Post-Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Peace Formation and State Formation 9781474402170, 9781474402187, 9781474405072

Table of contents :
Post-Liberal Peace Transitions
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency
1 Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland
2 Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace
3 Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo
4 Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool
5 Peace Formation Versus Everyday State Formation in Palestine
6 Afghanistan’s Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts
7 International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
8 Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia?
9 Timor Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding UN Peace Efforts from Within
10 Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-state Peace Agents in Post-conflict Solomon Islands
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

POST-LIBERAL PEACE TRANSITIONS BETWEEN PEACE FORMATION AND STATE FORMATION

OLIVER P. RICHMOND AND SANDRA POGODDA

Post-Liberal Peace Transitions

Post-Liberal Peace Transitions Between Peace Formation and State Formation

Edited by Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda

© editorial matter and organisation, Oliver Richmond and Sandra Pogodda, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/​14 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0217 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0218 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0507 2 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Contributors vii Acknowledgements xii

Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda

  1. Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland Roger Mac Ginty

1 27

  2. Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramović

47

  3. Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo Gëzim Visoka

65

  4. Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou

83

  5. Peace Formation versus Everyday State Formation in Palestine 105 Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond   6. Afghanistan’s Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts Martine van Bijlert

126

vi Contents   7. International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom   8. Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia? Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes   9. Timor-Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding United Nations Peace Efforts from Within Paula Duarte Lopes

143 160

179

10. Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands   197 Volker Boege Bibliography 217 Index 239

Contributors

Roberto Belloni is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Trento, Italy. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at the University of Denver, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Queen’s University Belfast. His main research interest is on post-conflict international intervention in deeply divided societies, with particular reference to south-eastern Europe. His publications include Statebuilding and International Intervention in Bosnia (2008), two co-edited books in Italian (2013, 2014), as well as more than forty journal articles and book chapters. Martine van Bijlert is co-director and co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), an independent non-profit policy research organisation based in Kabul (see www.afghanistan-analysts.org). Martine grew up in pre-revolutionary Iran, studied Sociology of NonWestern Societies at Leiden University and has been studying Afghanistan since the early 1990s. Her involvement in the country as a researcher, aid worker, diplomat and political analyst has given her a varied and multifaceted understanding of Afghan society and the effects of international intervention. While still a student, Martine started in Quetta where she studied the situation of Afghan refugees (1990 and 1992–93). She then worked as community development officer in Grozny (1995) and Kabul (1997–98); asylum officer in the Netherlands (1996–97 and 1999–2000); political secretary at the Netherlands embassy in Tehran (2001–04); and political adviser to the European Union Special Representative in Kabul (2004–08). Martine has published widely, ­travelled extensively, and is fluent in Dari.

viii Contributors Morten Bøås (PhD) is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). He has conducted research and fieldwork in Africa, Sierra Leone included, for more than two decades. Bøås has published a number of articles in international peer-review journals, and his most recently published books include: The Politics of Conflict Economies: Miners, Merchants and Warriors in the African Borderland (2015); with Kevin Dunn, The Politics of Origin in Africa: Autochthony, Citizenship, Conflict (2013); and, co-edited with Kevin Dunn, African Guerrillas: Raging Against the Machine (2007). Volker Boege (DPhil) is a peace researcher and historian, currently a Research Fellow at the School of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS) at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His fields of work include post-conflict peacebuilding and state formation; non-Western approaches to conflict transformation; natural resources, environmental degradation and conflict. His regional areas of expertise are: the South Pacific, South-east Asia and West Africa. Volker is currently working at POLSIS on a number of externally funded projects. These projects address issues of peacebuilding, conflict resolution and state formation in Pacific Island countries and West Africa (Ghana and Liberia). He has published numerous articles, papers and books in peace research and contemporary history. Maria Hadjipavlou was Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus (1995–2013). She also taught at Boston University and Bentley College in the United States. She has, for decades, facilitated and designed numerous conflict-resolution workshops among different social groups from both Cypriot communities. She is a founding member of non-governmental organisations: the Peace Center, Hands Across the Divide, The Cyprus Academic Dialogue, the Cypriots’ Voice and the Gender Advisory Team. She has been a consultant to the Council of Europe on issues of intercultural dialogue and gender equality. As a trainer for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), she worked with women in Bratislava, Kabul and Tunisia, and has been a member and trainer for the Women’s Initiative for Peace (WINPEACE) for Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. She has published in international journals on conflict resolution and the Cyprus conflict, citizens’ unofficial diplomacy, women and the peace negotiations etc., Her book, Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminisms, Gender and Conflict (2010), has become a reference book on women and Cyprus. Her research interests include international conflict resolution, gender and conflict, peace education, feminist theories, memory and reconciliation, gender and migration, women, peace and security, and women and economic crises.

