The Limits of Liberal Peacebuilding? International Engagement in the Sri Lankan Peace Process

Abstract

This essay explores international engagement in the Sri Lankan peace process between 2002 and 2008. The internationalization of peacebuilding in Sri Lanka is analysed as part of a broader international shift towards a model of ‘liberal peacebuilding’, which involves the simultaneous pursuit of conflict resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty. The essay provides a detailed and disaggregated analysis of the various exporters, importers and resisters of liberal peacebuilding, with a particular focus on the contrasting ways in which the United National Front (UNF) and the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) regimes engaged with international actors. It is argued that an analysis of the Sri Lankan case provides a corrective to some of the core assumptions contained in much of the literature on liberal peacebuilding. Rather than viewing liberal peacebuilding as simply an hegemonic enterprise foisted upon countries emerging from conflict, the essay explores the ways in which peacebuilding is mediated through, and translated and instrumentalized by, multiple actors with competing interests – consequently liberal peacebuilding frequently looks different when it ‘hits the ground’ and may, as in the Sri Lanka case, lead to decidedly illiberal outcomes. The essay concludes by exploring the theoretical and policy implications of a more nuanced understanding of liberal peacebuilding. It is argued that rather than blaming the failure of the project on deficiencies in its execution and the recalcitrance of the people involved, there is a need to look at defects in the project itself and to explore alternatives to the current model of liberal peacebuilding.

Keywords:

• Sri Lanka
• conflict
• liberal peacebuilding
• peace process
• aid
• donor policy

Introduction

This article focuses on the role played by international actors in the emergence and subsequent breakdown of the Sri Lankan peace process between 2002 and 2008. The unprecedented internationalization of peacebuilding in Sri Lanka was a reflection of shifts in both the global and local political economies. Key features of this heavy internationalization included international facilitation of peace talks, led by Norway and backed by three additional co-chairs (Japan, the US and India), the application of security guarantees and peace conditionalities, and the establishment of an international monitoring mission to monitor the ceasefire and funding for reconstruction in conflict-affected regions. The peace process is understood here to be emblematic of a growing number of experiments in ‘liberal peacebuilding’, which have involved the simultaneous pursuit of conflict resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty. An analysis of peacebuilding in Sri Lanka therefore has wider relevance, and as explored below, it exposes the limitations of liberal peacebuilding as a normative and analytical framework and as a guide for action.

The unravelling of the peace process and the eventual termination of the ceasefire agreement in early 2008 has underlined the primacy of domestic politics in determining the outcomes of peacebuilding interventions. The Sri Lankan experience is arguably best characterized as a simulated peace process where both parties saw engagement principally as a means to an end and where the costs of disengagement were ultimately weighed against domestic political benefits (Selby 2008). It also demonstrates several key shortcomings of international actors’ peacebuilding strategies, most notably their tendency to swing between extremes of engagement and disengagement and to attempt to promote change by sending signals to conflict actors. More often than not, these signals have been misinterpreted or instrumentalized and have produced unpredictable political outcomes. This essay points to several broader lessons regarding peacebuilding interventions, stressing in particular the need for international actors to recognize the limits of their interventions, be more frank about the potential trade-offs between their peacebuilding and other foreign or domestic policy concerns and to utilize a closer analysis of domestic and regional actors’ motivations to inform policy-making. Finally, and most fundamentally, there is a need to recognize the deficiencies inherent in the model itself and consequently to explore alternative versions of peacebuilding which are more attuned to the way in which a legitimate peace is forged from below.

Liberal Peacebuilding and the International Dimensions of the Sri Lankan Conflict

Although Sri Lanka is frequently characterized as an ‘introverted’ civil war, a deeper analysis of the conflict reveals a set of causes deeply rooted in the international and regional political economy (Moore 1985; Bastian 2006). These external factors are too numerous to analyse here but they include: the impacts of post-1977 liberalization on the Sri Lankan polity and economy; the enduring role of India as the regional hegemon; the effects of international financial institutions’ policies and donor-funded (conflict blind) projects on ethnic fault lines; the influence of regional and international diasporic networks on conflict dynamics; and the effects of global counter terrorism measures, specifically the proscription of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by various actors including India, the US, the UK, the EU and Canada. Arguably, the label ‘ethnic conflict’ has diverted attention away from the external dimensions of war and peace in Sri Lanka (with some notable exceptions) (see Bose 2002; Bullion 1995; Moore 1990). In fact, as Venugopal argues, what appears to be ‘internal’ is actually the result of complex syntheses of successive waves of political, economic and cultural engagements with the outside world (2003). In this essay we eschew the label ‘ethnic conflict’ and prefer instead to conceptualize the war as a crisis of the state – which in turn can be linked to how the polity has been inserted into the global political economy (see Bastian 1999).

Arguably, the ‘tectonic plates’ underpinning the Sri Lanka conflict have barely moved in the domestic sphere over recent years, and it is in the international arena where the big shifts have occurred. The internationalization of the Sri Lankan conflict reflects broader global trends. The post-cold war era has seen the lowering of international inhibitions to intervene in other peoples’ wars. During this period, the objectives of third-party interventions became more ambitious and wide ranging (and often more militarized) involving the simultaneous pursuit of conflict resolution, democratization and economic liberalization – sometimes referred to as Wilsonian peacebuilding (Paris 2004) or ‘liberal peacebuilding’ (Duffield 2001; Richmond 2006). Lately, liberal peacebuilding has increasingly become articulated within a discourse of counter terrorism.

