Failed statebuilding versus peace formation

Introduction

Statebuilding, like liberal or neoliberal peacebuilding, is failed by design. This is because, firstly, its institutional frameworks are externally designed with a European or northern, developed, rational and individualistic context in mind. Statebuilding constructs neoliberal states through the intervention of the United Nations (UN) or unilateral actors, donors, international financial institutions (IFIs) and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) (Paris and Sisk, 2009) in the same way as the liberal peace (Paris, 2004; Richmond, 2005). Neoliberal states do not include comprehensive responses to economic needs and fail to provide public services quickly enough to undercut currents of violence or address the root causes of conflict. Statebuilding follows structural power in the international system (Strange, 1988). Many statebuilding exercises have relapsed into violence (Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and Kosovo) or have threatened to do so (Sierra-Leone, Liberia, Guatemala or Cambodia). Some have failed to offer significant development (see human development indexes compared with Gini indexes (Richmond, 2011b)) or develop stable state–society relations, or implement the full terms of their founding peace agreement (Guatemala and Bosnia–Herzegovina).

Liberal forms of peacebuilding follow this pattern in that the normative universe from which they operate (institutions, donors or INGOs based in New York, Washington, Geneva, Brussels, Paris, London, Tokyo, etc.) is rarely commensurate with that of the specific context in which they are applied. This is mostly in developing, post-conflict settings outside of the global north, with the exceptions of a few cases such as Bosnia or Kosovo. Liberal peacebuilding normally occurs through the UN according to multilateral agreements on supporting democratisation, a rule of law, human rights and civil society as a form of governmental power (Richmond, 2005). This has also been the case with the closely allied modernisation and development approaches. These have suffered from ideological prescriptions, which are widely thought to undermine any short-term peace dividend (enabling material and power inequality instead).

Both state building and liberal peacebuilding strategies fail to connect with their local target populations. They end up buttressing problematic elites and their often chauvinistic, nationalistic or personal interests, and lack a connection in context, on the ground, amongst populations that have their own understandings of identity, sovereignty, institutions, rights, law and needs according to their own socio-historical and cultural traditions and context. The ‘local’ is used in the sense indicated by Massey and Appadurai’s work (Appadurai, 1996: 178; Massey, 1994) ¹ – and voices such critiques of peacebuilding and statebuilding, from Afghanistan to BiH or Kosovo. Policymakers have also acknowledged these problems (Richmond and Franks, 2009).

While analysts are keen to focus on the normative and technical processes of peacebuilding and statebuilding (see Mac Ginty, 2012), they are rarely keen to consider the global, as opposed to regional or local, power structures in which they take place. This dominant form, which, for a while in the 1990s, looked to be hegemonic, might be called the liberal peace, though at times its liberalism and its contribution to peace have been very questionable (Doyle, 1986). There is a common consensus that statebuilding is crucial for broader peace and security, and many theoretical and policy contributions aim to improve its tools and mechanisms (Chibber, 1997: 17; European Security Strategy, 2003; Fukuyama, 2004: 17; Kapoor, 2008: 4; OECD-DAC, 2007; US Department of Defence, 2008; US National Security Strategy, 2002; World Bank, 1997).

This article challenges the mainstream consensus on both peacebuilding and statebuilding, which came about far before the empirical evidence could be broadly assessed. It was coloured by post-Cold War triumphalism, rested on a crude form of capitalism and the erosion of citizens’ classical liberal rights and needs. It builds states around a marginalised political subject whose main role is to be pacified, produce, respect private property and vote in a procedural manner. This subject is to be subordinate to international expertise, as with the colonial subject’s relationship to the metropolitan centre in an early phase of the West’s anthropological engagement with other political power structures of the early twentieth century (Asad, 1973: 17). Attempts to create a sustainable peace have proceeded without the involvement of the subjects of that peace in its many theatres around the world. These subjects may be termed the ‘children’ of peacebuilding and statebuilding (Paris, 2002).

Alternative approaches are now emerging. ‘Peace formation’ processes are driven partly by local, peaceful forms of agency (though are often critical and resistant). Peace formation arises through subaltern power/agency (Richmond, 2011b) in sectors of society where non-violent, peaceful change is sought. It aims to negate local violence, preserve and ‘modernise’ local identity and political institutions and engage with and influence international actors, from donors to the UN. It sees political subjects as formative of the state, economy, society and the international community.

There is a vast related literature, often little noticed, scattered across several disciplines, covering most, if not all, of the world’s post-conflict states, including in some very surprising locations such as Somali, where most stability and many of the qualities associated with peace have been provided by local mobilisation (Menkhaus, 2006). Many other cases where similar dynamics are emerging have been documented, for example in Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Sierra Leone, DR Congo, Liberia, South Africa, Timor Leste, Afghanistan, Cyprus and Bosnia–Herzegovina (ACTIONAID, 2012; Adell, 2012; Autesserre, 2010; Ball, 1988; Hayman, 2010; Kappler and Richmond, 2011; Odendaal, 2010; Seder, 1997; Trindade, 2008; Van Tongeren et al., 2005; Zanotti, 2010). In these cases, a wide mixture of local organisations have become involved in everyday matters of peace and its infrastructures, in security, political, economic and social realms, drawing on socio-historical processes, sometimes in private or in public, sometimes reshaping governance and the modern state, and drawing selectively on the support of a range of international actors.

