing Criminal Governance,” Perspectives on Politics 19, no. 3 (2021): 854–873. 22 Lessing, “Conceptualizing Criminal Governance.”

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Through a counter-peace lens, slum dwellers like populations in insurgency-affected areas face a duopoly of violence since both the militarised quasi-state and criminal gangs systematically violate populations’ human rights, while also providing some degree of stability. However, both counter-peace forces ultimately block positive peace. In contrast to the stalemate pattern, popular support for counter-peace forces in contexts that span insurgency, state and criminal violence, is largely a matter of self-preservation. Suffering from structural violence, inhabitants of informal neighbourhoods, slum areas and conflict-affected pockets of the country may collaborate with counter-peace forces to secure their own survival. Yet this support is often limited and pragmatic, rather than based on ideological conviction. It does not constitute durable political alliances, but is above all an expression of not having other viable political or economic alternatives. More worrying is the ideological pull of extremist movements, which rose as a result of the War on Terror. This war’s global nature supplied the recruitment drive of extremist movements with a defensive rationale that turned jihadism from a locally-focused insurgency into a global endeavour.23 Islam is imputed to be under threat around the world and needs to be defended by all its followers. But here again recruitment of extremist groups benefits from external and domestic forces that have dislocated the individual. The combination of structural violence, poor state services, dispossession by extractive industries and displacement through environmental degradation have created avenues for new counter-peace movements to forge alliances with local populations as the spreading of the jihadist insurgencies across the Sahel region demonstrates.24 In limited counter-peace situations, grassroots peace agency (‘peace formation’25 ) is often either limited to peaceful areas of the country or seriously constrained in the space where counter-peace is rampant. For

23 Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 24 See e.g. International Crisis Group, “Sidelining the Islamic State in Niger’s

Tillabery,” Africa Report No. 289, 2020. Online at: https://www.crisisgroup.org/afr ica/sahel/niger/289-sidelining-islamic-state-nigers-tillabery; International Crisis Group, “Enrayer la communautarisation de la violence au centre du Mali,” Africa Report No. 293, 2020. Online at: https://www.crisisgroup.org/fr/africa/sahel/mali/293-enrayer-lacommunautarisation-de-la-violence-au-centre-du-mali. 25 Oliver P. Richmond, “Peace Formation and Local Infrastructures for Peace,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 38, no. 4 (2013): 271–287.

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instance, what enables localised peace in countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, Malawi, and Nepal is the presence of a loose national and local infrastructure for conflict prevention and conflict mitigation.26 Local peace committees tend to generate informal and temporary peace arrangements which address outstanding disputes in the short run, but are often undermined by limited national support, resources, and rapidly changing ecologies that sustain conflict. In order to permanently resolve conflicts at the local, regional and inter-state level, regional and global powers need to think beyond the stabilisation of power structures and support peace formation in its most subaltern forms.

Conclusion Central to the limited counter-peace pattern are the deficiencies of the quasi-state. As a product of historical conjunctures shaped by colonial rule, neo-colonialism, customs and tradition, the postcolony could neither replace the state nor make it work for its population. While the quasi-state is sometimes described as a ‘self-undermining institution’,27 our analysis highlights the diversity of external blockages that are stacked against its aspiration to provide peace and security. These counter-peace forces are diverse in their composition and objectives, yet in combination they have further eroded the quasi-state’s capacity to provide security, development and welfare. In the limited counter-peace, the international peace architecture encounters another murky context, in which dysfunctional states are facing off against insurgencies, criminal gangs and localised threats to peace. Here, a stability-focused alliance between the militarised quasi-state and its international backers has formed at the expense of civil society and social movements. In such contexts, the IPA has often sided with the violence of the state against the violence of its contenders in order to keep residual peace processes alive or to ensure UN access to conflict contexts. In the process, statebuilding has been reduced to building up the coercive capacity of the state, while rendering the quasi-state dysfunctional in its infrastructural capacity.

26 Richmond, “Peace Formation and Local Infrastructures for Peace.” 27 Arjun Chowdhury, The Myth of International Order: Why Weak States Persist and

Alternatives to the State Fade Away (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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As a result of various forms of geopolitically motivated external support, limited counter-peace contexts show a tendency to turn into unmitigated forms of counter-peace. Aiding the authoritarian tendencies of domestic elites in pursuit of stabilisation indicates a dangerous retrogression of the IPA from conflict transformation to conflict management, in which the maintenance of the international order is foregrounded over the creation of peace. Peace formation, which may hold governments to account and offer localised conflict resolution is fenced in by the stabilisation paradigm. This has the effect of delegitimising the international peace architecture not just in the local context, but also via the regional and global transmission of its ineffectiveness.

CHAPTER 6

Unmitigated Counter-Peace

Abstract This chapter examines the unmitigated counter-peace pattern, which is characterised by severe oppression, in which human rights are systematically violated. Dictatorships, military occupations and civil wars feature prominently in this pattern. The chapter analyses the key blockages in this cluster of cases, where unresolved political claims are effectively cordoned off by local and state elites and their foreign backers. The fierce state as the epicentre of the unmitigated counter-peace has thwarted the emergence of civil society, and kept the international peace architecture at bay. Dissecting the role of the fierce state in this pattern is important since counter-peace actors have currently converged on its formation as a central pillar of their alternative visions of ‘peace’ as Chapters 8 and 9 will show. Domestic authoritarian regimes seek alliances with similar geopolitical and ideological actors on the international stage, supporting their crude strategies of power accumulation. These alliances herald the formation of a more substantial counter-peace architecture. Keywords Unmitigated conflicts · War · Military intervention · Failed peace process · Authoritarian regimes

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Key Dynamics At the epicentre of the unmitigated counter-peace lies the ‘fierce’ state, which is so opposed to society that it can only deal with its population via coercion and raw force.1 Historically, it emerged from a history of power struggles between domestic and regional rivals, often combined with anti-colonial struggles. In a political environment characterised by radicalised social forces and other forms of inbuilt instabilities, factions which emerged victoriously tended to embark on ‘defensive state formation’:2 cementing their hold on power through a plethora of security institutions that focused on the ‘internal threat’. In the process of eliminating competing centres of power, domestic elites incorporated the economic ruling class into their regime, dismantled civic associations and controlled the media.3 As a consequence, the fierce state has over-developed its ‘despotic power’4 and uses it free of constitutional or external constraints. What it lacks is the infrastructural power to regulate social processes peacefully. Above all, the fierce state is a vehicle to cement an authoritarian regime’s hold on power (in collusion with geopolitical supporters). However, it can also constitute an outward mode of governance, directed at a territory under external military control (e.g. Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara, Russia’s occupation of parts of Georgia and Ukraine or the US occupation of Iraq). The oppressive nature of the fierce state is frequently mirrored by its violent contestation. This points to civil wars as another manifestation of the unmitigated counter-peace pattern. Hence, this pattern is characterised by severe oppression, in which human rights are systematically violated across the country. On its own territory, the fierce state is protected by the UN Charter, which threw its weight behind non-intervention in sovereign states as a safeguard for the self-determination of postcolonial countries. Yet the

1 See Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State. 2 Ray Hinnebusch, The International Politics of the Middle East (Manchester: Manch-

ester University Press, 2015). 3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951); Clive T. Thomas, The Rise of the Authoritarian State in Peripheral Societies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). 4 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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Charter’s simultaneous pledge to protect human rights should limit authoritarian regimes’ ability to use sovereignty as a smokescreen for systematic rights abuses. However, the practice of international relations ended up neither confirming a consistent commitment to sovereignty nor to human rights in clashes between the two norms. Instead, it proved the critics right who saw in both pledges “a veil masking the restoration of a great power directorate”.5 At a Security Council session in 2015, the representative of New Zealand stated: “…the use of the veto or the threat of the veto is the single largest cause of the Security Council being rendered impotent in the face of too many serious international conflicts.”6 Systematic human rights abuses within an unmitigated counter-peace context require either indifference of UN Security Council members or their active support. In cases in which they cared, the P5 have developed a whole range of tools to circumvent the UN’s principle of non-intervention in sovereign states:7 from subtle mechanisms (e.g. using aid dependency to leverage intervention) to bypassing the UN (e.g. in NATO’s Kosovo intervention), establishing the principle of the Responsibility to Protect (used in Libya in 2011) and inventing ‘preemptive war’ (to justify the US occupation of Iraq). In other cases, in which geopolitical ambitions outweighed normative considerations, liberal as well as authoritarian governments have been protecting fierce states by ignoring severe human rights abuses, providing aid to dictatorships, financing proxy wars and shielding military occupations against the application of international law. Since the start of the Arab Uprisings more than ten years ago, external pressure on dictatorships to respect human rights has given way to transnational support for authoritarian stability. In the beginning of the uprisings, some scholars believed that liberal internationalism had forged an ‘iron cage’ for dictators, which forced aid-dependent autocrats onto a

5 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 7; Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London: Verso Books, 2014). 6 Security Council meeting 7389, S/PV.7389 (23 February 2015), 9. 7 Adebajo Adekeye, “The Revolt Against the West: Intervention and Sovereignty,” Third

World Quarterly 37, no. 7 (2016): 1187–1202.

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political trajectory that they could not entirely control.8 Yet as soon as this mechanism had facilitated the fall of the dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, it became defunct. In fear of heightened instability, rising fundamentalism and increasing northward migration in Europe’s southern neighbourhood, European foreign policy shifted from liberal conditionalities to embracing new and old dictators in the Arab region.9 The failure10 of a UN-authorised humanitarian intervention in Libya (2011) permanently paralyzed the UN Security Council in such matters. With the ultimate threat of military intervention against systematic human rights removed, many countries have turned into an uncontested playing field of elite-level counter-peace alliances, dragging peace processes and peacebuilding tools along the same path. From Burma to Sudan, Egypt and the Sahel region, military regimes have rolled back democratization and peace processes. Meanwhile, multiple waves of peaceful mass uprisings have either been diverted into civil wars (e.g. in Syria, Libya, Yemen) or contained by counter-revolutionary regimes (e.g. in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Belarus, Thailand, and Hong Kong). Such transitions into the unmitigated counter-peace pattern have often been aided by international geopolitically-motivated alliances between authoritarian regimes. These alliances have eroded the potential of the IPA to insert itself into the peace process: backed by Russia and Iran, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad defeated a rebellion against his dictatorial regime by using fascist forms of violence, chemical weapons and cluster bombs on civilian populations, and supplanting UN mediation with the illiberal framework of the Astana Process.11 President Fattah al-Sisi’s reversal of the political transition process in Egypt and his brutal reign have been bankrolled by Gulf countries, paralyzing the capacity of

8 Daniel Ritter, The Iron Cage of Liberalism: International Politics and Unarmed Revolutions in the Middle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 9 Anchal Vohra, “The Arab Spring Changed Everything—In Europe,” Foreign Policy, 24 December 2020. Online at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/24/the-arab-spr ing-changed-everything-in-europe/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_cam paign=28864&utm_term=Editors%20Picks%20OC&?tpcc=28864. 10 In addition to mission creep, the R2P-intervention also failed to protect human rights since it enabled militia rule, localised conflict and ultimately a civil war. 11 Samer Abboud, “Making Peace to Sustain War: The Astana Process and Syria’s Illiberal Peace,” Peacebuilding 9, no. 3 (2021): 326–343.

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actors such as the EU to incentivize human rights and democratisation. Meanwhile, an inclusively designed UN peace process in Libya had been sabotaged by several key UN member states.12 Digital forms of surveillance, manipulation and oppression have increasingly contributed to the establishment and perpetuation of unmitigated peace processes. Fast-moving liminal contexts such as revolutionary moments or open warfare are prone to manipulation by digital forms of authoritarianism. This has been exploited by domestic dictators and their authoritarian external backers during the uprisings in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria through online disinformation campaigns in order to discredit emancipatory movements.13 Online surveillance systems that have been deployed to control domestic populations are being exported, sometimes with the explicit purpose of substituting peace processes with authoritarian alliances.14 In order to compensate external backers for their investment in propping up the fierce state, contentious forms of resource extraction might fuel further tensions making a peace process impossible (yet necessary) in all of these cases. Syria’s granting of oil concessions to a Russian company linked to the Wagner Group, for instance, curtails the state’s resources for reconstruction as much as it turns notorious mercenaries into a permanent fixture of Syria’s post-war politics.15 The strategies developed in Syria have subsequently been used in Wagner Group interventions in Sudan, the Central African Republic, Libya, Madagascar, Mali and Mozambique:16 disinformation and informational warfare campaigns,

12 Ghassan Salame, “On the Failures of the International Community to Stop Wars,” Mediator’s Studio, episode 2, season 1. 13 Marc Owen Jones, Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media (London: Hurst & Co., 2022). 14 Ronan Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, “The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon,” New York Times Magazine, 22 January 2022. Online at: https://www. nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel-spyware.html. 15 Amy Mackinnon, “Putin’s Shadow Warriors Stake Claim to Syria’s Oil,” Foreign Policy, 17 May 2021. Online at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/17/putin-shadowwarriors-stake-claim-syria-oil-energy-wagner-prigozhin-libya-middle-east/. 16 Raphael Parens, “The Wagner Group’s Playbook in Africa: Mali,” Foreign Policy Research Institute Report, 18 March 2022. Online at: https://www.fpri.org/article/ 2022/03/the-wagner-groups-playbook-in-africa-mali/.

