Within,Above, and Beyond: Churches and Religious Civil Society Activism in South Kivu

In South Kivu in the Eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), various church actors have chosen to involve in advocacy and mobilization through a formalized civil society structure known as La Société Civile (LSC). In this article, we explore the relationship between the churches and civil society in Eastern DRC, paying particular attention to why this cooperation has taken such a formalized expression, the motivations of church actors to become involved in LSC and, finally, how this relationship between different civil society actors has underpinned various peacebuilding efforts at the local, provincial, and national scale.     

The Limits of Liberal Peacebuilding? International Engagement in the Sri Lankan Peace Process

Abstract

This essay explores international engagement in the Sri Lankan peace process between 2002 and 2008. The internationalization of peacebuilding in Sri Lanka is analysed as part of a broader international shift towards a model of ‘liberal peacebuilding’, which involves the simultaneous pursuit of conflict resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty. The essay provides a detailed and disaggregated analysis of the various exporters, importers and resisters of liberal peacebuilding, with a particular focus on the contrasting ways in which the United National Front (UNF) and the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) regimes engaged with international actors. It is argued that an analysis of the Sri Lankan case provides a corrective to some of the core assumptions contained in much of the literature on liberal peacebuilding. Rather than viewing liberal peacebuilding as simply an hegemonic enterprise foisted upon countries emerging from conflict, the essay explores the ways in which peacebuilding is mediated through, and translated and instrumentalized by, multiple actors with competing interests – consequently liberal peacebuilding frequently looks different when it ‘hits the ground’ and may, as in the Sri Lanka case, lead to decidedly illiberal outcomes. The essay concludes by exploring the theoretical and policy implications of a more nuanced understanding of liberal peacebuilding. It is argued that rather than blaming the failure of the project on deficiencies in its execution and the recalcitrance of the people involved, there is a need to look at defects in the project itself and to explore alternatives to the current model of liberal peacebuilding.     

Is ‘good enough’ peacebuilding good enough? The potential and pitfalls of the local turn in peacebuilding in Timor-Leste

There is a palpable sense of humility within the United Nations and other international institutions regarding peacebuilding. Rather than seeking to implement the liberal peace, they now pursue the more modest goal of ‘good enough’ outcomes. This shift reflects a growing consensus in the critical literature that space needs to be provided for the local agency that will ultimately determine the outcomes of peacebuilding. At first blush this emphasis on local agency is positive; it offers an important correction to the technocratic and generally top-down nature of liberal peacebuilding. But, is the ‘good enough’ approach to peacebuilding good enough? What are the pitfalls and potential of the local turn? This article uses a case study of Timor-Leste to answer these questions. It finds that the local turn can help lend legitimacy to the state and increase opportunities for political participation and the delivery of public goods at the local level. However, the emerging evidence from Timor-Leste also highlights the pitfalls of the local turn. Most significantly, the state can transfer responsibility for public goods provision to the local level in order to lessen the burden on the state and to divert attention from ineffective or illegitimate central institutions.     

The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding Ten Years on: Critical Reflections and Stimulating Ideas on an Evolving Scholarship

ABSTRACT

The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This special volume opens up with a selection of nine of the most influential articles published in the journal. JISB's editorial team has asked the authors for their reflections on their original articles, telling us more about the writing process at that time, what they would do differently (with hindsight), or how they see their articles contributing to current debates on intervention and statebuilding. We have selected one article per volume, and we have ordered the contribution starting from volume 1 (2007) to volume 9 (2015). The articles will be made open access for the year, and we highly recommend (re-)reading the original articles along with the comments from the authors.     

Writing the History of the Future: Securing Stability through Peace Agreements

Abstract

Building effective states is crucial to global stability and prosperity, but this priority has yet to be translated into a consistent approach embraced by a community of practice. Various factors have constrained the emergence of such a community, including a lack of consensus on the range of functions that states should perform. Peace agreements are implicitly exercises in statecraft but have not been systematically analysed as such. Systematic analysis of peace agreements reveals seven foci of statecraft. This analysis in turn reveals seven key building-blocks that peace agreements, as exercises in statecraft, must address in laying the foundations for a durable, inclusive political, social and economic order.     

‘High Resolution’ Indicators in Peacebuilding: The Utility of Political Memory

This article explores the use of political memory in examining, and providing indicators for, everyday processes of peacebuilding in divided societies, using Northern Ireland as a brief case study. Adopting a position critical of many formal peacebuilding indicators, the article argues for the utility of informal, ‘high resolution’ indicators that can be supplied by examining localized and everyday forms of post-conflict memory. In so doing, the article views the ‘dealing with the past’ and reconciliatory paradigm of social memory in identity driven conflicts as being inadequate for this purpose, and instead posits a more nuanced form of examining memory as a political arena. A case study of political memory in east Belfast is introduced to illustrate both the need for nuance in highlighting localized activity, and need to better reflect a complex and ambiguous peacebuilding environment. Suggestions for methodological approaches geared to capturing processes of everyday political memory, and how these processes can inform praxis, concludes the study.     