This article outlines the theoretical debates about state formation and statebuilding as well as the contours of the critique of liberal statebuilding/peacebuilding that has emerged. It explores the potential theoretical contours of debates about local forms of peacebuilding or ‘peace formation’ (Richmond, 2011a). These four concepts represent the contours of the relationship between different forms of conflict and peace. By looking at the smaller scale and often invisible local attempts related to peace formation some answers may emerge to the pressing question of how large-scale peacebuilding or statebuilding may be significantly improved and made more representative of the lives, needs, rights and ambitions of its subjects.

State formation, statebuilding, peacebuilding and peace formation

State formation debates imply a negative peace that is maintained mainly through power sharing and balance of power arrangements within and between states, dictated by a security dilemma and the relative power of various factions (Tilly, 1985). This represents a crude version of conflict management in first-generation form (Richmond, 2008: 40–57). The negative peace that emerges represents a victor’s peace or an uneasy truce, meaning it is inherently unstable. Peace is made by local elites who desire, often for predatory reasons (social, political, economic and international), the capacities the state offers to them. This process occurs within and between states at the regional level.

Statebuilding approaches offer a more sophisticated concept of peace than the negative and realist version that state formation offers. Moving away from first-generation approaches, it sees the possibility of a status quo that is solid as long as the state is sufficiently well designed and prosperous. Statebuilding approaches offer the possibility of achieving a liberal peace, but they are more concerned with institutional and legal design as well as market access, and are less concerned with the normative architecture of peacebuilding (Chandler, 2010: 15; Kapur, 1998: 12). Peace is made via collaboration between a range of international actors concerned with regional stability rather than with a normative agreement. Local elites who maintain control of the state often pursue personal or family agendas. This approach to making peace is also inherently unstable because the state rests on international support and elite compromise, and it often lacks local legitimacy because the state does not provide welfare or services designed to offer a material peace dividend. Instead, it focuses on rights and markets.

Liberal peacebuilding is a third-generation, multilevel, multidimensional approach (Richmond, 2002) through which peace is built with twin anchors in international norms, law and institutions, and the liberal democratic and ‘marketised’ concept of the state. A liberal peace may range from a conservative peace, relying on external support and internal power-sharing, to an orthodox peace, which, as envisaged by the UN, rests on human rights, civil society, democracy and the rule of law. Or, it may have more ambitious emancipatory goals, where issues of social justice and identity are its focus (Richmond, 2005). Peace is made internationally within the liberal peace framework, with as much local participation as possible, but this is not its driving force. This peace should be extremely stable, though in practice it is often complex and prone to stalemate and elite hijack. It is also subject to the limitations brought about by a lack of coordination and consensus amongst its international supporters, and insufficient material support for its range of programmes and innovations.

The international approach, in terms of peacebuilding and statebuilding, is defined by liberal norms, laws and institutions, harking back to liberal internationalism in the twentieth century, and the liberal institutionalism which represents the UN, humanitarians, donors and other international agencies. This also defines its social dynamics. Its economic dynamics are mainly neoliberal in its intent for post-conflict states, though of course its exercise of material resources via centralised institutions and donors is more in the view of centralised economic planning. This underpins the liberal peace, and its security, institutional, constitutional and civil dynamics, formulated within the frameworks of states and their liberal domestic character, and their membership of an ‘international society’.

It has long been clear that the international ‘liberal peace’ project – which has now shifted towards neoliberal statebuilding – has been undermined by a series of crises (Chandler, 2006; Cooper, 2007; Duffield, 2007; Jahn, 2007; Mac Ginty, 2008; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2007; Pugh, 2005, 2008; Pugh et al., 2008; Richmond, 2005). These have emerged in its application in many post-conflict countries since the end of the Cold War. ‘Failed statebuilding’ has been the result. States have come into being as a result of a mixture of local and international dynamics and intervention which are effectively failed by design. Such states lack core capacity (as defined by the World Bank) in many crucial areas, partly because neoliberalism dictates they do not play a role in redistributing material resources, or because their standards and norms are ill suited to specific contexts. This causes potentially fatal flaws in externally driven statebuilding processes, and weaknesses in their local legitimacy, peace dividend and redistributive capacity.

Consequently, there have been some unanticipated consequences, not least in the redevelopment and evolution of the liberal peace project itself (Richmond, 2011b: 186–216). In response, local actors, often in association with select international actors, have begun to design their own versions of peacebuilding relevant to their own locations, states, cultures, histories, needs and expectations. This process has been difficult to describe and the policy and academic literature has struggled to find an appropriate language to capture its variety, not least because it stands as a challenge to longstanding policy instruments and concepts. It has often been called ‘grass-roots peacebuilding’; it is ‘civil society oriented’ and ‘donor supported’.

