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Abstract
Contemporary policy-making guided by the ‘liberal peace’ holds that peace is necessary for states to emerge, and that peace-building and state-building do not only go in tandem, but are mutually reinforcing. Yet, in view of both the historical record of state-making and empirical evidence provided by liberal interventionism, this proposition appears questionable. While scholars have shown that state-making has, historically, been as much associated with war than with peace, cases from Afghanistan to Somalia suggest that state-making is inherently conflictive, frequently upsetting nascent peace. In order to shed light on the reasons underpinning the relationship between prevailing peace-building practices and the fundamental exigencies of state-making, this article pursues a theoretical argument. It proposes that while peace-building is principally about creating a situation of non-violent co-existence despite prevailing differences and, thus, essentially geared at accepting and enshrining institutional and identity pluralism, state-making is vitally aimed at replacing institutional and identity multiplicity with greater degrees of rule hegemony and standardisation. Applying the prism of ‘rule standardisation’ to the nexus of peace-building and state-making, this paper seeks to advance existing debates on this delicate relationship.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the journal’s editors and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The standard disclaimers apply.
Notes
1. See e.g. World Bank, Conflict, Security, and Development; OECD, Concepts and Dilemmas.
2. United Nations, Agenda for Peace.
3. Fukuyama, End of History.
4. Malone and Thakur, ‘UN Peacekeeping’; cf. Ariye, ‘Bystander to Genocide’.
5. Evans et al., Bringing the State Back In.
6. Rubin, ‘Peace Building and State-Building’; Fearon and Laitin, ‘Neotrusteeship’.
7. See e.g. Howard, Failed States.
8. Galtung, ‘Editorial’.
9. cf. Patriota, ‘Statement’.
10. cf. OECD, Supporting Statebuilding.
11. cf. Grävingholt et al., Concepts of Peacebuilding and State Building.
12. Mac Ginty, ‘Warlords’, 584.
13. See Doyle, ‘Kant’; Williams, Liberalism; Selby, ‘Myth of Liberal Peace-Building’.
14. United Nations, Agenda for Peace.
15. Annan, Causes of Conflict, 14; Zürcher and Barnett, ‘Peacebuilder's Contract’; Call, Evolution of Peacebuilding, 3.
16. United Nations, ‘UN Peacebuilding’, 5.
17. Ibid., 8.
18. Bhuta, ‘Against State-Building’, 523; Roberts, ‘Post-Conflict Statebuilding’, 539.
19. See e.g. Jackson, Quasi-States; Bayart, State in Africa; Zartman, Collapsed States; Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest.
20. See e.g. Brinkerhoff, ‘Governance Challenges’; North et al., ‘Limited Access Orders’; Röder, Where Nation-States Come from; OECD, ‘Concepts and Dilemmas’.
21. Milliken and Krause, ‘State Failure’, 753.
22. Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States; Kaplan, Fixing Fragile States.
23. A major policy effort since 2008 involving states affected by conflict and fragility (the g7+), international partners (northern donors) and civil society (both international and national, within g7 + countries).
24. cf. Grävingholt et al., Concepts of Peacebuilding and State Building.
25. Tanabe, ‘Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding’, 448.
26. Newman et al., ‘Introduction’, 11f. It should be noted, however, that the liberal state-building project is highly illiberal in and of itself. While (neo-)liberalism postulates diversity and acceptance thereof, ‘liberal’ state-building as pursued by the so-called international community is geared at erecting fundamentally the same kind of state across the globe.
27. See e.g. Paris, At War’s End; Paris and Sisk, Contradictions of State Building.
28. Eyoh and Sandbrook, ‘Pragmatic Neo-Liberalism’.
29. Osterhammel, Transformation of the World.
30. Heathershaw, ‘Unpacking the Liberal Peace’; Call and Cousens, ‘Ending Wars’; cf. Dunne and McDonald, ‘Liberal Internationalism’, 7; Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad, 2.
31. Paris, ‘Peacebuilding’, 56; cf. Chesterman et al., Making States Work; Chandler, Empire in Denial; Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions.
32. Mac Ginty, ‘Warlords’, 578.
33. Ibid., 579.
34. Eriksen, ‘Liberal Peace Is Neither’.
35. See Maley, ‘Democracy and Legitimation’.
36. Paris, At War’s End, 140ff.
37. Goetze and Guzina, ‘Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, Nationbuilding’, 324.
38. See e.g. Duffield, Global Governance; Willet, ‘New Barbarians’; Pouligny, ‘Civil Society’; Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions; Newman et al., New Perspectives.
39. See e.g. Bose, ‘The Bosnian State’; Rashid, Descent into Chaos; Kostić et al., ‘Liberal State-Building’.
40. Paris, ‘Peacebuilding’, 56.
41. Polanyi, Great Transformation; Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice; cf. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts.
42. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 304ff.
43. Sörensen, ‘Return of Plural Society’, 274.
44. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 111f.
45. See e.g. Ricks, Fiasco; Allawi, Occupation of Iraq; Sörensen, ‘Return of Plural Society’, 284.
46. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 291; Dunne and McDonald, ‘Liberal Internationalism’, 10.
47. cf. Levene, ‘Limits of Tolerance’, 20f.
48. cf. Varouxakis, 145.
49. World Bank, ‘Conflict Trap’; see also Collier and Höffler, ‘Greed and Grievance’; Leander, ‘Wars and the Un-Making of States’.
