The critical impasse of peacebuilding: Toward an analytically eclectic critique of liberal peacebuilding

Liberal peacebuilding and its (realist) discontents

A common bar for what constitutes peacebuilding must be defined. One of the challenges in the debate is that different research programs have difficulty reaching consensus on what the term entails. ⁵ From this definitional discord, a wide range of peacebuilding outcomes therefore eludes concurrence among scholars. However, there are core consistencies that bind peacebuilding efforts which are outlined in the seminal UN declaration, An Agenda for Peace. These include the efforts to strengthen structures that support peace and prevent relapse into conflict. ⁶ This definition is an important departure point in measuring the outcomes of peacebuilding by establishing a common starting point from which scholars can engage in debate. The problem, however, is that when scholars reject categorization in favour of particularist approaches, core traits of peacebuilding become lost and obscured. ⁷ In these circumstances, scholarly exchange becomes virtually impossible. Critical theorists of peacebuilding often categorically dismiss the practice of liberal state-building projects as extensions of the universalizing discourse of liberal internationalism. The attitude typified in both Chandler and Sedra’s works is a wholesale rejection of the very premise of peacebuilding, which makes dialogue difficult, if not impossible. While the particularist cultural and historical idiosyncrasies of each case can present unique challenges for peacebuilding, critical theorists should not dismiss the practice of peacebuilding itself in a proverbial act of tossing out the baby with the bath water. One ought to keep in mind that the original purpose of the project is to alleviate the devastating effects of armed conflict.

Chandler’s work critiques the broader liberal peacebuilding project, benchmarking 1997 as the watershed year of the true beginning of liberal internationalism, with the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement by the parties of the Peace Implementation Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Using Bosnia as his starting point, Chandler examines how, with one failed experiment after another over the course of the next twenty years, the liberal peacebuilding project had to reinvent itself multiple times to remain viable and relevant. Meanwhile, Sedra’s work examines the evolution of a specific aspect of liberal peacebuilding over roughly the same time frame, the Security Sector Reform (SSR) model. Sedra asserts that SSR is a linchpin model of liberal peacebuilding, and that its implementations, revisions, and failures have represented a microcosm of the wider liberal peacebuilding project. Using Afghanistan as the test case, Sedra examines how, over the period of a decade and half, SSR has defied all optimistic expectations of liberal peacebuilding and failed to produce any substantial results, by engaging with how it was implemented through both liberal and realist discourses of IR. Some critical scholarship, such as Chandler’s work, directly engages with the larger theoretical debate among the grand theories of liberalism, realism, and critical theories; while other work, such as Sedra’s, is situated within the mid-range, or problem-solving, theories (such as SSR), and shows how their tenets, implementation, and outcomes reflect the larger grand theory discourses. The merits of radically critical perspectives are evident when they can convincingly outline the ontological, epistemological, and methodological shortcomings of liberal discourses and assumptions that have resulted in the devastatingly counterproductive effects that peacebuilding has had on its subjects. Furthermore, both authors charge the realist critics of liberal internationalism as apologists for Western interventionism and hegemony, effectively co-opting the vocabulary of critical theory while still maintaining a firm root in Western ontologies and epistemologies.

Chandler’s work pays direct homage to the original great debate of IR between realists and liberals, as the title is a reference to E.H. Carr’s landmark Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939. ¹⁸ Seen as the seminal work on realism in IR, Carr’s book warned that the scientific rationalism and utopian characteristics of nineteenth-century liberalism were starkly detached from reality, and that naïve attempts to construct a liberal world order in the period following the First World War threatened the very stability of the international structure. ⁹ Carr’s realist critique of what could have been construed as liberal internationalism was widely seen at the time as the first great debate within the discipline of IR. ¹⁰ Carr revealed the rift between liberal assumptions of the world in the interwar period and actual unfolding events—particularly that the liberal teleology of human progress and ontological understandings of power and morality did not match actor behaviours. While his methodology was understood as a defence of amoral realism, Michael Cox, a critical theorist himself, notes that Carr’s method of criticism was heavily influenced by Marxism, stating that “its real purpose was not to celebrate the status quo so much as attack all those liberals who thought they could build a new international system after 1919 without changing the basis of world politics.” ¹¹ Carr critiqued the liberal ontologies of power and moral duty from self-interest, materialist, and constitutive perspectives; therefore, it can be conceived that Carr’s method marked a convergence of what would now be considered the realist, Marxist, and post-structural schools of thought, from which critical theory draws heavily.