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securing payment through resource extraction deals from often impoverished conflict-affected countries before starting fierce counter-insurgency interventions that lead to high death tolls. Faced with the resulting political and humanitarian challenges of externally sponsored wars, liberal internationalism has all but collapsed.17 The fallout from decisive military support by autocratic regimes has fragmented the liberal coalition of Western countries and incapacitated normative foreign policymaking in the West. Russian and Syrian bombardment turned millions of Syrians into refugees, while Gulf sponsorship financed the mushrooming of jihadist militias.18 Combined, the effects of those interventions fuelled xenophobia and Islamophobia in the West, empowered far right-wing forces to fragment the EU, eroded support for the UN, and divided Western societies.19 Hence, counterpeace alliances not only prevented democratic regime change from being a principle guiding UN-intervention. They also established regime stability, itself a code for authoritarianism, as a norm of regional security.20 Peace processes could only end conflicts in the unmitigated counterpeace pattern, if a multitude of tools of the international peace architecture are aligned and simultaneously deployed. In particular, this would align international tools, capacity, and intervention, with subaltern political claims, neutralising the authoritarian capacity of the fierce state. Paving the way for peace in this pattern might also require an impartial investigation into the embedding of violence and crime in the everyday functioning of governing institutions.21 Due to the divisions in the UN Security Council, such concerted interventions are currently unavailable. Instead, UN-authorised peace interventions in contexts of unmitigated counter-peace are often ineffective single-track missions, which ultimately

17 Vohra, “The Arab Spring Changed Everything.” 18 See e.g. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian

Tragedy (London: Hurst & Co., 2017); Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 19 Vohra, “Arab Spring Changed Everything.” 20 In 2019, even some liberal countries had jumped train in a way that overtly under-

mined UN peacemaking in Libya. When UN Special Enjoy Ghassan Salamé organised a national conference to include the multitude of domestic interest, an alliance of authoritarian and democratic mandating powers of the peace process (Russia, France and the US) sabotaged his peace talks by supporting the military advance of warlord Khalifa Haftar. 21 Nordstrom, Shadows of War.

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erode the UN rather than create peace: mediation without peacekeeping, effective arms embargoes or no-fly zones (e.g. Syria); reconstruction and humanitarian aid without building a state, democratisation or peace negotiations conducted on the basis of international law (e.g. Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territories); sanctions without a wider peace process (e.g. Belarus, Burma). In both Palestine and Afghanistan, brutal military occupations have discredited simultaneous peace interventions to the extent that local populations have at times shifted their allegiances to local counter-peace actors (e.g. in the 2006 Hamas election in Palestine and the 2021 fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban). Disconnected from the larger interventionary toolbox of the international peace architecture, limited peace interventions cannot be used as an entry point for a wider peace process. Indeed, such limited interventions may dress up counter-peace dynamics in the disguise of peace. Russia’s military support for Syria’s Assad regime and its simultaneous hosting of peace negotiations in the Astana process, for instance, has allowed Bashar al-Assad to participate in a pseudo ‘peace process’, while rejecting any compromises in peace talks and engineering a new state and society through coercion.22 Syrian communities meanwhile have been bombed into consenting to local peace agreements, which ensure little more than their bare life. Supporting this process to its bitter end would implicate the UN in the formalisation of the unmitigated counter-peace in Syria. Similar dynamics have been at play in the Israel/Palestinian peace process over recent years. While the fierce state is mostly geared towards coercing its population (and the international community) into submission, alliances between segments of the population and counter-peace elites are possible through cultural institutions such as churches, media, or educational institutions.23 In Russia, for instance, recent military invasions abroad have been popularised by media outlets and the Russian Orthodox Church, elevating the invasion of Ukraine to a ‘holy war’.24 While overt individual resistance

22 Sara Hellmueller, “The Challenges of Forging Consent to UN Mediation in Internationalized Civil Wars: The Case of Syria,” International Negotiation 27, no. 1 (2021): 103–130; Samer Abboud, “Making Peace to Sustain War: The Astana Process and Syria’s Illiberal Peace,” Peacebuilding 9, no. 3 (2021): 326–343. 23 Antonio Gramsci, “Prison Writings 1929–1935,” in The Antonion Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999). 24 The Economist, “The New Cult of War,” 26 March 2022. Online at: https://www. economist.com/briefing/2022/03/26/the-new-russian-cult-of-war.

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in such contexts might be too dangerous, large parts of the population may opt for voluntary subservience,25 covert forms of resistance26 or fully-fledged attempts at revolution with few viable options in between.

Conclusion In the unmitigated counter-peace pattern human rights are systematically violated across the country. This pattern revolves around fierce states, military occupations and civil war. Considering dictatorships and military occupations as equally opposed to emancipatory peace as civil wars constitutes a stark contrast to Realist foreign policy thinking with its prioritisation of regional stability over human rights. Or in other words, maintaining the international order through alliances with fierce states implies complicity in unmitigated counter-peace dynamics. This chapter elaborated how the unmitigated counter-peace has emerged, how the pattern is perpetuated and what it implies for the international peace architecture. It shows how counter-peace forces have managed to create broad alliances in this pattern, connecting supportive segments of the domestic population to national and international elites. It analysed how the unmitigated counter-peace is perpetuated by geopolitically motivated alliances, digital forms of surveillance, and contentious forms of resource extraction. Once the pattern of the unmitigated counter-peace is established, the IPA is unlikely to maintain meaningful access to the conflict context. This distinguishes the unmitigated counter-peace from the two previous patterns. Here, authoritarian regimes, military occupations and their external allies shield systematic human rights violations from IPA involvement by invoking sovereignty, the Westphalian principle of nonintervention and often P5 veto rights in the UN Security Council. Hence, international alliances with counter-peace actors ensure that peace processes are either hollowed out, upended or pre-empted altogether. Yet, in the public discourse, this lack of access is often turned against the international peace architecture through the claim of hypocrisy and selectiveness (as in the case of Syria). While authoritarian countries might 25 Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Aubern: Mises Institute, 2015 [1552/1553]). 26 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

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deploy this strategy to undermine liberal internationalism within the UN system, liberal countries have also helped to erode the reputation of the IPA in pursuit of geopolitical objectives. The IPA’s tendency to deploy ineffective single-track missions in unmitigated counter-peace contexts—where concerted peace interventions would be needed—has further undermined its legitimacy. The stubborn and growing sets of blockages faced by the international peace architecture indicate that counter-peace dynamics have become proto-systemic. Indeed, the existence of three stable patterns of counterpeace processes implies that the actors driving them are better connected than previously understood. The subsequent chapters will thus investigate those connections and analyse whether the IPA is currently being supplanted by a counter-peace architecture.

CHAPTER 7

The Rise of the Counter-Peace on the International Stage

Abstract The systemic weakening of the international peace architecture through the blockages laid out in the previous chapters points to the crucial importance of investigating how counter-peace dynamics and actors are connected across all scales. Accordingly, this chapter hones in on these connections between the creation of an enabling international environment for counter-peace, the national rejection of the IPA, and societal support for counter-peace dynamics. It illustrates how smallscale tactics have been combined into larger strategies and disseminated transnationally. By identifying this trend, the chapter argues that counterpeace dynamics are escalatory. They aim at the creation of a global counter-peace framework. This analysis elaborates the underlying ideological stances underpinning such a framework in juxtaposition to both the liberal ideology that has shaped the IPA since the 1990s and scientific notions of emancipatory peace. Keywords International counter-peace · Great power rivalry · UN Peacemaking · Non-Western states

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The International Dynamics of Counter-Peace The emergence of three stable counter-peace patterns also indicates the formation of broader, revanchist or revisionist political processes to achieve maximalist pre-negotiation objectives, originally to be achieved through war. After regrouping under the cover of the peace and reform process, counter-peace actors might deploy the threat of violence, division, and polarisation to this end. While these tactics can be used in a stalemate,1 external counter-peace dynamics could escalate them into domestic war or regional conflict. If fuelled by international ideological struggle, an authoritarian, nationalist, or imperialist bloc could form, reconstituting regional order based upon the states that emerge from counter-peace processes.2 This reflects the way that authoritarian states have also regularly linked up in alliances or formed parallel institutions that both suppress challenges from within their own societies as well as attempts to expand human rights and democracy in the international sphere. International counter-peace thus provides a powerful platform through which to resist international norms aimed at the decentralisation of power, to block the rise of human rights and democracy, reverse or exploit interdependence, undermine law and justice, and block dialogue and reconciliation. Such elements within peace processes demand the checking and even the reversal of established power formulations that tend to control the government and regional order, political economy, and the state apparatus. Given their demands for checks-and-balances and their capacity to mobilise against the retrogressive politics of counter-peace actors, civil society, social movements, and their transnational links are thus a substantial threat to the nationalist and imperial configurations of power that counter-peace reconstitutes. 1 Philippe Leroux-Martin, Diplomatic Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 2 See for example, Ziya Onis and Mustafa Kutlay, “The New Age of Hybridity and Clash of Norms: China, BRICS and Challenges of Global Governance in a Post-liberal International Order,” Alternatives 45, no. 3 (2020): 123–142; Irene Constantini and Ruth Hanau Santini, “Power Mediators and the ‘Illiberal Peace’ Momentum: Ending Wars in Libya and Syria,” Third World Quarterly 43, no. 1, (2022): 131–147; D.S. Subedi, “The Emergence of Populist Nationalism and ‘Illiberal’ Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka,” Asian Studies Review 45, no. 2 (2022): 272–292; Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, op. cit.; Kirill Kobrin, “Sliding into Isolation: Russia and the World,” Open Democracy, 23 December 2020. Online at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-isolation-kobrin/.

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Our argument connects the failed expansion of pro-peace social and civil society engagement in peace processes under recent liberal and even neoliberal paradigms3 with the limitations of liberal international norms, law, multilateralism, and order building. Without a decisive alliance between civil society and international backers who command significant resources and political will, local political structures are likely to revert to stalemate or limited forms of violence. Yet while international support for civil society has been waning, domestic counter-peace forces have been bolstered directly (through external support) and indirectly (through unintended consequences of peace interventions).4 This has allowed quasi-states or revanchist forces to consolidate in a ‘fierce state’ (e.g. Egypt after 2013, Belarus after 2019, Burma, Chad, Mali, Sudan, and Guinea since 2021).5 Blocs within the rising multipolar order have already developed competing practices6 to counter the IPA. In order to expand their power and political control, geopolitical actors might underpin these practices with revisionist and revanchist ideologies. This results in geopolitical competition focused on competing ideologies. Counterpeace tactics at the domestic level connect with the international scale rapidly, becoming strategic and systemic, potentially leading to regional war as well as possibly a renewed cold war. As a result, civil society has been marginalised or shut down completely in several conflict contexts, while its international networks have been blocked.7 Stalemate and backsliding in peace processes around the world over the last thirty years were

3 See for example, Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4 Adam Day et al., “Peacebuilding and Authoritarianism.” 5 Sandra Pogodda, Oliver P. Richmond, and Gëzim Visoka, “Counter-Peace: From

Isolated Blockages in Peace Processes to Systemic Patterns,” Review of International Studies (2022); Steven Heydemann, “Beyond Fragility: Syria and the Challenges of Reconstruction in Fierce States,” Brookings Institute, June 2018. Online at: https://www.brookings.edu/research/beyond-fragility-syria-and-the-challenges-of-rec onstruction-in-fierce-states/. 6 Lewis et al., 2018. 7 See numerous Confidential Sources from a global network of scholars and civil society

actors in conflict-affected societies for the “Blockages in Peacebuilding” project (with Sandra Pogodda, Gëzim Visoka, and Jasmin Ramovic, University of Manchester) 2019– 2022.

