Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace

Methodological bypassing of target subjects in research

While this cannot be said to be the trend in much of the more recent research on the liberal peace, in the earlier work that set the research agenda, as well as in later formulations, there was a tendency to exclude or marginalize consideration of the people targeted by its interventions from the analysis. This methodological exclusion manifested itself in different ways.

In a seemingly banal sense, it was often manifested in work that sought to focus principally on the conceptualization of the liberal peace rather than its specific effects. Thus, some major works in the debate such as Richmond’s (2005) Transformation of Peace and Chandler’s (2010a) International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance did not represent or engage with the activities or behaviour of particular peoples targeted by interventions, since these were not considered relevant to the overall framing of this part of the research. Rather, such projects focused on making sense of the genealogies, contradictions and trajectories of intellectual traditions associated with the ‘West’ as the key object of intellectual concern. In the context of these deliberations, the peoples targeted by intervention were implicitly irrelevant to the conclusions that the research wanted to draw about the West’s relationship with post-conflict environments. While this is a methodological ‘exclusion’, then, it does not on the surface appear a problematic one – rather, it seems a natural artefact of a research design focused on Western ideology.

Contributing to the theoretical framing, methodological exclusion of targeted peoples also characterized some of the empirical work on particular interventions. This often focused very largely on the policies, beliefs and practices of interveners. Exemplary of this were Chandler’s Faking Democracy After Dayton (2000) and Empire In Denial (2006), which almost exclusively looked at the international administrative structures and their illiberal and hypocritical exercise of power. Where Bosnians did appear, it was briefly and through a short explanation of their nationalist politics in the context of anti-corruption policies (see Chandler, 2006: 154–157).

This same methodological exclusion is, however, also manifested in other influential writings. For example, in the cases covered in Richmond and Franks’ (2009) Liberal Peace Transitions, the focus is almost exclusively on the trajectory of the interventions. References to Kosovans, Cambodians and Timorese people are relatively brief, generally about recalcitrant politicians and offered in service of a critique that demonstrates the failure of the liberal peace to transform societies. Chesterman (2008) argues that the same applies to Zaum’s (2007) treatment of target societies. Even in Duffield’s work, which has included substantial efforts to ground the global theoretical critique in particular cases, the overarching tendency is to focus on the interveners and their practices in those environments rather than the peoples targeted by intervention. We see this particularly accentuated in the handling of the Zambezia Road Feeder Project in Mozambique (Duffield, 2007: 82–110) and continuities in Western attitudes towards Afghanistan (Duffield, 2007: 133–158). Again, there is a seemingly solid rationale for this – that this is the right methodological choice to make because these interventions are themselves the object of inquiry.

Yet, it is a fundamental of most philosophies of social science that methodological choices reflect underlying ontological premises (Jackson, 2010). As noted, our ontological premises determine our basic understanding of what the political is (Walker, 1993). In these cases, to look only at interveners, and to imply by design that this is an adequate account of the politics of intervention, helps to reproduce, however unintentionally, the background assumption that that which is exterior to this does not matter for an appreciation of the politics of intervention. The fact that no explicit methodological rationale is usually offered for this absence suggests further that this is a matter of scholarly commonsense.

Thus, defining and framing inquiry in this way supports habits of intellectual Eurocentrism by emphasizing ‘Western’ agency as the terrain of the political. What is under question, then, is not whether the methods used were adequate to the research question, but why research questions about the politics of the liberal peace have been continuously framed in this way. On our reading, this methodological habit precisely reproduces tenets of ‘old’ Eurocentrism here – the implied passivity, irrelevance or mysteriousness of the non-West – even as it tries to avoid them. It will be argued that, in combination with other avatars of Eurocentrism, it has played an important role in the construction of the ‘paradox of liberalism’ within the debate.

Analytic bypassing of subjects through governmentality frameworks

Allied to the methodological exclusion of peoples targeted by interventions is a deeper analytic bypassing of such peoples as substantive political subjects, via critical accounts of global governance. Specifically, the recent critical debate on the liberal peace has also been strongly influenced by the idea that it is a form of liberal governmentality (Dillon and Reid, 2000). This is the idea, derived from Foucault, that it is a productive technology of power that seeks to regulate life through its freedom – through the production of self-governing liberal subjects. This is understood to operate through a system of biopolitics (Duffield, 2005; Richmond, 2006), which articulates sovereign power as shifting from a management of territories to a management of bodies. This debate has been unfolding alongside the broader rise of Foucaultian analytics of the international, and particularly in analyses of war, peace and global governance (Jabri, 2007; Joseph, 2010).