Formation versus building

Peace praxis and theory have certain problem-solving limitations and ‘local’ blockages built into their own theoretical and methodological biases and into their very concrete dimensions in practice. Statebuilding has not become the antidote to state formation dynamics of violence, nor has peacebuilding in its liberal form connected with local forms of political legitimacy, with their social, cultural, political and economic requirements. Failed statebuilding has been the result of externalised states being based on blueprints determined by decontextualised and depoliticised agendas for states which provide security, political rights and institutions, and market access, but little in the way of political rights. Nor have they been proficient at developing a social contract, meaning they have led to virtual forms of peace. This ‘failed by design’ type of statebuilding has also come about because of confusion in the literature, which has fed expediency in international policy towards post-conflict, post-development contexts. This can be rectified by disaggregating, and examining the relationships of, state formation, statebuilding, peacebuilding and peace formation, following some conceptual remodelling of the various conceptualisations of peace and conflict that are available. A new model would have four cornerstones as follows:

It is notable that Tilly’s work on state-formation was a precursor to his later work on civil society organisations. Similarly, many development studies scholars, anthropologists and political theorists have tended to move from an analysis of the failures of systemic, institutional, state or market-led research to focus on the local agency and local organisation – often the counter-organisation of the sort partially envisaged by Foucault, and later by Scott (Scott, 1985: 445–447). Figure 1 illustrates the various issues, dynamics and actors involved in the ‘formation’ and ‘building’ approaches.

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Figure 1.

Related issues, actors and dynamics.

Figure 1 illustrates how force, governance, government, institutions, actors and social dynamics are central to this quadripartite model of the basic elements of peace, order and violence, and how easily each element can be conflict- or peace inducing. It shows how state formation, statebuilding, peacebuilding and peace formation suggest quite different perspectives on the state and peace. It also aligns each of these elements of order and peace to the four generations of thinking about peace and conflict (Richmond, 2002). This makes it clear that the process of peace formation offers levels of legitimacy and understanding of context necessary for peacebuilding, for the attempt via statebuilding to tame the processes of state formation.

Peace formation

This area of peace activity has become so important that such terminology no longer does justice to its significance. Instead, it can be called peace formation because it emerges from local and indigenous agency, rather than being prompted externally (as with peacebuilding, statebuilding, conflict resolution or transformation). Its starting point is that any society evolves small-scale peace practices commensurate with the conflict it experiences, and these are embedded in its identities, laws, norms and institutions. Such agencies seek to combat state formation and look for support from custom, civil society, elites and international actors, if possible.

What is new about peace formation as a conceptual framework is that it attempts to understand the local ‘formation’ of peace. It does so in terms of local scale politics and their encounter with the state and the international. It unites a scattered range of significant efforts, which already exist, in this direction (at the theoretical level these include, among many, Azar, 1990; Azar and Burton, 1986; Burton, 1990; Chambers, 1983; Curle, 1971; Kelman, 1972; Lederach, 1997). The agency on which peace formation rests is varied and complex. It has not been the result of direct resistance or action, such as violent demonstrations, but more a result of quiet capacity drawing on locally resonant social practices and critical discourses, understandings of peace drawing on history, myth, religion, social and customary institutions and patterns of governance. It sometimes expresses itself through resistance, opposition, civil disobedience, foot dragging, flight, non-compliance, limited cooperation, rhetorical resistance or other ‘hidden acts of resistance’ that have represented a lack of local legitimacy for a particular strategy or stymied its progress (Scott, 1985). It is mainly indicative of ‘subaltern power’.

In some respects, international norms aimed at peace and the state are supportive of peace formation (security, rights, representation, gender and civil society, for example). In other areas tensions exist (such as identity, secularism, hierarchy, community, sustainability, redistribution, or the ‘local–local’ at grassroots level where most people experience their everyday lives (Richmond, 2011b: 13)). In some cases, direct opposition has emerged, as with the ‘Kosovanisation’, ‘Timorisation’ and ‘Afghanisation’ campaigns against encroaching international trusteeship (Richmond, 2011b: 66–91). Women’s groups are often at the forefront of attempts to organise local peacebuilding initiatives in a wide range of areas, especially if peace formation movements support liberal understandings of civil society. In general, wherever a peace process, peacebuilding, statebuilding or development occurs, attempts to localise it will also occur.

Peace formation can operate as hidden and individual attempts to maintain everyday life and its security, and economic, political, social and customary needs, as well as some form of modernisation or progress. This private transcript (to Western/Northern eyes at least) has unexpected effects as it is often multiplied across a wide range of different actors and context. More obvious forms of mobilisation through various groups involved in civil association also add to its repertoire. These occur through customary governance, law or conflict resolution processes by means of church or religious groups, trade unions, sports or social associations, political parties, newspapers, lobbying organisations and a range of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and NGOs, which involve significant constituencies that political leaders and internationals must reach for legitimacy to be maintained. Political and civil association offers similar opportunities for refusal, co-optation, modification and acceptance, in disaggregated and private spaces or, more broadly, in terms of more recognisably organised forms of mobilisation. Private and passive resistance to more active resistance, lobbying and social displays have an impact as forms of representation upon administrative and political actors involved in statebuilding, especially where they offer platforms for discussions of a broader peace. This is so even if elites find such requests impracticable (e.g. requests for equality or for a revision of customary practices not in line with human rights).

