Normative Values and Economic Deficits in Postconflict Transformation

Abstract

When he [Ashdown] carne to Bosnia, he published a manifesto called For jobs and But there are no jobs and there is no justice. The only thing he is interested in is being able to write a report at the end of his term boasting of all his reforms.1It is remarkable how little attention is paid to the economic contexts in which peacekeepers, police, and other external agencies operate in wartorn societies. Yet it is arguable - without subscribing to reductive explanations based on economic rationalism characteristic of neoclassical economic ideology - that predation and the exploitation of resources play a significant role in civil wars as integral to untidy and violent processes in capital accumulation and development.2 Postconflict economies are also generally characterized by widespread and deep poverty, disrupted markets and production, high levels of unemployment, and varied patterns of criminality. Wartorn populations turn to a variety of means to survive when opportunities and incentives arise, and this may include growing poppy or selling black-market cigarettes. Social cohesion and intercommunal tensions may be aggravated by the deprivations and inequalities seemingly inescapable in emergence from conflict. In Kosovo, for example, an estimated unemployment level of 70 percent among school leavers and up to 24 years old was estimated for 2003, and in Timor Leste soldiers went on the rampage in May 2006 when they lost their jobs or suffered a pay cut. We know these issues are significant, but how can they be tackled?This article stems from the transformation of war economies project at the University of Bradford, UK, which examined the role of external as well as domestic actors in the political economies of wartorn societies.3 Postindustrial powers in the international system, we concur, have hegemonic preoccupations with international order that require the installation of a peace.4 The argument springs from an epistemology of political economy that is grounded in the structures of regulatory and disciplinary capitalism and the agencies and writers of liberal economics (such as Jeffrey Sachs, one time adviser to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan). The contention here reflects a resistance to the certainties of disciplinary liberalism, its mobilization of an ideology of probity against unruliness, and its efforts at problem-solving for peace - the notion that social life across the globe can be engineered into obedience to certain norms, through therapeutic governance, televisual representations of reality, and surveillance of everyday life.First, the article draws attention to the merger of peace operations and development as a key normative evolution in the hegemonic liberal peace project and contends that it provides a virtual teleology for advanced capitalism. Second, the article highlights the deficits in the economic agenda of postconflict reconstruction and illustrates the silence that surrounds income generation by using an example from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Finally, the article offers some lessons that might be drawn from the issues raised. The central argument is that without far more attention than is currently given by international agencies to deficits in the structures of employment and income in their own right, and not merely as adjuncts to the development of free markets, so-called economic transformations after conflict are likely to rely heavily on unobservable income generation, such as diaspora remittances and shadow economic activities, in order to meet basic needs.THE NORMATIVE MERGER OF SECURITY AND DEVELOPMENTWartorn societies have particular developmental concerns because of the destruction, displacement, refashioned incentive structures, and primitive accumulation through predation and exploitation that occurs during conflict.5 The favoured answers, however, have been framed by a wider issue: the normative merger of development and security. …