The Politics of International Intervention

The Tyranny of Peace

Mandy Turner, Florian P. Kühn, Mandy Turner, Florian P. Kühn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317486466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically explores the practices of peacebuilding, and the politics of the communities experiencing intervention.

The contributions to this volume have a dual focus. First, they analyse the practices of western intervention and peacebuilding, and the prejudices and politics that drive them. Second, they explore how communities experience and deal with this intervention, as well as an understanding of how their political and economic priorities can often diverge markedly from those of the intervener. This is achieved through theoretical and thematic chapters, and an extensive number of in-depth empirical case studies.

Utilising a variety of conceptual frameworks and disciplines, the book seeks to understand why something so normatively desirable – the pursuit of, and building of, peace – has turned out so badly. From Cambodia to Afghanistan, Iraq to Mali, interventions in the pursuit of peace have not achieved the results desired by the interveners. But, rather, they have created further instability and violence. The contributors to this book explore why.

This book will be of much interest to students, academics and practitioners of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, international intervention, statebuilding, security studies and IR in general.

PART I

Exploring peace

1 International peace practice

Ambiguity, contradictions and perpetual violence

Florian P. Kühn

Why is it called ‘peace’?

In international relations ‘peace’ is an ambiguous term and can have enigmatic meanings. While bearing mostly positive connotations, peace has become a key legitimising tool in international relations, especially in the politics of the UN regarding state stabilisation and regime change. Programmes of post-conflict reconciliation, peace conferences and policy to establish mechanisms for managing and transforming conflicts abound. This is striking because the notion of ‘peace’ was discredited during the Cold War era – when ‘peace’ was routinely evoked by Soviet leaders, and peace activists in the West were held to be subversive.¹ How then did peace become instrumental for legitimising international interventions, violent politics including bullying of allies, and increasing disregard of sovereignty?²

In this chapter, the notion of peace is traced through its changes and related to the common and most dominant form of social relations, the state. This is a limited approach given ample and mutually related theories and concepts of peace.³ However, international relations (IR) traditionally includes significant components of thinking about war and its absence, portrayed as peace. This self-conception relies on the solid assumption of a state as a container of social relations. While IR’s notion of national politics may have changed, the state remains centred in derived concepts of peace: state domination is viewed as juxtaposed to other, potentially un-peaceful, sub-state and transnational social relations. This reflects a historical change of meaning, from spiritual to worldly: formerly, eternal peace was a transcendental condition, which became possible immediately, mundanely enshrined in states. Peace and war became binaries and mutually exclusive.⁴

At the same time, ontological and epistemological problems arise when trying to clarify what peace actually means politically. To approach the puzzle of why aggressive politics have come to be viewed as supporting peace in Western, but also wider UN, policy circles, I argue that the state of non-violent politics between the members of a Western security community⁵ has amounted to understanding politics as ‘world domestic policy’.⁶ The states of the Western security community have increasingly come to view problems outside as challenges to the community. In turn, the security community, led by the United States and supported by liberal intellectual research institutes, assumed governance tasks in countries beyond. Representing a ‘can-do’ attitude,⁷ based on an Enlightenment understanding of the world as open for transformation by a subject,⁸ these states set out to create their social environs.⁹ Expanding the ‘domestic’ peace enjoyed within the community by identifying and transforming spoilers of peace or replacing illiberal regimes has required the development of a mode of governance assuming authority beyond institutionalised international law.

Although by no means global, Western integration and cooperation has developed a super-state structure, which shapes global governance bolstered by the combined power of nation states. Practising ‘peace’ through this structure combines both the characteristics of states as well as of the international system: formally segregated states share interdependencies to an extent that none of them could meaningfully act on their own in the ‘international’ sphere, while legitimisation and political control remain bounded nationally. While the governance super-structure has limited political scope (resembling the ‘night-watchman state’¹⁰) and works in selected places only, it guides political norms and repertoires of political action, and governs some segments of world society while neglecting others.

Reminding ourselves of the basic principles of liberal thought is necessary for unpacking the core function of contemporary practices of peace. We need to go back to Locke’s basic claims of freedom as being identical with property, organised guarantees of property rights and consensual execution of such rights. In Beate Jahn’s words, ‘[p]rivate property constitutes individual freedom and individual freedom requires government by consent whose main task in turn is the protection of private property and thus that of individual freedom’.¹¹ That a person owns himself (and less so herself), as Locke argues, is granted as a natural right by (the Christian) god, which implies a god-given legitimisation of things appropriated. Property, for liberals, is what freedom hinges upon.¹² A Lockean state of nature poses dangers to wellbeing, as property is not guaranteed and so property protection is the main reason to consent to common government. The free individual ‘seeks out, and is willing to joyn in Society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property’.¹³ The liberal portrayal of the interests of this small group (i.e. property owners) as common interests is replicated by Western states who propagate their own ordering role and policy aims as universally desirable.¹⁴ If property is essential for individual rights, then the humanitarian debate and cosmopolitarian ideals are an effigy stalking horse for global capitalist expansion. According to Andrew Sartori, ‘self-contradictory’ liberal thought makes possible this expansion through the application of violent social orders of exploitation and expropriation while simultaneously promoting epistemological individualism and broad representation in decision making.¹⁵

Peace and, by extension, war thus work to legitimise the expansion of the liberal world. Peace, understood in this way, is a teleological concept which may well remain void of clear definition. The end-state need not be pinned down, as the process of making peace will determine its form. It is supposed to be designed in the open and participatory way that liberal societies ascribe to themselves. But in practice, the liberal way of peace is a result of power structures and epistemic influence. Indeed, the process of making, keeping, or enforcement of peace is a violent endeavour, resembling war in many aspects. The distinction between declaring war and making peace is thus blurred, rendering peace another version of war.¹⁶ Regime change is the most violent end of this continuum (as experienced in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq), but there are more nuanced ways in which it has been pursued. In the name of security, violence is employed – essentially to preserve the existing peace of the powerful.