The post-cold war internationalization of peacebuilding also reflects changed notions of sovereignty. An expanded geopolitical space for Western governments to intervene was linked to an erosion of the inviolability of national sovereignty. Sovereignty increasingly became linked to, and conditional upon, upholding certain norms, responsibilities and forms of behaviour. These new principles were captured by the UN's Agenda for Peace of 1992 (Boutros-Ghali 1995) and more recently in the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty's Responsibility to Protect (ICISS 2001). Insecurity – of peoples as well as of states – is viewed as a global public bad, and where states cannot protect their citizens, this must be rectified through intervention, leading in the most egregious cases to forms of neo-trusteeship (Fearon and Laitin 2004).

Liberal peacebuilding has also involved new institutional arrangements, with the emergence of complex networks and contracting arrangements, which interlink state and non-state, and commercial and not-for-profit actors. This has blurred the traditional boundaries separating departments of government – for example, between development aid and foreign diplomacy – with the former being seen as instrument for conflict management and thus increasingly overlapping with the mandate of the latter. It has also blurred the division between the domestic and the international spheres; policies towards a given country are shaped by a range of actors (treasury, trade/commerce, home office, defence, development, diplomacy) each with different concerns (cost effectiveness, homeland security, refugees/immigration, global poverty, international security, trade relations). Although institutional boundaries have always been blurred and resulting policies involve complex trade offs, the difference now is the explicit connection between ‘our’ security and global security and the new assemblages of governance interconnecting state/non-state, home/overseas. Hard security interventions overlap with regimes of ‘soft’ social reconstruction, development and human security. Even ‘minor conflicts’ are seen as too dangerous to be left alone, because they have the potential to spread and destabilize others in the regional environment or further afield.

In some respects, Sri Lanka is atypical as an experiment in liberal peacebuilding. It is not a collapsed or failed state, and in spite of nearly twenty-five years of civil war it has maintained reasonably democratic political institutions, solid growth rates and good human development indicators. However, in terms of the ‘supply side’ it conforms to most of the classic features of liberal peacebuilding, combining interventions which aim to simultaneously promote the goals of conflict resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty (Pugh and Cooper 2004). Reflecting broader trends there has been a blurring of the lines between traditional diplomacy and the economic aspects of peacebuilding, with aid being explicitly used as an incentive for peace (Sriskandarajah 2003). Also introduced into the mix, increasingly but not only since 9/11, have been a range of counter terrorism measures in the domestic and international spheres.

Liberal peacebuilding is underpinned by a number of core assumptions:

• First, civil wars are internal problems with external solutions – in other words, the roots of the conflict lie in a complex mix of indigenous factors, including ethnic divisions, misgovernance and uneven development patterns. And the deadlock can only be broken through external measures which shift incentives, preferences and institutional arrangements in favour of peace rather than war.

• Second, it is assumed that in liberal peacebuilding ‘all good things come together’ – so that its various strands are mutually reinforcing and coherent with a broader vision of peacebuilding. An emphasis is placed upon harmonization and integrated missions so that international actors ‘talk with one voice’ in order to pressurize recalcitrant domestic actors to make the right choices. The desired end state – a polity and economy conforming to the core tenets of liberal orthodoxy – is not open to question. The only choices left are technical ones related to sequencing, prioritization and harmonization.

• Third, actors who do not subscribe to the liberal peace model and actively resist or subvert it are labelled as ‘spoilers’ (Newman and Richmond 2006). The custodians of the peace process have the authority to use the term ‘spoiler’, but whether this label sticks depends on the legitimacy of the peacebuilders and the process itself. Much depends on the complex interactions and bargaining processes between domestic and international actors and their different sources of legitimacy. As explored below, if the peace process itself becomes de-legitimized in the eyes of the population, then ‘spoiling’ is itself seen as legitimate and desirable.

• Fourth, liberal peacebuilding, with its emphasis on stability is essentially conservative in character. The seemingly paradoxically connection between liberalism and illiberal forms of rule has a long history. Uday Singh Mehta, for example, shows how liberal doctrines were not only made compatible with illiberal colonial rule, but were used to justify it (Mehta 1999). Liberal universalism and historical evolutionism perhaps represent points of continuity between nineteenth-century liberalism, twentieth-century modernization theory and contemporary liberal peacebuilding.1 In Sri Lanka, the antecedents of the current experiment in peacebuilding can be found in earlier attempts to import liberal institutions and ideologies, which provoked, as they have today, an illiberal reaction in the form of defensive ethno-nationalism (Spencer 2007).

The above points run the risk of overstating the homogeneity and hegemonic power of liberal peacebuilding. Richmond (2006) and Heathershaw (2008), for instance, have argued that the liberal peace involves several different versions or discourses, underpinned by divergent methodologies and assumptions. Others have highlighted how the application of these competing agendas has varied tremendously from one context to another (Cooper 2007; Goodhand 2006; Mac Ginty 2008). As the Sri Lankan case illustrates, writers on liberal peacebuilding tend to underestimate the importance of domestic political processes and the agency of individual actors who are either importers or resisters of liberal policies. A more careful analysis reveals the complex negotiations that go on between exporters and importers of liberal peacebuilding, how importers instrumentalize the interventions of external actors, and the ways in which they are ‘translated’ as they go through these multiple brokering arrangements. Therefore liberal peacebuilding may look very different from how it was originally framed, once it ‘hits the ground’.

Furthermore, the liberal peace model implies a level of homogeneity amongst international actors which simply does not exist in practice. The peacebuilders themselves are not disinterested parties and they intervene on the basis of a range of interests which may often be conflicting, both internally2 and with each other. The incentives and objectives of international actors should be subjected to the same kind of rigorous political economy analysis to which warring parties are subjected. For instance, Indian intervention in Sri Lanka in 1987 was motivated to a great extent by domestic concerns and the need for the Congress party to shore up flagging popularity and deflect public attention from various scandals and failures through a foreign policy triumph (Bose 2002). Chandler has argued more broadly that Western countries increasingly pursued ‘ethical’ foreign policies as a means of bolstering moral authority at home (2003). The outcomes of these projects were not submitted to great public scrutiny and failures could be blamed on domestic actors. This perspective implies that when the rationale for intervention is clear, there are strong incentives for international actors to be associated. Conversely, when these interventions become more complex and risky (as occurred in Sri Lanka after the election of Mahinda Rajapakse) there are incentives to withdraw.

