LIT9: Paris, Roland. 2010. “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding.” Review of International Studies, 36(2): 337-65.

Question 1

What are common critiques on peacebuilding? Roland 2010

Answer 1

For some observers, the principal problem in peacebuilding was not its brevity or superficiality, but quite the opposite: that peacebuilders exercised such expansive powers that they effectively squelched genuine political
participation and locally-driven reforms.

Other commentators, however, were more deeply sceptical about the prospects for peacebuilding reform, and some opposed the very idea of deploying international missions into war-torn countries.

Some have based their objections on moral criteria – arguing, for example, that peacebuilding is a form of Western or liberal imperialism.

The reaction of the US to 9/11 – including the declaration of a ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq – added fuel to these peacebuilding-as imperialism
arguments.

Question 2

What are the real shortcomings of Peacebuilding according to Paris 2010?

Answer 2

1. Inadequate attention to domestic institutional conditions for successful
   democratisation and marketisation.
2. Insufficient appreciation of the tensions and contradictions between the various goals of peacebuilding.
3. Poor strategic coordination among the various international actors involved in these missions.
4. Lack of political will and attention on the part of peacebuilding sponsors to complete the tasks they undertake.
5. Insufficient commitment of resources.
6. Unresolved tensions in relations between the military and non-military participants in these operations.
7. Limited knowledge of distinctive local conditions and variations across the societies hosting these missions.
8. Insufficient ‘local ownership’ over the strategic direction and daily activities of such operations.
9. Continued conceptual challenges in defining the conditions for ‘success’ and
   strategies for bringing operations to an effective close.

Question 3

What are common mistakes in critiquing peacebuilding?

Answer 3

Conflating post-conquest and post-settlement peacebuilding.
According to this perspective, supporters of liberal peacebuilding as well as US
neoconservatives who pushed for ‘regime change’ in Iraq have all suffered from
the same delusions and hegemonic impulses, which have led to dangerous and
futile efforts to impose democracy by force.
This is false analogising between UN peacebuilding and the American-led ‘war
on terror’.
2.
Equating peacebuilding with imperialism or colonialism.
Colonialism was practiced largely to benefit the imperial states themselves,
including through the extraction of material and human resources from the
colonised society. On the contrary, the predominant flow of resources in
contemporary peacebuilding has been in the opposite direction: from
international actors to the host state.
Even the longest-lasting and most intrusive missions of recent years have been
designed to exercise temporary and transitional authority in their host states,
and to create the conditions for effective self-government in those states.
3.
Defining the ‘liberal peace’ too broadly
If definitions include elements of peacebuilding that have little to do with
liberalism, they can lead to dubious conclusions about the viability or the
legitimacy of the ‘liberal peace’.
4.
Mischaracterising the peacebuilding record
Recognising the many shortcomings of some missions and their sometimes
troubling effects does not, in itself, demonstrate that peacebuilding has on balance been harmful to the societies into which these operations have been
deployed.

5. Oversimplifying moral complexity
   To arrive at sweeping moral judgments about peacebuilding based on
   fragmentary analysis is not only methodologically suspect, but it is ethically
   problematic in itself, given how much is at stake in debates over how and when
   to provide assistance to societies emerging from conflict.

Question 4

Is there an alternative to Liberal Peacebuilding? Roland 2010

Answer 4

In fact, there seems to be no viable alternative to some version of liberal
peacebuilding.

But why, in this case, must peacebuilding be liberal? The simple answer is that
alternative strategies – that is, strategies not rooted in liberal principles – would
likely create more problems than they would solve.

An alternative might be for international agencies to
establish permanent
trusteeships over
war-torn states, but this would come very close to colonial type control.

An alternative might be for international agencies to
establish permanent
trusteeships over
war-torn states, but this would come very close to colonial type control.have often turned out to be more fragile than they appear, in part because they tend
to lack domestic legitimacy.

A third alternative to liberal peacebuilding might be to
rely on traditional or indigenous practices of peace-making and governance, rather than elections
and other accoutrements of liberal democracy. However, no society has a single, unambiguous set of governance structures (traditional or otherwise) that can be automatically activated.

So, these alternatives would not be better than liberal peacebuilding.

Question 5

How to save liberal peacebuilding?

Answer 5

The challenge today is not to replace or move ‘beyond’ liberal peacebuilding, but to reform existing approaches within a broadly liberal framework.

Both liberalism and liberal peacebuilding are deeply problematic concepts – in theory and application.

Liberally-oriented peacebuilding can, in principle, accommodate a great deal of
internal variation and adjustment, including many of the specific changes
proposed by many critics.

Scholars who repudiate liberal peacebuilding or call for ‘alternative’ strategies should be expected to reflect carefully on the normative underpinnings of their own arguments and to clarify the alternatives they may be proposing.