The problem of peace and the meaning of ‘post-war’

Abstract

The literature on war endings and peace-building pivots on a concept that it in fact continues to struggle with: peace. I argue that we should abandon the conceptualisation of peace as a condition. By implication, we must also abandon the notion of war-to-peace transition and the underlying teleology that projects peace as a deferred and ambiguous end state. Instead, I propose the term post-war transition. Importantly, the prefix post should not be understood as a temporal breakpoint: a definitive after. Rather, it signals an ambition to address and move beyond, analogous to the term post-colonialism. I subsequently draw on the post-colonial literature to further elaborate my conceptualisation of post-war transition with three propositions, respectively concerning: the discursive politics of retrospectivity; the assertion of sovereignty as the foundational referent of law and political order; and the concept of articulation to juxtapose contingent change and constrained agency. I then apply these ideas to the Sri Lankan case to illustrate what angles and insights my conceptualisation of post-war transition could offer.

Keywords:

• War
• peace
• post-war transition
• post-colonialism
• Sri Lanka

Acknowledgements

The central ideas put forward in this article have accumulated over the last 15 years, over the span of various research efforts, and with contributions from many people in direct or indirect ways. I would like to thank four people in particular for their support: Georg Frerks, Jonathan Goodhand, Benedikt Korf and Jonathan Spencer. I would also like to thank the members of the Conflict, Justice and Development Cluster at the University of Melbourne as well as Joe Cropp, Uma Kothari, Daniel McCarthy, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Patrick Meehan, Neloufer de Mel, Anoma Peiris, Nathan Shea and Marika Sosnowski, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for feedback on earlier drafts. Part of my analysis was developed with research funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number PDFMP1-123181/1].

Notes

1. Heathershaw, ‘Towards Better Theories’; Jabri, ‘Peacebuilding, the Local and the International’; Richmond, The Transformation of Peace; Themnér and Ohlson, ‘Legitimate Peace’.

2. Coletta et al., The Transition from War to Peace; Goodhand and Sedra, ‘Who Owns the Peace?’; Lyons, ‘The Importance of Winning’; Raeymaekers, ‘Post-war Conflict’.

3. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War; Mac Ginty, ‘Indigenous Peace-making’; Richmond, The Transformation of Peace; Paris, ‘Saving Liberal Peacebuilding’.

4. Heathershaw, ‘Towards Better Theories’; Laffey and Nadarajah, ‘The Hybridity or Liberal Peace’; Paris, ‘Saving Liberal Peacebuilding’; Sabaratnam, ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism’; Selby, ‘The Myth of Liberal Peace-building’; Zaum, ‘Beyond the ‘Liberal Peace’.

5. Finkenbusch, ‘Postliberal Peacebuilding’; Richmond, ‘Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace’.

6. Boege et al., ‘Building Peace and Political Community’; Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; Richmond and Mac Ginty, ‘Where Now for the Critique’.

7. Hirsch, Theorizing Post-conflict Reconciliation; Maddison, Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation.

8. Mouffe, On the Political; Rancière, Dis-agreement.

9. Mouffe, On the Political, 20.

10. Lederach, The Little Book.

11. Little, Enduring Conflict. See also Rangelov and Kaldor, ‘Persistent Conflict’; and contributions in that special issue, such as Rasaratnam and Malagodi, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’.

12. Aggestam et al., ‘Towards Agonistic Peacebuilding?’; Byrne and Klem, ‘Constructing Legitimacy in Post-war Transition’; Hirsch, Theorizing Post-conflict Reconciliation; Little, Enduring Conflict; Maddison, Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation; Spencer, ‘Performing Democracy and Violence’.

13. Galtung, Peace by Peaceful Means.

14. The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (UCDP), for example, uses war-related deaths as a statistical threshold. When fewer than 1000 people per year are killed as a direct consequence of a conflict, it is no longer categorised as war. When the number of battle-related fatalities lies between 25 and 1000 per year, the situation is classified as an active armed conflict, rather than war. Below 25, it no longer counts as either. Significantly for this article, the UCDP database does not use ‘peace’ as a classification. See http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/definitions/.