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harbingers of these regressive processes and dynamics, now increasingly noted in scholarship on peacemaking and peacebuilding.8 For revisionist actors—including recent and current leaders in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Russia, Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Burma and Colombia—who may be determined to use violence or war as political tools, revanchism, ideology, grudges, hierarchy, and power shape their analysis, not science, norms, or concepts such as peace, justice, equity, and sustainability. Their problem is how and whether to camouflage their reconstruction of power where they are confronted by substantial opposition from multilateral, regional, and international organisations, norms, security guarantees, alliances, or peacekeeping and diplomatic missions connected to the UN, EU or security actors like NATO. Yet, where the latter have failed to bring about peace, the logic of domestic and regional politics favours counter-peace. Ideological struggle and concepts such as counterinsurgency or counter-revolution once alerted scholars to the dangers and subtleties of power and inequality, intervention, and the contested constitution of legitimate authority.9 Indeed, modern history can be told as an epic struggle between progressive networks and residual conservativism over institutional forms such as the state, class, gender, colonialism or the global political economy. Counter-revolutionary debates were often designed—as systems of governmentality and hegemony—to explain how ‘progressive’ politics would be destabilising. The status quo, by contrast, is portrayed as natural and secure (sovereign indeed) even if it only provided a limited, negative form of peace. Thus, radical movements for social change came to be seen as more of a danger than oppressive forms of power, even if they often drove state and international reform and were responsible for the multi-layered construction of the IPA.10 Consequently, the concept of counter-peace helps to map out the international dynamics of formal and informal structures and processes that resist and reshape what a peace process is in relation to global political order (including through mediation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding or statebuilding). This in turn points to the relationship between scientific 8 See Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, op. cit., in particular. See also Richmond, Peace in International Relations, 2nd edition, esp. conclusion. 9 Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics (London: Palgrave, 1999). 10 Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century (London:

Verso, 2015).

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and ideological knowledge about peace and order. It implies that resisting emancipation and progress is far from counter-intuitive in that such Burkean11 ‘restorations’ of power-relations and stratification are often deemed in theoretical and policy literatures to preserve vital interests, regional blocs, stability, and elite authority frameworks.

Tactics, Strategies, and Levels of Analysis For every peace intervention and process, there will be a counter-peace dynamic, as previous literatures have already highlighted,12 along with recent work on hybrid, authoritarian, and illiberal forms of peace,13 as well as on ‘backsliding’14 and peace-breaking figurations.15 It was initially driven by spoiling, devious objectives, elite, national and hegemonic interests. The counter-peace has devised processes to oppose the basic tenets of peace praxis and theory without arousing western forces, or leading to military and humanitarian intervention. Minor domestic or localised counter-peace strategies, which try to moderate the impact of peacekeeping, mediation, civil society, and development work, as well as state reform on conservative power relations tend to escalate slowly. Small pushbacks against peacemaking and reform then may escalate and find more traction, eventually becoming visible at the geopolitical level. This has been clear from the growing leverage of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serb pushback against a Kosovan state, the consolidation of the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, and the growing dominance of Hun Sen in Cambodia. The intensification of their revisionist tactics depended on increasingly ambitious regional hegemons (Russian, Turkey and China, respectively). At first this process may well look like a pattern of separate stalemates, weak states, and frozen conflicts, which tend to throw a poor light on liberal

11 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Pearson Longman, 2006 [1790]). 12 Stedman, 1997. 13 Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, op. cit. 14 Oliver P. Richmond, “Beyond Liberal Peace? Responses to ‘Backsliding’,” Contexto

Internacional 32, no. 2 (2010): 297–332. 15 Gëzim Visoka, Peace Figuration After International Intervention: Intentions, Events and Consequences of Liberal Peacebuilding (London: Routledge, 2016).

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peacebuilding, statebuilding and development strategies. It makes reform appear to be weakly backed, ill coordinated, and internally incoherent. Blockages and counter-peace dynamics can be seen on different levels of analysis. Firstly, blockages may create an enabling international environment for counter-peace processes. This can be observed in the withdrawal of the US from multilateralism and in its erosion of peace processes through pacification strategies in the War on Terrorism after 9/11. Duplicitous politics from the permanent members of the UN Security Council have caused the complex and urgently needed peace processes to collapse (as in Libya in 2019).16 China’s and Russia’s more recent resistance to the liberal peacebuilding consensus in the UN Security Council also contributes to it. Their shift toward the construction of competing zones of interests, their own development banks, and forms of military and diplomatic assistance of intervention further drives the escalation of counter-peace dynamics.17 External support by neighbouring dictatorships and international counter-peace forces has proven to be crucial for the viability of contested authoritarian regimes (as in Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Belarus, and Venezuela). A second level of analysis links the operational level of peace interventions to national rejection of the IPA. Here, the UN’s tendency to become locked into maintaining unsuccessful peace processes, peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions over a long period of time (as in Cyprus) has created space for counter-peace dynamics. Where urgently needed UN missions contract (as in Palestine) or where a drawdown and withdrawal of missions or donors indicates the lack of interest in the sustainability of the peace process (as in Kosovo, Timor Leste, and Afghanistan), the credibility of the IPA suffers. A further loss of legitimacy occurs in contexts, in which international donor conditionality fails (as in Cambodia) or results in the local elite’s partial reform syndrome (as in Liberia). Further undermining it is the inability to overcome blockages in the UN system even in cases of chemical weapons use (e.g. in the case of 16 See Ghassan Salamé on the failures of the international community to stop wars, The Mediator’s Studio. Online at: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ghassan-sal amé-on-the-failures-of/id1519016281?i=1000480309639. 17 Bruce Jones and Alexandre Marc, “The New Geopolitics of Fragility: Russia, China, and the Mounting Challenge for Peacebuilding,” Brookings Institute, October 2021. Online at: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-new-geopolitics-of-fragility-russiachina-and-the-mounting-challenge-for-peacebuilding/; Richmond and Tellidis, “Emerging Actors in International Peacebuilding and Statebuilding: Status Quo or Critical States?”

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Syria and Gaza). Here, the containment of civil society (as in Cambodia, most Arab countries and Sri Lanka), the establishment of ethnic or religious hierarchies and the targeting of minorities (as in India, Burma, and China) are signs of the state’s involvement in counter-peace dynamics. Corruption and the rejection of state reform further undermine the possibilities for a meaningful peace process. Brutal counter-insurgencies (as in Syria, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Burma) often radicalise conflict-affected populations. The militarisation of the state through coups (as in the Sahel region), democratically legitimated rule of the military (as in Egypt) or military occupations (as in Israel), even turn the state into an epicentre of domestic counter-peace dynamics. A third level identifies additional societal blockages to peace: a disinterest in peace processes (as in Israel) or the rejection of peace and the liberal model of state (as in Colombia18 ) by societal groups makes difficult compromises in favour of peace impossible to achieve. (Ethno-) nationalism and the acceptance of identity-based exclusion and hierarchies (as in Cyprus, India and the Balkans) also work as effective blockages to peace. The willingness of the majority to trade the human rights of marginalised groups for stability (as in Egypt, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Cambodia) constitutes another major impediment to peace. Moreover, widespread fear of radicalisation (e.g. by fundamentalist movements) enables oppression, backsliding or persistent authoritarianism with commensurate implications for international order.

Implications of International Counter-Peace Given the scale and scope of these counter-peace tactics, their containment requires a unified effort of the IPA and its supporters. A more detailed analysis of cases allows us to recognise how a combination of blockages enables small-scale counter-peace tactics (calibrated to resist peaceful reforms, but not to spark violence) to extend their reach into the structures of international politics. For example, in the more than halfcentury long Cyprus peace process, the forces of ethno-nationalism and geopolitics have been aligned against UN peacekeeping and mediation since 1964. They have also resisted the work of the entire IPA, including donors, NGOs, the EU, and the UN after the end of the Cold war. On 18 Fabrício H. Chagas-Bastos, “Colombia’s Peace in Tatters,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 13, no. 2 (2018): 127–134.

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the surface, since 1974, both disputants have been careful to couch their positions diplomatically, to avoid sparking another war, whilst maintaining the deadlocked status quo. In the UN-sponsored referendum over the liberal peace model for Cyprus in 2004 designed by the UN Secretary General, a small number of Greek Cypriot nationalists managed to keep the entire international liberal peace framework at bay by voting against the Annan Plan. They favoured ethno-nationalist majoritarianism, and the myth of the territorial nation-state, which disguised their preference for the former. Counter-peace forces tested the stability of the post-1974 order through basic diplomatic and political tactics which stalled the UN mediation process. Knowing that they could rely on UN peacekeepers as well as the regional balance of power allowed Greek Cypriot nationalists to shift to a more systematic counter-peace approach. On the one hand, this illustrates the weakness of the entire international peace architecture (so easily being deflected by a tiny number of Greek Cypriot voters), and on the other, the ease with which nationalism can align itself with geopolitics. It also illustrates how the main nexus of power in the counter-peace framework is fuelled by nationalism and geopolitics. A weakened IPA built on defanged civil society networks, a fragmented state order, and a divided or unwilling set of international actors more focused on their own security and economic interests, produces a vacuum that counter-peace forces can easily control. The outcome after the 2004 referendum in Cyprus represented a remarkable perversion of the relationship between critical knowledge about peacemaking and politics. This was also mirrored in the failed peace processes in the Middle East, in Sri Lanka with the re-emergence of authoritarian nationalism after 2002, and during peace processes in Kosovo, Colombia or Cambodia over the last decade.19 Residual resistance to peace and reform processes increasingly enhanced its leverage and found its regional and geopolitical supporters, as well as donors. This critical perspective brings into view a heavily camouflaged, but no less institutionalised, counter-peace process as the systemic level. As a sum of its parts it has become a framework, in which micro-level tactics combine into macro-level strategies and are exported, indicating the emergence of a conscious counter-peace architecture. These processes are deployed to

19 See our various Project Reports.

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retain power, push back against reform, protect the privileged status of elites, and enable the use of conflict, war, and violence as rent-seeking opportunities. Over the last few decades, the systems for multilateralism, UN peacekeeping, international mediation, and international peacebuilding have consequently become tactically blocked and many peace processes and conflicts have been systematically frozen. This is in part because of the stances of disputants but also because international actors have prioritised their geopolitical interests over multilateralism and support for peace processes. Elite actors are thus able to reshape political processes in their favour, even where this contravenes international norms, law and scientific knowledge. Disagreement on the UN Security Council, geopolitics, populism, nationalism, authoritarianism, weak states, as well as tensions between self-determination and territorial sovereignty have all hindered peacemaking, some of it amplified via digital technologies.20 This has led to a situation where a fragile, insecure, and unjust status quo has become the main outcome of peace interventions. This in turn has favoured geopolitical and ideological contestation on the international stage. Instead of unified notions of peacemaking and political reform, alternative and competing notions of peacekeeping, mediation, diplomacy, and development have emerged, often associated with authoritarian regimes. Isolated tactics, if successful, may link up, be disseminated through international and domestic networks, and become wider strategies, over time. This has been clear with the obstruction of revolutionary momentum in the Arab region by authoritarian elites and fundamentalist movements, and the contagion that spread military coups across the Sahel region. Similarly, collaborative Serbian and Russian rejection of the postwar regional order is increasingly challenging the stalemates in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Meanwhile, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin developed his own strategy of pulling economic, political and military levers to exploit

20 John Karlsrud, “Peacekeeping 4.0: Harnessing the Potential of Big Data, Social Media and Cyber Technology,” in Cyber Space and International Relations: Theory, Prospects and Challenges, ed. Jan-Frederik Kremer and Benedikt Müller (Berlin: Springer, 2014), 141–160.

