From peacebuilding as resistance to peacebuilding as liberation

Abstract

The liberal peace, in its various iterations and broadest characterization, has been in crisis since the first intervention in Somalia by the UN and the USA in the early 1990s. Many liberal peace-oriented interventions have had unintended consequences or failed to meet their ambitious goals (Paris 2004; Richmond 2005). This can be seen from Timor Leste and its ever fragile state, in the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, Cambodia and Central America where hybrid political regimes have emerged, often combining authoritarian rule and democracy, Kosovo where peacebuilding was co-opted into a nationalist project, Bosnia Herzegovina where political deadlock prevents EU accession as the ultimate guarantee of peace, and finally Afghanistan and Iraq, where even the most basic form of security has failed to emerge despite (or perhaps because of) liberal interventionism (Richmond and Franks 2009). The liberal peace’s attempt to connect security, institutions, justice, development and civil society has been challenged as insufficient, inconsistent and weak, particularly by its subjects. This refers to citizens and civil society organizations which are integral to the social contract with the putative liberal state. Such local actors do not just include those engaged in institutional frameworks, or civil society, but also those operating in the context of the local-local, that is, indigenous social actors, those operating in customary, cultural and identity realms. As a result, they have developed ways of dealing with its deficits, especially in terms of social justice and the recognition of diverse identities, cultures and custom. It is the contention of this chapter1 that local, hidden agencies for peacebuildinghave responded to international incapacity to build peace in a number of ways. These show how local actors in civil society, in the local-local beneath the internationally induced civil society, draw on international peacebuilding, hold it to account, and modify it to maintain the integrity of local understandings of peacebuilding, from customary perspectives, perhaps in religious contexts, to manage pressing human needs and security issues. This indicates the hidden but significant capacity of local actors for peacebuilding, such that they resist and modify the liberal peace process in the interests of associating peace with justice and emancipation, not just in rights frameworks, but also in cultural, needs and contextual terms.