This analytic framework, particularly as developed by Duffield (2001, 2007) in the two books cited here, has been incredibly powerful as a critical imaginary for understanding the structure and practices of the development–security nexus and the liberal peace. While the first of the two books details the emerging strategic complex of actors – humanitarian, military, developmental – who intervene widely in the global South in new configurations, the second articulates these practices via a Foucaultian reading of liberal power and the expanding frontier of Western governance.

Duffield (2001: 31–34) offers his reading of liberal peace, through Foucault, as a contrast to theses suggesting that interventions are a ‘new imperialism’. Rather, liberal power is ‘based on the regulation and management of economic, political and social processes’ (Duffield, 2001: 34). One of the most important themes emerging from the later work (Duffield, 2005, 2007) is the unevenness of life-chances and developmental expectations accorded to the liberal West and the rest of the world. For Duffield, this is a continuation of colonial strategies of rule (Duffield, 2005) and liberal racism (Duffield, 2007: 185–214) – we might also call it the production of ‘colonial difference’ in Mignolo’s terms. Duffield (2007: 10–11) roots this analysis in Harvey’s (2003) account of capitalism’s need to reproduce ‘surplus populations’ to avoid systemic crises.

However, the central problem with Duffield’s analytic framework is its tendency to ignore the exteriority of power through the discounting of Southern subjecthood. This turns on the way in which political power and political subjecthood are implicitly understood to interact and produce consent:

People in the South are no longer ordered what to do – they are now expected to do it willingly themselves. Compared to imperial peace, power in this form, while just as real and disruptive, is more nuanced, opaque and complex. Partnership and participation imply the mutual acceptance of shared normative standards and frameworks. Degrees of agreement, or apparent agreement, within such normative frameworks establish lines of inclusion and exclusion. (Duffield, 2001: 34)

Here it is strongly implied that liberal governmentality operates in the international sphere in the same way as it does within ‘advanced liberal societies’ (Joseph, 2010) – that is specifically through the productive power of liberal discourse to produce self-regulating and self-governing subjects. If it is the case that the liberal peace consists of strategic complexes of governance consisting of different actors (Duffield, 2001: 12), then the implication is that they are governing the global South through the production of liberal subjectivity.

Nonetheless, the way Duffield frames it here actually hedges the bet over Southern subjectivity while simultaneously endorsing the overall framework. That is, he does not want to say outright that Southern political subjecthood is produced by the liberal peace. Yet, this is the point of the ‘governmentality’ framework insofar as it has any analytic traction – that is, that it is a specific modality of power that works through the production of volition rather than coercion or loyalty. Throughout the work, then, we have a fairly strong narrative of the liberal peace and development–security network as a web or network of Western liberal power, the logic of which works through its attempted production of liberal subjects.

There are longstanding debates as to whether a Foucaultian account of power is applicable at the global level (Joseph, 2010), adequate for understanding either the development of governmental structures themselves or the nature and character of ‘resistance’. As Jabri (2007: 74–75) notes, postcolonial critiques have argued that Foucault’s own focus on the European expression of power ignores the differentiated character of imperial power. In particular, they have problematized Foucault’s ignoring of the specific historical angle or positionality that informs his account of power (Jabri, 2007: 74), and subsequently his account of resistance that is itself ideologically somewhat empty, as noted by Spivak (Jabri, 2007: 75).

These concerns can be applied to the use of his work in the liberal peace debate, and are specifically connected to the account of the subject that is implicit in the governmentality framework. Chandler has made similar claims, arguing that there is an emptiness to Duffield’s call for a ‘solidarity of the governed’ as a response to governmentality (Chandler, 2009: 67), because it lacks a political subject as the basis for critical theorizing (Chandler, 2010b: 153).