What is important about peace formation is that it is locally situated in the political, social, economic and historical contexts of the conflict; is networked across the state or the international; is transversal; and has contributors who act with a notion of an emancipatory form of peace in mind. Such groups may be very small given that most conflict and post-conflict societies are still polarised about sensitive issues such as resources, land and identity and are reluctant to give concessions or relax their maximalist goals. Yet, they are also able to develop a clear view of how peace may be designed in a way that may be both locally and internationally legitimate.

There are, of course, many other local actors who would see peace formation as a betrayal of locally held conflict objectives, and they often control the material resources of the state. However, peace formation, even though it may be marginal, hidden behind methodological blinkers or epistemic frameworks that are very different to those of external actors, is able to escape sanction because it is aware of the political terrain and how local legitimacy is produced. Peace formation may provide signposts for both a viable peace and a legitimate state.

These dynamics of peace formation may have been spurred on by the slow progress, sometimes inability, sometimes reluctance of statebuilding or peacebuilding to engage with the deep-rooted causes of conflict. These span indigenous issues, the need for dignity as well as rights, ideological opposition to the liberal peace or neoliberal markets, inequality and poverty, land tenure and ownership, identity or religious divisions, or elite predation. Furthermore, as emerged from Guatemala to Timor Leste and Sierra Leone, there has been a perception that international intervention, whether for security, peacebuilding, development or statebuilding, does not provide self-determination, is not pluralist in its engagement with difference on the ground, does not provide social justice and rejects local autonomy. It may not even be democratic if it blocks local practices (Harvey, 1998).

The critique that has produced peace formation in conceptual terms is not merely based on a view of understanding how to further spread democracy, the rule of law, free trade or civil society. Peacebuilding and statebuilding themselves also need to be more accountable, democratic and law governed, with higher ethical and methodological standards than at present, meaning they should be drawn from their subjects rather than their managers. Equally important, we also need to understand how civil society (and the local–local beyond this often Westernised social artifice) makes peace at its own level, but also how the small-scale and often low-level efforts made beneath state, often in hidden or marginal spaces, have actually been silently modifying the grand liberal peace and liberal statebuilding project. Peace formation may lead to different political forms, rights and institutions, which need to be understood, accommodated and mediated. This indicates the need to evaluate what such ‘hidden’ modifications to the liberal peace mean for understanding peace itself in its multiple forms, and whether they offer greater sustainability for the liberal peace or other and alternative types of peace. To achieve this requires a political sociology and ethnography of peace formation.

Peace formation draws on second-generation conflict resolution approaches, third-generation peacebuilding and conflict transformation approaches, and fourth-generation critical approaches to peacebuilding (Richmond, 2002). The last seek to empower local agency and promote the international enablement of a hybrid form of peace. Peace and justice are intertwined, difference and social justice are enabled and different life worlds meet (Boege and Curth, 2011). This creates a contextual legitimacy via a set of relationships and networks which has so far been lacking for the liberal peace system (especially in dealing with non-western cultures, in its advocacy of capitalism, and its construction of individualistic rights, the state and secular norms). Peace is made locally in this framework, perhaps individually in hidden and public spaces across a wide range of everyday life activities, though it may be ‘enabled’ internationally. External support would engage with political, social, economic and identity needs and rights as they are both locally and internationally understood. Peace formation provides signs of the raw agency, legitimacy, consensus and capacity that may coalesce into the state, norms, law, government and governance, institutions and international organisations necessary for a wide-ranging peace.

Local agency

‘Local agency’ should be seen in relation to peacebuilding as transnational, transversal (grassroots to elites), traditional and modern, liberal and non-liberal, simultaneously (Appadurai, 1996: 178; Massey, 1994). It represents fluid identities and movement, rather than static and fixed identities. ‘Agency’ refers to capacity related to critical, discursive agency and social praxis (Foucault, 1976: 184). It is often critical, hence the term ‘critical agency’ (Richmond, 2011b: 1–21). This might be for everyday needs, to shape the political environment, to negotiate with international actors, to take on international norms, to operate the liberal state, to form contextual institutions of peace, and so forth. It might imply large-scale and organised political mobilisation. It might also imply alternative forms of civil society organisations, networks and associations (in a ‘local–local’ context below the western-induced artifice of ‘civil society’). It implies a mutual construction of the local, state and international.

This may be hidden and disguised from potential sanctions from predatory elites, and it may be fragmented, atomised and not representative of mobilisation on a large, industrial scale. Yet, it is well known in anthropology, ethnography and sociology, as well as in more radical versions of political theory, that small, hidden, often individual actions, not coordinated in any way, add up to a sum which is greater than its parts, even if these parts are not the product of large-scale and coordinated mobilisation (Scott, 1985). Thus, peace formation can represent significant mobilisation of local actors or it may be small scale and fragmented, hiding itself to escape sanction. It may take place in traditional, customary, religious or other culture venues. It may be simultaneously liberal and modern and localised and contextual (not to introduce a somewhat artificial dichotomy between tradition and modernity) (Boege, 2011: 433). It implies mediation between its different facets, and also with the ‘international’. In this way the might of international statebuilding is modified by the actions of its many recipients in diverse contexts, from Afghanistan to Timor Leste, where peace formation is inevitably occurring. Many of these recipients also now construct international and local peacebuilding simultaneously. This may represent non-compliance (or stagnation) as in Bosnia or more outright resistance as in parts of Central America. It may also lead to wholesale adoption of international agendas, with a twist, as in the ‘authoritarian democracies’ that have emerged in Namibia, Mozambique and Rwanda. It modifies those agendas through the introduction of concepts such as ‘local ownership’ and participation in World Bank, International Monetary Fund and UN policies (Richmond, 2012). It is certainly political.