Liberal peacebuilding then is the manifestation of a structural shift that has taken place in the post-cold war international environment and this in turn has profoundly influenced conflict and peace dynamics in Sri Lanka. However, liberal peacebuilding is neither omnipotent, nor homogenous, and the analytical challenge is to better disaggregate the domestic and international arenas and the complex interface between them.3 In the following sections we will attempt to do this by briefly examining two distinct phases in the peace process in Sri Lanka – the UNF government after 2001 and the UPFA government after 2005 – each involving contrasting responses and approaches to the internationalization of peacebuilding.

International Role in the Peace Process

UNF Government: Towards a Cosmopolitan Peace? 4

The election of the UNF government (led by Ranil Wickramasinghe) in 2001 and the consequent ceasefire agreement of 22 February 2002 led to a significant role for Western countries for the first time in the history of the conflict.5 As mentioned above, there were considerable supply side factors influencing this internationalization and Sri Lanka was viewed at the time, by many international actors, as a success story that they wished to support and be associated with. Also important was the existence of Norway as a willing mediator, whose role was accepted by both sides.6 On the demand side, the incentives for an internationalization process were more mixed. For the UNF government, international security guarantees, particularly from the US and India, helped provide a safety net and thus reduce the government's exposure in the event of a return to war. Furthermore, international donors provided the financial backing for the infrastructure of peace talks and the promise of significant funding in order to generate a peace dividend (Sriskandarajah 2003).

Wickramasinghe's strategy was shaped partly by the lessons drawn from the previous round of peace talks in 1994–95, notably their failure to implement confidence-building measures before entering the hard bargaining of the talks themselves. Therefore an incremental, rather than a ‘big bang’ approach, was adopted which entailed dealing with the humanitarian consequences of the war before moving on to the core political issues regarding settlement. It was hoped that this strategy would not only build confidence between the two sides, but also in the long term that opening up the north and east to foreign investment and development would increasingly make the armed struggle irrelevant. The so-called economization of peacebuilding reflected the government's ideological position as a party of the right, which came to power with the strong backing of the business sector. For Wickramasinghe, the peace process represented a means to an end, the ultimate goal being liberalization and structural reforms leading to rapid economic development and the attainment of a 12 per cent growth rate, as outlined in the government's poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP), entitled Regaining Sri Lanka (Bastian 2006). Sri Lanka's future was believed to lie in becoming an entrepot metropolis for the fast growing south India region. There was therefore at this time a strong convergence in the values and interests of domestic and international elites.

For the LTTE, the internationalization process offered an opportunity to regroup and refinance the organization after a period of intensive military activity as well as providing the chance to cement the legitimacy of the LTTE as an internationally-recognized political actor.

A number of problems can be identified in the Wickramasinghe strategy. First, its heavy dependence on international actors undermined his domestic legitimacy, which helped to foster a nationalist backlash and, ultimately, led to the breakdown of the process. The belief that international backing could enable Wickramasinghe to ignore important domestic constituencies (including the President, the army and nationalist groups) proved to be fatal. These dynamics were intensified by the tsunami response, which inflamed nationalist sensitivities to questions of sovereignty and ‘neo-colonial’ interference.7 Second, it was simply not possible to circumvent the core political issues, as the conflictual dynamics surrounding the Interim Self-Governing Authority (ISGA) and the Post-Tsunami Operational Management Structure (P-TOMS) negotiations demonstrated.8 A focus on normalization, without some kind of road map for the end game, increased public fears about the outcome of talks, thus further weakening popular support. Third, the bi-polar track one approach marginalized other groups such as the Muslims and the nationalist groups including the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) which encouraged spoiling behaviour.9 Fourth, it has been argued that heavy internationalization perversely meant that domestic actors often spent more time addressing the international players than they did each other. Fifth, Wickramasinghe, by attempting to simultaneously negotiate peace and push through major structural reforms, put too much strain on the southern polity. These reforms, which included a freeze on public sector positions and the removal of fertilizer subsidies, were implemented without consultation or compensatory measures and were seen by many as an illegitimate dismantling of the welfare state. They consequently undermined support for the regime in the south, and it has been argued that the UNF regime lost the 2004 parliamentary elections, primarily on the basis of economic failures rather than its performance in the peace process (Bastian 2006; Kelegama 2006).

This period exposed the difficulties associated with moving from a ceasefire towards a settlement. As Uyangoda argues, in the absence of ‘settlement stability’ a political solution was never viable (2003). In spite of the Oslo Declaration of 2002, in which both sides agreed to explore a federal solution, fundamental divisions remained between the two sides about the means and ends of the peace process. Essentially, the government prioritized the economic over political transformation, whilst the LTTE felt that the reverse would better further their interests (Uyangoda, 2009). The LTTE withdrew from direct peace talks in June 2003, with their spokesman, Anton Balasingham, stating that they needed to break free of the ‘peace trap’. By this he meant that the LTTE felt increasingly hemmed in by an internationally-driven peace process which favoured the state over the non-state. The LTTE, the government and significant sections of Sri Lankan society remained fearful of the implications of a political settlement. This hesitancy arguably helped to reinvigorate southern nationalism and enabled it to re-enter the political mainstream. These so-called ‘spoilers’ were hard to engage, but perhaps the potential for international actors to influence them was reduced by the problematic binary division between those who are ‘for’ or ‘against’ peace. A closer analysis of the ‘spoilers’ reveals a division between those who spoil in order to shape the process and those who attempt to destroy the process itself.10

External engagement during this period has been critiqued on several grounds. International support (particularly from the US) became too closely associated with the UNF regime and the bi-polar negotiation model excluded other key actors (including the President) (Lunstead 2007). International actors can also be criticized for failing to consistently stress human rights issues and to insist on serious commitments from both the LTTE and the Government to introduce democratic reforms. The prioritization of the management of the peace process, and an ‘even-handed’ approach, arguably meant turning a blind eye to the growing violence and abuses that were being committed under the guise of ‘peace’ (Keenan 2007). This problem was accentuated by Norway's double role as both facilitator of the peace process and member of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) responsible for monitoring abuses and ceasefire violations.