Chandler is right to an extent: there is a lack of political subjecthood in Duffield’s account of intervention. However, what he does not clearly specify is that the principal lack is of the subjecthood of those targeted by intervention, not those seen to be enacting it. The latter actually have plenty of strategic agency, intentionality, ideology and purpose in this framework. In this sense, Duffield’s account of intervention is not dissimilar to Chandler’s, in that they both focus on the agency and subjecthood of interveners, even if under the analytic of governmentality this becomes more diffuse. Yet, they both exclude and avoid considerations of the exteriority of this power, and particularly the peoples targeted by interventions as political subjects. The habit of methodological exclusion noted in the previous section becomes then cognate with the analytic exclusions that underpin the framework of governmentality. Both exhibit avatars of Eurocentrism, which emphasize the distinctiveness and importance of Western behaviour while occluding the space outside it.

Ontologies of Otherness: Liberal–local relations, ‘hybridity’, ‘resistance’ and the ‘everyday’

Sensitive to the problem of such occlusion, a major strand of recent literature has emphasized the need to rethink the relations between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’ in intervention settings (Mac Ginty, 2011; Richmond, 2009, 2010, 2011), in what has been labelled a ‘fourth generation’ approach (Richmond, 2011). This writing has taken a much more proactive approach to research with and about the peoples targeted by intervention, aiming to correct the impression of smooth liberal transformation and the ‘romanticization’ of the local (Mac Ginty, 2011: 2–4). Yet, the paths it has taken have, quite unwillingly, reinforced a Eurocentric understanding of intervention, through the use of an ontology of ‘Otherness’ to frame the issues.

Prominent among these accounts is Richmond’s (2009, 2010, 2011) recent work on ‘post-liberal peace’, which frames the key problems of intervention through an ontological distinction between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’. In earlier writing, the liberal peace is elaborated as genealogically endogenous to Western traditions of thought, reflecting Enlightenment, modern and post-Christian values (Richmond, 2005). In post-conflict settings, however, it is critiqued for exercising forms of hegemony that suppress pluralism, depoliticize peace, undermine the liberal social contract and exercise a colonial gaze in its treatment of local ‘recipients’ of the liberal peace. In view of these various aspects of failure, the liberal peace is characterized as ‘ethically bankrupt’ (Richmond, 2009: 558) and requiring re-evaluation.

The ‘local’, on the other hand, is a space characterized by ‘context, custom, tradition and difference in its everyday setting’ (Richmond, 2010: 669), which is suppressed by liberal peace interventions. The very conception of the ‘post-liberal peace’ is thus about the ways in which two ontologically distinct elements – the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’ – are ‘rescued and reunited’ via forms of hybridity and empathy, in which ‘everyday local agencies, rights, needs, custom and kinship are recognized as discursive “webs of meaning”’ (Richmond, 2010: 668).

Mitchell (2011: 1628) has recently argued that Richmond’s conception of the ‘local’ is not ‘a reference to parochial, spatially, culturally or politically bounded places’ but ‘the potentialities of local agents to contest, reshape or resist within a local “space”’. Richmond (2011: 13–14) himself has also been concerned not to be understood as ‘essentializing’ the ‘local’, emphasizing that it contains a diversity of forms of political society. Indeed, in this more recent work, a more complex conception of the ‘everyday’ as a space of action, thought and potential resistance is elaborated.

Despite these qualifications, however, there is much conflation, interchangeability and slippage between these conceptions of the ‘local’. Accordingly, the ontology of Otherness, understood as cultural distinctiveness and alterity, continuously surfaces throughout the narratives of liberal and post-liberal peace. Not only is the liberal peace closely linked to the intellectual trajectory of the ‘West’, but a conception of the ‘local’ as non-modern and non-Western often re-appears:

This requires that local academies and policymakers beyond the already liberal international community are enabled to develop theoretical approaches to understanding their own predicaments and situations, without these being tainted by Western, liberal, and developed world orthodoxies and interests. In other words, to gain an understanding of the ‘indigenous’ and everyday factors for the overall project of building peace, liberal or otherwise, a via media needs to be developed between emergent local knowledge and the orthodoxy of international prescriptions and assumptions about peace. (Richmond, 2009: 571, emphasis added)

There is a clear emphasis here on the need to engage with the ‘indigenous’ or ‘authentic’ traditions of non-Western life, which seems to reflect an underlying assumption of cultural difference as the primary division between these two parties. This reproduces the division between the liberal, rational, modern West and a culturally distinct space of the ‘local’.