Its aim is not merely to create a liberal peace but to lead towards a more emancipatory and empathetic form of peace in both local and international contexts (Richmond, 2008). In this way, it is a form of critical agency and resistance which goes beyond the production of a new metanarrative, based on social practices, autonomy and self-determination (Pickett, 1996: 445–447), pointing towards liberal–local hybrid forms of peace.

The interaction of peace formation with external approaches

The debates over peace and state building and formation represent four cornerstones of several phases of an interdisciplinary and intermethodological dialogue spanning at least 40 years. They point to the same objective: a peaceful order rather than one that rests on structural violence and identity discrimination, or even a benign hegemony. Sociology, anthropology, development studies, post-colonial and subaltern studies, as well as economics, politics and international relations, have all played a role in this debate and its interwoven methodologies (Asad, 1973; Bhabha, 1994; Escobar, 1995; Geertz, 1973; Kapoor, 2008; Spivak, 1988). This points to a hybridised epistemology for peace. Which one of these four cornerstones dominates determines the character of that order, the state it creates and the quality of the ‘peace’ that emerges. Understanding peace formation in its relation to the other three dynamics is crucial for the sustainability of any peace and state that emerges, yet is also the most challenging aspect of the whole process of creating a viable and legitimate order or peace. A peace dominated by the processes of peace formation also connected to externalised peacebuilding is likely to be more viable, particularly if both actively shape the other – as many current examples suggest, from Kosovo to Timor Leste. One that is dominated by statebuilding or state formation is likely to be very conservative and security oriented. It may lack international or broad local legitimacy and resonance (because the state will tend to be elite dominated and authoritarian), as the cases of Bosnia–Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate. A peace dominated by liberal peacebuilding is likely to rest on external support and international rather than local legitimacy. Figure 2 outlines these dynamics.

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Figure 2.

A contemporary matrix of conflict and peace.

The four cornerstones in Figure 2 illustrate the balance between the positive and negative aspects of both formation and building. Each cornerstone implies a range of actors, interests, dynamics, institutions, structures and agencies. Taken together in the range of relationships implied by the diagram, different forms of peace, state, politics and development may arise according to the different types of power relations each implies. The diagram illustrates how statebuilding and peacebuilding may easily slip into a securitised, hegemonic or predatory model for politics, and how, despite the forces of state formation, peace formation is necessary. It enables a focus on emancipation, empathy, rights and a social contract, all of which ultimately point to a more emancipatory form of peace.

What Figure 2 illustrates is that statebuilding is a narrow version of peacebuilding, with its focus on institutions and security as a way of taming state formation, whereas peace formation is the essential source of local legitimacy for the international norms and interests that statebuilding and peacebuilding represent. International norms and law have been constructed mainly on the basis of a Euro–Atlantic understanding (though this is widening in the post-colonial context) of international relations and the requirements for order since the early twentieth century. As the numbers of voices expand – from emerging states to citizens newly empowered in different ways – the more international legitimacy needs to be reconsidered and made more locally inclusive. It is in the process of peace formation that mediated forms of identity, custom, culture, political rights and economic needs emerge at an institutional level. This shapes the state and makes it representative, providing sufficient support and legitimacy from its citizens to enable a plausible and self- sustaining peace. It is from this understanding that peace may be externally enabled, with the dual role of taming the state formation processes and supporting peace formation. Any hybrid outcome would also seek to accommodate the liberal peace (now shorn of its totalising tendencies) and would be reflected in the institutional structure of the state.

Peace formation thus implies a reconstruction of political community, the state and international organisations from the ground up, if they are to be representative, democratic and responsive to the situations of their subjects in local, state, regional and global contexts. Peace formation processes also connect to a post-colonial civil society. Such resistance and critical agency represent as a local and international conversation about the impact of hegemony, colonial praxis, the global economy, and the reconstitution of rights, needs and identity. This conversation is carried along transversal, transnational networks and merges both the liberal and the local, and the global north and south. These networks, in post-colonial fashion, may transcend the state through networked agency that operates through the international system itself, through communications, trade, civil and global civil society, donors and agencies, IFIs, NGOs and even academia, where such critical agency is now exercised on both a global and a local scale (Kahler, 2009). They are dynamic and offer legitimacy at both levels, in cultural, social, political and economic terms (Barker, 1990; Knoll, 2008). They draw on local and international forms of legitimacy. Increasingly, they place international organisation, financial institutions and donors in a negative light, reminiscent of the subaltern critique of imperialism (Bhabha, 1994; Spivak, 1988).

