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Thinking beyond the liberal peace: From utopia to heterotopias

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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.

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Notes

  1. Such thinking was exemplified in Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 ‘Agenda for Peace’, and its 1995 supplement.

  2. Some authors have discussed how a neo-liberal conception of peacebuilding assumes very particular roles for civil society. Those include the fostering of social capital such as democratic skills and civic values, informing the state, taking over service provision from the state, or serving as a watchdog on the state or protecting citizens from the influence of the state. A less influential discourse that is nonetheless worth mentioning consists of less radically neo-liberal, more Western European perspectives on the role of civil society. Rather than positioning civil society sharply in contrast against the state, civil society is attributed more substantial roles. Particularly in Europe, donor agencies and internationally operating NGOs acknowledge the active role civil society may have in emancipating citizens, fostering participation in the state, or (re)defining citizenship and state–society relations (see Howell and Pearce, 2001; White, 2004; Paffenholz and Spurk, 2006; Dagnino, 2008).

  3. Present-day wars are nearly always civil wars, not wars between countries as in Europe when states came about. The consequences of these civil wars are in many ways the opposite of state-building: they destroy the national economy, cause a flight of the middle class, divide the nation into competing identity groups and lead to the collapse of state institutions and the capacity to levy tax. In addition, as contemporary civil wars have causes and consequences that reach far beyond their borders, some measure of external involvement is also needed to end them (Verkoren, 2010).

  4. Television interview with Noukhaev in Dutch programme VPRO Tegenlicht, 21 January 2002, www.vpro.nl/programma/dnw/afleveringen/4889745/items/4395862/.

  5. The irony is that ‘developed’ countries have recently intervened in their economies on a large scale as a response to the economic crisis, whereas post-conflict countries, who are more in crisis than any other, are expected to immediately adopt ‘small government’ policies (Del Castillo, 2008).

  6. Pugh (2005, p. 37) and Turner and Pugh (2006, pp. 476–478) make a number of other recommendations to re-orient post-war economic policies towards distribution and employment creation, including public works and deficit financing.

  7. Upon closer inspection, however, ‘civil society’ is rather a grouping of organizations of which it is unclear what constituencies and values they represent.

  8. In line with this Orientalist way of thinking, the violence that accompanies interventions is seen as ‘just’ violence, necessary in order to spread civilization and counteract the ‘fanatical’ violence of terrorists and warlords in the countries where intervention takes place. From that perspective, the fact that intervention itself also leads to violence and casualties, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not considered as something to dwell on (Meyer, 2008).

  9. such as the Loya Jirga in Afghanistan and Nahe Biti in East Timor.

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  1. Centre for International Conflict – Analysis and Management (CICAM), Institute of Management Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, Nijmegen, 6500 HK, The Netherlands

    Mathijs van Leeuwen & Willemijn Verkoren

  2. Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias, San Diego State University,

    Freerk Boedeltje

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  1. Mathijs van Leeuwen
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  2. Willemijn Verkoren
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*Mathijs van Leeuwen and Willemijn Verkoren are both working at the Centre for International Conflict – Analysis and Management (CICAM), Radboud University Nijmegen.

**Freerk Boedeltje is working as post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias at San Diego State University.

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van Leeuwen, M., Verkoren, W. & Boedeltje, F. Thinking beyond the liberal peace: From utopia to heterotopias. Acta Polit 47, 292–316 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2012.1

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