Indeed, the call for a post-liberal peace is often a call for peacebuilding to reflect a more ‘culturally appropriate form of politics’ (Richmond, 2011: 102) that is more empathetic and emancipatory. This emphasis on tradition and cultural norms as constitutive of the ‘local’ is carried through in recent research on interventions in Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands. These focus largely on the reinvigoration of ‘customary’ houses and institutions as a form of ‘critical agency’ in distinction to liberal institutions and the state (Richmond, 2011: 159–182). The point here is not simply that there is an account of alterity or cultural difference within the politics of intervention, but that the liberal/local distinction appears to be the central ontological fulcrum upon which the rest of the political and ethical problems sit (see also Chandler, 2010b: 153). Therefore, ‘local’ or ‘everyday’ ‘agency’ is seen to be best expressed to the extent that it reclaims ‘the customary’ and is not ‘co-opted’ by the internationals. It is understood as enhanced where codes of ‘customary law’ become part of the new constitutional settlement.

A similar division can be seen in Mac Ginty’s (2011) framework, which sees the hybridities in peacebuilding as emerging at the intersection of the ‘international’ and ‘local’ agents and institutions. Again, this framework is built on an ontological distinction between the two that repeatedly splits the ‘Western’/‘international’ from the ‘non-Western’/‘local’. Even though this is well qualified, overall Mac Ginty (2011: 94) defends this distinction, arguing that if one were to abandon such potentially problematic labels then this would lead to an abandonment of research altogether. This can quite straightforwardly be read as a defence of the basic ontology of the project, which is an ontology of the distinction between the West and its Others, which meet through various forms of hybridization. While Mac Ginty does not pursue the ethics of the post-liberal peace in the same way as Richmond, the underlying intellectual framework also uses this distinction as the analytic pivot of the research.

We earlier defined Eurocentrism as the belief in Western distinctiveness, and I have argued that this is philosophically fundamental to this strand of the critical literature that grapples with the relationship between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’. This strand has put substantial analytic weight on fundamental cultural differences between these two entities, even while disavowing any essentialism and making some substantive conceptual efforts to move away from this. Such difficulties are indicative of the deep hold that this particular avatar of Eurocentrism has on the critical imaginary. By contrast, the point made by a wide variety of other ‘postcolonial’ writers has precisely been against such an ontology of the international, pointing instead to the historically blurred, intertwined and mutually constituted character of global historical space and ‘culture’ (Bhabha, 2004; Bhambra, 2010).

Nostalgia for social contract politics, welfare democracy and the liberal political subject

The three avatars just discussed are prominent features of critiques that shape the basic starting points of research. This last avatar, however, can be characterized as more ‘recessive’ in critical scripts, occupying a more muted but important place in the overall thinking. This is an implicit nostalgia for the social contract, the liberal subject and the welfare state, which are understood to provide the substance of alternatives to the present liberal peace. However, as will be further elaborated, these end up reinforcing the rationale for interventions rather than disrupting them.

The ‘social contract’ or even ‘liberal social contract’ are sometimes invoked in the critiques as a means of restoring balance between powerful and less powerful actors, but also as a way of shoring up the liberal peace itself through moving away from neoliberalism. For Richmond (2009: 567–568), a ‘new social contract’ offers a means of balancing the international with the indigenous, which provides the basis for a post-liberal peace with more ‘everyday legitimacy’. For Divjak and Pugh (2008: 373), writing in the context of corruption in post-conflict Bosnia, the main cause of corruption is understood as the ‘absence of a liberal social contract’. This resonates with other literature that has pointed to the ‘external’ rather than ‘internal’ contract engendered by peacebuilding (Barnett and Zürcher, 2009).