15. Galtung, Peace by Peaceful Means.

16. Björkdahl and Höglund, ‘Precarious Peacebuilding’; Richmond and Mac Ginty, ‘Where Now for the Critique’.

17. UNDP, ‘Human Development Report 1994’. The UNDP distinguishes seven components of Human security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political.

18. Richmond, ‘Jekyll or Hyde’.

19. Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday Peace’.

20. Themnér and Ohlson, ‘Legitimate Peace’.

21. Aggestam et al., ‘Towards Agonistic Peacebuilding?’; Schaap, ‘Political Reconciliation’.

22. Most obviously, Lederach has posited that peace is not an end-state, but rather a continuously evolving quality of relationships characterised by a non-violent approach to engage with the natural occurrence of conflict (Lederach, The Little Book). While this is an important point, it still suggests that peace-builders can help transform a conflict into a situation where relationships are more peaceful. It thus leaves open the possibility of thinking of peace as a condition, even if that condition is not a wholly harmonious end-state (i.e. conflict ‘resolution’), but rather one of non-violent relationships. My point that peace should be understood as an aspiration goes a step further.

23. Drawing on some commonly used elements, a working definition could be that war comprises the escalation of conflict into organised armed violence between two or more parties, which results in a significant number of fatalities on all sides. At least one of these parties is usually, but not necessarily, a state actor.

24. This is evidently not a new point, but it is worth reiterating given that the term post-conflict (and post-conflict peace-building) is still commonly used to refer to post-war contexts.

25. Barkawi, ‘Decolonising War’; Jabri, Discourses on Violence.

26. In the relevant literature, it has become increasingly common to write postcolonial instead of post-colonial, signifying a broader effort to dissent the term from ‘merely’ being about societies after colonialism (for discussion, see note 27). From that perspective, it would be adequate to also write postwar transition (rather than post-war transition). To avoid a wholesale break with journal style guidelines, however, I have decided to keep the hyphen in place.

27. In view of the enduring forms of colonial imposition, the post in post-colonialism has in fact come under increasing scrutiny. In her recent book, Ann Stoler suggests bracketing the prefix – ‘(post)colonial studies’ – or in fact leaving it our altogether: ‘colonial studies’. Stoler, Duress, ix-x.

28. Said, Orientalism.

29. Cooper, ‘Decolonizing Situations’.

30. Spivak, ‘Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality’, 228.

31. Cooper, ‘Decolonizing Situations’; Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire.

32. Anghie, ‘Finding the Peripheries’; Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law; Hansen and Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies; Mongia, ‘Historicizing State Sovereignty’; Schaap, ‘Political Reconciliation’; Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’.

33. Anghie, ‘Finding the Peripheries’; Hansen and Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies; Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’.

34. Balint et al., ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice’; Maddison, Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation; Schaap, ‘Political Reconciliation’.

35. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 87–145; Klem and Maunaguru, ‘Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry’.

36. Hirsch, Theorizing Post-conflict Reconciliation; Pahuja, Decolonising International Law.

37. Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”’; Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’.

38. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, chapter 9. Building on Hall, Bhabha uses the terms mimicry and hybridity to take the colonial encounter beyond the binary of domination and resistance. Mimicry by colonial subjects may involve docile compliance, but may also be a form of camouflage or even mockery. Similarly, hybridity involves the mixing of cultural forms, which dilute the colonial narrative and may yield subaltern outcomes that elude colonial categorization. These articulations are contingent, Bhabha argues. They involve arbitrary closure, they are not teleological, and they involve a contingent kind of agency, the ability to act within a particular discursive articulation.

39. Barkawi, ‘Decolonising War’; Barkawi and Laffey, ‘The Postcolonial Moment’; Bilgin, ‘The “Western-Centrism” of Security Studies’.

40. Hirsch, Theorizing Post-conflict Reconciliation; Maddison, Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation; Schaap, ‘Political Reconciliation’.

41. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War; Seoighe, ‘Discourses of Victimization’.

42. My research involvement in Sri Lanka dates back to 2000. Since then I have been involved in both applied research (part of it associated with the 2002–2006 peace process) and academic work (mainly, but not only, on eastern Sri Lanka). For related arguments on political order and sovereignty before and after the end the war, see: Klem, ‘In the Eye of the Storm’; Klem and Maunaguru, ‘Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry’; Klem and Maunaguru, ‘Public Authority under Sovereign Encroachment’. For my collaborative work on the Norwegian facilitated peace process, see Goodhand et al., ‘Pawns of Peace’. For our academic reflections on the politics of knowledge production of such evaluations, see Goodhand et al., ‘Battlefields of Method’.