Contributors  ix

Caroline Hughes is Professor of Conflict Resolution and Peace at the University of Bradford. She is the author of Dependent Communities: Aid and Politics in Cambodia and East Timor (2009) and The Political Economy of Cambodia’s Transition (2003), and the co-author of The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia (2014). She has also edited several collections on Asian politics, and has written more than fifty articles, reports and chapters on aid and development in post-conflict countries. She was previously the director of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University in Australia, and has a long-standing position as an external adviser to the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She has been a faculty member at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham, and has held visiting positions at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. Stefanie Kappler is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies at Liverpool Hope University. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews. Her research interests include local and international peacebuilding, local agency and resistance, as well as (spatial) practices of memory and commemoration. Stefanie is particularly interested in the contested and transformative nature of local imaginations of peace and has conducted fieldwork in Bosnia– Herzegovina, South Africa, Cyprus, Belfast, Brussels, Northern Ireland and the Basque Country. Her recent publications include book chapters and articles published in Third World Quarterly, Security Dialogue, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, International Peacekeeping, and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Stefanie has recently published a Palgrave monograph on the role of local actors in peacebuilding operations in Bosnia, South Africa and Cyprus. Paula Duarte Lopes is Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) and Professor of International Relations at the School of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. She has a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests focus on international interventionism, namely peace studies and development aid. Roger Mac Ginty is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and in the Department of Politics, University of Manchester. His recent books include the edited volume Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding (2013) and International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (2011). He co-edits the journal Peacebuilding and edits the Palgrave book series, ‘Rethinking Political Violence’.

x Contributors Eng Netra manages the governance research programme at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute. Since 2003, she has been working on decentralisation and local governance issues in Cambodia. Her 2014 doctoral dissertation examined the politics of decentralisation reform in Cambodia. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book to be published in 2016 by Routledge. Sandra Pogodda is Lecturer of Peace and Conflict Studies in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. Previously, she completed her PhD in International Relations at the University of Cambridge as a Marie Curie Fellow and worked at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the United States Institute of Peace and the University of St Andrews as a postdoctoral Fellow. Her research focuses on state-formation processes in the revolutionary societies of the Arab region, resistance movements; revolutionary challenges to peace and conflict studies, and critical development studies. Jasmin Ramović is currently pursuing a PhD at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester. Previously, he has worked as a lecturer, teaching undergraduate courses in political science and international relations. As a British government Chevening scholar, he obtained a master’s degree in International Security Studies at the University of St Andrews in 2007. In 2005, he completed his degree in Political Science at the University of Sarajevo. Jasmin has extensive experience working with various international organisations, including the United Nations and the European Union missions to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Oliver P. Richmond is a Research Professor in International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. He is also International Professor, College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tromso. His publications include Failed Statebuilding (2014), A Very Short Introduction to Peace (2014), A Post-Liberal Peace (2011), Liberal Peace Transitions (with Jason Franks, 2009), Peace in International Relations (2008), and The Transformation of Peace (2005/​7). He is editor of the Palgrave book series, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, and co-editor of the journal, Peacebuilding. Patrick Tom is cofounder, writer, editor and proofreader at Mindleag Limited, a book reviews copy editor for Exemplar: The Journal of South Asia Studies and board member for Zimbabwe Policy Dialogue Institute. He earned a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews, BA General, BA Honours in Philosophy and MA in Philosophy