Finally, the commitment of $4.5 billion of development aid, made at a donor conference in Tokyo in 2003, which was conditional on ‘good performance’ in relation to the peace process and human rights, was based upon an inflated assessment of the leverage of aid. The declaration ultimately ‘put the development cart before the political horse’, raising the political stakes before there was a mechanism in place for deciding how the stakes would be divided up (Sriskandarajah 2003). Arguably, donors were too bullish, whilst diplomats were too timid, in terms of their failure to address key political issues as they emerged (Goodhand and Klem 2005). This lack of coherence, or strategic complementarity, became more evident as the peace process started to fall apart. In fact, just as peace talks acted as a lightening rod for a range of broader societal conflicts in the domestic sphere, the break down of talks exposed a range of inter and intra-group tensions in the international sphere. When there was an international ‘tailwind’ behind talks there was a level of coherence between the external players. But international divisions were exposed as soon as the talks started to unravel11 and, as explored below, these divisions were subsequently exploited by the new government.

UPFA Government:12 Reasserting Domestic Ownership of ‘Peace’?

The defeat of Ranil Wickramasinghe to Mahinda Rajapakse in the 2005 Presidential elections immediately reduced the influence of those international actors who had backed Wickramasinghe's peace strategy. By 2005, both the UPFA government of Mahinda Rajapakse and the LTTE had come to the conclusion that an excessively internationalized peace process that had prevailed between 2002 and 2004 was not in their interests. Both sides wanted to extricate themselves from the so-called ‘peace trap’. The LTTE was frustrated at its lack of room for manoeuvre and what it perceived as its growing marginalization to the process since 2004. The defensive mood was compounded by the organization's own internal problems. The breakaway of the group's Eastern commander, Karuna Amman, in March 2004 considerably strengthened the position of government forces in the east and made it less likely that the LTTE would return to the negotiation table.

President Rajapakse's Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), has traditionally been a party of the left, whose support base largely came from the rural peasantry and whose legitimacy was connected to a narrative of state welfarism. This and its dependence on a fragile alliance with the JVP meant that the UPFA government's approach was bound to be very different to that of the previous regime's. As Uyangoda (2008) notes, the UPFA government has shifted the terms of the debate about the nature of a political solution to the conflict in Sri Lanka. The three key components of the government's political framework are: first, there can be no political solution without a military victory; second, the LTTE are the main obstacle to peace, in which case they must be defeated rather than negotiated with; third, a political solution can be found within the framework of a de-merged north and east, thus reversing a political consensus about the unit for regional autonomy that goes back to the Indo-Lanka accord of 1987.13

Rajapakse's strategy has been to mobilize and maintain a broad coalition both in parliament and more broadly amongst societal groups in the south. This attempt to take the south with him was bolstered by stepping up the pursuit of the war in the north and east and building pragmatic alliances with non-LTTE militant groups. The new government also presented an alternative development vision drawn out in the Mahinda Chintanaya Election Manifesto of 2005; in many respects, the mirror image of Regaining Sri Lanka. It questioned the existing framework of the peace process and external interference, whilst stressing autarkic economic development and the unitary nature of the Sri Lankan state. Rajapakse's inward-looking political strategy permitted a more expansive military strategy which, by early 2009, had wrested back control of the vast majority of LTTE-controlled territory including the LTTE's former ‘administrative capital’, Kilinochichi, and the key coastal stronghold of Mullativu. At the same time, discourses of reconstruction and development have been invoked as a means of co-opting donors and legitimizing the government's military and political pacification of the east (Rampton 2007).

Rather than focussing on international sources of legitimacy, like Wickramasinghe, Rajapakse drew much more explicitly on domestic sources. Consequently, his strategy has been to dilute the international role and at times, in an attempt to outflank the JVP and reassert domestic legitimacy, to disavow international involvement as a threat to Sri Lanka's sovereignty. This distancing from the liberal peacebuilding approach of Western powers has to some extent been counterbalanced by a strategy of regionalization, which involved strengthening links with India and encouraging a growing role for other non-Western donors such as China, Pakistan, South Korea and Iran.14 Although loans and grants from Western countries fell between 2006 and 2007, total loan commitments actually increased slightly (from $1.0 billion to $1.2 billion), with China picking up most of the shortfall. China committed approximately $1 billion to fund a new port in Hambantota, while Iran has provided Sri Lanka with $1.5 billion in soft loans to develop an oil refinery and to buy Iranian oil.

The Rajapakse government has explicitly pursued a two-pronged strategy to the conflict: on the one hand taking on the LTTE militarily and, on the other, pursuing a version of ‘peace’ amenable to international actors via the stuttering peace negotiations of 2006, the Ceasefire Agreement and a series of consensus-building mechanisms such as the SLFP/UNP Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), the International Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP) and the All-Party Representative Committee (APRC) which were designed largely to deflect international opposition to the conflict.15 While these mechanisms provided the government with time and space to pursue its military strategy by fending off international criticism; coalition partners, primarily the JVP, exerted increasing pressure on the government to water down the recommendations of the APRC and to abrogate the ceasefire. Although terminating the CFA involved political costs to the government at the international level, the price was outweighed by the potential domestic political costs of an election prompted by the withdrawal of the JVP's parliamentary support.