Yet current policy and intellectual understandings of the relationship of state formation, statebuilding and liberal peacebuilding indicates that statebuilding is now the antidote for the often violent processes of state formation. This also ironically implies that peacebuilding in its liberal form is seen as an antidote for peace formation where this achieves a form of peace which is not commensurate with liberal norms. This problematic understanding of peace in general undermines its salience even where it is supposed to be the objective of theory, analysis and policy. Instead, peacebuilding should align with and support peace formation. Nevertheless, local processes of peace formation draw partly on international models for democracy, human rights and human security, but are also often in opposition to other aspects of statebuilding and liberal peace processes. In particularly, they oppose versions of law that do not incorporate their own neoliberalism where it has a negative impact on community rights, secularism and disrespect for identity and custom.

Processes of formation, including violent state formation or peace formation, are in a relationship with both externalised and elite dynamics of statebuilding and liberal peacebuilding. This is a tense relationship where one tries to constrain the other, though there are also complementarities. Similarly, state formation responds in order to provide security and stable institutions. Clearly, peacebuilding should facilitate peace formation, which in turn should determine the role of peacebuilding. This would mean mitigating power relations by external or elite actors, and engaging with the material needs, identity and culture of citizens on their own terms. This means that citizens or subjects represent their own understandings of peace formation and the way that peacebuilding can assist its various dynamics, but that they also do this in the knowledge of the possibilities that peacebuilding represents. This local–liberal or post-liberal peace (Richmond, 2011a) may therefore avoid reinscribing the international, national or local with new forms of colonialism or with local power dynamics posing as ‘local knowledge’ (Mohan, 2001: 153). Hybrid possibilities for peace offer a site of radical possibilities (Bhabha, 1984).

This four-cornered perspective has implications for the nature of democracy, rights, needs, civil society, the construction of the rule of law and constitutions, as well as the type of property rights and economic system that emerges in the form of the state. While peace formation (and all of the cultural, historical, social, economic and political dynamics it implies) has an impact on, but is also mediated by, the state and the broader compromises any pluralist constitution entails, it also has an impact on the international. Thus, international practices may shift as they learn about the local engagement’s impacts and shortcomings (and there have been some signs of this). The state adjusts to both international and local pressures for legitimacy as well as to elites’ power-sharing arrangements, in the interests of placating them and holding them accountable (some signs of this have also emerged). Meanwhile, local understandings of legitimacy are communicated, as local voices find ways of navigating upwards, towards the state and the international. This implies that peace formation, in its multiple and diverse forms around the world, influences the construction and form of the liberal peace including the family of organisations, international and regional, international financial institutions, the diversifying groups of donors, and the increasingly transnational nature of NGOs and civil society organisations. In effect, it implies the democratisation of the international and more direct forms of redistribution, as well as a pluralist openness to difference in a more participatory democratic local context. Yet, at the same time, it problematises many of the unitary concepts, actors and boundaries that an understanding of international relations in late modernity implies. This has also created a debate about retrogressive aspects of the local (or overbearing aspects of the international). So the influence of peace formation is merely significant not for a replication of pre-existing institutions and norms, but for a process of consensus building whereby these are transformed. The multiple processes and agency produce hybrid peace as a new structural form.

Figure 3 shows how international and local forces produce peace through an agonistic interaction, which contests and reformulates legitimacy and the dynamics and institutions of peace. Though this merely represents a crude binary between international and local, formation and building, what this figure also makes clear is that if local peace formation dynamics align with international statebuilding and liberal peacebuilding, peacemaking should outweigh the violent processes of state formation. This also requires the international to more fully understand, empathise and enable the local, however. This tends not to occur, however, as the ‘international’ is so often the starting point for liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding. If this can be rectified so that peacebuilding is locally driven and externally supported, then a local–liberal form of peace, or at least a local– regional/international form might emerge, with higher levels of local and international legitimacy, as opposed to the now-failed statebuilding praxis of the contemporary era. Indeed, without a counterbalancing, context-sensitive understanding of peace formation and local forms of critical agency, international statebuilding and peacebuilding have little to guide them about how local and international forms of peace and legitimacy interact to mitigate state-formation dynamics. Statebuilding strategies may mitigate state formation while peacebuilding should support peace formation.

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Figure 3.

Dynamics of hybridity.