Contributors  xi

degrees from the University of Zimbabwe, MA in Conflict, Development and Security from the University of Leeds and MA in International Peace Studies from the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Patrick has written critical analyses on political texts for Mouseion Professors Limited. He has taught Philosophy at the University of Zimbabwe, Arrupe College, United Theological College and Christian College of Southern Africa (Zimbabwe). Patrick has interned at the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (Uganda) where he developed a human rights training manual for the organisation’s schools outreach programme. His research interests include local and international peacebuilding, African politics, conflict transformation, environmental philosophy, NGOs and Peacebuilding, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Gëzim Visoka is a Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at Dublin City University (DCU) in Ireland. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from DCU in Ireland. Dr Visoka has extensively published on Kosovo, post-conflict peacebuilding, ethics of international governance, and foreign policy and diplomatic recognition. He has over six years of experience working with various local civil society groups in Kosovo on peace and reconciliation in divided communities. His academic work is available at www.gezimvisoka.com.

Acknowledgements

We should like to thank the authors included in this volume who contributed their time and thoughts to the problem of how locally formed peace activity in a number of conflict affected societies has an impact on order in the modern world. Many of this book’s authors relied on local research assistance and sources whom we would also like to thank. Finally, our editors and publishers have also provided invaluable support for which we are very grateful. Thanks also to the University of Manchester and the British Academy which provided some financial assistance for parts of the work this book is based on. Finally, many thanks to Jasmin Ramović who helped manage this book project as well as contributing to a chapter.

Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda

In 2009 Liberal Peace Transitions (Edinburgh University Press) examined how, in the cases of Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor Leste, Cambodia, and the Middle East, liberal peacebuilding had collapsed into the altogether less ambitious statebuilding project and, in any case, had failed to produce democracy, rights, and justice. These internationally backed transitions, variously described as statebuilding or peacebuilding instead, had focused on security, institutional reform, and marketisation. Some aspects of these ‘programmes’ had increasingly been resisted or co-opted by local actors: from elites to social movements. They had produced to a large degree, oligarchical, authoritarian states and disaffected populations but little in the way of reconciliation, pluralism, or prosperity – goals that had been used to justify the initial interventionary focus on democratisation, human rights and a rule of law, civil society, and marketisation. This study concluded that hybrid outcomes were emerging, and the possibility of a hybrid peace was present though distant. Less clearly, its line of thought pointed to the emergence of rather negative hybrid forms of peace where the tensions between local legitimacy and long-standing power structures, international norms and rights, and capitalism, rendered the interventionary project ineffective and even redundant. This follow-on study, extends this argument in order to understand the interplay of forces that shape ‘peace’ in the modern state, in an expanded range of case studies, including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste, Cambodia, Solomon Islands, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Northern Ireland, and Israel–Palestine. It outlines the often countervailing forces and norms of state formation, statebuilding, and peacebuilding according to their associated theoretical approaches. It explores the concept of

2  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda peace formation which focuses on localised peace agency and its institutional evolution. Hence, peace formation counterbalances peacebuilding’s juxtaposition of internal violence with externalised institutional agency, reform and conditionality. It offers the possibility of connecting local interests with international intervention, local state formation, and thus a broader legitimacy: a more positive form of hybrid peace. According to the evidence compiled in this study, the states emerging from statebuilding will remain as they are, however – failed by design – if they fail to incorporate a better understanding of the multiple and often critical agencies involved in peace formation. We seek evidence about the positive aspects of hybrid peace, despite such dynamics. In preliminary terms, localised peace formation connects more subtle forms of legitimacy and resistance to injustice. It tends to survive in a parallel universe, opposing conflict forces in and across society. It may seek to realise aspects of the international liberal peace architecture or strongly oppose the liberal peace for its failing to incorporate local needs and aspirations into its peace- and statebuilding strategies. It offers the opportunity to determine the emancipatory nature of the state and to ‘educate’ interveners’ political reforms necessary for a more emancipatory transition. Attention tends to be elsewhere, however. In all our cases, peace formers struggle on, trapped in a parallel space yet offering an epistemological mediation of local issues and regional or international norms. They offer local knowledge about the conditions of peace in situ and, from their positionality, a view of what problems they face. They are confronted with near insurmountable power structures at the state, regional or international level, often anchored in local and global economic frameworks. And yet, on paper at least, the state, regional and international organisation, and the global economy, have evolved or been actively designed for peace, or at least to manage and prevent conflict. The United Nations, European Union, World Bank, donor system, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), and other organisations (not least their military components), however, are constrained by their own interests and naturalised norms. They are founded on externalised political frameworks, legitimacy and norms. As the ethical perspective of peace has expanded from the state to the region and international, but more importantly to human beings and their societies, such mechanisms have been lacking in their capacity to engage with a contextual, critical, and emancipatory epistemology of peace. Engaging with the processes of peace formation may aid international actors in gaining a better understanding of the driving forces behind continuously morphing conflicts and the influence of the evolving international peace architecture and the global economy on conflicts’ root causes. From here it would be a shorter step to understand how local