The LTTE's strategy, since 2004, appears to be one of upping the ante, and by promoting a military backlash, after the election of President Rajapakse, they perhaps hoped to weaken the support base of the current regime and tip international support once more in their favour (Uyangoda 2007). Again, this highlights the need for international actors to think carefully about how internationalization is instrumentalized by domestic actors to pursue political goals.

The role of international actors in this changed environment has become more complex. With nationalist voices in the ascendancy, a more critical stance towards external ‘interference’ emerged, which was manifested in media attacks and public demonstrations against international actors, particularly Norway. Several donors responded to the concerns about the government's military strategy, human rights abuses and displacement by disengaging: Germany stopped new commitments of development aid (until the peace process advances) and the UK suspended around $3million of debt relief. The US's Millennium Challenge Account's commitment of $110 million to Sri Lanka was put on hold in December 2007 ‘pending an improvement in the security situation’.16 In many respects, the current environment has seen a return to the behaviour of the 1990s, in the sense that international actors are increasingly risk averse, ‘peace’ is viewed as a taboo subject and donors work ‘around’ conflict (see Goodhand 2001).

International engagement in 2006 and 2007 continued somewhat unevenly with international actors mobilized intermittently by spikes in violence, such as the Mavil Aru crisis in July 2006, or the evictions of Tamils from Colombo in June, 2007.17 Some, more sustained, efforts were made by international actors to address the human rights situation with the US, for example, calling for a UN human rights monitoring mission for the first time in October 2007 and the EU members on the UN human rights council attempting to pass a resolution on human rights in Sri Lanka. The government, however, was able to ward off these engagements with tokenistic gestures to the international community, for example by inviting the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, to Sri Lanka (HRW 2008).

International engagement entered a new phase after the termination of the CFA by the government in January 2008, but the Sri Lankan government has been able to maintain its strategy of deflecting and offsetting concerted international pressure (CPA 2006, p. 11). Given their loss of international legitimacy, the LTTE, on the other hand, continued to have little to lose (CPA 2006, p. 10). There were some signs that international actors were willing to exert greater pressure on the Sri Lankan government in this new context. In January 2008, Japan stated that aid to Sri Lanka was under ‘continuous review’ although no existing aid commitments were cut. Since the start of 2008, EU threats to withdraw trade concessions to Sri Lanka under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP + ) scheme grew more forthright but a final decision on Sri Lanka's status was delayed in December 2008, providing Sri Lanka with concessions until late 2009. Although these threats have clearly worried the government (as evidenced by its vigorous campaigning on human rights in Europe), they have also been used by President Rajapakse as a means of articulating his own domestic agenda of defending Sri Lankan state sovereignty, autarchic economic development, and a strengthened relationship with Asian, rather than Western, powers. As the Government edged nearer towa rds a military defeat of the LTTE in 2009, it became increasingly confident about dismissing calls for intervention from Western powers. In this context, the focus has increasingly shifted back towards India, which has come under pressure from political parties in Tamil Nadu to take action to protect Tamils in the Wanni.

International actors have been divided by the terrorism agenda, which has led many to take a tougher approach towards the LTTE. The proscription of the LTTE by the Canadians on 10 April 2006 and the EU on 18 May, coupled with increased efforts to curb LTTE front organization fund raising, reduced their capacity to engage and damaged the potential for the strategic complementarity of the ceasefire period where the European countries played the ‘good cop’ to the US and India's ‘bad cop’ (see Lunstead 2007). The discourse of terrorism has also been useful for the Sri Lankan government because it allows a discrete separation of its military aims (which are described as a campaign to eliminate terrorist threats) and its longer-term political objectives (to resolve ethnic-based grievances and existing structures of governance).

In addition to their material effects, external interventions play an important symbolic role. The extent to which they can have a positive effect in peacebuilding terms depends in large measure on how different actors read and interpret the meanings and ‘signals’ behind interventions. In Sri Lanka, the growing impasse between international and domestic players is partly related to how the signalling effects of aid have been interpreted differently by various domestic constituencies. For example, whilst the US felt it was sending a clear message that their military support to the government came with strings attached – notably an imperative to show restraint – others interpreted it as a green light to pursue the war. Furthermore, whilst internationals felt that that their hard line on the LTTE was part of a quid pro quo – i.e. the government would, in return, put forward political proposals for power sharing – others viewed it as symptomatic of a swing back towards a state-centred approach.

The Dilemmas of Liberal Peacebuilding

Conflictual War to Peace Transitions

Just because international actors failed to ‘bring peace’ does not necessarily mean that international intervention was ill-conceived or a failure. As with other cases of liberal peacebuilding, the metrics of success are contested and their measurement is difficult because of the problems of data, counterfactuals, attribution and variance in time frames.

The Sri Lankan experience provides some general lessons on the nature of war-to-peace transitions which are always conflictual and often violent. Peace processes are moments of change when the new rules of the game and one's position in the game are decided; in this sense they always involve ‘positional conflicts’, as different groups attempt to either get a seat at the table or disrupt the table. External interventions in these so-called ‘charismatic moments’ of politics (Grenier 1996) are ineluctably political and cannot be reduced to generalisable technical exercises.