More than five decades after Carr’s critique, liberalism once again established itself as a hegemonic ideology and discourse upon the end of the Cold War. Without the ideological rival of the Soviet bloc, liberalism’s utopian and internationalist outlook took the form of peacebuilding in the global peripheries. It is this renewed faith of liberal teleology that Chandler tackles head-on in his work. Where Carr believed that liberalism and realism should work together to provide counterbalances for each other toward the construction of a better international system, ¹² Chandler is less conciliatory in his critique of both. In his view, this cooperation between these two seemingly incompatible schools has amounted to an academic and policy collusion toward the maintenance of Western hegemony over an underdeveloped and illiberal other. By critiquing the individual policies and decisions, the realists mounted an ahistorical and depoliticized critique. In essence, Chandler believes that the realist critiques of liberal peacebuilding miss the mark by failing to question the statist orthodoxy of liberal peacebuilding, positing the superiority of Western-styled institutions, and only critiquing the semantic point of whether liberal institutions are the right tool to do the job, instead of relying on the self-help anarchical nature of the international system. This critique, according to Chandler, is therefore woefully inadequate because it leaves intact the assumption that the interventionist policies of liberal peacebuilding in conflict-afflicted areas were ultimately “good,” but that they were not carried out under the right conditions. ¹³ For Chandler, the realist critics miss the mark because they leave intact both peacebuilding and its liberalism ideologies, while only really challenging the hubris of the intervenors who overestimated the strength of their ideologies and methods, and the lack of willingness of the other to accept what the intervenor had to offer.

The normative implications of this line of reasoning are advanced even further by realist scholars, whom Chandler deems the “radical pragmatists,” ¹⁴ such as Stephen Krasner and Fareed Zakaria. Where “Krasner argued that sovereignty was problematic for many states because they lacked the capacity for good governance and required an external regulatory framework in order to guarantee human rights and the rule of law,” ¹⁵ Zakaria would then conclude that what liberal peacebuilding needed “more urgently than democracy is good governance.” ¹⁶ This, for Chandler, was nothing more than a mere reiteration of Samuel Huntington’s Cold War-era thesis on how to contain the effects of political decay in the Third World. ¹⁷ Chandler asserts that the realist critics of liberalism ultimately do not push far enough by only challenging the technical aspects of peacebuilding. In this sense, the realists ultimately avow the fact that liberal peacebuilding can still be an effective intervention mechanism of containment. Just like E.H. Carr had done at the eve of World War II, Chandler believes, realists are attempting to rescue liberal internationalism from itself. The underlying power structures, legacies of previous doctrines, and discourses of Western superiority are not only left intact, but are reinforced. As such, the realist critiques of liberal peacebuilding are more technical, rather than ontological.

Sedra, while not directly engaging with Chandler and the critiques of the liberal–realist debate at the grand theory level, demonstrates his concurrence with Chandler’s analysis through a critical evaluation of how the SSR model was implemented and evolved in its many iterations on the ground. For Sedra, SSR is a litmus test for the outcomes of liberal peacebuilding as well as the realist countermove because it is an “indivisible pillar of the global peace-building and state-building agendas … . SSR had come to represent a point of convergence between the fields of development, security and governance.” ¹⁸ Unlike Chandler, Sedra’s critique of liberal peacebuilding echoes Carr even more, where he agrees that “the ultimate goal of liberal peace is not emancipatory Wilsonian liberalism but Western stability.” ¹⁹ Where Chandler’s concerns about the debate are much more theoretical and ontological, Sedra focuses on the praxis where liberal peacebuilding is translated into political outcomes. Sedra locates the origins of SSR in realist Cold War exercises of Western security assistance provisions to the Third World, which then took on a “human face” in the era of liberal triumphalism as the SSR model tried to instill liberal principles of governance, institutions, state-building, and human security, rather than merely propping up friendly regimes. ²⁰ Despite multiple attempts over the period of nearly two decades, SSR has failed to demonstrate any real semblance of success in conflict-affected regions of the world, or even improved the overall stability of the international system; it therefore saw a reversion toward the Cold War-era securitization:

