Liberal Peace Framework Research Articles

Beyond Liberal Peace: Religious Violence and Tactical Peacebuilding in Indonesia

Since the downfall of Suharto’s authoritarian government in 1998, Indonesia has witnessed a variety of violent conflicts, intergroup tensions and Islamist radicalism, which in turn pose threats to the country’s security, safety and peace. This article examines various forms of religious violence, particularly Islamist violence, and ways of overcoming them tactically or strategically in post-Suharto Indonesia. This article underscores the need to go beyond the liberal peace framework, underlines the significance of the implementation of tactical peacebuilding and highlights the central roles of domestic religious actors in the peace and reconciliation processes. This article suggests that tactical peacebuilding requires multiple approaches that utilise various sources, including religion and culture, and needs a strategic collaboration among manifold actors—religious and secular, state and society, domestic and foreign. The Indonesian case shows that religion is not only a source of conflict, violence and ‘violence-building’ but also a useful resource for reconciliation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

The Impact of the Theory of Liberalism on the United Nations’ and African Union’s Approach to Global Peace and Security

This article presents a critical analysis of the impact (influence) of the theory of liberalism on the United Nations’ (UN) and Africa Union’s (AU) approach to global peace and security. There are various and sometimes conflicting theories of international relations relating to how world politics functions, including international and regional peace and security. Which theory of international relations and peace would explain the United Nations' role in promoting worldwide peace and security, as well as the African Union's role in promoting regional peace and security within the African continent? Even though this question is difficult to answer and no single theory can fully capture the complexities surrounding the issues at hand, this article contends that the liberal peace framework has had a profound influence on the creation of the United Nations and the African Union, as well as their roles in international and regional peace and security. To this purpose, the study adopts a qualitative critical research strategy with secondary data collection and analytical approaches which comprise characterizing, thematizing, and contextualizing the topic at hand. The paper explains how liberalism influenced the essential thinking, values and norms, institutional legitimacy and mandate. It also conceptualizes and operationalizes peace and security concerns at the UN and AU. This is tied to UN-led global action which, when paired with the AU's considerable continental role, illustrates liberalism's impact in terms of laws, conventions, principles, and practices, facilitating cooperative peacebuilding efforts. Despite some critical theoretical and practical shortcomings, this paper argues that liberalism is still essential to achieving the UN’s and AU's, agenda for global peace and security.

Emerging Power Liminality in Peacebuilding: Turkey’s Mimicry of the Liberal Peace

ABSTRACT International peacebuilding is no longer dominated by Western actors and their liberal peace framework, neither there is a full-fledged alternative formulated by emerging peacebuilding actors. In this paper, I first establish the relationship between the liminality of emerging powers and their mimicry of the liberal peace. Secondly, I distinguish three forms of mimicry in peacebuilding that stem from emerging power liminality: a discursive mimicry, a complete mimicry and a substantive mimicry. In the case of the discursive mimicry, there is a liberal peacebuilding discourse which is rarely substantiated with policies. The complete mimicry is when both the liberal discourse and the policies are mimicked, and the substantive mimicry is a genuine adaptation of the liberal peacebuilding by the emerging power. The case of Turkish peacebuilding is analysed to illustrate the tripartite distinction. I demonstrate that Turkey mimics solely the discourse of the democratic peace thesis, while there is a complete mimicry of the Western model in security sector reform. However, the Turkish civil society peacebuilding and Turkey’s approach to economic development substantively mimic their liberal peace counterparts. This article contributes to the critical literature on liberal peacebuilding by identifying the different forms of emerging actors’ mimicry of the liberal peace.

The Role of Civil Society Actors in Peacemaking: The Case of Guatemala

This article builds upon recent scholarship in critical peace studies that focuses on the role of civil society actors in formal peacemaking processes, in short, peace talks, and post-conflict peacebuilding. The article specifically explores the role of civil society actors in the Guatemalan peace process. The research addresses the possible tensions and potential complementarities in processes where civil society enjoys a mandated role in centralised, formal peace negotiations carried out between the state and armed actors in talks levied within the liberal peace framework. In the case of Guatemala, non-state actors participated to an unprecedented extent in the peace negotiations, and Guatemala has not relapsed into armed conflict. However, post-conflict Guatemala is a violent and unstable country. Consequently, the study challenges the assumption that peacemaking is necessarily more successful in those instances where provisions have been established to guarantee the participation of civil society.

The Influence of the Liberal Peace Framework on the United Nations Approach to Peacebuilding in Guinea-Bissau*

The article explores the United Nations approach to peacebuilding in Guinea-Bissau following the 1998-1999 armed conflict in the country. Despite efforts from the United Nations and other international actors, the country seems still far from achieving the sustainable peace advocated by intervenors. The main hypothesis herein sustained is that this limitation is due to the strong basis of the UN approach on the liberal peace framework. This framework is particularly marked by the (usually top-down) promotion of fundamentally liberal values and practices to post-armed conflict situations. It is thus argued that the limitations of the UN approach to peacebuilding are to be found not only in the implementation or operationalization of specific policies, but also in their own design.