In negotiating these turbulent political waters, both domestic and international actors tended to swing dramatically from one approach to another, and by doing so they arguably over-compensated for shortcomings in earlier phases of the peace process. In the domestic arena, Wickramasinghe's strategy of an incremental, process-based and largely exclusive approach, gave way to Rajapakse's strategy, based on military engagement, hard bargaining, building a southern consensus and returning, in some respects, to the ‘big bang’ approach characteristic of the 1994–95 peace process. In the international arena there have been similar pendulum swings, from the veritable ‘peace rush’ of 2002–03, with a maximalist approach to peacebuilding, back to a more defensive and risk averse strategy since 2005. International actors have been criticized for this ‘traffic light’ behaviour,18 rather than steering a more consistent and long term course of action.

It would be wrong to conclude that international players have had no influence on conflict and peace dynamics in Sri Lanka. The international regime influences the environment within which domestic actors operate. Although international actors failed to bring about a peaceful resolution to the Sri Lankan conflict, they played an important part in creating the pre-conditions for negotiations and have the potential to create an enabling or disenabling environment for peace. This case demonstrates the importance of distinguishing between the conditions that led to the ceasefire and the interventions required to move towards a settlement. It also stresses the need for different supportive strategies from donors for ceasefire, settlement and peace consolidation.

Struggles for Legitimacy

The Sri Lankan experience illustrates the way in which peace processes present opportunities for conflict actors to pursue a range of political agendas. Domestic actors manipulate and instrumentalise interventions by third-parties for their own ends. The various parties’ engagement in the peace process accrued different benefits at different times. The UNF government and business elites were important transmission agents for the liberal peace, but they lacked the political base and consequent legitimacy required to push through major structural changes. While the UNF regime principally saw the heavily internationalized peace process as a means of shoring up a strategy of rapid economic development, the UPFA government increasingly used the peace process as a means of deflecting international criticism and facilitating the war, which in turn could be seen as a part of a broader strategy of regime consolidation (CPA 2006). The peace process initially provided the LTTE with an opportunity to regroup and refinance but, as the shadow of war escalated, also provided them with a means of managing the risks associated with a return to war or the implications of a renewed peace process. These shifting agendas of domestic actors undermine the assumption of liberal peacebuilders that peace is pursued because it represents an absolute good.

As already mentioned, the idea that liberal peacebuilding is foisted upon domestic actors is overly simplistic. There are always importers of liberal peacebuilding in the political sphere (such as Ranil Wickramasinghe) and within sections of civil society in Sri Lanka. The peace process has highlighted an associated problem of over-internationalization. Being too closely associated with international actors can be damaging for all kinds of domestic political actors. These lessons also apply to NGOs. Since 2005, NGOs working on peace and conflict issues have increasingly been attacked for their close ties to international actors and labelled ‘peace vendors’ (Walton 2008). Perversely, liberal peacebuilding may have illiberal effects by inadvertently bolstering the positions of hardliners. As mentioned above, there is a long history in Sri Lanka of liberal reforms inducing defensive reactions from nationalists.

The peace process then is best seen an intensified political environment providing a range of opportunities for different actors to generate legitimacy in different ways. First, the process provides the parties to the agreement with opportunities to bolster their own legitimacy and to use it as a means of pursuing their own agendas. Second, it furnishes international actors with a means of shaping political and economic outcomes by conferring legitimacy on some actors, whilst attempting to delegitimize others by excluding them from negotiations or labelling them ‘spoilers’. Third, the failure of the process to generate popular legitimacy provides space for critical domestic actors such as the SLFP and the JVP to mobilize in opposition to it.

Finally, the illiberal consequences of liberal peacebuilding may further undermine the long term prospects for peace. A history of failed peace processes in Sri Lanka has added new layers of complexity and new forms of grievances to an extremely resilient conflict system. A political settlement that might have resolved the conflict a decade ago would no longer be sufficient today. For very different reasons, neither regime has been able or willing to address the underlying need for state reform. The manner in which each regime sought to end the war, paradoxically limited their ability to find a long term solution. The UNF government was caught in a liberal ‘peace trap’ because it had a limited support base and legitimacy, depended on external actors and advocated structural reforms which accentuated, rather than addressed, the underlying sources of conflict. On the other hand the UNPFA government is now caught in an illiberal ‘war trap’ because its legitimacy is tied to the successful pursuit of the war and a nationalist support base, both of which limit its willingness and ability to ‘win the peace’ by forging a new grand bargain or political settlement.

The contrasting approaches of the Wickramasinghe and Rajapakse regimes highlight how interventions, ostensibly aimed at addressing the ‘root causes’ of conflict, often miss their target since different actors will often subscribe to different versions of what those root causes are. These divisions not only help to drive conflict, they also play a crucial role in how domestic actors engage with internationals. As Woodward has argued: ‘Crucial to the way a conflict ends are the parties’ campaigns to win external support (including intervention) for their side by shaping outsiders’ perceptions of the causes of war’ (2007, p. 155).

Development, Peacebuilding and Security

The Wickramasinghe and Rajapakse manifestos, Regaining Sri Lanka and Mahinda Chintanaya respectively, contained contrasting development visions and different understandings of the link between development and the peace process. For the former, development was explicitly linked to the peace process: firstly, as an instrument to create disincentives for war by generating a peace dividend; secondly, it was hoped that peace would kick start economic take-off, leading to structural reforms and development through export-led growth. Rajapakse's regime, in contrast, sought to de-link development issues from the peace process – international donors were discouraged from straying into the political realm, and international aid belonged strictly in the economic and technical spheres. Furthermore, unlike Ranil's idea of development through liberalization, Mahinda has stressed a more populist vision of development within a national, state-led framework.19

The post-ceasefire period has demonstrated the limitations of development aid: even though some attempts were made to address structural causes of the conflict, the peace process did not shift the ‘tectonic plates’ underpinning the conflict. The experience of this period suggests that development aid is best suited to addressing these medium- to long-term issues related to state reform, governance, poverty and uneven development patterns, rather than as a tool for incentivizing a change in conflict actors’ short-term strategies.20

Therefore, it is not possible to ‘buy peace’ in Sri Lanka, whilst leaving the core political questions unresolved. The so-called economization of peacebuilding is based upon a fundamental misreading of the incentives driving conflict in Sri Lanka and the idea that a dose of liberalization can somehow act as a conflict prophylactic is similarly misconceived. There is ample evidence to point to the conflict-producing potential of rapid liberalization in Sri Lanka and elsewhere and to suggest the need for greater caution on the part of donors who advocate sweeping reforms (as the IMF and others did in 2002) (Gunasinghe 2004; Moore 1990; Bastian 2005, 2006).

