Domino Effect of Negative Hybrid Peace in Kosovo's Peacebuilding

The concept of hybrid peace is at the forefront of recent scholarship on the local turn in peacebuilding. It highlights the interplay between the international and local, and advocates for better involvement of local actors and agencies. This paper adds to the growing scholarship on hybrid peace by substantiating the concept of negative hybrid peace and characterizing its dynamics on the ground. Using the case of Kosovo's post-conflict peacebuilding process this paper reveals that the co-option of a select group of local actors unintentionally contributed to a rejection of minority rights, resistance to liberal justice, and contextualization of healthcare provision. It shows that negative hybrid peace has a domino effect in that when a negative form of hybrid peace takes root in a peacebuilding component, other peacebuilding components become susceptible to other forms of negative hybrid peace. The analysis in this paper proves the utility of the concept of negative hybrid peace in understanding the consequences of unresolved tensions from international/liberal–local encounters during internationally administered peacebuilding missions.     

Transitional Justice in Peacebuilding: Dynamics of Contestation in the DRC

ABSTRACT

This article examines the place of transitional justice in peacebuilding by exploring how domestic and international actors frame this relationship and how this, in turn, moulds dynamics of contestation around transitional justice. In the transitional justice literature, contestation is usually framed around an international–domestic dichotomy: transitional justice agendas promoted by external actors confront strategies of instrumental adaptation of transitional justice by domestic elites and the adoption of alternative transitional justice approaches by local actors. Based on an analysis of transitional justice policy-making in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this paper proposes that a more multifaceted reading of contestation to transitional justice is needed. In the DRC, both external and domestic actors variously acted as transitional justice promoters and resisters, and their positioning on transitional justice was strongly conditioned by their broader understandings of the nature of the conflict and transitional justice’s role in peacebuilding. It is therefore suggested that contestation of transitional justice does not necessarily reflect a rejection of international approaches to justice, but instead more broadly expresses a lack of agreement on what transitional justice is and what its goals are. The article thus contributes to a broader interrogation of how discourses about the meaning of transitional justice are constructed in practice.     

Peace and Justice through a Feminist Lens: Gender Justice and the Women’s Court for the Former Yugoslavia

ABSTRACT

Post-conflict interventions to ‘deal with’ violent pasts have moved from exception to global norm. Early efforts to achieve peace and justice were critiqued as ‘gender-blind’—for failing to address sexual and gender-based violence, and neglecting the gender-specific interests and needs of women in transitional settings. The advent of UN Security Council resolutions on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ provided a key policy framework for integrating both women and gender issues into transitional justice processes and mechanisms. Despite this, gender justice and equality in (post-)conflict settings remain largely unachieved. This article explores efforts to attain gender-just peace in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It critically examines the significance of a recent ‘bottom-up’ truth-telling project—the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia—as a locally engaged approach to achieving justice and redress for women impacted by armed conflict. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with women activists, the article evaluates the successes and shortcomings of responding to gendered forms of wartime violence through truth-telling. Extending Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the article advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognizing women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialize before, during, and after conflict.     

Local Ordering and Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan: What Can Customary Orders Achieve?

ABSTRACT

The post-liberal IR debate on peacebuilding has made considerable efforts to reintroduce ‘the local’. In principle, critical peace studies follow the argument that communal capacities for peace formation exist in every society. However, few take the further conceptual step of taking emic perspectives on ordering and peacebuilding more seriously. This article aims at exploring and understanding customary concepts and practices of ordering with examples from Kyrgyzstan. It asks how and why communal actors and institutions contribute to ordering in the context of limited local tensions and how these actors navigate at national and international levels.     

The myopic Foucauldian gaze: discourse,knowledge and the authoritarian peace

ABSTRACT

The discourse of liberal peacebuilding has often been characterized by critics as a hegemonic discourse, in which power and knowledge are co-constitutive. Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, an important strand of the literature has demonstrated how epistemic communities have produced knowledge that supports this discourse, while marginalizing other, contrary voices. A ‘local turn’ has sought to uncover what Foucault termed ‘subjugated knowledges’, peripheral voices that were seen as potentially contributing to a more emancipatory peace. This article, in contrast, argues that the explicit and implicit Foucauldian framing of discourse and knowledge is no longer adequate to conceptualize the contested nature of peace and conflict in a rapidly changing international system. In a period of significant geopolitical shifts away from a Western-centric international order, post-Foucauldian discourse theories offer a more productive analytical perspective that makes visible the multiple, competing discourses that attempt to achieve closure in defining meanings of peace and conflict. A theoretical framework that emphasizes discursive contestation rather than unitary domination allows serious consideration of alternative conceptualizations of peacemaking. In particular, theoretical frameworks that highlight contestation make visible an authoritarian, illiberal approach to managing conflict that challenges both liberal and emancipatory conceptualizations of peace and conflict, but is occluded in the current debate over post-liberal peace.     