This line of argument is interesting precisely because of the strong suggestion that what is required is not a rejection of intervention, but the need to control it by bringing it into a classical liberal framework of accountability through contract. If only such contractarian relations were available to guide international–local relations, or indeed the relations between elites and masses, then the liberal peace could, in Richmond’s words, be ‘salvaged’. Practitioners, of course, might point out that in a formal sense there are plenty of ‘contracts’ and agreements that govern intervention in all peacebuilding missions – governments necessarily consent to them, and constitutions are also forged through political processes that are designed to be ‘inclusive’. For critics who know this, however, the implication must be that these are not genuine or authentic forms of contracting.

Complementary to the call for a (better) social contract is also a call for more welfare provision and state intervention in post-conflict economies (Pugh, 2005, 2009; Richmond, 2008) within a critique of neoliberal economic policy. This resonates with Duffield’s observation that the provision of ‘social insurance’ for ‘surplus populations’ in the global North is not replicated in the South. In particular, Pugh (2008) emphasizes the need for employment creation and labour rights, and Richmond (2008) emphasizes the meeting of basic needs and rights through better state provision. These stipulations, however, are combined with an emphasis on the need to uphold ‘culture’ or ‘heterogeneity’ (Pugh et al., 2008) in the context of a developmental political economy, and with a consciousness of the problems of some of these objectives (Richmond, 2011: 39).

While the critique of the effects of neoliberal economic policy in these writings is very insightful and important, it is nonetheless interesting that the alternative vision is clearly based on a particular conception of state-led social democracy akin to that practised in postwar Western Europe, but one that is able to accommodate culturally appropriate modifications and development. Again, however, practitioners might well point to this as actually reflecting the current centre of gravity in intervention policy (‘we are all Keynesian now’). ⁴ Moreover, they may note that it is Western donors who have enabled any kind of social provision via health and education services to take place. While critics might argue soundly that such provisions are everywhere inadequate, this does not seem to reflect any kind of real gap in thinking between interveners and critics.

In a slightly different vein, other critiques have shown a nostalgia for the liberal political subject as a basis of political action. Earlier, for example, we noted that Chandler (2010b) critiqued Duffield for the thinness of the idea of the ‘solidarity of the governed’. In the same piece, Richmond is also criticized for a fear of doing epistemic violence to ‘the Other’. These concerns reflect Chandler’s criticisms of post-structuralist and cosmopolitan approaches, which mourn the loss of the ‘liberal right-bearing subject’ (Chandler, 2009: 56) and the ‘transformative dynamic ontology of the universal rational subject’ (Chandler, 2010b: 155).

This is because, for Chandler (2010b), liberal peace represents not so much the contradictions of divergent strands of liberalism but a degraded ‘neoliberal’ form that critiques autonomy. While it is never made totally explicit what kind of politics of engagement Chandler would advocate, it is clear that his preoccupations with autonomy, sovereignty and the virtual death of political ideologies in the West indicate a kind of refounded pluralist liberalism in which ‘politics’ and ‘autonomy’ are themselves more highly valued as the foundation of a properly political project. Yet, as Jones (2011: 237) has recently argued, this seems to depend upon an implicit defence of the ‘mythology’ (Chandler’s word) of unproblematic autonomy as the basis for political society. Indeed, the focus on the unaccountability of intervention and the critique of autonomy suggest that he too might be in favour of a classical liberal social contract as the alternative to neoliberalism.

Thus the critiques of the liberal peace often remain tied to alternatives that reflect political imaginaries grounded in the vision of a ‘better’ European past, in terms of ideas either about the social contract or welfare state, or about the autonomous liberal political subject. These may all be improvements in many respects on the present situation; however, it is perhaps disconcerting that these alternatives are framed in terms of and with references to such a past, and that there is little real difference between these visions and those that practitioners of intervention themselves hold. As will be argued in the next section, these imaginaries are an important limit to the potentiality of critique through confining the intellectual spaces from which critique can emerge.

Recovering historical political presence

As noted earlier, habits of methodological and analytic exclusion of target societies have also characterized some of the critiques of the liberal peace. While there are clearly many differences between these and older colonial thinking, this iterated habit of exclusion is nonetheless a problematic one. It does seem to uphold the overall sensibility that nothing worth engaging with is going on outside the interventions themselves.