43. Stokke and Uyangoda, Liberal Peace in Question; Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age; Winslow and Woost, Economy, Culture and Civil War.

44. De Silva, ‘Sri Lanka in 2015’; De Silva, ‘Sri Lanka in 2016’.

45. Bowden and Binns, ‘Youth Employment and Post-war Development’; Goodhand, ‘Stabilising a Victor’s Peace?’; Haniffa, ‘Competing for Victim Status’; Jazeel and Ruwanpura, ‘Dissent’; Höglund and Orjuela, ‘Hybrid Peace Governance’; Keen, ‘The Camp’; Laffey and Nadarajah, ‘The Hybridity of Liberal Peace’; Rasaratnam and Malagodi, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’; Satkunanathan, ‘Collaboration, Suspicion and Traitors’; Seoighe, ‘Discourses of Victimization’; Seoighe, ‘Inscribing the Victor’s Land’; Stokke and Uyangoda, Liberal Peace in Question; Van Schaack, ‘More than Domestic Mechanism’; Wickramasinghe, ‘After the War’.

46. E.g. Goodhand, ‘Sri Lanka in 2012’.

47. E.g. Rasaratnam and Malagodi, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’.

48. E.g. Goodhand, ‘Stabilising a Victor’s Peace?’.

49. E.g. Sarvananathan, ‘Elusive Economic Peace Dividend’.

50. For discussion on the ICG as a discursive entrepreneur, see Bliesemann de Guevara, ‘Studying the International Crisis Group’.

51. ICG, ‘Reconciliation in Sri Lanka’, 34–40.

52. ICG, ‘Sri Lanka’s Authoritarian Turn’.

53. ICG, ‘Sri Lanka’s Transition to Nowhere’, i.

54. Ibid., 1.

55. Ibid., 28.

56. For example, the 2011 report (ICG, ‘Reconciliation in Sri Lanka’) starts with calling Sri Lanka ‘post-conflict’ and home to a ‘hard, unhappy peace’ (p. 1). There is in other words a peace of sorts. This is then contradicted with the statement that the conflict is still going on, when the report says Sri Lanka is ‘post-war’, but not ‘post-conflict’ (p. 34). Just few pages later, it is suggested that this conflict has in fact demised, when the report closes with recommendations to avoid ‘renewed conflict’ (p. 40).

57. The Island, ‘Checkmate!’; see also Holt, The Sri Lanka Reader; Keen, ‘The Camp’.

58. Saunders, ‘Kingship-in-the-making’.

59. Tamil Guardian, ‘Our Holocaust’.

60. Seoighe, ‘Discourses of Victimization’; Wickramasinghe, ‘Producing the Present’.

61. Quoted in Wickramasinghe, ‘After the War’, 1046.

62. ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’.

63. Seoighe, ‘Inscribing the Victor’s Land’; Seoighe, ‘Discourses of Victimization’.

64. Spencer, ‘Securitization and Its Discontents’. Spencer’s analysis uses apparently simple questions – such as when the war in Sri Lanka began and ended – to prompt an incisive review of the many ripple waves of the war in Sri Lanka’s society, most obviously in the form of securitised governance.

65. Klem and Maunaguru, ‘Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry’.

66. For a similar discussion, see Thiranagama, ‘Claiming the State’.

67. Gowing, ‘War by Other Means?’. See also Höglund and Orjuela, ‘Friction and the Pursuit of Justice’.

68. Spencer, ‘Securitization and Its Discontents’.

69. Haniffa, ‘Competing for Victim Status’; Klem, ‘Islam, Politics and Violence’; McGilvray, ‘Sri Lankan Muslims’.

70. Schonthal, ‘Environments of Law’; Spencer, ‘Securitization and Its Discontents’.

71. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers; Thiranagama, In My Mother’s House.

72. Satkunanathan, ‘Collaboration, Suspicion and Traitors’; Thiranagama, In My Mother’s House.

73. Mahadev, ‘The Maverick’; Spencer et al., Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque.