Resistances and Challenges to Liberal Peace Processes

Literature Overview

In the last few years, the literature on post-conflict interventions has become more nuanced and more theoretically minded. ² A general call for contextualising the intervention strategies in ways that become more meaningful for the particular idiosyncrasy of a conflict has been added to an acknowledgement that interventions are not neutral but political and thus much contested. ³ It could be argued that critical and mainstream literatures have converged in this regard, providing analyses in which the politics of interventions, of the interveners and of the intervened are taken into account. ⁴ In this context, the literature has increasingly tended to stay away from broad categories, to highlight the contestation of those politics by different actors on the ground and to provide fieldwork-based analyses. Alden et al. is particularly relevant in this regard. They show how militias hold the key both to peace (due to statebuilding strategies’ favouring power-sharing strategies) and to war (due to militias’ capacity to ruin peace processes through their challenges to DDR strategies) and therefore emphasise the need for context-specific strategies. Mac Ginty’s volume also represents the expansion of the literature of hybridity, of which he was one of the pioneers. ⁵ This volume is not only evidence of the consolidation and extended application of the concept of hybridity in peace and conflict studies, ⁶ but also of the fact that Mac Ginty continues to be at the forefront of research in this area, with one of the first volumes focusing explicitly on resistance. ⁷

Additionally, both volumes, from their particular fields, represent a critical stand. Mac Ginty contributes to the critiques of the liberal peace debate, while Alden et al. succeed at their main aim of ‘contributing to a growing body of scholarly literature aimed at critiquing the DDR process’ (p. 18). Not only do Alden et al. expand the critical literature on the international political economy of conflict and militias, for which the authors take previous work by Mats Berdal and David Ucko’s as reference, ⁸ but they contribute to recent research, such as that of Charles Call’s recent Why Peace Fails, ⁹ which precisely elaborates on the risks of marginalisation of certain groups and on the need for context-sensitive strategies.

As such, both volumes speak to several literatures that have converged in critical analyses of the major policies and actors of intervention. The usefulness of analysing these two volumes together is the fact that they provide an insight into these developments, and an opportunity to examine the relevance of the concepts and frameworks they use.

Brief Summary of the Volumes

Mac Ginty argues that international peacebuilding is a process of hybridisation both for the societies it is applied to and for international peacebuilding and its agents. Hybridity is defined as ‘the composite forms of social thinking and practice that emerge as the result of the interaction of different groups, practices, and worldviews’ (p. 8). Thus, for Mac Ginty, hybridisation is a process of intertwinement of individuals as well as institutions within and across societies. It is the recognition of the heterogeneity that defines societies and a call on researchers to stay away from concepts that attempt to capture societies’ purity, homogeneity or particularity. This applies to how we think about interventions, because both interveners and intervened are already hybrids in themselves due to their previous historical trajectories and their complex composition. When they encounter each other, they are both subject to a process of transformation. Local societies are subject to transformation because of the power and hegemony of the liberal peace. International interventions are transformed by the distortions, blowbacks, resistance and alternatives posed by local societies. However, as will be explained later, with this vision of the encounter, Mac Ginty is reifying the categories of local and international, arguably jeopardising his own critique.

With three chapters elaborating a conceptual framework on the liberal peace, hybridisation and a chapter-length note on indigenous peacebuilding, the book is well sustained empirically and theoretically. As we are promised (p. 13), the in-depth case studies present the practice of the major elements of a peacebuilding intervention: security – Afghanistan; statebuilding – Bosnia; governance – Lebanon; economic reforms – Iraq; and civil society – Ireland. By the end of the book, readers have a better understanding of how liberal peace interventions work on the ground and the transformations they undergo in the process. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the theorisation of hybridity has neglected a similar theorisation of the concept of resistance, despite being one of the drivers in the book title. This point will be expanded below.

On the whole, Mac Ginty’s book will allow scholars and practitioners to have a strong sense of the trajectory of debates in the literature of peacebuilding and of the practice of peacebuilding itself. The author’s modest claim of contributing to the critique of contemporary peace processes is more than fulfilled in providing a stocktake of peace operations of the last 20 years with a balanced study that is empirically grounded, theoretically informed and openly normative. Mac Ginty is not shy of calling George Bush an ‘absurd figure’ (p. 211), of claiming that peace interventions have at times little to do with peace, and that ‘peace’ might not be better served by a veneration of all things traditional and ‘local’. It is perhaps here where his promise of a radical critique might reside (p. 1), in that the book makes an effort to pose the ‘big questions about power and equity’ (p. 24). However, Mac Ginty’s conclusion could evoke Chandler’s critique of the critics of liberal peace in that, short of radicalism, this critique ends up giving guidance for reforms and lessons that policy-makers could take into account to better conduct their enterprise. ¹⁰ Mac Ginty’s analysis indeed provides certain policy-relevant prescriptions, but it also illustrates the existence of second agendas, the cacophony that multiple voices and multiple political projects entail for the interventions, and that even the most sophisticated intervening strategies are met with resistance, alternative strategies and armed struggle.

Armed militias and hard-core resistances are precisely the topics Alden, Thakur and Arnold address. Although they advocate for the reform of DDR programmes, there is a subversive element in remarking on the lack of real knowledge of, and the lack of real commitment to, DDR. Alden et al. and Mac Ginty meet unconditionally in their advocacy to put the peace of those who are suffering the conflict at the centre of the policies implemented, and not any other international or national agendas. This is not a new form of ownership but rather a call to refrain from top-down approaches and contextualise interventions in meaningful ways.

The need for contextualising and making DDR programmes harmonious with the political, economic and social environment in any given society is the crucial message to take from Alden et al.’s book, which argues that DDR programmes tend to be void of their personal, political and societal aspects. Not only does this cause the programmes not to succeed in their enterprise, but it also has the potential to put at risk the very societies they are meant to secure.

The book succeeds in giving a very strongly grounded empirical analysis of militias and DDR programmes in four countries (Sudan – specifically South Sudan; East Timor; DRC; and Afghanistan). The book opens with two chapters, one giving a historical overview of militias and the other setting up a conceptual framework for militias. These, together with the conclusion, make the book theoretically minded and conceptually nuanced. One of its greatest contributions is precisely clearing the ground for a useful and simplified, yet sophisticated, working notion of ‘militias’. This is added to the extensive primary research and fieldwork done.

Their notion of militias is that these are ‘lucid, rational players operating within the international system who can successfully politicise and instrumentalise identity cleavages, not only for the mobilization of fighters in particular and society in general, but also for the retention of their model base’ (p. 25). Alden et al. highlight the rationality of these actors in assessing their gains and motivations in undertaking such activities. In doing so, the authors provide a framework that includes the political and social environment in which these groups operate, keeping in line with their call to contextualise both research and policy-making. Taking this context seriously thus implies analysing how regional politics influence, impinge on and serve these groups.

Yet this nuanced analysis seems to clash with a certain naivety when exposing what is in need of reform. An emphasis on the spoiling character of militias risks constructing an image of a peaceful ‘international community’ confronting an armed ‘local population’, ready to continue fighting. The problem is that the ‘international community’ is neither disaggregated nor problematised. Power dynamics between various sectors of diplomatic missions, multinational corporations, entrepreneurs, government and international organisations’ agents, as well as the dynamics from political and economic trends, are absent from the analysis.

Both volumes take, from different standpoints, the responsibility of portraying a realistic ground-based understanding of how interventions are carried out and how they are challenged and resisted. They also provide useful and timely recommendations for academics and policy-makers in the field of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. This is of great value in contributing to emerging research that attempts to analyse and problematise interventions in all their complexity. However, they both fall short of providing nuanced conceptualisations especially of resistance, and reify binary understandings of the interventions between the international and the local. The remainder of the review elaborates on these critiques accordingly.