Relatedly, even when this exclusion is avoided, it is often the case that there is little if any historical grounding of the people targeted by an intervention beyond the conflict that preceded the intervention (see Chandler, 2000; Duffield, 2007; Richmond and Franks, 2009). This also compounds the erroneous impression – one that is sometimes formed by students reading the critical literature as well as countless practitioners – that the very ideas of peace and democracy are somehow ‘new’ imports of the peacebuilders to benighted post-conflict environments.

If critical scholars are to displace this habit of analytic negation and the errors it produces, it must be in part through an extended appreciation of the historical political presence of societies targeted by interventions, and of forms of rule, power and resistance that existed in the territories concerned. This is important both in terms of the peoples and spaces themselves, and in terms of their broader coeval connections to the constitution of global modernity. This appreciation was an important dimension of 20th-century anti-colonial thought, of which one key strand was the recovery of ongoing pre- and postcolonial ‘presence’ (see Cabral, 1979).

On the one hand, this recovery of presence can substantially contribute to repositioning the analytic gaze through fleshing out a knowledge of different ideas, values, issues and solidarities that constitute the pluralities of human political life. For example, Ayers’ (2006) work on African political forms elaborates other historical modalities of authority and participation that sought to manage conflicts and inequalities between groups. This work challenges the Eurocentric sensibility that it is only Western or ‘international’ actors who have valuable political ideas and exercise meaningful political agency in the world.

On the other, however, the appreciation of presence draws out the longstanding connections of mutual constitution between different societies that are so often buried by intervention discourses. This is crucial for undoing the Eurocentric presumption that ‘modernity’ itself emerged miraculously in one geographic-cultural locale and is only now in the process of spreading across the world (see Bhambra, 2010). This is important, because past encounters of colonization and empire, which are for some not in the very distant past, come to have a much more direct influence and impact on contemporary interventions (Sabaratnam, 2013).

This historical appreciation must also be coupled with an understanding of contemporary political presences, including an engagement with key political concerns, oppositions, motifs, discourses and patterns of action. These are central to being able to read intervention in a multi-sited way, and in terms of understanding its complex impacts on the political life of the target society. This awareness counteracts the tendency to read intervention as something that generally floats above or is separate from other dynamics, regrounding our conception of the political in public experience.

Moving from (alien) ‘culture’ to alienation

As recognized earlier, of course, not all writers in the debate ignore the exteriority of interventions. Richmond (2010) has advocated the use of ethnographic methods, combined with principles of empathy and care, as a means of engaging with ‘everyday’ relations and practices outside the vista of international interventions. These methods provide a clear counterweight to the habituated closures of some research, and opens up the possibility of engaging with the ‘critical agency’ or ‘resistance’ of those targeted by intervention. Yet, as earlier elaborated, it has a tendency to prioritize cultural difference, understood through traditions and customs, as the principal site of this politics.

As Balibar (1991) has argued, however, we must be wary of accounts and explanations that work on ontologies of ‘cultural difference’, which can functionally replicate ontologies of civilization and race. Many anti-colonial thinkers were also suspicious of using ‘culture’ as a basis for political claim-making, recognizing that more often than not it had become an instrument of political imprisonment and alienation (Fanon, [1967] 2008), or a means of depoliticizing colonial dominance (Said, 1994). Indeed, within anthropology itself there have been strident critiques of the use of ‘culture’ as a framework that persistently reinscribes the ‘West’/‘non-West’, ‘self’/‘Other’ distinction (Abu-Lughod, 1991).

The notion of ‘colonial difference’ forwarded by Mignolo and Quijano, emergent from these considerations, can be understood in this respect to repoliticize the distinctions and hierarchies made in assertions of ‘cultural difference’ as the constitutive ontology of the international (see also Neumann, 1996). It does this through conceptualizing the condition of ‘coloniality’ as a complex hierarchy of epistemic, political and material dynamics that have continuously fed into the sustenance of racialized imperial power over the last five centuries (Quijano, 2000). This intellectual move can be understood as the equivalent of moving from understanding gender as a function of biology to understanding it as a function of social powers that are not only constructed but maintain a complex, shifting hierarchy of masculinity over femininity.

The alternative to the culturalist framework is to repoliticize the field of action in which different peoples operate. One key strategy in anti-colonial thought was not to focus on the ‘alien’ (i.e. incomprehensible, inauthentic) character of colonial rule, but on its ‘alienating’ character – that is, its displacements, violence, silencing, humiliations and dispossessions, which accrued to people as individuals and as a group. These included the epistemic violence done to symbols, social orders and knowledge. The point is that this becomes a positional, and thus political, story rather than a ‘culturalist’ one about ‘difference’.