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.     

Challenges of Local Ownership: Understanding the Outcomes of the International Community’s ‘Light Footprint’ Approach to the Nepal Peace Process

This article investigates whether a ‘light footprint’ approach to peacekeeping and peacebuilding by the international community more effectively addresses local drivers of conflict than the dominant model of large, multidimensional peace operations. It considers international engagement in the Nepalese peace process through the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), and argues that the international community’s approach to local ownership became more focused on non-imposition and therefore less politically engaged over time as a result of both local and international factors. This facilitated local elite ownership of the process, which fundamentally undermined the international community’s capacity to support peace consolidation as elites moved away from key transformational pledges of the peace settlement.     

Reflections of the nexus between justice and peacebuilding

This commentary reflects on eight articles recently published in this journal as part of a special issue on the nexus between transitional justice and statebuilding (Volume 10, Issue 3, 2016). It positions the special issue within an emerging ‘fourth phase’ literature on transitional justice that draws on critiques of liberal peacebuilding to urge an expansion of its boundaries to embrace socio-economic issues. It is argued that the type of analysis found in the special issue, characterized by in-depth, on-the-ground empirical analysis of complex domestic politics of material accumulation and ideological contestation, marks a significant and welcome advance in a literature which to this point has been largely de-contextualized, exhortatory and over-reliant on tired binaries of the ‘international and the local’ or the ‘liberal and legitimate’.     

Transitional Justice and Its Discontents: Socioeconomic Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Limits of International Intervention

ABSTRACT

The incorporation of socioeconomic concerns into transitional justice has traditionally, as a result of prevailing liberal notions about dealing with the past, been both conceptually and practically difficult. This article demonstrates and accounts for these difficulties through the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country which has been characterized by a complex transition process and a far-reaching international intervention, encompassing transitional justice and peacebuilding as well as political and economic reforms. Examining the limits of international intervention in Bosnia and the marginalization of socioeconomic justice issues, the article analyses the events surrounding the protests that broke out in February 2014, and the ensuing international engagement with the protest movement. Faced with a broad-based civic movement calling for socioeconomic justice, the international community struggled to understand its claims as justice issues, framing them instead as problems to be tackled through reforms aimed at completing Bosnia’s transition towards a market economy. The operation of peacebuilding and transitional justice within the limits of neoliberal transformation is thus instrumental in explaining how and why socioeconomic justice issues become marginalized, as well as accounting for the expression of popular discontent where justice becomes an object of contestation and external intervention.     

Practicing Normality: An Examination of Unrecognizable Transitional Justice Mechanisms in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT

Transitional justice and peacebuilding mechanisms have a tendency to reflect the extraordinary nature of conflict. These recognizable mechanisms—official bodies and institutions with preconceived goals and processes—are often inaccessible and undesired. In fact, what is often desired in post-conflict societies is the ordinary: a transition to a ‘new normal’. This article explores the various ways in which Sierra Leoneans practice normality in the post-conflict era. This is done through economic restoration, agricultural activities and religious engagement. Ultimately, these mechanisms are often seen as a more legitimate and meaningful way for many ordinary Sierra Leoneans to move past their war-related experiences and find some sense of peace and justice.     

Gendered Justice Gaps in Bosnia–Herzegovina

A gendered reading of the liberal peacebuilding and transitional justice project in Bosnia–Herzegovina raises critical questions concerning the quality of the peace one hopes to achieve in transitional societies. By focusing on three-gendered justice gaps—the accountability, acknowledgement, and reparations gaps—this article examines structural constraints for women to engage in shaping and implementing transitional justice, and unmasks transitional justice as a site for the long-term construction of the gendered post-conflict order. Thus, the gendered dynamics of peacebuilding and transitional justice have produced a post-conflict order characterized by gendered peace and justice gaps. Yet, we conclude that women are doing justice within the Bosnian–Herzegovina transitional justice project, and that their presence and participation is complex, multilayered, and constrained yet critical.     

A Resilience Approach to Transitional Justice?

ABSTRACT

Transitional justice, which is typically part of a liberal peacebuilding strategy, often seems distant, ineffective or even counter-productive. The concept of resilience, to which transitional justice discourses and scholarship have remained relatively indifferent, appears useful to explore justice initiatives in conflict or post-conflict situations. This article argues that much can be gained from better understanding the relevance of – and significant risks associated with – resilience thinking in this context. Through a critical approach to resilience, and embedded within a legal-pluralist framework, it examines some of the ways of dealing with political violence, with a particular focus on the Central African Republic.     