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ethnic conflicts in Russia’s orbit.21 Western actors, donors, the UN, EU, and other third parties all played their part in turning a blind eye, being under-committed, or unwilling to support peace processes against such challenges. They operated according to strategic interests or shifting ideological preferences (e.g. from liberal peacebuilding in the 1990s to neoliberal statebuilding in the 2000s). Populist and nationalist forces in Western democracies have even actively contributed to the contestation of peacebuilding.22 Another element of the emerging counter-peace architecture lies in the formation over time of a political network around an axis of revisionist powers (or even revanchist actors), who prefer force to push back international law and human rights and reclaim lost historical territorial possessions, powers, or hierarchies. Currently, this network appears to form a substantial group of the world’s states, including Russia, China, India, and Turkey, even if some of them are unstable states.23 Of course, their foreign policies and geo-economics may differ from their internal social and civil society perspectives, where concepts of human rights, justice, and democracy may be more germane. Regional and international actors and organisations may thus begin to form a parallel system of global order, as with China’s ‘Belt and Road’ project, or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or Russia’s ‘Eurasian Union’ complete with tools to maintain that order, even with tacit approval from within the IPA.24 They also might form systematic frameworks that co-opt and hollow out peace processes, peace practices, as well as institutional and legal frameworks. This diverts emancipatory theories aimed at equality, justice, hybridity, and sustainability, towards 21 Uri Friedman, “Putin’s Playbook: The Strategy Behind Russia’s Takeover of Crimea,”

The Atlantic, 2 March 2014. Online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/arc hive/2014/03/putins-playbook-the-strategy-behind-russias-takeover-of-crimea/284154/. 22 Fanny Badache, Sara Hellmüller, and Bilal Salaymeh, “Conflict Management or Conflict Resolution: How Do Major Powers Conceive the Role of the United Nations in Peacebuilding?,” Contemporary Security Policy (2022): 4. https://doi.org/10.1080/135 23260.2022.2147334. 23 Angela Stent, “The West vs. the Rest: Welcome to the 21st-Century Cold War”, Foreign Policy, 2 May 2022. Online at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/02/ukrainerussia-war-un-vote-condemn-global-response/. 24 Oliver Jütersonke, Kazushige Kobayashi, Keith Krause, and Xinyu Yuan, “Norm Contestation and Normative Transformation in Global Peacebuilding Order(s): The Cases of China, Japan, and Russia,” International Studies Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2021): 944–959.

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realist containment strategies such as ‘conflict management’. Order versus disorder seems to dominate authoritarian conceptions of international relations rather than considerations of peace.25 At the strategic and system level, counter-hegemonic tools aim to fragment the multilateral consensus on how to build peace, increase the inconsistencies within the international peace architecture, weaken the proscription of violence when it comes to political interests, and discredit liberal norms and law. These strategies may work indirectly, and at first be aimed at a stalemated counter-peace, as perhaps early on in Tunisia after 2014 or Sri Lanka around 2002. By producing domestic polarisation,26 or enabling an increasingly authoritarian government as in Cambodia through Chinese sponsorship of the Belt and Road project, the stalemate might be tipped into a more violent counter-peace pattern.27 Such dynamism in the counter-peace framework points to the contestation not just of the localised conflict and the stalemated tools for making peace, but to broader ideological issues.

Conclusion International counter-peace is an insidious form of resistance to the IPA and the norms and scholarship that have shaped it. This chapter explained the rise of the counter-peace in terms of the trans-scalar connections between its domestic, regional and international driving forces. Counter-peace strategies have become global in scope by connecting local small-scale resistance to reforms and peace processes with the capacities of national and international counter-peace forces. As local tactics become more effective, they may begin to link up, forming broader strategies and a global framework of counter-peace, which actively works to undermine international efforts to bring peace, justice, and security. This framework is often supported by geopolitical actors who have their own interests in maintaining the status quo and preventing reform and progress. For these reasons, counter-hegemony—like balance of power praxis—is difficult to

25 David G. Lewis, Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 1–23. 26 Blockages Project: Tunisia Report, 2019; Blockages Project: Sri Lanka Report, 2021,

12. 27 Blockages Project: Cambodia Report, 2020, 1.

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modulate. Violence maintains utility in this counter-hegemony and scientific evidence about order is dominated by politics and ideology. Hence, counter-peace strategies, even when locked into a stalemate are likely to escalate, if they manage to create strong domestic and international connections to better resourced counter-peace actors. At the state level differing variants of authoritarianism and violenceprone (ethno-)nationalism are its clearest outcome, facilitated by the deadlock of the peace and reform process. This is in line with securitisation dynamics, geopolitical foreign policy goals, and elite interests in preserving social hierarchies and inequalities. At the civil society level, a clear indication of a more active counter-peace emerging lies in the proscription and marginalisation of non-governmental actors working on human rights, democratisation, and in social areas, as well as their networks. The governments of China, Russia, India, some Gulf States, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, along with other authoritariancapitalist and military-led countries increasingly have not only rejected Western hegemony and liberalism, but deny civil society actors any political space for their work.28 Counter-peace thus forms the embryonic foundations of new regional orders with their own ‘peace’ and ‘reform’ strategies, centred on alternative ideologies and power centres. A victor’s peace and the justification of authoritarian rule thus sets into sharp relief the liberal project to foreground civil society, and its aim to perfect the technology of peace, the state, and international order, and to overcome uneven development.29 An international counter-peace implies centralised power, imperial or (ethno-)nationalist rationalities, bordering, the securitisation of dissent, the support of parallel states and institutions, and a rejection of rights and democracy. Law and norms would be subservient to power-politics in this framing. In an international counter-peace framework liberal order would be reversed by peace and reform strategies that actively pushback via a limited or unmitigated counter-peace (rather than remaining in stasis as in a stalemate). This would imply elite hierarchy and capital accumulation through the state and global capital; illiberal societies; the state being designed for

28 Blockages Project: Sri Lanka Report, op. cit., 7. 29 Justin Rosenberg et al., “Debating Uneven and Combined Development/Debating

International Relations: A Forum,” Millennium 50, no. 2 (2022): 291–327.

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war and internal oppression rather than peace; and ultimately an imperially based international order emerging from sovereign competition and ensuing arms races. This is a logical conclusion of the counter-peace phenomena, which becomes clear with the limited counter-peace pattern. Indeed, while the BRICS, for example, may have been able to play a positive role as supportive of the liberal order in a viable peace process or a stalemate, in a limited counter-peace situation, their revisionist tendencies and ideologies begin to come to the fore.30 Such dynamics illustrate how the proscription of violence collapses, and nationalist groups are closely defined according to centralised power and perhaps expanding borders, especially if geopolitical plates shift.31 They appear in much of the existing literature (which has not yet pieced together counter-peace tactics into wider strategies) to be associated with democratic backsliding in the West and Global North, and within democracies more generally.32

30 Richmond and Tellidis, 2014. See also Yuji Uesugi and Oliver P. Richmond, “Reconstructing the International Peace Architecture in the Asian Century,” Global Society 35, no. 4 (2021): 419–434; Yuji Uesugi and Oliver P. Richmond, “The Western International Peace Architecture and the Emergence of the Eastphalian Peace,” Global Society 35, no. 4 (2021): 435–455. 31 Michel Smetana and Jan Ludvik, “Between War and Peace: A Dynamic Reconceptualization of ‘Frozen Conflicts’,” Asia Europe Journal 17, no. 1 (2018): 1–14; Julia Strasheim and Subindra Bogati, “A Challenge to the Liberal Peace? EU Peacebuilding Faces China in Nepal,” European Review of International Studies 8, no. 3 (2021): 354. 32 Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, Backsliding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 1–4.

CHAPTER 8

Transitions in International Order and the Tools of Peacemaking: Back to the Future?

Abstract This chapter explores why and how revisionist actors escalate their counter-peace tactics into systemic challenges to the international peace architecture. In particular, it explores how the stances of prominent actors such as China, Russia and Turkey towards the liberal peace model have evolved since the end of the Cold War. It identifies the turning points in their relationship with the IPA as well as the depth of its contestation. From this analysis different trajectories emerge that are leading from cooperation with the international peace architecture to sabotage and rivalry. This chapter identifies a trend towards counter-peace collaboration via the divergent strategies of its actors. A convergence of counterpeace forces in opposition to the IPA spells trouble for international peacemaking in the emerging multipolar order. Keywords UN mediation · Liberal internationalism · Multipolarity · Revisionism

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3_8

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Problems with Peacemaking Under the Conditions of Multipolarity The brief liberal peace interregnum, which was always shaky and uneven and in particular unsatisfactory for the global south, began to break down with the advent of the War on Terrorism after the attacks on the US in September 2001. This exposed the lack of consensus on and hypocrisies surrounding the rules-based international order, including the integrity of the liberal peace model. In turn, the move back to nationalism, populism, and international competition has recreated the old problems of regional and global geopolitics, as well as of constrained rights and representation in many countries, undermining the peacemaking tools that had been built from 1945 to deal with them. The vacuum caused by the decline of liberal internationalism and the IPA, points to building momentum for a multipolar international order.1 The latter somewhat implausibly tries to balance rulegoverned liberal democracies and their regional orders with authoritariannationalist, unfettered states and their geopolitical interests. International and Western disunity is complicit in the failure of the UN Security Council, World Bank, IMF, and Development community to achieve sustainable peace, security, and development efforts. Their ‘offers’ to conflict-affected societies, already wary of external actors as much as their own elites, have been perceived as unjust, neo-colonial, appended to Western hegemony, and too little too late.2 Since this rejection has not led to an adjustment of this offer, so-called BRICS actors have attempted to revise the international order, while China3 and Russia in particular seek to influence, impede, displace, and replace liberal peacebuilding. Effectively when critique crosses over into revisionism, reactionary politics, and even revanchism, this reduces the global appeal and reach of the IPA. In combination with parallel institution-building and increased 1 Sara Hellmüller, “The Challenge of Forging Consent to UN Mediation Processes in Internationalized Civil Wars: The Case of Syria”; Ekaterina Stepanova, Anti-terrorism and Peace-building During and After Conflict (Stockholm: International Peace Research Institute, June 2003). 2 See for example, Ali A. Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967). 3 See for example, Doshi’s argument that China joined regional organisations to stall and constrain them and limit Western influence. Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 66.

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geopolitical interference of regional powers, this places the IPA in competition with an increasingly explicit ideological and strategic alternative. Possibilities to build on or improve the liberal-international order are eroded as a consequence. This produces competing systems of multilateralism, alliances, capital, technology, and information flows,4 as well as populist networks, along with related tools of conflict management. It exploits dissatisfaction with the regressive drift of liberal peacebuilding into statebuilding and counter-insurgency according to Eurocentric, but primarily US interests. Yet if deprived of a commitment to human rights, anti-imperialist critiques of the IPA are at risk of becoming strange bedfellows with a diametrically opposed ideological tendency. Illiberal and neoliberal positions equally agree on a reduced the salience of rights, justice, and development in peace processes. Such stances often end up supporting the interests of dictatorships and military regimes, which insist on sovereignty in order to perpetuate their authoritarian, closed states, capital and technology networks, and internal political suppression of insurgency or resistance.5 Some of these dynamics were pioneered by the several Turkish ‘interventions’ in the Cyprus conflict in the period between 1963 and 1974. Despite an ongoing UN peacekeeping and mediation mission, Turkish involvement in Cyprus defied norms of non-intervention, manipulated approaches to self-determination as a cover for occupation and used war as a political tool.6 The debacle of ONUC from 1960 to 1963 inside the DRC as well as for the UN itself, where UN peacekeepers were drawn into a civil war and which also destabilised the UN Security Council, probably provided room for such manoeuvres.7 Turkish tactics succeeded 4 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). 5 David Lewis, “Contesting Liberal Peace: Russia’s Emerging Model of Conflict Management,” International Affairs 98, no. 2 (2022): 654. See also: Reinhard Wolf, “Between Deference and Defiance: Hierarchical Status Roles and International Conflict,” International Studies Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqab063. 6 James Ker-Lindsay, “Great Powers, Counter Secession and Non-recognition: Britain and the 1983 Unilateral Declaration of Independence of the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 28, no. 3 (2017): 431–453. 7 United Nations Security Council, Resolution 143 (S/4387), 14 July 1960: Jane Boulden, Peace Enforcement: The United Nations Experience in Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001).