Challenges and Resistance

The portrayal of international operations as not being overpowering is something that these two books clearly illustrate as a point of convergence in the literature about peace operations. This relates to both the pitfalls of the interventions themselves and to the responses from the populations in which they intervene. It is precisely the antagonistic responses given by populations that these two books interestingly conceptualise in different ways. What Mac Ginty calls hard-core traditional resistance is seen as a ‘challenge’ by Alden et al. The interesting conundrum that arises with how the authors have conceptualised similar dynamics is the relationship that these antagonistic responses and their actors have to power. Both books clearly illustrate that actors operate outside traditional categories of dominating and dominated, often swapping sides and at times cooperating together. Mac Ginty seems to convey that resistance means the capacity of subverting power agendas. As such, for him, resistance is not only outright armed resistance but also forms of non-compliance and even disengagement. On the contrary, Alden et al.’s reference to ‘challenges’ rather than to resistance seems to be a cautious move since most of the militias represented are would-be political elites and possible power-sharers. What both volumes reflect is a still timid elaboration on the meaning of resistance, how the challenges reflect on the structural recomposition of society and the domination/resistance dynamics in a context of social transformation.

Having ‘resistance’ as a key word in Mac Ginty’s book title is in this sense slightly distracting because the real backbones of the book are international peacebuilding and hybridity. The theoretical chapters do not provide a theoretical framework of resistance, nor is there an engagement with any literature on the concept of resistance, ¹¹ and even less so an attempt to problematise the concept as such. The result is that the concept of resistance is vague. It seems to be what ‘locals’ do to counter, stop, transform, ignore or evade through other alternatives the kinds of strategies ‘internationals’ try to impose, which include transformations of some fundamental power, economic and even social arrangements in societies.

Alden et al. state that their work ‘builds implicitly on Ted Gurr’s political psychology of rational choice’ (p. 23). They situate their framework ‘between the traditional “military capabilities analysis” approach … and the more dynamic approach that is anchored in the historical, anthropological and cultural narratives of modern non-state actors’ (p. 25, emphasis in the original). However, their portrayal of militias as moving along the axis of greed/grievance and the portrayal of the conflicts (mostly Sudan, East Timor and DRC) as civil wars seems to share the ahistoricism of Hoffler and Collier rather than expanding on Gurr’s account of long-term relative deprivation.

The lack of a conceptual framework for understanding resistance results in some slippages. In Mac Ginty’s book, for instance, resistance is lumped with other things such as blowbacks and disengagement as factors of hybridisation but not as an elaboration of strategies of resistance. Additionally, who the resisters are and who is being resisted seem to follow an artificial divide between the international and the local. This is very problematic because a disaggregation of ‘the local’ might show that, for instance, national elites are more often than not in line with certain international agendas for their own purposes, provoking their own resistance from non-elites. It seems that peace interventions literature needs to think harder about the taxonomic differences between resistance, challenges, rebellion, disengagement and blowbacks.

Alden et al.’s exclusive focus on militias as the ‘challengers’ of peace provides an excellent in-depth study of these but overlooks other important challenges. For instance, in the case of the DRC, despite acknowledging how fundamental it is to understand the regional context (pp. 108, 127), the role of Rwanda in the DRC is not analysed, and nor is the role of Angola or other regional actors, let alone the role of international powers such as the US, the UK or the EU. Little is developed in terms of what regional actors do to destabilise the process. Something that could have been added, for instance, is that both the Congolese government and the UN accused Rwanda of supporting CNDP militias that threatened peace in 2008. ¹² The ‘piecemeal’ support of important actors like ‘Belgium, France, USA, the European Union and South Africa’ (p. 112) and the lack of political will (p. 145) should be analysed as a convergence of multiple interests and disinterests of different actors that defy the traditional picture of international actors as peace-makers and local militias as war-mongers.