By 2016, SSR was a central element of virtually every peace-building and state-building project, a prerequisite for liberal peace. The stature of the model was elevated after the 9/11 attacks, albeit in a perverse fashion, when it came to be seen as a vital tool to advance Western security interests and contain terrorism in the global periphery. ²¹

For both Chandler and Sedra, what the realist critics have offered the discourse of peacebuilding is not so much a substantive criticism as an attempt to save it. After seeing the disastrous applications of liberal peacebuilding in the global periphery, realists attempted to revise and re-steer the peacebuilding project in order to maintain its credibility and viability toward the ultimate goal of maintaining the hegemonic positions of Western power. If realists claim that states as we understand them in the Westphalian sense are functionally the same, liberal internationalists therefore claim that through peacebuilding, we can construct an international system where all states are not only functionally the same unitarily, but internally as well in the Weberian sense. Therefore, both Chandler and Sedra would agree—although in a less sympathetic way—with Michael Williams, who claims that realism did not seek “the destruction of liberalism, but its salvation … . It was in fact, the defense of a particular kind of liberalism.” ²³ This kind of liberalism, as Chandler and Sedra would see it, is that of the Kantian, statist, and internationalist brand, where a Weberian state is universalized and grafted onto the global periphery, and the international conditions of self-help, anarchy, and uncertainty are therefore mitigated and managed. Therefore, when it comes to peacebuilding, the collusion of liberalism and realism is a dialectic, whereby the teleology of both is ultimately the same: the maintenance of Western hegemony and Lockean liberal epistemologies. But if the moralist agenda of liberal internationalism failed to produce the desired outcomes, the realist intervention into the peacebuilding project would produce similar, if not more disastrous results: reverting what little progress liberalism has accomplished in peacebuilding. The cynicism associated with realism could even lead to an abandoning of the project altogether, which would leave the global peripheries in worse situations than they were prior to such “benevolent” experiments of peacebuilding.

How “liberal” is liberal peacebuilding?: An appraisal of the critical scholarship

Both Chandler and Sedra established a high bar of criticism in the debate between realist and liberal observers when it comes to peacebuilding. It contends that the very premises upon which this debate is founded are false. This ontological and epistemological difference makes the critical theory approach nearly incommensurate with the existing debate in a Kuhnian sense. ²⁴ Moreover, it charges that the existing debate occurs under one overarching ideological umbrella that many critical theorists deem to be liberal or neoliberal. As such, for the critical theorist, any peacebuilding project that takes place under these auspices will have a liberal ontology, regardless of whether its proponents are self-described as liberals or realists. Scholars like Chandler and Sedra therefore identify the problem as the peacebuilding project itself, which is inherently self-contradictory and constantly arrives at impasses where it will have to reinvent itself to move forward. As mentioned in the previous section, even the realist intervention could not resolve these contradictions. According to the authors, while liberal peacebuilding may set out to try and build liberal and democratic institutions to alleviate the human suffering caused by conflict and insecurity, the failure of these institutions to take hold on the ground resigns the intervenors to settle for the goal of containment of the underdeveloped, and therefore dangerous, other. What critical scholars see is that liberal peacebuilding can often by its own mechanisms and action create the very problem it seeks to solve. Both authors identify several key common areas in which liberal peacebuilding fails to create any durable peace.