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in consolidating a subversion of early peacekeeping, mediation, and later liberal peacemaking. Meanwhile, Turkey remained a member of NATO and seemed to display good faith in the UN process and potential hybrid outcomes.8 Such approaches pioneered a limited counter-peace framework of otherwise disconnected micro-strategies designed to hold back the encroaching liberal peace framework as it emerged over time (a pattern shifting between the stalemate and unmitigated counter-peace pattern). Turkish policymakers could claim Turkey to be a member of NATO, pro-Western, and a good international citizen, upholding the principle of self-determination while partially undermining UN mediation, exploiting the presence of UN peacekeeping, and deviating from Western norms of human rights and democratic governance, especially in the 1970s. Similar tactics are present in Western Sahara where Morocco has manipulated the UN-led peace process, expanded the occupation on the ground, and curtailed the human rights of Sahrawi people by exploiting geopolitical rivalries.9 Through this complex set of dynamics, the door was opened for the international dynamics of counter-peace to become more systematic. The inherent fragility of frozen conflicts implies that foreign backers could effect the breakdown of a stalemate, resulting either in a shift to a limited counter-peace, or an uncontrolled collapse into an unmitigated counterpeace. As a consequence, this laid the groundwork for Turkish foreign policy’s current contortions: from zero problems with neighbours to its involvement in Syria, and its stance on the Russia-Ukraine war.10 Success in manipulating the Cyprus peace process (often against the preferences

8 Constantinos Adamides and Costas M. Constantinou, “Comfortable Conflict and (Il)Liberal Peace in Cyprus,” in Hybrid Forms of Peace, ed. Oliver P. Richmond and Audra Mitchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012), 242–259; See also, Richmond, 1997. 9 Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy, Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution, 2nd edition (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2022). 10 Mustafa Kutlay and Ziya Öni¸s, “Turkish Foreign Policy in a Post-western Order: Strategic Autonomy or New Forms of Dependence?,” International Affairs 97, no. 4 (2021): 1085–1104.

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of Turkish Cypriots)11 as well as carving out an idiosyncratic and dissonant set of international positions and norms (with obvious domestic and international contradictions) presaged Turkish and Russia collaboration in the Syrian war,12 and both Chinese and Russian attempts to follow suit on a much grander scale in the 2000s. It also perhaps indicated how closely counter-peace is entangled with peace systems that are embedded in hegemony (such as the liberal peace). The current Ukraine war is a visceral reminder of how local tensions can be used as an entry-point by an external counter-peace force to escalate conflict through the three patterns of our typology.13 Serbia’s stance on Kosovo’s statehood and on its internal and regional conflicts is also indicative of how counter-peace dynamics can escalate.14 The UN Security Council remains divided on Kosovo’s independence, with US, France, and the UK vouching for Kosovo with many strings attached, while Russia and China unreservedly back Serbia. While the presence of NATO peacekeepers and EU’s rule of law mission on the ground is the most important deterrent of inter-ethnic tensions, legacies of the conflict and other structural and emergent disputes continue to persist. The EU-led talks for normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia represent the only viable and mutually acceptable platform for conflict avoidance.15 However, this platform has so far proven unsuccessful in transforming and resolving multiple layers of contention between Serbia and Kosovo. National authorities on both sides of the border have endorsed a counter-peace agenda, refusing to make any concessions. Kosovo’s vision of peace is mutual recognition with Serbia within existing borders and political rights for minorities, whereas Serbia refuses to recognize Kosovo but seeks to expand autonomy for local

11 For recent adverse developments, see: Cyprus Mail, “Ankara Asserting ‘Absolute Authority’ over North,” 29 May 2022. Online at: https://cyprus-mail.com/2022/05/ 29/ankara-asserting-absolute-authority-over-north/. 12 Seçkin Köstem, “Russian-Turkish Cooperation in Syria: Geopolitical Alignment with Limits,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 34, no. 6 (2021): 795–817. 13 Pogodda et al., “Counter-Peace.” 14 See Blockages Project Reports, 2019–2022. 15 Gëzim Visoka and John Doyle, “Neo-functional Peace: The European Union Way of Resolving Conflicts,” Journal of Common Market Studies 54, no. 4 (2016): 862–877.

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Serbs.16 International diplomacy and civil society have so far been unsuccessful in overcoming differences between Serbia and Kosovo. Serbia’s support for the Republika Srpska’s secessionism in Bosnia-Herzegovina is another example for the gradual build-up of counter-peace tactics. Here, the Dayton Peace Accords has not only ensured the protection of minority rights, but also granted ethno-nationalist hardliners veto power to block, undermine and decimate Bosnia’s weak central institutions.17 Due to Belgrade’s financial and political backing, Serb nationalist Milorad Dodik has been able to build up Republika Srpska as a para-statelet with the intention of eroding the Bosnian state and destabilising its peace process.18 Thus, starting with small tactical approaches, the three patterns of counter-peace have a clear escalatory dynamic, enabling revisionism at the international level. Revisionism is also present in alternative attempts to develop non-UN tools to mediate, conduct peacekeeping and peacebuilding, and development in a range of cases from Yemen to Syria, and the wider Global South. It points to the implausibility of creating an IPA based upon homogenized institutions, units, norms, and policies (i.e. under unipolarity). China has connected its interests (i.e. its version of ‘peace’ for Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong) with the space created by a transition into a multipolar order, as well as building supportive coalitions of authoritarian states.19 This has substantial ramifications for the IPA, human rights, and democracy. Amidst all of this international level contestation, the scholarship and insights produced by global civil society networks have been marginalised, undermining both democratic processes and social resistance to authoritarianism and injustice. Such contestation explains why multilateral approaches to peace have been unambitious since 9/11 and have aligned with the ideological goals of revisionist actors to a large degree in the UN system, at least in practice if not in doctrine. This has enabled regressive forms of statehood to [re-]emerge, as in the DRC, Sri Lanka, Syria, and Burma, amongst many 16 See Gëzim Visoka, “Metis Diplomacy: The Everyday Politics of Becoming a Sovereign State,” Cooperation and Conflict 52, no. 2 (2019): 167–190. 17 Leroux-Martin, Diplomatic Counterinsurgency, 2014. 18 Hamza Karcic, “Putin’s Most Loyal Balkan Client,”

Foreign Policy, 7 October 2022. Online at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/07/bosnia-elections-mil orad-dodik-putin-russia/. 19 Rush Doshi, op. cit., 284.

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others.20 Often, liberal peacebuilding actors, the donor system, and even UN actors, have inadvertently enabled such dynamics without mounting any robust responses.21 Thus, peacemaking under multipolar conditions appears very limited. As the Syrian peace process shows, the internationalisation of conflict makes international peacemaking tools subservient to force and victory.22 Multilateral processes are sidelined by geopolitical actors, while the pursuit of peace is replaced by authoritarian conflict management and nationalism or sectarianism. Against this international backdrop, persistent peacemaking stalemates, as in the Cypriot peace process, have tested the credibility of the UN and the EU,23 and perhaps undermined the legitimacy of international order itself. Other seeming post-conflict successes, such as in Northern Ireland, now also appear to be weakened. China has become involved in UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding mainly to shape its normative framework. It has played a role in conflictaffected societies across Africa, including in CAR,24 as well as in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Burma and many others.25 It is creating its own financial, political, and regional networks and institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative, and initiatives such as the China-Africa Forum, and other regional networks.26 These institutions combine a belief in economic growth as a force of stability and order with the assumption that markets for future growth will be located in the global south.27 According to Doshi, Chinese commentators have argued in recent years that China’s concepts of peace, security, development, and government are more viable than liberalism, 20 See Blockages Project Reports, 2019–2022. 21 See for example, Adam Day et al., op. cit.; Sarah von Billerbeck, “Enabling

Autocracy? Peacebuilding and Post-conflict Authoritarianism in the DRC.” 22 Hellmueller, 2022. 23 See for example, Ker-Lindsay, EU Accession and UN Peacemaking, 2005. 24 Robert Kosho Ndiyun, “Peace Agreements with No Peace: A Critical Review of

Peace Agreements in the Central African Republic,” African Security Review (2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/10246029.2022.2086477. 25 This is noted in many of our Blockages Project Reports, 2019–2021. 26 Rush Doshi, op. cit., 161 and 283–285. 27 Howard W. French, “What the US Still Doesn’t Get About Countering China,” Foreign Policy, 7 July 2022. Online at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/07/g-7-inf rastructure-investment-biden-china-africa/.

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and able to contend with extremism and terrorism better, partly though its application of advanced technologies. Initially—at least until 2019—such initiatives were seen as complementary, experimental, and constructive to and for liberal order. However, recent events in Hong Kong, China’s increasing use of its veto on the UN Security Council, its continuous support for Russia in the face of international sanctions, and its steadfast defence of authoritarianism, have led observers to assume that China aims to—at least partly—reshape the international order.28 Indeed, in the face of the UN’s attempts to put pressure on China over its treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjang,29 the Chinese Communist Party may have hardened its stance towards multilateralism. Under Xi Jinpin’s leadership this has increasingly appeared as a rejection of the liberal international order combined with attempts to replace it with alternative hegemonic formulations, including their own peacemaking tools. So-called rising powers, according to Gilpin,30 are prone to trying to undermine existing hegemonic systems, and may endeavour to replace them with alternatives, complete with new tools for the preservation of the rising order, its norms, security, stability, and areas of influence.31 For Chinese strategists, this may extend as far as a whole range of strategic goals in East Asia, related to control over Taiwan, the Koreas, Tibet, removal of US forces from Japan, and influence in the wider Pacific area. It may also be related to the reform of world order, the exemplar of the ideal state as authoritarian-capitalist, and China’s partial control of the developing world through the Belt and Road Initiative.32 The existing multilateral systems, its laws, norms, and institutions would stand as an obstacle to such extensive goals, as they maintain Western, not Chinese, hegemony. Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China has 28 Paul J. Bolt and Sharyl N. Cross, China, Russia, and Twenty-First Century Global Geopolitics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 29 Darrren Byler, In the Camps: Life in China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (London: Atlantic Books, 2022); Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn Morgat, How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-education’ Camp: A Uyghur Women’s Story (Canbury, 2022). 30 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Robert Gilpin, “The Theory of Hegemonic War,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (1988): 591–613. 31 Doshi, op. cit., 298. 32 Ibid., 302.

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focused on producing a stalemate in many conflict-affected societies. Now it seems to increasingly support a limited model of counter-peace in its spheres of influence (where little progress can be made along liberal, civil, or scholarly lines, but where order prevails and violence is territorially limited) in order to co-opt the IPA towards Chinese interests. However, there are now suspicions that it may go much further vis-à-vis control of Taiwan (given its recent success in Hong Kong), dependent on the outcome of the Ukraine war. Similar dynamics can be seen in Russia’s engagement with peace and order maintenance.33 Russia followed a version of the evolution of UN peacekeeping through the 2000s, but as with China began to diverge during the War on Terror and after the Financial Crisis of 2008.34 Sakwa has described this evolution as ‘neo-revisionist’, indicating some intent to work within the existing system as well as to supplant it with alternative regional models, and to reject US hegemony. This has become more pronounced recently.35 The split widened after the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011. President Putin, ever aware of the potential of revisionism, has called Russian intervention in Syria a model for ‘regional crisis management’, which has spilled over into Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic,36 as well as ongoing in Ukraine. This concept emerged from Russian mimicry of liberal crisis management, yet was designed to undermine the rules-based international system, allowing space for its own interests and influence to re-emerge.37 In the context of Chechnya, an illiberal and authoritarian state model began to consolidate based upon Russian coercion. This strategy appealed to countries like Sri Lanka and Serbia in their attempts to frame liberal peacebuilding as weakening their own standing and security.38

33 Lewis, “Contesting Liberal Peace: Russia’s Emerging Model of Conflict Management.” 34 Chen Zheng and Yin Hang, “China and Russia in R2P Debates at the UN Security Council,” International Affairs 96, no. 3 (2020): 787–805. 35 Richard Sakwa, “Russian Neo-revisionism”, Russian Politics 4, no. 1 (2019): 1–21. 36 Lewis, 2022, 653. 37 Ibid., 659. 38 Jean-François Ratelle and Emil Aslan Souleimanov, “A Perfect Counterinsurgency?

Making Sense of Moscow’s Policy of Chechenisation,” Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 8 (2016): 1287–1314.