Contested Governance: Understanding Justice Interventions in Post-Qadhafi Libya

ABSTRACT

This contribution reflects upon the nexus between transitional justice and peacebuilding through a study of how transitional justice practices in post-Qadhafi Libya interacted with broader efforts to establish governance institutions in the aftermath of Libya’s 2011 armed conflict. It argues that dominant practices of transitional justice, promoted by external actors, prescribed narrow state-centric justice interventions that were ill-suited for a polity in which the state was highly contested. In fact, transitional justice proved divisive in Libya because attempts to project state-centric liberal justice practices were limited by their targeting of weak institutions that lacked local legitimacy and their inability to reconcile alternative normative frameworks that challenge the modern state. In addition, the weakness of Libya’s state institutions allowed thuwwar, or revolutionary armed groups, to dictate an exclusionary form of justice known as political isolation. Drawn from fieldwork conducted in Libya, this contribution provides lessons for both peacebuilding and transitional justice practice that call for a rethinking of teleological notions of transition and greater engagement with notions and concepts that fall outside dominant practices.     

Becoming Liberal,Unbecoming Liberalism: Liberal-Local Hybridity via the Everyday as a Response to the Paradoxes of Liberal Peacebuilding

Abstract

It has become clear that the liberal international institutions and ‘corridors of power’ have so far failed to deliver on their promise of a liberal peace for all. Liberal peacebuilding has often offered resources to an elaborate structuration of sometimes predatory elites – international and local – but not to the general populations of these multiple states. Institutions have been created, but the reach of liberal politics has had little impact – other than in basic security and in rhetorical, rights oriented terms – on the everyday life of populations. The local is commonly deployed to depict a homogenous and disorderly Other, whose needs and aspirations do not conform to liberal standards. Claims that moves toward the everyday have already been made disguise the limited ambitions of liberal statebuilders to enable a real improvement in local agency. In the midst of all of this the real everyday needs and lives of individuals have become obscured. This essay briefly suggests some theoretical responses, via the concepts of the ‘everyday’ and ‘empathy’. These offer the possibility of placing the social contract back within the heart of post-conflict states, or of allowing a new, post-liberal, politics which is more locally ‘authentic’, resonant and agential, to emerge.     

The Local Legitimacy of Peacekeepers

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship and policy doctrine alike have identified local legitimacy as an important ‘success factor’ in peacekeeping – but like many such calls for greater attention to local dynamics, it is often unclear what local legitimacy actually means, how to analyse it, what causal processes are at work, and what might obstruct the operationalization of well-intentioned policy recommendations for peacekeepers to seek local legitimacy. This article aims to bring clarity to the complex concept of local legitimacy, including the ways in which insights drawn from legitimacy theory developed in very different social contexts can be adapted to the realities of the conflict societies into which peacekeepers deploy. First, it examines what it means to locate the legitimacy of peace operations at the local level, rather than the international. Second, it clarifies the causal links between peacekeepers’ legitimacy and their effectiveness, reviewing scholarship on local legitimacy and its adaptation of broader legitimacy theory. Third, it identifies three important reasons that locally legitimizing peacekeepers is so difficult in practice, distinguishing between the difficulties derived from the particular features of conflict societies and those derived from the institutional characteristics of peace operations.     

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.     

Institutionalized Intervention: The ‘Bunker Politics’ of International Aid in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

Afghanistan has come to be seen as emblematic of the security threats besetting peace and security operations, and in this article we consider the response to such threats via the ‘bunkering’ of international staff. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative survey with aid and peacebuilding officials in Kabul, we illustrate how seemingly mundane risk management procedures have negative consequences for intervening institutions; for the relation between interveners and national actors; and for the purpose of intervention itself. Bunkering, we argue, is deeply political – ‘imprisoning’ staff behind ramparts while generating an illusion of presence and control for ill-conceived modes of international intervention.     

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.     

Overcoming the Original Sin of the “Original Condition:” How Reparations May Contribute to Emancipatory Peacebuilding

This short article explores the relationship between transitional justice mechanisms and peacebuilding by analysing the role that reparations may play in transforming or deepening conflict. Research seeks to identify potential components of an emancipatory approach to peacebuilding through the prioritisation of ‘transformative reparations’ processes, framing this proposal within the case study of collective reparations to the trade union movement in Colombia.     

There Is a Crack in Everything: Problematising Masculinities,Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice

The study of masculinity, particularly in peacebuilding and transitional justice contexts, is gradually emerging. The article outlines three fissures evident in the embryonic scholarship, that is the privileging of direct violence and its limited focus, the continuities and discontinuities in militarised violence into peace time, and the tensions between new (less violent) masculinities and wider inclusive social change. The article argues for the importance of making visible the tensions between different masculinities and how masculinities are deeply entangled with systems of power and post-conflict social, political and economic outcomes. An analysis of masculine power within and between the structures aimed at building the peace in societies moving out of violence is considered essential. The article argues for an analysis that moves beyond a preoccupation with preventing violent masculinities from manifesting through the actions of individuals to considering how hidden masculine cultures operate within a variety of hierarchies and social spaces.