Tensions, Trade-offs and Limitations

The case also highlights the tensions and trade offs involved in liberal peacebuilding and suggests that a greater awareness of these can contribute to better policies in the future. The ‘all good things come together’ approach should be replaced by one that pays greater attention to the prioritization and sequencing of interventions. Ultimately, international actors need to decide whether domestic peace is their overriding priority and can coexist alongside other policy goals, including trade, economic liberalization, terrorism and refugee flows. Elevating peace may mean de-prioritizing other policy goals, particularly those which have only a limited base of support in Sri Lankan society, such as economic liberalization or civil service reforms. Pursuing goals inconsistently can undermine the credibility of international actors in the eyes of conflict actors.

Sri Lanka is unlikely to become an overriding concern for international actors. Its middle income status is increasingly setting it outside the aid strategies of many donors. A lack of key strategic interests for many international actors increases the government's room for manoeuvre, as does the growing role of international actors who do not necessarily subscribe to the liberal peace agenda such as China, Iran and Russia.

This support from regional players has been critical in sustaining Rajapakse's ambitious military strategy which rejected the assumption that a negotiated solution to the conflict is the only effective solution. The sources of credit and military aid have permitted sustained increases in defence spending and made up for cut-backs in aid from several multi-lateral and western bilateral donors, for whom supporting development alongside a military solution to conflict was unpalatable. For the time being at least, Rajapakse's uncompromising strategy for dealing with the LTTE has sustained high levels of popular support among the Sinhalese majority.

This convergence of interests between nationalist domestic actors and a group of regional actors challenges the view that liberal peacebuilding acts as a monopoly, crowding out space for alternative versions of peace (Mac Ginty 2007, p. 458). In the Sri Lankan context, where there is a strong state which is not dependent upon donor funding and where state legitimacy is linked to state welfare provisions as well as an absence of significant Western strategic interests, the liberal view is a minority position which is easily crowded out by ‘non-Western’ alternatives. In retrospect, the pursuit of liberal peacebuilding during the UNF period was only pursued for a brief period of time when there was a temporary convergence of political interests between external actors and domestic elites.

Conclusions: The Liberal Peacebuilding Paradox?

The limits of international action need to be recognized and evolving strategies cannot be based on inflated assessments of outsiders’ capacities to engineer peace. It seems that, within the current peacebuilding paradigm, effective international engagement is only possible when a government shares a belief in the strategies of liberal peace policies – but ownership needs to extend beyond the government in power. When the regime in power feels they do not have any ‘ownership’ over (indeed feels antipathetic to) such policies, the scope for meaningful reform is extremely limited. In this context, a simulated peace process is likely to emerge, where conflict actors use the process as a means of accruing residual benefits and masking war-like strategies (Selby 2008). International actors are left treading a fine line where the pitfalls of being too critical or too close to the regime are equally hazardous. While outspoken international actors can suffer from a loss of access and therefore influence, those actors who get too close to the regime can also lose out in the long term, as was demonstrated after 1994 and 2002. Furthermore, criticism of a regime hostile to external engagement can easily be instrumentalized to bolster illiberal or belligerent agendas.

Although the Rajapakse regime appears to have successfully defeated the LTTE on the battlefield, this victory has come at a great cost both in terms of human lives lost and in the broader damage inflicted on democratic governance in Sri Lanka. Some international actors have begun to look at ways in which the end to military conflict can provide opportunities to reconstruct the north and east and to forge a new, more inclusive political settlement which incorporates moderate Tamil voices. While Rajakapakse's approach can be seen as offering an alternative path to peace from the kind laid out by liberal peacebuilders, its goal is at best a much more limited version of peace concerned with defeating the LTTE and at worst little more than an attempt to consolidate the power base of the Rajapakse regime.

This essay has suggested that peacebuilders could navigate some of the contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the liberal peacebuilding project by paying greater attention to the way in which legitimacy is constructed on the ground and by adopting a more flexible, nuanced and long-term approach based on a closer reading of the political incentives of local actors and the ways in which they may be influenced by (neo)liberal interventions. These arguments resonate to some extent with the critical literature on liberal peacebuilding that advocates alternative models of engagement. This literature has highlighted the need for greater focus on the potential for consent to be built through the provision of social welfare and engagement with ‘progressive’ elements in civil society (Richmond 2008) or via the legitimation of state institutions (Barnett 2006) and has emphasized the extent to which a perceived lack of legitimacy of external intervention is likely to be exploited and instrumentalised by local actors (Williams 2007).