Introduction  3

actors may be assisted, how violence and power-seeking may be ended or managed, and how local legitimacy may emerge. Thought through to its local apogee, this is a radical design for peace. It involves reforms at multiple levels, redistribution, and a refocusing of political authority towards local legitimacy to foreground the positionality of peace formers. In the absence of such concerted and reflexive action, statebuilding, like liberal peacebuilding, has become failed by design.1 This is firstly because its institutional frameworks are externally designed with a European or northern, developed, rational, and individualistic context in mind. Statebuilding constructs neo-liberal states through the intervention of the United Nations or unilateral actors, donors, international financial institutions (IFIs) and INGOs2 in the same way as the liberal peace.3 It makes them subservient to global capital and northern state security interests, rather than to human rights, representation or law. Neo-liberal states fall short of responding comprehensively to economic needs and fail to provide public services quickly enough to undercut currents of violence or address the root causes of conflict. Statebuilding follows structural power in the international system.4 Many statebuilding exercises have relapsed into sporadic violence (Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor Leste, Palestine and Kosovo) or have threatened to do so (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guatemala, or Cambodia). Some have failed to offer significant development (see human development indexes compared to Gini indexes),5 or have fallen short of developing stable state–society relations, or implementing the full terms of their founding peace agreement (Guatemala and Bosnia–Herzegovina). Liberal forms of peacebuilding also follow this pattern in that the normative universe they operate from (institutions, donors, or INGOs based in New York, Washington, Geneva, Brussels, Paris, London, Tokyo, etc.) rarely is commensurate with that of the specific context they are applied in. This is mostly in developing, post-conflict settings outside the global north, with the exceptions of a few cases, such as Bosnia or Kosovo. Liberal peacebuilding normally occurs through the United Nations according to multilateral agreements on supporting democratisation, the rule of law, human rights, civil society, ‘good governance’ and economic liberalisation.6 This has also been the case with the closely allied modernisation and development approaches. These have suffered from ideological prescriptions widely thought to undermine any shortterm peace dividend (enabling material and power inequalities instead). As has become obvious over time, statebuilding and liberal peacebuilding strategies fail to connect with their target populations. Instead, they end up buttressing problematic elites and their often chauvinistic, nationalistic, or personal interests, and lack a connection in context, on the ground, among populations that have their own understandings

