Connolly and the never-ending critiques of liberal peace: from the privilege of difference to vorarephilia

Abstract

Over the last decade, a dominant critique of international interventions underlines the problem that interventionary strategies have denied the political, societal and cultural heterogeneity of conflict-affected societies, excluding the interests of the majority of their population. A deeper engagement with the everyday life of these societies is understood to expose the errors of international missions and animate an alternative way of thinking about peace: ‘hybrid peace’, which is formed contextually and from below. Engaging with William Connolly’s work on pluralism, this article clarifies the nature of this critique, which rests securely on the assumption that local alterity cannot be fully understood, respected or treated sensitively by international governance approaches. However, as much as this assumption enables the thinking of an emancipatory hybrid peace, it is in turn the source of its critique, as hybrid peace is also seen as reproducing binary schemas and thus considered incapable of caring for the societies intervened in. At the conclusion, the metaphor of vorarephilia—paraphilia where sexual arousal occurs in the idea of being eaten or eating another person—will be used to warn against the tragic direction that critiques seem to be travelling to: critical scholars would be increasingly tempted to welcome the inevitable failures of international interventions.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my colleagues at the Institute for Development and Peace and the Centre for Global Cooperation Research for their feedback in the two colloquiums and to the anonymous reviewers and editorial team for their constructive comments. I am especially grateful to David Chandler, Peter Finkenbusch, Frank Gadinger, Aidan Hehir, Albert Kuhn, Elisabet Portavella, Vanessa Pupavac, Xavi Romero, Jessica Schmidt, Christopher Smith and Paulina Tambakaki for their helpful suggestions and critiques of earlier versions of the manuscript.

Notes

¹ Connolly (2013, 402–403) prefers the term ‘speculative realism’ or ‘immanent naturalism’ to ‘new materialism’ or ‘posthumanism’ in order to define his care for the ‘fragility of things’. This is an appreciation of the multiple entanglements between humans and non-humans and the imbrications of culture and nature in a cosmos that remains open, becoming, self-organizing, mysterious to human understandings.

² It is important to note that Connolly is not seeking to counter liberalism. He critically revises it by cultivating an ethics that affirm the ambiguities and contingencies of life (Connolly 2002, 83; Schoolman 2008, 19).

³ In his work on pluralism, Connolly (2002, 10; 1995, 1–40) borrows from the two philosophers: he shares with Foucault a responsibility to difference through genealogical strategies that the Nietzschean ethos lacks; and he supplements Foucault with Nietzsche by emphasizing the plethora of life-forms called to care. It could be argued that in the latter Connolly (2014, 149–178) the Nietzschean sensibility—an attention to (non-)human elements in a world in constant flux that is never ready for human understanding—has come to dominate over the Foucauldian.

⁴ This sensibility can be said to stem from Edmund Husserl’s philosophy and his insight that ‘objects always lie beyond any possibility of total presence’ (Harman 2005, 3).

⁵ Beyond international relations debates, this ethical commitment to the Other has been long discussed. A radical interpretation of this position can be found, for example, in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1991, 9–11), who underscores an unconditional indebtedness to the Other prior to subjectivity or knowledge of the Other. For an excellent study that mobilizes Levinas’s ethics to criticize frameworks of international intervention, see Campbell (1998, 171–185).

⁶ Pragmatic sociology has influentially posited a critique from below. Rather than using totalizing elements to describe an already made social world from above (a position always close to discourses of power or governance over society), this critique starts from the observation of agents in action or en situation and is attentive to their critical performances (Boltanski 2011).

⁷ These approaches recognize their own limits and failures to embrace alterity. As Sabaratnam (2011, 800) explains in a self-reflexive note: ‘the approach I have set out as a mode of “decolonizing” the liberal peace is in no way exhaustive and necessarily instantiates its own exclusions’.

⁸ Seminal here is Bruno Latour, who can be read as reversing the Modernist project by the means of turning the scepticism and nihilism of Postmodernist critiques into a new hubristic project (Latour 2004). He graphically summarizes it this way: every time the Moderns wish to create something, they create monsters. But instead of abandoning or criminalizing the monsters, as the Postmoderns intimate, we must learn to ‘love’ our ‘monsters’ (Latour 2011, 21–22).