50. Clapham, ‘War and State Formation’, 1; Huntington, Political Order; cf. Pereira, ‘Armed Forces’, 387.
51. Cohen et al., ‘Paradoxical Nature of State Making’, 901; see also Colley, Britons; McNeill, Pursuit of Power; Mann, Sources of Social Power; Creveld, Transformation of War; Creveld, Rise and Decline of the State.
52. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 67.
53. Kaldor, New and Old Wars; Kaldor, From Just War to Just Peace; Duffield, Global Governance; Jung, ‘Political Economy of Intra-State War’.
54. Herbst, States and Power in Africa, 22.
55. Enzensberger, Civil War; as in Cramer, Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing, 77. See e.g. Leander, ‘Wars and the Un-making’.
56. Callahan, Making Enemies; Clapham, ‘War and State Formation’; Deflem, ‘Warfare’; Cramer, Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing; Niemann, ‘War Making and State Making’.
57. Newman, ‘Violence of Statebuilding’, 141.
58. Gomez et al., War, Politics and Peacebuilding, 4.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 5.
61. Parts of this section draw on Balthasar, ‘From Hybridity to Standardization’.
62. Mac Ginty and Richmond, ‘Local Turn in Peace Building’.
63. Böge et al., Hybrid Political Orders.
64. Nadarajah and Rampton, ‘Limits of Hybridity’.
65. Röder, Where Nation-States Come From, 4.
66. Böge et al., ‘Undressing the Emperor’, 88.
67. cf. Nadarajah and Rampton, 2.
68. Biró, ‘The (Un)Bearable Lightness’, 10.
69. Simmel, ‘Conflict’, 25; Mann, ‘Autonomous Power of the State’, 195.
70. cf. North, ‘New Institutional Economics’; Putzel, ‘Survival of an Imperfect Democracy’; Harriss, ‘Institutions, Politics and Culture’.
71. North, Process of Economic Change, 3.
72. Balthasar, ‘From Hybridity to Standardization’, 5.
73. Hobbes of Malmesbury, Leviathan.
74. Locke, Two Treatises of Government.
75. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social.
76. Schwarz, ‘Diversity Myth’.
77. Levene, ‘Limits of Tolerance’, 21. See also Connor, Ethnonationalism, 92; Conversi, ‘Homogenisation’, 371; Scott, Literature Review, 4.
78. e.g. Turton, War and Ethnicity, 3.
79. Newman, ‘Violence of Statebuilding’.
80. Ibid., 146f.
81. Ibid., 147.
82. e.g. Migdal, State in Society.
83. North, Economic Change, 161.
84. Ottaway, ‘Nation Building and State Disintegration’.
85. Lemay-Hébert, ‘Statebuilding without Nation-Building?’, 23.
86. Clapham, ‘War and State Formation’, 14.
87. e.g. Reinhard, Power Elites and State Building.
88. e.g. Herder, Abhandlung; Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation; Anderson, Imagined Communities.
89. e.g. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication; Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution.
90. e.g. Hechter, Internal Colonialism; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism.
91. e.g. Szilagyi-Gal, ‘Nationality of Reasoning’.
92. e.g. Howard, ‘War and the Nation-State’; Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States.
93. Ottaway, ‘Nation Building and State Disintegration’.
94. Conversi, ‘Homogenisation’.
95. Levene, ‘Limits of Tolerance’.
96. See also Connor, Ethnonationalism; Lemay-Hébert, ‘Statebuilding without Nation-Building?’; Reinhard, Power Elites and State Building.
97. North, Economic Change, 42.
98. Lemay-Hébert, ‘Statebuilding without Nation-Building?’, 23.
99. von Bogdandy and Wolfrum, Max Planck Yearbook, 585.
100. Böge et al., Hybrid Political Orders, 10.
101. CSRC, ‘War, State Collapse and Reconstruction’, 8.
102. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, 3.
103. Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 422.
104. cf. Lidén, ‘Whose Peace?’, 28.
105. Schwarz, ‘Diversity Myth’; see also Scott, Literature Review, 4. In the words of Schwarz, the USA ‘was characterized by ethnic dominance, not ethnic pluralism’ and that ‘“Americanization” was a process of coercive conformity according to which the United States was a melting pot, not a tapestry’.
106. Simmel, ‘Conflict’, 92 [emphasis added].
107. Mann, Sources of Social Power; quoted in Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 80.
108. Renan, Qu’est-Ce Qu’une Nation?
109. Turton and Fuki, War among East African Herders.
110. Ferguson, Warfare, Culture, and Environment.
111. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War.
112. Howard, War and the Nation State, 108.
113. See also Conversi, ‘Homogenisation’, 372. Conversi proposes that ‘the broader relationship between homogenization and war should be reconsidered as a key feature in the historical development of nationalism’, whereby he defines ‘homogenization’ as ‘the sociopolitical process of deliberately fostering cultural homogeneity’.
114. Jacquin-Berdal, Nationalism and Ethnicity, 62, 41.
115. Ropp, War in the Modern World, 13.
116. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’.
117. Ibid., 168.
118. Keen, Complex Emergencies.
119. Haider, ‘Topic Guide’, 6.
120. Sörensen, ‘War and Statemaking’, 283.
121. Grävingholt et al., Concepts of Peacebuilding and State Building, 3.
122. Ibid.
123. e.g. Call, ‘Ending Wars, Building States’; Cliffe and Manning, ‘Practical Approaches’; Call and Wyeth, Building States to Build Peace.
124. Hirschman, ‘Search for Paradigms’, 343.