4  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda of identity, sovereignty, institutions, rights, law, and needs according to their own socio-historical and cultural traditions and context. The ‘local’ – a term used in the sense indicated by Massey and Appadurai’s work7 – voices such critiques of peacebuilding and statebuilding, from Afghanistan to BiH or Kosovo. Policymakers have also acknowledged these problems.8 Peacebuilding and statebuilding are coloured by postcold war triumphalism, rested on a crude form of capitalism and the erosion of citizens’ classical liberal rights and needs. Interveners tend to build states around a marginalised political subject whose main role is to be pacified, produce, respect private property, vote in a procedural manner and rely on its own resilience rather than making demands towards state support. This subject is to be subordinated to international expertise, echoing the colonial subject’s trusteeship and native administration-framed relationship to the metropolitan centre.9 While analysts tend to focus on the normative and technical processes of peacebuilding and statebuilding, they are rarely keen to consider the global, as opposed to regional or local, power structures in which they take place. This collection of case studies challenges the mainstream consensus on both peacebuilding and statebuilding which came about far before the empirical evidence could be broadly assessed. It endeavours to begin the reconstruction of peace-making activities according to the knowledge we have amassed about the problems of liberal peacebuilding and neo-liberal statebuilding, about local agency and mobilisation, and the shifting nature of political legitimacy and authority in contemporary conflict-affected societies. Alternative approaches are now emerging which do not necessarily fit well with the existing international architecture or with the accepted wisdom on state formation and statebuilding. ‘Peace-formation’ processes are driven partly by local, peaceful forms of agency (though often critical and resistant). Peace formation arises through subaltern power/​ agency10 in sectors of society where non-violent, peaceful change is sought. It aims to negate local violence and preserve and recondition local identity and political institutions. It engages with, and influences, international actors, from donors to the United Nations. It sees political subjects as formative of the state, economy, society, and the international community. Peace formation is limited in scale and scope but is often well versed in the historical, political, economic, social and cultural dynamics required in any stable and peaceful governance system in context. In other words, it comprehends the dynamics of legitimate political authority necessary to make a sustainable peace in ways which external actors cannot, rendering them reliant on extremely problematic blueprints that lack local legitimacy and any real capacity. There is a vast, related literature, often little noticed, scattered across several disciplines, covering most, if not all, the world’s post-conflict

Introduction  5

states. This includes some very surprising locations, such as Somalia, where most stability and many of the qualities associated with peace have been provided by local mobilisation.11 Many other cases where similar dynamics are emerging have been documented: for example, in Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, South Africa, Timor Leste, Afghanistan, and Cyprus, BiH.12 In these cases, a wide mix of local organisations has become involved in everyday matters of peace and its infrastructures, in security, political, economic, and social realms. These organisations draw on socio-historical processes, operate in private or in public, may reshape governance and the modern state, and draw selectively on the support of a range of international actors. This is an incoherent and hardly visible set of issues, networks, and actors but then political mobilisation for rights and emancipation has often confronted hegemony and power throughout history in such a manner. It therefore seems germane to seek out peace formation to understand the requirements for a future peace. This introduction outlines the theoretical debates about state formation and statebuilding as well as the critique of liberal statebuilding/​ peacebuilding that has emerged. It explores the potential theoretical contributions of local forms of peacebuilding – or ‘peace formation’13 – to set the scene for the case studies that follow. These four concepts represent the cornerstones in the relationship between different forms of conflict and peace. By looking at the smaller-scale and often invisible local attempts related to peace formation, some answers may emerge to the pressing question of how large-scale peacebuilding or statebuilding may be significantly improved and made more representative of the lives, needs, rights, and ambitions of its subjects.

Peace formation in the context of power and external intervention There are three sites, scales, or levels of peace and progressive politics, with differing norms, identities, institutions and types of power: the local and everyday; the state; and the international system. Aligning these, deciding which should lead, co-ordinating their complimentary roles, or resolving their tensions, require a broad agreement on the nature of everyday peace, progressive politics, the state, and the role of international politics. This requires a shared view or an acceptance of moderated difference. The latter is the key to positive hybrid peace which includes contextual resonance, reform, and equity across local and international scales. How this might come about is an important question. All too often, high-level talks between leaders or warlords over territory and the state have dominated the public notion of peace