Building a Repressive Peace: The Case of Post-Genocide Rwanda

Abstract

Security, economic recovery, democracy and statebuilding are seen as tenets of post-conflict peacebuilding in the academic literature. In Rwanda, 15 years of post-genocide peace were built through security, economic recovery and statebuilding, but without democratisation. The result was a repressive peace. The Rwandan case suggests that post-conflict peacebuilding does not require democracy; that elections can reinforce authoritarian tendencies; and that statebuilding can lead to a repressive peace. It also suggests that the repressive peace can be durable, at least in the short to medium term.     

Tajikistan’s Atomised Peace: Approaching Conflict Management from the Ground Up

ABSTRACT

By analysing constitutive everyday peace practices, the article shows that poor socio-economic conditions, rather than political grievances and aspirations, are major sources of an actual and potential discontent in present day Tajikistan. It is argued that peace is atomised in a way that it is upheld through state withdrawal from welfare provision and an ongoing, ever more deepening fragmentation of the social fabric in the context of the precarity accompanying the country’s integration into the global political economy after the Soviet collapse and the subsequent civil war (1992–97). Nevertheless, individuals themselves navigate, domesticate and mitigate conflicts from the ground up.     

Building peaceful citizens? Nation-building in divided societies

ABSTRACT

Interventions aimed at citizenship formation and nation-building in divided and post-conflict societies place great emphasis on promoting and entrenching peace as a cornerstone of economic development and statehood. Such efforts are multi-scalar, encompassing interventions to build democratic institutions and responsible citizens with the pursuit and maintenance of peace at the heart of these ideals. Dominant international pedagogies and policies for liberal-peace-building in divided societies can be used to maintain existing power relations and hierarchies, and may prevent the realization of social (and other forms of) justice while stifling dissent and criticism through exhortations to patriotism, unity, civility, and nation-building. Thus, the ‘goodness’ of peace makes this concept particularly useful as a technique of governance. However, ‘peace’ can also be reworked to suit counter-hegemonic political purposes that open up rather than shut down the question of what peace means. Through an exploration of contestations around the notion of ‘peace’ and its deployment in efforts to promote particular foreign policy agendas we highlight the incongruities in civil society actors’ approaches to peace, and their efforts to achieve sometimes conflicting aims, within divided societies.     

Adding to the Controversy? Civil Society’s Evaluation of the National Conference Dialogue in Yemen

ABSTRACT

This article assembles a picture of Yemen’s 2013–14 National Dialogue Conference (NDC) by collecting perspectives from local civil society organizations (CSOs), which are contrasted to the views of international commentators. Despite all efforts by internal parties as well as the international community, the dialogue failed to avert war, which broke out shortly after. Through interviews with 50 CSOs, we reconstructed the reasons for failure, as well as paying attention to the observed strengths of the dialogue. Half of the consulted organizations were directly involved in the NDC, either as an invited participant or in a brokerage role. The other half concerns outside observers. We identify aspects on which the opinion of the CSOs converge, but also highlight striking divergences depending on insider/outsider status. In contrast to the view espoused in the international literature, the CSOs overall feel that, in spite of all its procedural and substantive flaws, the NDC was a significant junction in the long road towards peace and stability and laid important groundwork for future dialogues.     

Civil Society Capture: Top-Down Interventions from Below?

Driven by the failure of internationally led top-down peacebuilding interventions, international donors have increasingly posited that civil society actors can play a crucial role in peacebuilding and conflict resolution. This has led to a notable increase in the support for civil society in order to integrate local perspectives into peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions over the past decades. Using the case of Cyprus, this paper challenges this premise and argues that this support continues to create homogenized discourses that are not representative of the diversity of local notions of peace. Rather, most types of international support cause civil society actors to adapt their agendas to external priorities, and exclude alternative, less professionalized and critical voices. Local peace actors who resist liberal governmentality have access neither to the monetary support needed to sustain their peace work, nor to international protection for their cause. At the same time, those actors working in line with the international endeavour remove themselves from the ‘everyday’ of local realities so that peace interventions yet again fall into the old trap of top-down interventions.     

Privatization in Kosovo: ‘Liberal Peace’ in Practice

This article examines internationally led privatization in Kosovo as an example of international statebuilding. It concentrates on the period from 1999 to 2008, when privatization was planned and implemented under formal international management. International statebuilding is typically sought justified with the idea of ‘liberal peace’, and this article shows how the tension between the political and economic tenets of the idea of liberal peace manifested itself in Kosovo's internationally led privatization.     

Water privatization,hegemony and civil society: What Motivates Individuals to Protest About Water Privatization?

The article takes the case of protest against water privatization in Ireland to show that protestors with high levels of instrumental motivation as opposed to ideological motivation are more likely to protest. In order to explain this we uniquely combine Klandermans’ social psychology of protest with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. By bridging these two bodies of theory, we provide an interdisciplinary account of the reason why protestors serve to uphold the exact power structures they intend to challenge. We argue that for water movements to be successful they must focus equally on both their instrumental and ideological motivations to ensure that power structures are confronted. This would enable movements to devise a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse, which is essential to contest the dominant global hegemony of water marketization.