The notion of ‘challenges’ allows Alden et al. to move beyond what they see as a ‘distorted understanding’ of militias due to the ‘underlying normative assumptions’ (p. 22). This is in response to an earlier literature on ‘spoilers’ but also other approaches that Alden et al. helpfully divide into ‘ideological’, ‘behaviourist’ and ‘system’ (pp. 21–5). They reproach earlier analyses for their portrayal of power relations along an axis of coercion and of action/reaction that disregards subtle dynamics, complex structures of authorities and alliances across and within societies. While Alden et al’s framework sets the basis for a context-specific and nuanced analysis, there is no disclosure of the authors’ own normative assumptions. The framework facilitates an exploration of the rationality and politics of militias to challenge peace processes, but it does not analyse the politics and multiple agendas of international interveners. As mentioned earlier, this ultimately reifies a depoliticised and decontextualised image of peacebuilding-committed international actors intervening in violent local societies.

These two volumes unearth an interesting muddled ground of ambiguity in peacebuilding processes, where actors can simultaneously subvert and gain power, evade or engage in political transformative processes. The large spectrum of actors that could fit categories of challengers and resisters actually points theorists and future researchers to develop a more refined conceptualisation of resistance. Interestingly, while Mac Ginty emphasises the hidden, non-confrontational resistance strategies à la Scott, ¹³ and Alden et al. focus on the open armed militias, both illustrate how power is exercised through multiple channels and how pervasive and rich the strategies to subvert and confront such power are. If this everyday framework is to be of value, it should make us embrace the ambiguities and multidimensional character of the context, its dynamics and its actors. ¹⁴ In this process, the binary of the local and the international should be rethought.

The International and the Local

Both books critique the vision of peace interventions as homogeneous, unilinear and well-planned. From the interventions that both books cover across four continents (Soudan/Democratic Republic of Congo; Afghanistan/Iraq/Lebanon; East Timor and Bosnia/Ireland) what becomes clear is the entanglement – hybridisation in Mac Ginty’s terms – between the international and the local and how these need to be necessarily disaggregated if we are to have a realistic picture in order to contextualise policies to apply on the ground. However, both volumes arguably end up reifying an artificial binary of actors and spheres between the international and the local. If hybridity, or context-specific analysis, is to be our lens for future research, other dynamics and categories, including economic, political, social, class, gender and race, might illuminate more than whether these agendas, dynamics and categories classify as internal or external.

For instance, in the case of Afghanistan, both Mac Ginty and Alden et al. highlight how the use of militias for the benefit of a peace process can end up in a ‘remilitarisation’ process. Although this is done in the pursuit of providing the state with the monopoly of the means of violence, it causes precisely the opposite. However, neither of the volumes highlight how, in the process, national and military elites are created, becoming the backbones of a new government and subsequent state. This process is at certain moments perhaps even more important because it will dictate the legitimacy or not of violence’s ownership. This is most poignant in cases like Sudan, DRC or Bosnia. Still, challenges come from multiple fronts (from the nature and application of peace agreements, e.g. East Timor; from the nature of economic reforms, as in the case of Iraq or Ireland; or from the underlying theme of self-defence for lack of security in the case of most of the militias treated in Alden et al.) in ways that require broader categories for the actors involved.

Most important for both books is to highlight what might be impeding the realisation of peace. Both books point out that the lack of contextuality and the top-down, ‘cookie-cutter’ (Alden et al.) style of the internationally led interventions provoke blowbacks, challenges and resistance. Both volumes therefore identify the need for peace to be meaningful for actors on the ground. An underlying theme in both volumes is the power that international actors have. Mac Ginty explains that liberal peace is a system, but it is not the most developed part of the book (p. 211). Alden et al.’s statement that transitioning from war to peace is a ‘large-scale social change’ (p. 20) is very interesting but again not developed. Both seem to point to some underlying assumptions about capacities and the ways in which power, resistance and multiple agendas come into play. For Mac Ginty, for instance, drafting policy on the spot (pp. 167, 221) proves his argument that liberal interventionism is not as coherently well planned as thought, and ‘gives space to resistance’. But it could also be argued that it is precisely the capacity to implement ‘off the cuff’ policies that is a testimony of their power. Of course this power and its fissures bring in resistance, but it is the hegemony, the authority to claim that whatever ‘they’ do and in whatever form is ‘adequate’, that actually proves their authority. The same conclusion could be drawn from Alden et al.’s book in that the ‘cookie-cutting’ approach used in DDR programmes is not only a lazy ignorant approach on the part of the interveners, but evidence that they have sufficient authority to apply those programmes. Therefore, an analysis of the power politics and hegemonic actors that are involved in peace processes should include a broader set of categories and not just across an inside/outside divide.