The first false assumption is the premise that Westphalian sovereignty and the Weberian state are universally applicable, “rather than an outgrowth of a particular set of historical experiences in Europe.” ²⁵ Therefore, the grafting of statehood and state institutions in contexts where they are entirely alien creates conflicts with existing social relationships, and without the constant reinforcement and tutelage of the intervenors, the state will fall apart at the seams. The resultant state is one that may have “formal sovereignty and elected government but their relationship of external dependency mean[s] that the domestic political sphere [can]not serve to easily legitimize the political authorities or cohere their societies.” ²⁶ Any “legitimacy” or authority of the state is, therefore, purely contingent on the presence of the Western powers to back it up with military force.

This leads to a second inherently contradictory assumption: that if Weberian statehood is a universal good, then state-building is a technical process rather than a political one. The problem with conflict, then, is not one of unequal power or social grievances, but one of coordination, and the solution rests in getting the state-building sequence and process right. A key liberal proposal is “institutionalization before liberalization,” which harkens back to Francis Fukuyama’s argument that a strong state (read: institutions) must be built before the franchise (read: democracy) can be expanded. ²⁷ The problem with the apolitical, technocratic approach is that it ignores local antagonisms and power relations, and attempts to build a legal framework that is divorced from the population that lacks belief in such a system. As Chandler points out, this method of peacebuilding is contradictory because liberal democratic institutions supposedly derive their authority from the consent of self-governing human subjects, yet liberal peacebuilding’s approach is one that is “externally imposed … outside the political process of debate and consensus building.” ²⁸ In the end, the critique sees that approach to liberal peacebuilding as depoliticized, ahistorical, and technocratic, which diminishes capacity and security, and undermines the very object of its own undertaking.

Chandler begins his analysis with the events of 1997, and traces the path of liberal peacebuilding over the next twenty years. According to Chandler, this is when peacebuilding definitively took on a liberal nature, where it revised the Westphalian notions of inviolable state sovereignty in favour of one that required the holistic micromanagement of the international community. ²⁹ This marked the transition of Cold War peacekeeping to post-Cold War peacebuilding, based on the now-famous aphorism of several observers that in some instances, there was “no peace to keep.” As Chandler states, “once the idea of sovereignty and self-government was put to question in poorer, less developed regions, the liberal internationalist approach legitimized increasing levels of international involvement at every stage of the peace process.” ³⁰ The underlying reason behind intervention remained the same, however, with the belief that insecurity in the peripheries challenges the security of the core. It is here that I find Chandler’s year selection of 1997 interesting, if not problematic. He claims that 1997 is the true watershed year and the start of the “twenty years’ crisis” of peacebuilding because of the overwriting of the sovereignty in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Peace Implementation Council, responsible for overseeing the execution of the Dayton Peace Accord. ³¹ By Chandler’s own definition, if the crisis of liberal peacebuilding began with the international community’s collective efforts to impose liberal institutions and values on the illiberal other to build the Weberian state, then arguably, this project would have started in 1993 with UNOSOM II in Somalia. Then “U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright declared ‘an unprecedented [emphasis added] enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country as a proud, functioning, and viable member of the community of nations.’” ³² It appears, therefore, that Chandler had to massage the relative significance of historical dates and events in order to make a more apt allusion to Carr, so that his dates would coincide with the publication of this work.

According to Chandler, as liberal peacebuilding reached an impasse in the post-Balkan period, evinced by the policy failures in Bosnia, the lesson learned is that it had to reinvent its narrative in the early 2000s, into one of state-building. The rationale was that the failures of Bosnia demonstrated that the creation of peacebuilding protectorates through the micromanagement of liberal internationalism was inefficient, and it was ultimately unviable unless the target state had the capacity to absorb the peace that was impressed upon it. Once again, Westphalian sovereignty went through another revision to denote state capacity, and a moral and legal responsibility to its citizens and the international community. ³³ Here, Chandler makes a poignant observation that the 9/11 attacks accelerated the urgency for liberal peacebuilding when insecurity in the peripheries directly threatened the security of the core; and it was in this period that the lexicon of state failure became mainstream in academic and policy discourses. ³⁴ Micromanagement in the peace process placed too much onus on the intervenors, who visibly had to account for the shortcomings, but if the discourse shifts to one of capacity and ownership, then responsibility for the failures of peacebuilding initiatives is effectively offloaded onto the Other, whose implied backwards social relations are unable to adapt to the high modernism of Western and liberal institutions. Therefore, by “helping” conflict-affected countries build state capacity (in the limited Weberian sense), a neo-trusteeship is effectively established, where the Western powers can simply absolve themselves of responsibility if the project goes awry, as has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, as Chandler remarked, it was the realist critics who were instrumental in the exoneration of liberal peacebuilding of its failures as it met yet another impasse in the late 2000s and 2010s.