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A brief attempt to collaborate with Western peacebuilding in the Balkans highlighted substantial contradictions in Western and Russian approaches. In response, Russian President Putin’s model now extends Western counter-terrorism and stabilisation policies, but focuses more explicitly on short-term conflict management connected to Russia’s geopolitical advantage. It pioneered a diplomatic and mediation approach of exclusive and limited conflict management with key power-brokers, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, bringing to bear Russia’s leverage for its own multipolar and regional interests.39 In Syria, it consolidated a model of counter-insurgency to help allied dictators such as Syrian President Assad to regain state control, buttressed by aggressive military support even for the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations. Extreme violence against rebel-held enclaves in Syria facilitated local ‘peace agreements’, which made no political concessions other than a cessation of hostilities.40 Moreover, Putin pursues an interest-based approach to regional diplomacy often through the provision of mercenaries in exchange for primary resources.41 This approach highlights the utility of war over peace, aligning military intervention and diplomacy with older forms of conflict and crisis management. This strategy enabled Putin to reconstruct Soviet spheres of influence, from CAR and Mozambique to Syria and the Middle East more broadly.42 With the deployment of Russian ‘peacekeeping’ in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, a model emerged based upon the use of military force, topdown coercive negotiations following Russian geopolitical interests, and the exclusion of Western actors, interests, and models. This represents the rejection of multilateralism in favour of regional dominance and rivalry in a multipolar order. Even humanitarian issues were controlled under this model, along with information, and longer-term reconstruction.43 It offered a competing model of order maintenance and crisis management in other words, one which replaced rights, democracy, and inclusion with 39 Lewis, 2022, 668. 40 Rim Turkmani, “Local Agreements as a Process: The Example of Local Talks in

Homs in Syria,” Peacebuilding 10, no. 2 (2022): 156–171. 41 Raphael Parens, “Wagner Group’s Playbook in Africa: Mali,” Foreign Policy Research Institute Reports, 18 March 2022. Online at: https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/03/ the-wagner-groups-playbook-in-africa-mali/. 42 Lewis, 2022, 661. 43 Ibid., 665.

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Russian pacification, authoritarianism, and exclusion. It points to crisis management and balance of power tools in a broader, multipolar order. This strategy resonantes with the failed nineteenth century attempts to curtail war through balance of power mechanisms in an imperial order. The use of private military companies also joined the panoply of measures to replace norms with interests, as in CAR, Mali and Libya.44 Taken all together, this suggests that Russian approaches have pushed into an unmitigated counter-peace terrain, where violence coexists with a coercive peacemaking framework, geared towards rent extraction, pacification and a victor’s peace. Given Russia’s blocking of the IPA through its veto in the UN Security Council, this unmitigated counter-peace aims to replace the IPA, impacting international order itself. This indicates ambitions for a restructured multipolar international order, complete with tools for its own maintenance. The order envisaged here is based upon power-relations rather than cosmopolitan norms, functional institutions, democracy and rights. It also indicates a rejection of western approaches (e.g. decentralisation of power, democracy, active civil society, proscription of violence, and human rights-based interventions), which Russia sees as destabilising historical patterns of order.45

Conclusion The vacuum caused by the decline of liberal internationalism has enabled revisionism and the emergence of a multipolar order through several variants of counter-peace. This order spans rule-based liberal democracies and their regional orders with varying commitment to the IPA as well as authoritarian-nationalist, unfettered states and their geopolitical interests. As shown in this chapter, this has had substantial ramifications for the IPA, the legitimacy of the UN and other international order-supporting institutions. Through various tactics and changing strategies, global actors such as China and Russia have attempted to reshape the international order, replacing the liberal peace model with their own strategies for conflict intervention. Rather than achieving emancipatory forms of peace, this has resulted in an international environment where violence is used to 44 Euronews, “UN Report: Libya Faces Serious Security Threat from Foreign Fighters, Russia’s Wagner,” 28 May 2022. Online at: https://www.euronews.com/2022/05/28/ un-report-libya-faces-serious-security-threat-from-foreign-fighters-russia-s-wagner; Report of the Secretary-General, United Nations Support Mission in Libya, S/2022/409, 20 May 2022. 45 Lewis, 2022, 668.

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support geopolitical interests and regimes of pacification. As a result, the UN Security Council is now frequently blocked, which reduces its global reach and diminishes the reputation of the IPA. Part of this rivalry is an increased competition for support from countries in the global south. Weary of Western hegemony and neocolonialism, countries in the global south might be receptive to a better offer by counter-hegemonic forces. Consequently, Russia has sought opportunities to indicate the viability of its support in order to bolster its political credibility even during the invasion of Ukraine, for instance during the 2022 economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka.46 All these strategies have achieved success according to Putin’s revisionist and possibly revanchist policy goals, including the attempt to reduce the emancipatory capacity of the UN, multilateralism and related peacemaking tools. Such strategies have been pressed into service with the aim of supporting authoritarian despots with all means necessary in many cases. Even Russian attempts, together with China, to build a regional, revisionist network of states, playing on anger at Western hypocrisy particularly after the Iraq invasion of 2004,47 and its weakness since the 2008 financial crisis, have met with some sympathy.48 Like China’s evolving approach of pushing back at Western hegemony, blocking it from the inside after becoming integral to its systems, and then replacing it in some areas, Russia’s approach has substantial implications for the tools, norms, and functional capacity of the IPA. China has also apparently noticed the possibilities of the Russian conflict management approach in their goal of reclaiming Taiwan.49 Other actors are also considering the revisionist potential in their own locales and regions of such an approach, especially in terms of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, power-based mediation, peacekeeping, arms acquisitions, and hybrid military interventions. Thus, peacemaking capacities under a counter-peace-shaped international order appear to be exceptionally- and dangerously-weak.

46 Al Jazeera, “Cash-Strapped Sri Lanka Gets Russian Oil to Ease Shortages,” 28 May

2022. Online at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/28/cash-strapped-sri-lankagets-russian-oil-to-ease-shortages. 47 Toby Dodge, “Intervention and Dreams of Exogenous Statebuilding: The Applica-

tion of Liberal Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Review of International Studies 39, no. 5 (2013): 1189–1212. 48 Al Jazeera, “At BRICS Summit, China Sets Stage to Tout Its Governance Model,” 22 June 2022. Online at: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/6/22/at-bricssummit-china-seeking-stage-for. 49 Lewis, 2022, 670.

CHAPTER 9

Impact on the IPA and International Order

Abstract This chapter explores how the rise of the counter-peace impacts upon the international peace architecture and international order. In order to assess this impact, the analysis first examines the entanglement of the IPA with counter-peace processes, before juxtaposing their rationalities. It concludes that the dominant counter-peace approaches examined in this book exaggerate the current trajectory of failed peacemaking, and follow a very different logic. In counter-peace approaches, fierce states are not unintended consequences of peace interventions, but central pillars of stability. Civil society demands are oppressed as ‘factionalism’ in order to preserve national unity. Gendered, ethnic and religious hierarchies are cemented in pursuit of securing order against the forces of disorder. For the IPA to incorporate this logic, it would have to reduce its interventions to stabilisation missions and shed any emancipatory or normative aspirations for peace. Alternatively, the IPA could become part of the ideological competition over the allegiance of the global south in the emerging multipolar order. Yet, achieving legitimacy in conflict-affected populations in the global south would require a thorough revision of the IPA and its incorporation of broader principles of justice, sustainability and emancipation. Keywords International peace architecture · International order · Counter-peace tactics

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3_9

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Escalation Versus Innovation The limited and long-term capacity of civil agency in the international peace architecture appears to be easily countermanded through different counter-peace strategies and their implications for international order and peacemaking therein. Counter-peace tactics as identified in this book deploy direct, structural or governmental power, to undermine law, order, and social agency. They aim to reduce rights and justice by foregrounding power and interests. To this end, they use propaganda, often in the form of disinformation campaigns. Moreover, they exploit the global economy to maintain inequality. International and regional organisations are either co-opted or pushed back by counter-peace forces. They censor or negate civil society actors and networks. Centralised power, state recognition, control of the assets of statehood, control of information and domestic constituencies, credible access to international order, as well as grey operations that manipulate legal norms are often connected. The counterpeace patterns provide a framework through which to escalate tactics into strategy. As this book has shown, it is based on some sense of mission or an ideological framing, which is camouflaged at first. Thus, from challenging critical and emancipatory norms and discourses in international order, authoritarian domestic governance then relates to the contestation of international norms. The next step in the escalatory framework that counter-peace patterns imply entails ideological struggle against liberal hegemony. Here, counterpeace actors will seek to justify the reversal of progress (in terms of rights, norms, the rule of law, effective and accountable governance, security sector constraints, the redistribution of resources, the establishment of checks and balances, as well as global social networks and multilateral order). At the moment, establishing ‘order’ and preventing ‘disorder’ is used as an argument to justify a reversion to top-down, centralised, and territorialised autocracy, escalating regional geopolitics, and effectively, renewed colonial and imperial war. The latter might need to be reframed for a digital era. Given the rise of counter-peace actors in the apparently emerging multipolar order, emancipatory approaches within the international peace architecture are at risk of being reneged upon. Indeed, it is currently unclear whether the IPA itself will be able to withstand this current pushback from the revisionist camp. Should it survive though, a new layer might be added to the IPA to contend with the rising multipolar order.

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Since the IPA consists of different layers, which reflect different sets of pressures at particular moments in time,1 it is worth considering the type of frameworks that the current transition could add to the overall structure. Should the IPA survive, the pressure of rising authoritarian forces could transform the IPA and its interventionary practices fundamentally: the role of elite power in the IPA could be further heightened, while the role of civil society and social movements along with their political and justice claims might be further reduced. Stabilisation operations (which strengthen counter-peace forces as Chapter 5 shows) might replace attempts at conflict transformation. At the very least, this international contestation requires a complete rethink of the IPA. The rise of a multipolar order promises international instability, the return of revolutionary politics at the domestic level, and the escalation of many more direct and proxy conflicts, hopefully short of nuclear war. Alternatively, liberal countries could try to influence the emerging ideological competition by transforming the IPA into a fair and appealing offer engaging with the global south. This could prise postcolonial and post-Soviet countries away from the pacification, authoritarian approach of the counter-peace framework. The international dynamics of counter-peace suggest that the current contestation of the IPA is part and parcel of resistance against the hegemony of the liberal order. Peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding have been expanded or established within a system of hegemony since the end of the Cold War. This drove the development of the liberal democratic peace and liberal peacebuilding as seen in the Balkans and other cases in the 1990s. Remarkably the embedded nature of most research and methods in liberal hegemony has been unnoticed by many scholars. Liberal peacebuilding rested on US hegemony and the claim of an alignment with the form of democratic state, civil society and social contract based on law and rights. It modelled peacebuilding on a blueprint, ready to be applied in all post-war situations after the end of the Cold War. With the alignment of these three sites (the international, the state, and civil society) of peacemaking, in terms of agreed concepts, norms, and interests, the IPA appeared to be viable because it was based upon an international consensus about political order.

1 Richmond, The Grand Design: The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture.

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Then counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency or stabilisation tools emerged towards the end of this era, which were indicative of the shortcomings of unipolar order. They distorted and eroded many peace processes. Not only did the last remaining superpower foreground its own national security concerns over concerns for global peace, but counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency and stabilisation discredited the international order that produced them. Divorced from scholarship on emancipatory praxis after war and revolution, this produced a vicious cycle of increased terrorism, insurgency, instability and in response more stabilisation-type-interventions. Peace and reform are nested within hegemony in our time. This is clear in the close entanglement of the international peace architecture with the counter-peace patterns. The hegemony underpinning the IPA is mostly couched in US and Western versions of liberalism and neoliberalism. In a multipolar environment, in which international counter-peace is on the rise, the current default in peace processes might shift from ‘stabilisation’ to alliances that camouflage control, proxy conflicts and hybrid or technological warfare. Worse still, Russia’s current military expansion in its neighbourhood and potentially China’s belt-and-road initiative seem to indicate a return to empire-building strategies that partially mirror US hegemony and Western euro-centrism. This would be at the expense of theoretical, ethical, and normative advances in the field, challenging in particular rights, law, civil society networks and aspirations for justice. The large range of destabilisation strategies discussed in this book also indicate that the emerging multipolar system is an unstable form of international order. The BRICS countries have gone from potentially part of the liberalinternational system in the 1990s and 2000s, to revisionist actors in the 2010s, and are now on the cusp of building an alternative to the tools and thinking that emerged within the post-war US backed policy and epistemological framework. Since their revision of the international order seems to foreground the pacification of conflict-affected populations and work to destabilise peace processes, such strategies have been discussed as counter-peace in this book. Their loose counter-peace alternative at the international level exploits but also drives local dissatisfaction with the liberal international order. It also indicates that there is a bifurcation between the scholarly developments that have emerged in understanding the roots of conflict and what might be done in order to achieve a sustainable peace, and the multipolar direction of travel in global politics.