The interaction of peace formation with statebuilding and peacebuilding revolves around three main elements. These are broadly generalisable and include recognising local knowledge, working with local capacities, and building relationships and partnerships that form peace and the state. They imply that the function of the state is to produce a positive and emancipatory, and probably hybrid, peace. This requires an understanding on the part of internationals of what local knowledge involves, as well as the potential of local agency and forms of legitimacy. Such knowledge and a recognition of peace formation agency and its legitimacy implies that an everyday form of peace is required from peacebuilding and statebuilding praxis. This praxis is accountable to its local subjects and their evolving understanding of peace across generations, in their local context, resonating with both socio-historical experience and liberal peace norms and standards (Boege and Curth, 2011: 12). Indeed, it often appears that local legitimacy, for all of its difficulties, is stronger than that of the state or the international community. This can be observed from the Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Kosovo, Cyprus and Colombia, where numerous local organisations mobilised for peace where the state and internationals had failed, even if the nature of peace is also heavily contested in each local context (Van Tongeren et al., 2005). Indeed, localised tensions, even including issues such as class, caste or gender inequality (as particularly in Afghanistan with the Taliban acting as interlocutors), are more likely to be resolved in context through a consensual process than solely by international or state-led prescription. It has a stronger chance of dealing with difference because it is locally grounded, and, together with international support, a better chance of establishing a social compact between citizens and state (IDS, 2012). What is more, and as has been realised in the Balkans, society can be called such because it has ways of offering and maintaining ‘patchwork’ systems of formal and informal support in material and identity ways, including care and empathy, including jobs, justice, education and health (all significant components of an emancipatory peace) (Richmond, 2008: 149–165). This occurs through families, kin, charities and community allegiances that connect informal networks to formal or professional networks (Fischer, 2006: 305). However, such processes also need international and state support, enablement and facilitation, whereby alliances between a range of local actors – including police, politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs and social movements – and state- and international-level actors are mutually constituted, converge and become complementary. This should be driven by a balanced understanding of both local and international legitimacy. However, this should not become an excuse for the seepage of international structural or governmental power and interests into a peace process.

The result should not be such as that in Bosnia–Herzegovina where the Office of the High Representative, European Union, UN, and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have driven statebuilding without gaining a broad consensus on the ground (see Berg and Solvak, 2011); in Kosovo where a dominant group has taken over the institutions of state, thus marginalising other minorities, including Serbs, with international support; or in Afghanistan, where an embryonic state has been limited to the capital and has failed to make headway in negotiating with the Taliban, who have continued their violent and discriminatory strategies. In these cases, local knowledge was often ignored, capacities were not identified and supported, and partnerships were limited and selected on the basis of external interests rather than with the aim of achieving a sophisticated peace.

It is from contextual and mediated local, state, regional and international legitimacy that the agency for peacebuilding (and peace formation) arises in parallel. International actors have long been aware of the legitimacy of such a move with their appeals for local participation, local ownership, community peacebuilding and bottom-up approaches, even if they were mainly only rhetorical. Informal and social agencies, translated into formal institutions, are emerging in post-conflict environments, in practical ways. They offer signals as to how internationals might facilitate the development of peace. The signals lie in critique, demands or resistance to certain strategies, and acceptance or attempts to modify them, expressed through local leaders, NGOs, identity and religious groups, trade unions, professional groups, religious communities, media, peacebuilding and human rights organisations, women’s groups, veterans groups and so on. But the mere existence of such signals indicates that there are local peace formational agencies already in operation. In Guatemala, South Africa and Northern Ireland, the importance of civil society actors, NGOs and local leaders were paramount in the peace process, as was their support by international donors and/or the UN system (Fischer, 2006: 291). Factors that were crucial to such processes include alternative media venues for reporting; monitoring elections, human rights and the political process; community work; educational support; supporting cultures of peace; gender issues; disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) and security sector reform (SSR); documenting war crimes; dealing with trauma; dialogue; and reconciliation. None of these factors can be carried without local participation and support, and, perhaps more importantly, local consent and legitimacy. This indicates the most obvious form of peace formation, but one that is mainly internationally scripted, providing opportunities and space for local actors and processes to connect with them. Peace formation also has an indigenous and locally based character, which may either connect with these or maintain its autonomy.

These aspects should be represented in the formation of political institutions, whether state or international. There has long been hints of this in related literatures, from Chambers’ Rural Development, Cernea’s Putting the Last First in development studies, Burton’s focus on Basic Human Needs in International Relations, to earlier Marxist literatures focusing on class and ownership issues, and general shifts in anthropology from cataloguing the exotic for the benefit of power to an understanding of social dynamics and alterity for their own sake (Asad, 1973; Burton, 1990; Cernea, 1985; Chambers, 1983). Studies on peace matters have also long been aware of the needs of bottom-up approaches, including issues related to custom and society. UN and World Bank policy, setting an example followed by many donors in the 1990s, also adopted such discourses. Reaching further back in time, policies and writings about the creation of peace and order have long recognised the basic capacities of individual agency, group mobilisation and their tendency to be concerned with rights and needs, governance and international order. It is surprising, therefore, that appropriate conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches have not emerged as distinct to those which already engage with the international as a construct of states, norms, power and resources. Such an approach would deal with the root causes of conflict that impact on everyday life as well as enabling responses constructed by those suffering the consequences, with assistance by external actors. It would need to be able to build relationships with citizens, subjects, the oppressed and marginalised on their own terms, offering them a form of peace as emancipation or liberation which they would recognise and cooperate with. This would mean bottom-up, rather than merely top-down, empowerment of local and marginal actors, communities and individuals, caution about institutional and state power and their ideologies’ and biases’ unintended consequences for rights and needs, and an attempt to connect with local epistemologies of peace. It would be a process of enablement and liberation rather than a process of intervention and governance (or governmentality in Foucaultian terms) (Foucault, 1991: 87–104).