Sedra covers a similar period, tracing the articulation of SSR as a specific liberal peacebuilding policy from 1999 to today, examining it through the test case of NATO’s intervention in Afghanistan starting with the 2001 invasion. Like Chandler, Sedra notes that SSR, as a central mechanism of the peacebuilding project, reflected a wildly ambitious and universalizing narrative, where it sought to completely transform all existing social relationships. ³⁵

According to Sedra, the problem with SSR—and by extension, peacebuilding in general—is that if it faltered or compromises were made in just one of those dimensions, the entire project was doomed to fail. ³⁶ This runs the model into an even larger problem, as Chandler alluded to, which is that for the construction of those institutions to be remotely viable, a local and historical context must already exist to facilitate their operation. In other words, in places that lack formal market structures, civil society, and all the other attributes of a pre-existing Weberian state, SSR will necessarily face the “conceptual-contextual gap.” ³⁷ Hence, SSR faces a total tautological problem: it works to create a liberal state, but can only work in the presence of a liberal state. The pragmatic resolution of this paradox is a “ramming through” of the model in places where it does not fit, and the appropriation by the traditional security sector, who then adopt it for the purposes of counterinsurgency and security force assistance.

In this area, Sedra makes a poignant observation, and his argument is further corroborated by proponents of SSR, such as Rebecca L. Schiff, who argues that in order to successfully conduct a counterinsurgency, there should be a “targeted partnership” between civilian and security apparatuses of the state, “which allows … policy makers and military leadership to set aside predefined roles temporarily in order to formulate the most appropriate approach to the situation at hand.” ³⁸ The result is reminiscent of Cold War security assistance, where oppressive regimes are propped up in the name of security. The difference is that, under the rubric of liberal peacebuilding, the rhetoric of human rights, democracy, and good governance seems unable to take root on the ground, and the default is a backslide into realist and pragmatist security discourses. Where Cold War development assistance was “associated with a deepening pattern of statist authoritarianism” ³⁹ in the Third World, a survey of the failed efforts of liberal peacebuilding in the post-Cold War era, with Iraq and Afghanistan being prominent examples, seems to prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same. As Adrian Leftwich remarked, “It became apparent that the good governance agenda was really an intimate part of the emerging political economy of the new world order.” ⁴⁰ Therefore, as Chandler and Sedra point out, the realist intervention of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm is apropos to the critical impasse in which it finds itself unable to further justify the moral and idealistic underpinnings of its practices.

The critical alternative: Retrenchment and impasse

The issue that both Chandler and Sedra take with liberal peacebuilding and its realist critiques mirrors that of the “third debate” in IR, whereby in the late 1980s and early 1990s the positivist grand theories of realism and liberalism became increasingly challenged by post-positivist schools, such as those scholars identifying with constructivism and critical theory. ⁴¹ With intellectual roots in the Frankfurt School, as well as the critical methods of postmodern and post-structuralist theorists such as Foucault, critical theorists challenged the IR discipline by deconstructing the Western biases inherent in existing ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. These scholars took all IR research agendas to task, from great power politics to political economy. Later, scholars such as Laura Sjoberg and Amitav Acharya would call for greater mainstreaming of feminist, non-Western, and post-colonial perspectives into the discipline in order to challenge dominant Western discourses. ⁴² Along with constructivism, critical theory has become its own research program. But the pushback that critical theory faced at the time of its emergence, and the issue it continues to face in the contemporary iterations of the debate, is that it is inaccessible due to theoretical density, dismissive of the progress made in the field, too particularist, and that it critiques for critique’s sake without offering viable alternatives. ⁴³ Both Chandler and Sedra, engaging in a critical lens on the peacebuilding research agenda, demonstrate that this impasse in the dialogue between positivism and post-positivism is still alive and well.