The chapter is split into four sections. The first analyses the genesis of peace as a concept and relates it conceptually to the state and politics. I then explore how Western peace practice has been informed and dominated by these anti-emancipatory and reductionist notions of peace. The third section elucidates the need to constantly adapt and re-invent peace in a changing world. The chapter concludes by arguing that peace should be understood as a historical and constantly evolving concept, open for ideational competition and requiring further critical interrogation. This implies questioning dominant definitions as influenced by and serving the purposes of powerful interests and structurally conservative actors.

A short genealogy of peace

How peace is understood is intrinsically linked to the development of modern statehood. Michael Howard explains how distinguishing between domestic and foreign politics preceded understanding peace as a mode of international interaction. The creation of order by warrior elites, which then required legitimacy, ‘produces domestic peace, and also legitimizes the conduct of war’.¹⁷ When society was riddled by power rivals such as church, feudal landlords, and kings who competed over funds, control and legitimacy, feuds were frequent and characterised politics.¹⁸ Only the state with its – often forceful – claim to a monopoly of violence was able to pacify society by virtue of its organisational capacity to accumulate the means of mass violence. Creating a pacified container for social relations, states had to begin to convey war or non-violence between these ‘like units’¹⁹ – creating a system of states.²⁰ To possess the means of violence against internal and external rivals was essential for the development of European states’ specific form.²¹ While this violent legacy and its historicity tends to be forgotten in all states’ narratives, Jahn argues that the intellectual constitution of the ‘international’ as outside legal arrangements and rights guarantees allowed the appropriation of foreign land to be legitimised. The people in possession of that land had forfeited their rights by not protecting it. The sovereign state, in this reading, is a liberal invention derived from the property rights it ought to protect; it bundles power to compete with the war-like outside world.²²

What is important is the self-legitimisation of the state and its elites once political interaction was institutionalised. For the modern state, which was to become the seminal template for social structures, a myth of rationality took hold with the Enlightenment. Law supports the relevance of the rulers rather than emanating from social necessity: ‘by claiming that political action follows rational decision-making, political parlance masks the banality and ritualistic character of most political interaction’.²³ On the global scale, these states’ mode of economic reproduction – based on money and surplus production – outcasts other forms, as Pierre Clastres described for subsistence based societies.²⁴ The production of surplus allows the allocation of resources for organised mass violence and, ‘for the most part, they [the states] relied heavily on capital and capitalists as they reorganized coercion’.²⁵ Such professionalisation of violence, subsequently, led to developing strategic and tactical concepts within hegemonic structures of knowledge production.

The Westphalian norm of sovereignty prescribed a system to be ‘at peace’ when war did not occur, though war was possible at any time under anarchy. The international level thus appropriated the characteristics of what Hobbes had described as the state of nature: ‘For WAR, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: … during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.’²⁶ Hence, war is what may occur on the international level, whereas a state’s attempts to domesticate violence meant that power struggles were not war.²⁷ Historically, some philosophical strands have viewed peace as the default mode of social relations, while others have counted it as a temporal, and desirable, deviation.²⁸ It seems plausible, however, to argue that the fatefulness of war as one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse disappeared with the gradual formation of the modern state: from something that comes over a society to something that politics can avert. An Enlightenment assumption that the world is open to be fashioned according to men’s ideas makes it possible to think of politics and thus peace as something to be designed.²⁹ Peace becomes a process of constant political interaction, shaped by human will and decisions which are expressions of individual freedom.³⁰

Ontologically tied to statehood, peace thus becomes a concept based on reason and something that can be precipitated. For Immanuel Kant, a League of Peace could be established as a federation of republics whose citizens controlled the means of war. The political system was the prerequisite for inter-state peace; its creation the state’s most noble task.³¹ However, Kant believed the league would need defending against the ‘outside’ world that was characterised by either lack of adequate (that is peace-inducing) government or lack of reason. Reason was the basis of enlightened forms of statehood in the first place and necessary for societies, and states, to be viewed as equal.

Against non-equals, argued John Stewart Mill, intervention could be justified: ‘[t]o suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error’.³² According to Mill, there is always a difference between the civilised and the barbarian; akin to democracies and non-democracies in current parlance. Risks that resemble the unpredictable nature of the uncivilised stem from the latter, and their ‘failed’ and ‘failing’ states. This, then, constitutes an order, determined by a ‘standard of civilisation’ or membership of a ‘security community’,³³ what Edward Said describes as ‘Othering’ with regard to orientalist framings that distinguishes between ‘us’ and ‘them’.³⁴ It allowed the culturally different to be regarded as non-rational, child-like, and unable to self-govern.³⁵ Such binary orde...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: The tyranny of peace and the politics of international intervention
• Part I Exploring peace
• Part II Imposing peace
• Index