Peace stillborn? Guatemala's liberal peace and the indigenous movement

This article analyses the relationship between Guatemala's protracted internationally sponsored peace process (1987–96) and the country's indigenous movement. The impact of the peace process and its emancipatory potential was ultimately limited by the intransigence of triumphalist national military, economic and political elites and the acute limitations imposed by the liberal peace framework in the aftermath of the United Nations' Agenda for Peace. Negotiations did not respond adequately to the underlying structural causes of armed conflict, nor did they represent or incorporate sufficiently the historical demands and cultural focus of Guatemala's majority indigenous population, undergirded as they were by a restricted rights framework that coincided with the liberal peace parameters. Indigenous actors nevertheless took advantage of the embedded liberal peace and the political space it afforded, developing hybrid political forms to make visible their historical demands and establish an incipient peace infrastructure.

The End of the Liberal Peace? Post-Liberal Peace vs. Post-Liberal States

A Post-Liberal Peace. Edited by P. Richmond Oliver. London: Routledge, 2011. 288 pp., $35.15 paperback (ISBN 978-0415667845). International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance. Edited by Chandler David. London: Routledge, 2010. 240 pp., $40.41 paperback (ISBN 978-0415421188). During the last decade, a multitude of research findings have critiqued the liberal peace framework, concentrating mainly on the illiberal effects that liberal peacebuilding has had on the countries it was implemented in, the ambivalence in international understandings of the aims of the state, rights, and governance, and to a lesser extent on the international institutions and organizations that were involved in peacebuilding and state-building missions. (Lederach 1997; Bleiker 2000; Duffield 2001; Clark 2001; Paris 2004; Richmond 2007; Jabri 2007; Pugh and Turner 2008). Two scholars of peacebuilding and state-building, Oliver P. Richmond and David Chandler, have now taken the logical step of moving beyond the maladies of liberal peace and its critique, to provide us with a debate about possible new paradigms whose repercussions are not limited to peace and conflict studies, but also resonate with international relations theories in general. Richmond's A Post-liberal Peace and Chandler's International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-liberal Governance offer insights into liberalism's failure when it comes to peace- and state-building, and they reformulate the very basic assumptions that underpin the theoretical foundations of international interventions. Both studies are destined to leave their mark in the fields of peacebuilding and state-building, and they are bound to generate a novel, key debate in international relations that will attract many more arguments and criticisms from more scholars. In his latest volume, Richmond highlights the deficiencies, the problems, and the obstacles that are either inherent in or are caused by the liberal peace framework. For a start, Richmond argues, the frameworks through which liberal peace are deployed tend to focus excessively on the development of the liberal state and its institutions, and a neoliberal economy (p.6). Rarely, if at all, does the international community contextualize its responses to conflict by …

The impact of orthodox terrorism discourses on the liberal peace: internalisation, resistance, or hybridisation?

This article examines the relationship between orthodox terrorism discourses and liberal peacebuilding, particularly where states are being reconstituted after a conflict. Drawing upon fieldwork in Sri Lanka, Palestine, Kashmir, Nepal, and Northern Ireland, our findings suggest that conflicts in which orthodox terrorism theory is deployed to explain violence are those in which there is little interest (by all parties) in dealing with root causes or achieving mutual compromise. This is so even though the liberal peace is commonly a claimed aspiration for most parties, apart from the most radical of non-state actors or authoritarian of states. They effectively reify both terrorism and state securitisation. The aspired to internalisation of the liberal peace framework has instead been supplanted by the politics of state securitisation and violent resistance. Liberal peacebuilding has become a nominal exercise in constructing virtually liberal states in which the security and integrity of core groups are partially maintained by orthodox terrorism praxis. To counter these dynamics, critical positions need to engage with agendas beyond liberal or cosmopolitan frameworks.

Coopting Liberal Peace-building

The liberal peace framework aims to regulate, govern and empower the individual in a democratic and pluralist milieu. Yet liberal peace-building, even on the scale and depth employed in the international governance of Kosovo, is susceptible to local cooption, particularly where one group can adopt the language of the liberal peace and has strong support and credibility from the international community. This has led to a focus on achieving statehood for Kosovan Albanians, the marginalization of other identity groups and their agendas, and consequently the undermining of the pluralist goals of peace-building with the implicit cooperation of liberal peace-builders. Given Serb opposition to statehood for Kosovo, there is a danger that liberal peace-building will encourage the partition of Kosovo rather than create a pluralist polity. The article illustrates the susceptibility of liberal peace-building to local cooption.

Patterns of Peace

Different strategies are used to conceptualise peace in the literature on International Relations, peace and conflict studies. These have included strategies based upon the notion that peace is geographically contained, and constructed by race, identity, ideology, or power, and has universal qualities, although it is also utopian and unlikely to be fully achieved. What has developed more recently in the relevant literature is a hybrid version of peace—the liberal peace. This is universal, attainable, and dependent upon a specific methodology. The following essay outlines the main discursive characteristics associated with peace, and with the emergence of the concept of the liberal peace. It outlines the patterns of thought prevalent in the conceptualisation of peace, and their ontological and epistemological implications in the context of the liberal peace framework. This essay is partially based upon a section of my new book, The Transformation of Peace (London: Palgrave, 2005). I take responsibility for any errors in this essay.