It is interesting to note that both authors engage with a critique of the critiques of liberal peacebuilding before actually substantially engaging with the debates of liberal peacebuilding on their own terms. Secondly, both authors reject any evidence, both in their respective cases as well as in general terms, that peacebuilding can produce any positive results, and therefore suggest that any efforts in peacebuilding must be abandoned as they are inherently ideological projects. This all-or-nothing approach amounts to intellectual turf-guarding that is wholly unproductive to the field. Rather, what it indicates is that both authors are adamant to defend a hijacking of the critical exercises against liberal peacebuilding by the realist school to prevent further co-optations of critical methods and theories. Furthermore, both authors mischaracterize some of the key theoretical underpinnings of realism (not to mention misidentify authors with particular schools of thought), which results in both authors’ rejection of valid and constructive realist critiques of liberal peacebuilding. It is not so much that a realist critique would see liberal peacebuilding as misguided, but that the uncertainty inherent in the international system defies any attempts for actors to truly calculate cost and benefits, and any attempts at doing so are futile.

The balkanization of research programs into ideological paradigms tends to place blinders on scholars against evidence that goes against preconceived notions. The danger of this categorical dismissal as demonstrated by Chandler and Sedra is a failure to account for the times when peacebuilding produces positive benefits. Moreover, it deconstructs without offering viable alternatives. This can be particular jarring given the wealth of positivist studies that have emerged in the peacebuilding literature which suggest that intervention, when conducted under specific circumstances, may produce durable peace. For instance, as early as 2004, in addressing the pessimism over the efficacy of UN peacekeeping missions, Virginia Fortna’s study concluded that “intervention by the international community helps maintain peace.” ⁴⁴ More recently, Kyle Beardsley’s study found that intervention has a significant impact in the reduction of conflicts and the prevention of their escalation; ⁴⁵ Stefano Costalli, in studying Chandler’s own case of Bosnia, found that intervention in the form of peacekeeping was instrumental in mitigating the worst effects of the violence, but recommends a more localized approach to address specific regional problems. ⁴⁶ Similarly, Lisa Hultman, Jacob Kathman, and Megan Shannon found that with an appropriate composition, an intervention force can be effective in creating durable peace; ⁴⁷ finally, Beardsley and Skrede Gleditsch’s 2015 study showed that when peacekeeping is effectively employed, it can be an effective mechanism in conflict management. ⁴⁸ It is important to note that none of these scholars, from positivist and what Chandler would deem as “liberal” camps, claim that intervention is the panacea to conflict, nor do they suggest that it does not have shortcomings or limitations. However, to summarily dismiss the entire body of empirical evidence that indicates the potential of liberal peacebuilding marks a grave blindside on the part of both Chandler and Sedra. Of course, when the bar of critique is set so high, critique falls prey to selection and confirmation biases, ignores evidence, and does not engage with the existing debate on its own terms. This intellectual turf-guarding would even go so far as pitting other scholars also critical of the liberal peacebuilding project against each other, which evinces, to some extent, the identity crisis for Chandler, who seems more concerned about the assimilation of critical theory under inclusive liberal and realist epistemologies.

