Thinking beyond the liberal peace: From utopia to heterotopias

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a fierce debate about the ‘liberal peace’: a specific vision of peace that has come to be leading and that promotes democracy, human rights, free markets and the rule of law as the solution for war-torn countries around the world. Critics have called for moderated and alternative policy models for what is seen as an imposed agenda, based on Western values and interests. However, much of this criticism of the liberal peace is in fact criticism of interventionist, top-down approaches. The manner in which the liberal peace is disseminated is criticized, but not, usually, the basic ideas on which it is based. This is problematic because some of the basic neoliberal assumptions that play a role in contemporary peacebuilding approaches, including the lack of attention for (collective) identity, the promotion of the free market, and the emphasis on national-level, formal institutions, do not sit well with the realities in many post-conflict countries. Still, despite all the criticisms of the liberal peace, there is a dearth of alternative visions. Orientalist ways of thinking and the hegemony of the neoliberal discourse make it very difficult to move beyond the liberal peace. At the same time, the search for alternatives may easily make the same mistake as the liberal peace does, namely to assume that the same solutions apply everywhere. Instead of one alternative utopia, we need to open up space for heterotopias: disturbing, but real places that demonstrate the frictions of and the grains of multiple alternatives to neoliberalist peacebuilding. Following Foucault, we call for a world with many ‘heterotopias’ that show the ‘friction’ between the liberal peace and alternative realities, producing not one but multiple visions and interpretations. It is possible that the space for heterotopias will widen in the near future, as the economic crisis and other related developments combine to create uncertainty about the future of the liberal peace.