Mac Ginty’s book is a commendable effort at dismantling the neat categories of giver and recipient between ‘liberal peacebuilding’ and ‘local societies’. One of Mac Ginty’s greatest contributions is to illustrate that giver and recipient work both ways, and that, notwithstanding the constraints on providing a legible and simplified analysis, categories constructed so far in the literature of peace interventions need to be put in question. However, it is precisely at this point where Mac Ginty’s book is arguably prey to its own critique. Although categories such as ‘liberal peace’, ‘international community’ or ‘international peacebuilding’ are disaggregated, the book maintains a dividing line between the ‘international’ and ‘the local’. The chapter on ‘Indigenous Peace’ seems to have confused ‘indigeneity’ with ‘nationality’. The four-point analytical framework that sustains the broader lenses of hybridity (coercive and incentivising powers of liberal peace and the ability of ‘local actors’ to resist, ignore, subvert and present alternatives to liberal peace) is symptomatic in revealing that the dichotomies international/local and liberal/non-liberal have not been entirely broken down, even if Mac Ginty’s book itself is a step in that direction. The problem is that, as Mac Ginty’s book shows, ‘the local’ and ‘the international’ are huge categories that are almost useless when we find that subversion and compliance have multiple directions and that actors operate outside those neat categories.

Conclusion: Notes for Future Research

With the experience of 20 years of post-cold war interventions, and, above all, acknowledging the difficulties and few instances of success, the literature on peace interventions has become increasingly nuanced, theoretically minded and rich in context-specific and ground expertise. These books are both evidence of this.

Together, both volumes come to prove that a turning point has been reached and that the picture of liberal interventions as all-powerful, coherent and monolithic is a thing of the past. Far from muddling the analysis, these books present a balanced picture of the complex texture and circumstances on the ground, including the agency of different local, national, regional and international actors.

Both books promise to serve an academic as well as a policy-oriented audience but both have a slight bias. Mac Ginty’s breadth and direct engagement with scholarly debate is tilted more towards an academic audience. The clarity and simplicity of the writing, without being overly referenced, makes it ideal as a reference book on hybridity and peacebuilding in university courses on conflict resolution, peace and post-conflict interventions. Alden et al.’s concentration on militias and the richness of the authors’ empirical and primary research, with less discussion of academic debates and fewer disaggregated concepts, fits better a policy-makers’ audience, though it would also be of interest to academics that are doing research close to the ground and want to have a theoretically minded yet simplified study of the complexity of militias in post-conflict interventions. The case studies in both books discuss a wide range of interventions, focusing on the major areas of peace interventions and amply covering the needs of researchers, teachers and practitioners. The policy prescriptions will prove useful and insightful for practitioners, even if they will become the target of critics for whom ‘critique’ is to go beyond policy prescription. ¹⁵ If part of the critique is to highlight the secondary agendas of interveners and policy-makers in ways that challenge their commitment to peace, and the power relations in any given post-conflict context, a policy-orientated research is questionable in its simultaneous ‘critical’ insight. Still, policy-relevant research illustrates a tougher scrutiny of policy-making and the need for reflective research in which the normative stand of scholars is also open to scrutiny.

The lack of elaboration in Mac Ginty’s book of the concept of resistance and the use of the term ‘challenges’ rather than ‘resistance’ in Alden et al.’s book are symptomatic of what seems to be an emergent but still timid trend when talking about the blowbacks, antagonistic reactions and insubordination against peacebuilding. Future research would benefit from taking the opened path, though not necessarily too far regarding the problematisation and inclusion of more categories and spheres of analysis beyond the construction of interventions as internationally led and locally received.