Chandler openly vocalizes his disdain for realists’ co-optation and perversion of Foucauldian theories for their own agendas, rather than them engaging in genuine criticism of the status quo. He claims that peacebuilding scholars rooted in the realist tradition have appropriated the arguments that critical theorists have made about local agency to explain the failures of peacebuilding for the purposes of absolving Western interveners of responsibility. ⁴⁹ Therefore, in what is perhaps a perverse reading of Foucault, this reification of the local has rejected “the importance of structures of economic and social relations” ⁵⁰ and attributed the failings of liberal peacebuilding not to the peacebuilding project itself, but to the nature of the target society itself. To Chandler’s credit, by criticizing the flexibility of post-structuralism, he demonstrates how easily the arguments can become co-opted and reinforce orientalist views of the peripheral other. However, it is in this very critique of critical theory that Chandler’s own argument loses coherence, and falls into the trap of his own arguments. This is evident in his criticisms of Mark Duffield, as well as his own prescriptions of how to escape the dilemmas and impasse of liberal peacebuilding.

Duffield is perhaps best known for his eclectic Marxist and post-structural critique of the development–security nexus as a means of securing the Global South under the rubric of a liberal technology of governance. But in Chandler’s view, this argument of the liberal world order is the flipside of the same coin of the realist critique, and in fact, the two sides form a consensus. He asserts that “there was an inevitable tendency towards a consensual framing of the problematic of liberal peacebuilding intervention as a problem of the relationship between the liberal West and the non-liberal Other.” ⁵¹ There is a potential point to be made by Chandler here as Duffield largely focuses his critiques on the structural and historical processes of peacebuilding and its effects on local populations, which may be a larger critique of the structuralist and systemic methods of analysis. However, Chandler completely undermines his own logic when he claims that the issue with romanticizing the local is that it does not take into consideration structural forces, but when the local is brought into focus, he accuses the commentators of blaming the local as the barrier to liberal peacebuilding. So, where scholars like David Lake, ⁵² Krasner, and Zakaria see peacebuilding failing because of the other’s lack of institutional and social capacities, critical theorists like Duffield reify the resistance of the other to liberal peacebuilding as a result of identity politics. ⁵³ Not only is this logically inconsistent with his own critique of liberal peacebuilding, but it is also a wilful and disingenuous misrepresentation of Duffield’s arguments.

For instance, Duffield fully recognizes that the good governance agenda of liberal peacebuilding is “a method of decentralizing the administration of the colonial state to local elites in an attempt to quell the discontent among the surplus population with their dispossession in the face of capitalism.” ⁵⁴ Furthermore, Duffield also recognizes that the more intense liberal interventionism finds itself engaged in the state-building program in the peripheries, the more alternative modes of governance and capacities are taken away from the subaltern other as “wider and complex process of globalisation involving the qualification of nation-state sovereignty, the growing intrusion of IR of governance and the demise of Southern political alternatives.” ⁵⁵ Duffield even echoes both Chandler and Sedra’s critique that as liberal peacebuilding finds itself at increasing impasses, it will simultaneously promote “a will to govern in the name of the people, freedom and rights, [but it will] readily accept despotic rule over others provided that the ultimate outcome is developmental.” ⁵⁶ Finally, the argument that Chandler makes about the tendency of liberal peacebuilding and its critics to place the onus of self-reliance on the target population was in fact made by Duffield in 2010. Duffield states that “the liberal way of development … privileges adaptive self-reliance,” ⁵⁷ and “traditional” ways of life and subaltern “resiliency” are thereby romanticized. Therefore, Duffield does not ignore the structural and systemic forces, nor does he romanticize the “noble savage.” Furthermore, unlike Chandler’s suggestion that this line of criticism only seeks to amend liberal peacebuilding to the subaltern other, Duffield’s whole argument hinges on the premise that unless the international system and capitalist structures can be fundamentally changed, liberal peacebuilding will continue to create dislocations and insecurity. Chandler’s excessive defensive turf-guarding prevents him from being amenable to other theorists who have made similar arguments.