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Effectively, this indicates that the liberal peace alignment has collapsed into a multipolar order of different spheres, which have their own internal peacemaking approaches. But between these different spheres there is little left in the way of an international peace architecture, other than the balance of power, and minor tools like peacekeeping and mediation which were left over from the Cold War and previous imperial order. Though local level agency seems to determine social legitimacy for peace settlements to a large degree, it appears to be international politics that determine whether a counter-peace escalates from small tactics to the strategic level, constituting an ideological platform. As the counter-peace phenomenon is inherently escalatory, only states and alliances have sufficient capacity to channel it into a stalemate or limited form. Yet the same actors can also unleash it. Initially, international counter-peace dynamics maintain peace processes to a limited degree in order to harvest indirect resources from them. These include some time to regroup, gain recognition, consolidate power and to form alliances. Such small-scale tactics have blocked power-sharing models, human rights, and democratisation, as well as peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and peacemaking over the last three decades. They have harvested donor resources illicitly, and have stymied the development of civil society, also undermining the development of public services. Effectively, they have maintained securitisation, which facilitates the return of power to pre-war and new elites whose authority might otherwise be reduced or removed by peacemaking, peacekeeping, as well as development, state reform, and democratisation associated with liberal peacebuilding approaches. Small-scale tactics ultimately lead to larger strategies, which then imply the potential for ideological opposition. This pits evolving liberal internationalism (and more postcolonial, pluriversal, and intersectional approaches to peace) against regional geopolitics, authoritarianism, nationalism, and possibly imperialism with all of their social stratifications related to race, identity, gender, and class. This ideological competition might be fought over the allegiance of a third camp with a yet indistinct ideology: the Global South.2 Given that so many peace processes have led

2 Michael Schuman, “The World Is Splitting in Two: Separate Events Are Accelerating a Shift That Is Transforming Global Politics,” The Atlantic, 28 March 2022.

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to illiberal and authoritarian outcomes recently,3 ideological rivalry might gloss over the fact that all political blocs have tended to ignore or pay only lip service to scholarly, and scientific developments vis-a-vis peacemaking. Since the end of the Cold War there has been as strong assumption that intervention, broadly defined, was designed to bring security, reform the state, generate checks and balances, and support the rule of law and civil society. This framework was easily blocked, as we have argued: civil society tends to be very weak, the state is controlled or propped up by the same actors that defend traditional hierarchies and exclusions, while the regional environment tends to be driven by geopolitics. The international peace architecture is often distant, divided, and marginal. Much of the critique of liberal peacebuilding was focused on the continuing weakness of civil society and development strategies in conflict-affected societies, the way in which the state and elites continue to maintain power after peace and reform processes, and the inconsistency and weakness of international support. The standard pattern that emerged from the era of liberal peacebuilding in the 1990s can be characterised as such: a weak international strategy connected to a weak civil society, attempting (but often failing) to contain a fierce state. Neoliberal statebuilding in the 2000s accentuated this pattern. Thus, the liberal peace offered limited progress and lost legitimacy since it produced illiberal, stalemated and corrupt governance from Cambodia to Bosnia and Afghanistan across this time period. As a consequence, liberal ideology failed to shape structure and political order substantially, leaving space for counter-peace frameworks to develop. The emerging multipolar order has generated alternative approaches to peace. However, the emerging powers are limited to pursuing authoritarian models, with an even weaker role of civil society, and a strong defence of non-intervention for oppressive governments. Hence, the counter-peace architecture exaggerates the same trajectory of failed peacemaking. Yet counter-peace actors’ rationality is different: they claim legitimacy on the grounds of safeguarding order, nationalism and sovereignty. Civil society voices are oppressed as ‘factionalism’ in order to preserve national unity. Counter-peace actors refrain from making emancipatory and normative promises, but focus on identity and historical interests.

3 David Lewis et al., 2018.

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Gendered, ethnic and religious hierarchies are justified as securing order against the forces of disorder. Negating international peacemaking thus revolves around interfering with UN and development support, accentuating regional geopolitics, coopting elites at the state level, and countering civil society with ‘uncivil’ majorities. It requires the construction of different and competing international narratives about ideology, authoritarian nationalism and its efficiency in development, its capacity to maintain order and to reconstitute former territorial possessions. This appears to be the main ideological outcome connected to the counter-peace framework. Indeed, the international components of counter-peace draw on reserves of power that far outweigh those of international and grassroots peace efforts, especially in terms of international political economy and military capacity—the former driven by extraction, and the latter by geopolitics. The pressures of a newly forming world order could aid the urgent reconstruction of the international peace architecture, align it more closely with scientific knowledge about peace, justice, and sustainability, and connect the IPA more substantially to the claims of global civil society. Yet, an enormous investment in new international mechanisms designed to support the IPA would be needed in this scenario. This would require close attention to current critical debates about the decolonisation of the international system, different types of justice, and sustainability therein. These debates have to some degree been connected in the UN’s sustaining peace agenda (which emerged from global civil society engagement with expert knowledge in multilateral venues across the UN system).4

Conclusion International counter-peace dynamics are far deeper rooted and better networked than often assumed. They are closely entangled with the IPA. This chapter has laid out how counter-peace tactics have evolved into strategies and now also span ideological contests. Counter-peace processes are marked by interference with balance of power mechanisms, blocking

4 For example, see UN Secretary-General, “Report of the Secretary-General, Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace,” A/72/707–S/2018/43 (New York: United Nations, 2018).

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and undermining civil society as well as multilateral networks, undermining international norms, chipping away at the international political will and legitimacy of a settlement or process, and the rise of populist nationalist networks that claim to have an interest in ‘stabilisation’.5 Instead of norms, law, and rights they focus on geopolitics. The international dynamics of counter-peace generally negate support structures for local reconciliation and state reform. They also reject the emancipatory, epistemic premises of scholarship on peaceful social orders, the state, and international security. They reject rights and civil society, informal global networks, as well as designs for state and multilateralism which check power and interests. In sum, counter-peace forces at the international level can rapidly consolidate from sets of small-scale tactics into broader strategies and ultimately form an ideological axis of geopolitical power with alternative visions for the nature of political order. This indicates some preference for the avoidance of direct war, but counter-peace remains war by other means to a large extent. As yet the emergence of a multi-polar order has not been reflected in the creation of new peacemaking tools to deal with conflict or war. Instead, more traditional tools of diplomacy, the modulation of the balance of power, mediation, and peacekeeping are being sparingly used, while newer (liberal) interventions are being sidelined. Given what we have outlined above with respect to the necessity for the preservation of the IPA, this lacuna needs urgently addressing. A new level of complexity is now emerging in the IPA, following on from our three patterns of counter-peace and their international implications. We have shown that different counter-peace actors have begun to develop their own counterpeace tools. These include independent attempts to undermine peace processes in a way which falls short of a restart of violence and war, Russia’s conceptualisation of conflict management in its areas of influence (which the Kremlin seeks to take outside of the existing IPA), or China’s engagement with peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and development both within the UN system and within its own evolving framework. The liberal peace model is probably the most developed peacemaking framework, and despite many flaws related to economic and justice questions not least, it has provided a platform for more sophisticated peace tools to emerge (as well as more regressive “statebuilding” approaches).

5 Constantini and Hanau Santini, op. cit., p. 4.

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These include platforms for rights to expand, for subaltern voices to emerge, and democracy to consolidate even within a generally stalemated outcome. Yet, liberal peace practice has been marred by a lack of international political will and consensus, the failure of neoliberal models of peacebuilding and development, and the ambiguity with which recognition, ownership, and global and local justice questions have been addressed. The Russian and Chinese versions of peace are more harmful by comparison. They fail to deal with the big issues mentioned above (e.g. global justice and the failure of neoliberalism), while turning the liberal peace’s unintended consequences into strategic objectives: the fierce state, weak civil society and stubborn gender, and identity-based hierarchies are all justified in pursuit of authoritarian ‘order’. In practice, counter-peace processes tend to escalate. None of these outcomes furthers the IPA or its alignment with emancipatory scholarship on peacemaking, and merely entangles it within the stranglehold of structural forces, particularly related to territorialism, nationalism, geopolitics, lack of political will, poor legal capacity and enforcement, and unsustainable and inequitable economic models. Ultimately, it must be said that multipolarity—and the limited peacemaking tools it may produce and depend on—is unlikely to be aligned with critical and emancipatory scholarship on the nature and needs of peacemaking.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

Abstract This conclusion summarizes the core findings of our book. The book has explored the dynamics of the recent stagnation of peace processes and the impact of tactical and strategic actions of counter-peace forces. This chapter recaps the typological analysis of three variants of counter-peace and their characterization with specific types of protracted conflicts. Different counter-peace patterns, like the stalemate, limited, and unmitigated counter-peace patterns, are now intertwined with peace and reform processes. The conclusion then briefly reflects on the implications for a developing multi-polar order where local and international peace and reform tools appear ineffective while identifying the rise of counter-peace processes at the heart of unsuccessful peacemaking efforts. It concludes with a few suggestions on where the research agenda on counter-peace might focus in the future. Keywords Failed peacemaking · Counter-peace processes · Structural violence · Interventionary practices

This book has shown how and why peace processes across the world are blocked and have been prone to relapsing into violence. It elaborated three distinct patterns of blockages: the stalemate, limited counter-peace and unmitigated counter-peace patterns. Individually, the analysis of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3_10

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the different patterns elaborated distinct sets of tactics through which emancipatory goals pursued in peace processes are resisted. This analysis demonstrated that conflicts have distinct epicentres, around which conflicts evolve. Yet, these epicentres are difficult to tackle as this research also explained. The greatest diversity between the patterns lies in the role of international peace architecture itself: in the stalemate pattern, the IPA has become captured, in the limited counter-peace pattern its operations have been diverted and in the unmitigated counter-peace pattern it has been kept at bay altogether. Collectively, the existence of stable patterns across the world suggests that sets of blockages are not coincidental, but proto-systemic. It indicates that spoilers have not only developed distinct tactics and strategies to stall, delegitimise and reverse peace processes, but disseminated them among revanchist1 or revisionist2 actors. This research yielded the concept of the ‘counter-peace’ to capture strategies that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational) as well as tactics that exploit structural blockages and unintended consequences of peace interventions in order to block peace processes and reform. In pursuit of a better understanding of the emerging counter-peace strategies and their underlying ideologies, the book then turned to the international scale. The picture that emerges from this investigation highlights that counter-peace processes have emerged as a powerful force in the post-Cold War era, obstructing the successful implementation of peace processes and peace settlements. Counter-peace processes have been used as a tool to obstruct civil society-level accommodation, and to protect traditional power-structures and hierarchies, while entrenching existing socio-economic inequalities. As a result, the international peace architecture has been left unable to address the most difficult issues within conflict-affected societies. In short, the book has shown how deeply connected and networked counter-peace forces have become. Yet what the analysis presented here also shows is that contemporary alliances between counter-peace forces are not necessarily stable since their underpinning ideologies are not aligned.

1 Revanchist actors aim to reverse the outcome of peace processes and restore the pre-war order. 2 Revisionist actors contest the international order that underpins contemporary peace processes.