Whilst it is too early to draw conclusions from current developments in the Sri Lankan political arena and on the battlefield in the Wanni, this case does illustrate both the problems inherent in liberal peacebuilding, and the pitfalls associated with alternative endogenous versions of peacebuilding that may emerge in reaction to the former. Although these rival models may have relevance in certain contexts where the state is weak and stability is the overriding priority, their application appears more problematic in contexts such as Sri Lanka whose post-independence history has seen the state grow increasingly exclusionist in character and where repeated failures to resolve conflict have entrenched mistrust and divisions between the parties to the conflict. In this environment, efforts to build a peace based on state legitimacy, bolstered through a discourse of Sinhala nationalism, have resulted in extreme violence and have enduring negative consequences for minority groups. Therefore, the paradox in Sri Lanka has been that whilst liberal peacebuilding has been exclusionary and destabilizing, alternatives have often had similarly negative consequences. Although a welfare-led approach has potential to cement a social contract, building the legitimacy of the state and creating stability, these strategies can also be used to cement illiberal models of governance that augment exclusion and defer a just political settlement to conflict. At the current moment in Sri Lankan politics, this just settlement cannot be built around the alliances constructed by the Rajapakse regime to wage war. A more broad-based and progressive set of alliances will be required to forge a new grand bargain for peace. The likelihood of this coalition emerging could be enhanced through sensitive international engagement, but it will certainly be decreased if once again liberal peacebuilders seize the ‘post conflict’ moment as an opportunity for radical reforms.

Notes

1. See Rudolph (2005) for an excellent critique of the ‘Lockean impulse’ which she argues the US is particularly prone to. This involves the impulse to impose the Lockean liberal consensus everywhere.

2. For example, diplomats and development actors from the same government may have different and sometimes competing sets of incentives in relation to any one country. There may be disbursement pressures on the development agency whilst the diplomats want aid to be withheld as a bargaining lever.

3. The ascendancy of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ as the dominant model of western intervention has been increasingly questioned with Cooper (2007) declaring a ‘crisis of the liberal peace’. He highlights a growing consensus amongst analysts that interventions should pursue more consensual and accountable approaches.

4. The UNF coalition was formed in 2001 and included the main opposition United National Party (UNP), a number of key dissidents from President Kumaratunga's People's Alliance government as well as members of the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress and the Ceylon Workers’ Congress.

5. India intervened in the 1980s, sending a Peacekeeping Force (known as the IPKF) to Sri Lanka in 1987.

6. Historical links with Sri Lanka, the perceived absence of geostrategic interests, its experiences of peace mediation elsewhere and the personal commitment of individuals like Erik Solheim, Minister for International Development (Martin 2006) were all important factors behind Norway taking on the role of mediator.

7. This was largely a result of problems surrounding the Post-Tsunami Operational Management Structure (P-TOMS) mechanism for distributing tsunami aid between government and LTTE-controlled areas (Goodhand and Klem 2005). The heavy international NGO presence in the aftermath of the tsunami provided further opportunities for nationalists to assert discourses of neo-colonial intervention, drawing in particular on stories about the uneven distribution of tsunami resources, NGO malpractice and the cultural impropriety of NGOs.

8. ISGA was a set of political proposals for power-sharing in the north and east, presented by the LTTE in 2003, which drew heavy criticism from both the then opposition Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) led by President Kumaratunga and the nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). The P-TOMS mechanism was designed to facilitate the transfer of international aid to LTTE-controlled areas in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. The mechanism was agreed by the LTTE and the government but subsequently blocked by the Supreme Court in July 2005.

9. The JVP are a youth-based Sinhala nationalist group which initiated two armed uprisings against the government in 1971 and between 1987 and 1989. The JHU are a nationalist political party led by Buddhist monks founded in 2004.

10. For example, arguably the JVP fall into the latter category whilst Muslim groups or human rights organizations who were critical of the peace process, wished to influence rather than destroy it.

11. One example of this is the failure of donors to follow through on their proclaimed conditionalities. After a united position in Tokyo, donors then proceeded to disburse money irrespective of the peace process and human rights abuses (Frerks and Klem 2006).

12. The UPFA alliance was formed in 2004 ahead of parliamentary elections and involved collaboration between the SLFP and the JVP as well as several other smaller parties.

13. The Indo-Lanka Accord was signed by the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayawardene in 1987. The Sri Lankan government agreed to several Tamil demands including the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the devolution of power to the regions and official status for the Tamil language. The IPKF was tasked with enforcing the Accord.

14. This trend is not new. Sri Lanka first developed strong trade and diplomatic links with Communist countries such as China and Russia in the 1950s (Bastian 2007).

15. The SLFP and the UNP signed a Memorandum of Understanding in October 2006 to cooperate on issues relating to the resolution of the conflict. The International Independent Group of International Experts (IIGEP) was established in February 2007 by the President of Sri Lanka to oversee the government's Commission of Inquiry into human rights abuses. The group withdrew from Sri Lanka in April 2008 on the basis that the government had not sufficiently taken on board their recommendations. The All-Party Representative Committee (APRC) was appointed by President Rajapakse in June 2006 with the aim of generating a consensus in the South on devolving power to the regions.

16. Several important European donors such as Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands are in the process of winding down commitments to Sri Lanka in line with broader policy changes.

17. The Mavil Aru crisis arose when the LTTE closed a sluice gate in Trincomallee Province, prompting a military offensive from the Government forces. In June 2007, approximately 400 non-resident Tamils were forcibly removed from Colombo by Sri Lankan police on ‘security grounds’. The evicted people were allowed to return after spending two days in detention centres in the Northern town of Vavuniya.

18. Which is at least in part the result of how they have built close relationships with the ‘like minded’ (i.e. those who subscribe to liberal peacebuilding), without appreciating their often tenuous political and social base and the considerable scepticism towards aspects of the liberal peace in many parts of Sri Lankan society.

19. This strategy is evident in the government's Nagenahira Navodaya or ‘Eastern Resurgence’ programme which aims to develop and democratize the east in the aftermath of the region's ‘liberation’ in 2007. As Nadarajah and Rampton (2008) have argued, couching this project in the terms of ‘development’ is not only depoliticizing, it also serves to co-opt foreign donors into a state-driven agenda.

20. The growing role of China has limited the scope for the use of economic tools and has further eroded any residual belief in the efficacy of economic carrots and sticks from ‘middle powers’.