Conclusion

Peace formation represents a range of socio-historical agencies operating in everyday locations. It is driven by the need to form locally legitimate institutions and, ultimately, states. It also borrows from the liberal peace system and often opposes the neoliberal character of statebuilding as well as its tendency to compromise with elite interests, while accepting that a form of state is necessary for peace. In this encounter, political subjectivity on both sides develops. Local actors work to modify liberal peace or donor strategies, to make them more democratic, accountable, ethical, and resist them and mount their own counter efforts to make peace. Internationals seek to maintain a distinction between their views of the liberal peace and local practices, but they also reach out to local actors. Thus, neither liberal peacebuilding, neoliberal statebuilding or peace formation are clear alternatives, but instead seek mutual, hybrid accommodations, representing different forms of power and legitimacy. It is too early to say whether this process is going to lead to a more stable peace, but the international liberal peace architecture is already responding as if this were assumed to be the case.

Peace formation actors do not necessarily reject the dominant paradigm of liberal peace and the neoliberal state, but invariably they point to a range of shortcomings. They often prefer to exercise political autonomy in the frameworks they construct, as can be seen in the contexts of peace formation in Timor Leste, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Nepal and Colombia, in different ways. While this article has mainly been theoretically oriented, suffice to say that peace formers in these locations often expect external support for reforms relating to institutions, rights, gender or economic development and redistribution. However, historically they have been rarely noticed, let alone supported, because they are not perceived to be power-holders; they are connected to negatively perceived religious, customary or cultural movements; and they appeal to community-level organisations and alternative ideologies in the political and economic spheres. This is now beginning to change.

Political mobilisation around the liberal state project differs in scale, scope and ambition to the smaller-scale, localised political projects that are now emerging in post-conflict polities. These are also transnationally networked through critical agency forming an emerging post-colonial civil society (Richmond, 2012). The latter has the potential to make a more locally resonant and sustainable form of peace, even if on a smaller scale, and contradicting or weakening the western notion of a rational, strong, productive and secure state. Indeed, the western notion of the state, when exported, has only really attracted the interest of predatory elites who were able to exploit its weak points with little accountability to their citizens or internationals. Political and civil society actors have often been attracted by liberal reforms but internationals have not offered sensitive and long-term support. So, the process that is currently under way of designing local forms of political institutions, accountability, prosperity, security and law, with reference to local and international standards, should be supported rather than ignored. At the moment, many such efforts are wasting time and energy trying to combat the heavy-handed unsuitability of liberal statebuilding. Instead, the international community could be seeking out local peace agencies in a wider range of areas, and becoming involved in extended and supportive relationships with them, developing better action and ethnographic methodologies and ethical guidelines. They should be much more focused on improving the everyday life and potential for individuals and communities in post-conflict states, rather than on the states themselves. The peaceful and legitimate state arises out of everyday consensus, which shapes the state in turn supports local refinements and international stability. The support of such processes in order to stabilise the polity would also engender contact, reform and modification of both local and international processes, so as not to compromise each other’s standards.

Local peace formation agencies operate in parallel or related to, or even despite, the liberal statebuilding project of mainly western donors and the UN system, raising two key issues. The first is what type of peace emerges in each context via the interplay of international and local processes of peacebuilding. The second relates to what impact international and local approaches have on each other. Over the last 20 years, the contact between both has significantly modified the international liberal peacebuilding/statebuilding project and local contextual projects for peace. Post-liberal forms of peace represent (unequally) both liberal and local contexts in a hybrid form. Both have been pushed hard to examine, comply and advance each other’s standards, norms, processes, institutions and objectives. Sometimes the outcomes have been retrogressive, seeming to support warlords, patriarchy and isolation, but more often this mediation of local contexts and global ambitions have had positive and mutually transformative implications.

As a result, more grounded versions of security have emerged, implicit in the human security concept, which has become mainstream (even if mainly rhetorical). This concept has faced much resistance at the international level, but it has been very difficult to dismount because it ties into local expectations of security that engages with military, welfare, identity and rights issues, rather than just ‘hard security’ regional- or state-level matters. Hybrid notions of law and transitional justice have also emerged. Democracy has advanced from the previous international focus on elections to more of a participatory, grounded ethic and framework for long-term politics. Human rights frameworks have engaged with questions of context and dignity beyond externalised legal shells. Development and marketisation have been forced to confront and engage with local poverty, lack of access to resources and facilities, and structural inequality, not least in the global political economy and north–south relations. Concepts such as local ownership, participation, human security, responsibility to protect, sustainable development, ‘do no harm’ and others have emerged. They illustrate the legitimacy, agency and capacity of the local and a more heavily contextualised, transversal, transnational understanding of peace and the state. This represents the birth of the post-liberal peace in response to post-colonial forms of civil society now emerging. The current effort to increase the legitimacy and sustainability of peacebuilding and statebuilding cannot succeed without peace formation and its view of peace, the state and global structural inequalities. These often undermine attempts at making peace even as they gather pace. Only then may critical agencies of peace formation, the state and international peacebuilding converge on more sustainable forms of peace.