As a strategy, a positional critique requires a careful engagement with the experiences and critical political consciousness of those who are rendered as ‘objects’ of power, but who were never only silent and/or ‘co-opted’ through their involvement with particular structures. In research, in large part this means engaging with the ways in which different people politicize various aspects of their experiences, narrate the terms of their situations and critically interpret the world around them (Abu-Lughod, 1991). Moreover, while it requires a reflexivity about the limits of one’s own gaze (see Mac Ginty, 2011: 4), it also requires a commitment to the possibility of substantive engagement with the particular politics of the situation (Ortner, 1995).

This shift in emphasis I have sketched from ‘alienness’ to ‘alienation’, broadly understood, is an important one in the decolonizing project because it refuses to organize the world into boxes primarily defined by ‘culture’, which tends to limit rather than deepen understanding. Rather, by emphasizing the political content and context of human consciousness, meaning and agency, it repositions the analytic gaze towards a fuller appreciation of the politics of the international. Indeed, there is an important radicality to the refusal of this ordering. This does not mean that ‘culture’ is epiphenomenal to consciousness, meaning and agency (Ortner, 1995: 181–182), but that ‘cultures’ are not the most important subdivisions in international politics, and that ‘individuals’ themselves may never belong to them stably (Walley, 1997).

Decolonizing political economy: Politicizing entitlements, dispossessions, accumulations

Lastly, a fundamental means of repoliticizing our understanding of phenomena is to try to understand their distributive impact. Important critiques of political economy have been made in the context of the liberal peace debate, particularly by Pugh (2005) and Duffield (2007), who have drawn attention to the structural effects of neoliberalism in reducing state-provided social insurance, and the forms of elite corruption to which this contributes. Bringing considerations of political economy to the study of the liberal peace has also been an increasingly important trend in the wider scholarly community (see Pugh et al., 2008), and there is a growing discussion about questions of labour economics (Cramer, 2008), economic reconstruction policy (Mac Ginty, 2011: 115–133), trade (Willett, 2008), shadow economies (Pugh, 2004) and the place of businesspeople in reconstruction (Woodward, 2010).

These insightful and detailed engagements have, however, largely operated as analyses at arm’s length from the peoples whose experiences are being studied. Even where they go beyond the broad structural level and into the details of particular economic spaces or systems, there is a tendency in the writing to skip over the interpretations given by people of their own situations, and to narrate these issues with the voice and gaze of the economist. In one particular article, Divjak and Pugh (2008) do exceptionally go beyond this through engaging aspects of Bosnian public opinion around corruption.

In keeping with the strategies of recovering historical political presence and politicizing interpretations of intervention, it is also important to extend this awareness to discussions of the ‘economic’ or ‘material’ dimensions of intervention, which are co-constituted in important ways with the epistemic and political dimensions. This was strongly emphasized by anti-colonial materialists such as Cabral (1979). These political dimensions are as intrinsic to such seemingly mundane problems as differentials in aid salaries between internationals and nationals (McWha, 2011) as they are to the ‘bigger’ problems of chronic and deep public indebtedness in post-conflict states.

To decolonize the way we think about the political economy of liberal peace interventions, then, means two things. First, it requires an engagement with how those targeted by an intervention experience and interpret the material effects of that intervention. This means that accounts that base their analyses of intervention primarily on the structural tendencies of capitalism miss the multiple ways in which intervention itself constitutes a politics of distribution. Emerging work on the significance of aid fortresses in the political landscape, embodying the structure of aid entitlements, is thus to be welcomed (Duffield, 2010). Second, it requires an analysis that politicizes the various forms of entitlement, dispossession and accumulation that characterize the rationales for intervention and its distributive effects. This must avoid entangling itself in the language of ‘development’ – already widely recognized as a fundamentally colonial and depoliticizing approach to poverty and economic policy (Escobar, 1995; Ferguson, 1990) – and begin to challenge the historical terms on which this dysfunctional political economy is made thinkable.