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In all three patterns the external environment is crucial for the production of blockages to peace. Geopolitics, counter-peace alliances between autocrats, structural violence and vested interests in resource extraction constitute important factors that perpetuate conflict dynamics. Peace interventions are thus shaped by geopolitics and the interference of fierce states rather than transnational or international norms. Indeed, the exact choice of approach within a certain interventionary practice might be determined by external interests, rather than analyses of the root causes of the conflict. This represents a failure for the international peacemaking model, and one that needs urgent attention, as counter-peace actors increasingly control political and international order. Other blockages are more pattern-specific. Worryingly, the potential for broad-based counterpeace alliances (i.e. alliances across all scales between the population, counter-peace elites and their international backers) is present in all three patterns. All three patterns highlight not only the severe limitations of the international peace architecture, but also its internal contradictions and decay. In the stalemate pattern, the peace process itself has been captured by counter-peace elites, even where there are plausible alternatives. In the limited peace pattern, an effective peace process would need to create legitimate and peaceful socio-political orders, requiring massive investment externally and a mix of legitimacy, consent, and moral discipline domestically. Instead, external stability-oriented interventions have often aggravated the dysfunctions of conflict-affected quasi-states. Interventionary practices such as statebuilding and counter-insurgency have reinforced the coercive state apparatus and supported its rulers’ authoritarian tendencies. This renders quasi-states unable to regulate social processes peacefully. It might even propel the slippage of conflicts from limited to unmitigated counter-peace. Once the state of unmitigated counter-peace has been reached, effective peace processes would require the simultaneous deployment of a whole array of peace tools and interventions. By contrast, carefully circumscribed and therefore ineffective interventions are the norm in this pattern. Disconnected from the larger toolbox of the international peace architecture, these peace practices cannot be used as an entry point for a wider peace process. Instead, such interventions may discredit the notion of an externally-promoted ‘peace’ and the international peace architecture that supports it. Given the internal and external contestation of peace interventions, it is remarkable that that the historical edifice of the IPA has managed to come

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into being at all, while its many instabilities are unsurprising. It exists by virtue of its necessity, and yet it is riven by internal contradictions. The trend among all three patterns is that the IPA has been captured or eroded by counter-peace forces. Its entanglement with counter-peace processes makes the architecture’s revision necessary to ensure its survival. While the emerging multipolar order is characterised by the rise of revisionist powers, these actors have so far used disjointed approaches in their engagement with the IPA. Turkey, for instance, has exploited the resources made available through peace processes, while stalling their further progress. China has established new institutions that could complement or compete with the IPA with a recent trend towards confrontation and rivalry. The most severe challenges come from Russia given its direct attack on the IPA and its underlying international order. Despite those differences, divergent strands of revanchism and revisionism have recently converged towards a discernible logic: fierce states would become central pillars of stability, while civil society would be oppressed and gendered as well as identity-based hierarchies cemented. This counter-peace agenda is justified by the pursuit of ‘order’ against the forces of ‘disorder’. Finding a common denominator between this vision of peacemaking and the IPA would neutralise emancipatory processes and reduce the IPA to minor stabilisation-type missions. Such a compromise would still not solve the problem that pacification approaches and frozen conflicts are inherently escalatory as this book has shown. Hence, peacemaking guided by this logic would fail by design. Elements of the IPA have so far rejected the expanded political claims of the global south. Instead, the IPA has focused only on basic human rights, limited democratisation, allowed stabilisation, counterterrorism/counter-insurgency approaches to erode its own legitimacy, and displayed a problematic focus on sovereignty and the security-state, along with narrow, Eurocentric conceptions of the ‘international’. The emergence of a multipolar order has reduced the space for internationally supported peace processes, while providing a platform for counter-peace actors to justify their return to traditional geopolitics and securitisation. It is clear that the future of international peacemaking is at stake. Whether the IPA can survive in this new era will depend on its ability to create a fairer and appealing relationship with the global south, based on global justice, sustainability and the treatment of southern countries as equal partners.

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The current ideological competition in the international order over the allegiance of the global south will determine the parameters of the IPA for years to come and ultimately its survival. A future research agenda that emerges from counter-peace’s delegitimisation and defanging of the IPA might revolve around its decolonisation in order to respond to its hidden counter-peace dynamics. This would require a constitution of a more pluriversal peace architecture, a necessary task if conflict, war, and violence are to be avoided. Such innovations, however, can only be imagined in the light of a much more detailed understanding of the blockages and counter-peace dynamics affecting the current IPA. This study has attempted to open up and explore failed peacemaking and its theoretical, conceptual, and empirical dimensions, in order to help set the scene for future innovations in peacemaking. A more detailed treatment of blockages and counter-peace is now required in order to stabilize, and build new layers of, the IPA.

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Index

A Afghanistan, 6, 17, 18, 63, 72, 90, 92, 98 Agenda for Peace, 5 Arab Uprisings, 59 Authoritarian conflict management, 19, 87 Authoritarian peace, 6

B Backsliding, 69, 71, 73, 79 Balance of power system, 4, 5 Blockages to peace enabling environment, 72 national rejection of the IPA, 72 social blockages, 12 structural blockages, 37, 104 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 10, 14, 40, 43 BRICS, 20, 68, 79, 82, 92, 96 Burma (Myanmar), 2, 7, 17, 60, 63, 69, 70, 73, 86, 87

C Cambodia, 2, 11, 12, 18, 70–74, 77, 87, 98 China, 6, 24, 68, 71–73, 76, 78, 82, 85–89, 91, 92, 96, 100, 106 Civil society, 2, 5, 7, 10–12, 14, 18, 24, 41, 45, 46, 54, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 86, 91, 94–101, 104, 106 Columbia, 10 Counter-hegemony, 32, 77, 78, 92 Counterinsurgency, 52, 70 Counter-peace ideology, 78 limited counter-peace pattern, 26, 54, 79 stalemate pattern, 21, 46, 53, 105 tactics/strategy, 9, 11, 15, 21, 22, 25, 69, 73, 79, 86, 94, 99 unmitigated counter-peace pattern, 58, 60, 62, 84, 103 Counter-revolution, 2, 15, 22, 32–37, 70 Criminal gangs

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pogodda et al., Failed Peacemaking, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30081-3

123

124

INDEX

criminal governance, 49 criminal networks, 31, 36 violence, 53 Crisis management, 89–91 Cyprus, 10, 12, 18, 40, 43, 44, 72–74, 83, 84 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, 71

D Dayton Peace Accords, 14, 43 Decolonial critiques, 14 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 12, 18, 50, 83 Democratisation, 13, 14, 50, 61, 63, 78, 97, 106 Development, 2–7, 9, 12–14, 19, 22, 25, 41, 42, 46, 48, 51, 54, 71, 72, 75, 78, 82, 83, 87, 95–101 Digital authoritarianism, 61 Digital governmentality, 8 Digital surveillance, 61, 64 Digital technologies, 75

E Egypt, 11–13, 18, 36, 60, 69, 70, 72, 73 Elite peace capture, 10, 23 Emancipatory peace, 34, 64 Environmental degradation, 49, 53 Ethnic segregation, 40, 43, 44 Ethno-nationalism, 15, 42, 44, 46, 73 Eurasian Union, 76 European Union (EU), 5, 12, 14, 15, 43, 44, 51, 52, 61, 62, 70, 73, 76, 85, 87 Everyday nationalism, 24

F Femicides. See Women’s subjugation

Formalised political unsettlement, 25, 40, 45, 46 Frozen conflicts, 2, 43, 46, 71, 84, 106 Fundamentalist movements, 73, 75

G Gender, 13, 70, 97, 99, 101, 106 gendered hierarchies, 99 gender equality, 45 Geopolitics, 4, 6–10, 13, 14, 31, 44, 46, 50, 58, 59, 65, 69, 71, 73–75, 77–79, 82–84, 87, 90–92, 94, 97–101, 105, 106 Global civil society, 24, 86, 99 Global governance, 7, 68 Global justice, 8, 14, 21, 24–26, 101, 106 Global South, 20, 48, 82, 86, 87, 92, 95, 97, 106, 107 Great powers, 14, 59 Gulf States, 20, 78

H Humanitarian intervention, 60, 71 Hybridity, 76

I Illiberal peacebuilding. See Peacebuilding IMF, 82 International law, 4, 5, 18, 59, 63, 76 International order, 2, 3, 9, 15, 20, 22, 27, 55, 64, 73, 78, 79, 82, 83, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94, 96, 104–107 International peace architecture (IPA), 3–9, 12–15, 17–19, 23–27, 37, 41, 46, 54, 55, 60, 62–65, 69,

INDEX

70, 72–74, 76, 77, 82, 83, 86, 89, 91, 92, 94–101, 104–107 Iraq, 6, 40, 58–61, 92 Irredentism, 48 Israel/Palestine conflict, 17 J Justice global justice, 8, 14, 21, 24–26, 101, 106 social justice, 13 K Kosovo, 2, 10, 14, 18, 40–44, 59, 72, 74, 75, 85, 86 L Lebanon, 34, 40, 42–45, 60, 61 Liberal internationalism, 5, 59, 62, 65, 82, 91, 97 Liberal peacebuilding. See Peacebuilding Libya, 17, 18, 59–62, 72, 89, 91 Limited counter-peace pattern. See Counter-peace M Marginalisation, 13, 19, 34, 35, 37, 48, 52, 78 Micro-politics, 10 Military occupation, 34, 36, 58, 59, 63, 64, 73 Multilateralism, 2, 4, 9, 69, 72, 75, 83, 88, 90, 92, 100 Multipolar order, 24, 46, 69, 86, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 106 N Nagorno-Karabakh, 90

125

Nationalism, 3, 13, 36, 45, 74, 75, 82, 87, 97–99, 101 NATO, 5, 59, 70, 84, 85, 89 Negative peace, 10, 14, 31, 32 Neocolonialism, 92 Neoliberalism, 6, 8, 42, 96, 101 Neoliberal statebuilding. See Statebuilding NGOs, 5, 73 Non-Aligned Movement, 4 Non-intervention, 58, 59, 64, 83, 98 Norm Contestation, 76

P Peacebuilding Chinese peacebuilding, 20 illiberal peacebuilding, 19 liberal peacebuilding, 15, 72, 76, 82, 83, 87, 89, 95, 97, 98 Peace formation, 6, 36, 45, 52–55 Peacekeeping, 2, 5–7, 10–12, 14, 24, 26, 43, 46, 63, 70–72, 75, 84, 92, 95, 97, 100 Russian peacekeeping, 90 UN peacekeeping, 10, 73, 75, 83, 84, 87, 89 Peacemaking future of, 106 in multipolar order, 82 liberal peace, 15, 46, 84 norms (contestation), 70 theory, 71 tools, 2, 11, 18, 82, 87, 88, 92, 100, 101 Peace negotiations, 12, 34, 46, 63 mediation, 12, 46, 63 peace agreement, 18, 30, 34, 43, 46, 49, 63, 90 Peace process co-optation, 25 failure/collapse, 10, 15, 17, 30, 72

126

INDEX

illiberal outcomes, 18, 98 in limited counter-peace pattern, 21 in stalemate pattern, 44, 45, 105 in unmitigated counter-peace pattern, 60, 62, 104 mechanisms and components, 99 resistance to, 11, 74, 77 stagnating/frozen, 12, 21, 23, 41 Political transition, 50, 60 Post-Cold War era, 2, 104 Postcolonial conflicts, 58 critiques, 14 leaders/governments, 48 Power-sharing, 10, 23, 25, 26, 40–45, 97

Q Quasi-states, 51, 52, 69, 105

R Race, 13, 79, 97 Reconciliation, 8, 10, 14, 15, 22, 23, 25, 34, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 68, 100 Republika Srpska, 44, 71, 86 Revanchism, 70, 82, 106 Revisionism, 26, 82, 86, 89, 91, 106 Revolution, 2, 12, 33, 34, 36, 64, 96 Russia, 24, 44, 46, 58, 60, 62, 63, 70, 72, 75, 76, 78, 82, 84, 85, 88–92, 96, 100, 106

S Sahel region, 7, 49, 53, 60, 73, 75 Sectarianism, 42, 44–46, 87 Serbia, 75, 85, 86, 89 Societal blockages to peace. See Blockages to peace

Sovereignty, 10, 41, 43, 48, 50, 59, 64, 75, 83, 98, 106 Spoilers, 19, 20, 22, 23, 30, 31, 37, 45, 104 Sri Lanka, 2, 70, 73, 74, 77, 86, 87, 89, 92 Stabilisation approaches, 6, 24 Stalemate pattern. See Counter-peace Statebuilding, 2, 6, 8, 10, 22, 24, 26, 50–52, 54, 70, 72, 76, 83, 98, 100, 105 State formation, 12, 13, 36, 58 Statehood, 44, 48, 52, 85, 86, 94 State reform, 25, 71, 73, 97, 100 Structural violence, 23, 53, 105 Sudan, 7, 17, 60, 61, 70 Syria, 7, 12, 14, 18, 44, 60, 61, 63, 64, 72, 73, 84, 86, 89, 90

T Tactical blockages. See Counter-peace Taiwan, 86, 88, 89, 92 Top-down statebuilding, 23 Tunisia, 2, 12, 13, 18, 60, 77 Turkey, 24, 71, 76, 84, 106 Turkish Republic of Northen Cyprus. See Cyprus

U UN General Assembly, 7 UN Peacekeeping. See Peacekeeping UN Security Council, 59, 60, 62, 64, 72, 75, 82, 83, 85, 88, 91, 92 UN Sustainable Development Goals, 7 UN Sustaining Peace Agenda, 9, 26, 99 UN system, 3, 65, 72, 86, 99, 100

W Wagner Group, 61

INDEX

Women’s subjugation, 49 brideprice, 49 femicide, 49 World Bank, 42, 82

X Xinjang, 88 Y Yemen, 17, 18, 60, 86

127