Apart from Chandler’s misrepresentation of this critical argument, another egregious inconsistency that further undermines the thesis of his book is his recommendation on how to move beyond the impasse of liberal peacebuilding. He proposes what he terms the “resilience” approach of “pragmatic sociology [that] refocuses … attention on actors en situation, as the main agencies of performance of the social.” ⁵⁸ He further states that this approach concerns itself with “the internal processes of practical relations and outcomes … [whereby] the local, or the everyday [is] understood … as a set of fluid microprocesses of practices in a constant interaction driven by the agency of ordinary people in concrete circumstances.” ⁵⁹ Immediately, we can recognize that what Chandler is proposing here is essentially social capital theory, although he is reluctant to label it as such for good reason—because social capital theory has become a linchpin of neoliberal developmental policy based on self-reliance, empowerment, and grassroots local agency. This proposal is irreconcilable with Chandler’s own criticisms of liberal peacebuilding. Not only does he overly romanticize “local knowledge” and social relations, but he effectively creates an erasure of the historical processes and grassroots power relations. The elite capture of state-building resources and processes is an endemic problem among the Global South, and Chandler’s proposition implies that local self-reliance and mediation would simply resolve these conflicts without intervention.

Chandler’s “solution” of empowerment and resilience has long been problematized in the development literature as entirely tautological as well; as Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton point out, “either people have power to exercise choice, in which case there is no cause for empowerment, or they do not and the task of empowerment is that of the logical problem of development [read: liberal internationalism].” ⁶⁰ Resilience and empowerment are, therefore, convenient methods for Western interveners to absolve themselves of responsibility for the failures of intervention, and as Duffield remarks, a cost-effective method of governance that provides a virtually free social security system offering the possibilities of adaptation and strengthening in order to manage the risks of market integration.” ⁶¹ For someone who is concerned about becoming an apologist for liberal peacebuilding through co-optation of the local, Chandler seems to unwittingly situate himself within an inclusive neoliberal paradigm of self-reliance. The problem with Chandler’s argument is that he refuses to acknowledge and engage the proponents of liberal peacebuilding and the realist critics on the merits of their own argument, and instead builds a wall of theoretical incommensurability. What makes Chandler’s position even more untenable is that he constructs strawman arguments of even those who agree with his analysis and provide their own critiques of liberal peacebuilding. Building on the assumption that the very premise of liberal peacebuilding and the ontological and normative goals of the realist critics are flawed, Chandler forecloses the possibility of meaningful dialogue, not only with realist and liberal scholars, but with critical scholars who are ostensibly sympathetic to his line of argument as well.

Sedra, on the other hand, moves the debate much further forward, not only because he targets a particular problem in the form of SSR, but more importantly because he takes a much more conciliatory position toward liberal peacebuilding, by acknowledging that the SSR model, while highly problematic, could be adapted and put to better use; as such, he would be criticized by Chandler as being an apologist as well. Sedra, however, is much more practical than Chandler about the way forward. Sedra believes that the SSR model should take on a more hybrid approach than its current form. The hybrid approach would return to the human security roots of SSR, and acknowledge that Weberian statehood is not always possible in places where SSR is practised. In this method, the hybrid approach is much more collaborative, and mixes local and traditional structures with those of the West. ⁶² Sedra openly recognizes the fact that the international state system as well as liberal democratic ideologies are not going to be displaced in the foreseeable future, and therefore attempts to work from within these structures to try to address the problems that peacebuilding has encountered. This proposition, of course, comes with its own set of normative problems, the most glaring of which is that what Sedra deems to be the hybrid system does not seem to be a far departure from the orthodox approaches to SSR as originally articulated. In fact, Sedra goes to painstaking lengths to identify where the SSR model emphasizes local ownership, input, and even hybridity, but the reality simply has not translated. This is the essence of the conceptual-context problem of SSR. In this respect, Sedra’s argument also becomes self-contradictory. By maintaining that SSR cannot be seen as a technical problem, the normative implication of his proposition is simply that SSR has not been implemented correctly or to its full potential. Therefore, incorrect and inappropriate applications are what led to the realist slide to expediency. However, it is curious that Sedra tries to salvage what appears to be an ideal-type model that he himself claims is too self-contradictory to be implemented in conflict-affected areas.