6  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda ­ rocesses (as with the fifty-year-long – and still counting – high-level p talks over the Cyprus problem). International diplomacy often remained stuck over elite interests at the expense of local peace, reconciliation and emancipation.14 Peace praxis and theory have certain problem-solving limitations and international or state biases. Efforts are required to move beyond these blockages. Left to its own devices and largely removed from public view, local peace agency has been trying to work through the conflict issues most relevant to local conflict spheres. It has been attempting to create localised spaces for reconciliation, provide potential (if contested) solutions to the underlying conflict issues within local communities or developing quick fixes for the most pressing security, socio-economic or political issues that tend to depress conflict-ridden communities. This type of local peace agency has often been stifled by a lack of resources and political support. Recognising the importance of peace-formation agency, this volume is dedicated to the analysis of how this agency plays out in different conflict contexts, what its limitations are and how it can be most effectively supported in order to contribute to a positive peace. Hence, a positive hybrid peace requires that peace formation is understood in its local contexts and its state and international networks, as well as in terms of debates around the conditions for progressive politics. It should be understood as a discursive and practical formation which may exercise agency to build a locally resonant peace, legitimacy, representation, rights, and redistributions of resources. Peace formation reflects whether institutions, authority and the state are grounded in local legitimacy and satisfy local expectations. In this sense, peace formation requires a confluence of direct, structural, governmental, normative, as well as subaltern agency. Peace-formation processes, however, are very marginal in terms of agency and, simultaneously, are often in opposition to localised or regional conflict dynamics. Moreover, they might run counter to the linkages between peace and statebuilding within the international peace architecture, aimed at creating a homogeneous state and mode of life. Furthermore, peace-formation processes are affected by global capital and dominant international interests. From a peace-formation and subaltern perspective, these processes aim at expunging local history, identity, culture, religion and society, and replacing them with a rational–legal administrative framework in which individuals focus on consuming and producing ever more efficiently. This is the progressive version of politics that has, since the cold war, been appended to high-level peace talks by internationals. As a positive peace project, however, the liberal peace has failed where it confronts key norms and values of society, as well as material needs in both a local and global context. Local resistance and peace-formation processes have both pointed to very significant limita-

Introduction  7

tions of the liberal peace and its normative framework for peacebuilding and statebuilding. These international blueprints are appended to the interests and values of dominant states, organisations, and markets, and do not reflect political debates in context. From below, a positive hybrid peace would be more acceptable and would involve active peace formation. The peace-formation project is also fragile, however, subsisting only because of great ingenuity and support networks. It offers a clear advance over older conflict management, resolution, transformation, and peacebuilding systems, and may well provide internationals with an avenue to enable peace. It may also highlight norms, values, and interests that are unacceptable at the international level, though, or seek to reconcile strongly opposed positions from all these quarters. The problem partly is that international and local actors operate in a relatively parochial epistemological framework that claims a universal or contextual ontological status: it is rare that they accept the diversity or need to reconcile acute difference, or the consequences of power inequalities. The inability of international actors to accept difference in terms of identity, local culture, institutions, as well as modes and paces of development, has been noted over the years by the very civil society actors that internationals claim to be empowering.15 Yet, peacebuilding and statebuilding praxis underlines the limits of both the will and power of internationals to ‘make’ peace. The reasons for this are complex, down to methodological limitations and blinkers, hangovers from colonial and cold war international relations, ontological hypocrisy, and an epistemology that enables the imposition of sacrifices on voiceless others through the exercise of executive power in pursuit of ‘global’ interests, ‘universal norms’ and economic power. At the same time, local peace formers, including those in civil society, are weak in terms of public support (accommodation and reconciliation are often unpopular), unable to counter the structural and direct power of elites, and are critical of international donor preferences and lack of support.

Relating the four conceptual frameworks Conceptualising a positive hybrid peace – as a first stage towards better practices – requires disaggregating, and examining the relationships between state formation, statebuilding, peacebuilding, and peace formation. As this introduction has so far outlined, a far more balanced model recognises four cornerstones as follows: 1. State formation describes the formation of the state through indigenous or internal violence between competing groups and their agendas

8  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda which often turn the state into a criminal and predatory elite racket à la Tilly.16 This leads ultimately to internal balances of power and power-sharing arrangements based on hierarchies and inequalities that perpetuate structural forms of violence. State formation is a mainly internal exercise of direct and structural power. Through this process of shifting alliances and force, often associated with forms of identity, parochial or national, the nature of the resultant state is determined often in the favour of authoritarian elites. It also facilitates their control of security and capital. At best, states so formed are unstable and represent a negative or victor’s peace. Anthropological and sociological engagements with state formation point to prospects for a more positive process.17 Yet, positive forms of state formation have so far been described only as encounters at the margins of the state.18 Attempts by internationals to intervene in this process has often simply dragged them into the dynamics of violence (Iraq and South Sudan being recent examples) or at best their superficial mitigation. 2. Statebuilding is the resultant externalised process aimed at rectifying this situation. It is focused on the role of external actors, organisations, donors, IFIs, agencies, and INGOs and building institutions for security, democracy, markets, and creating basic infrastructure and public services. Statebuilding is an exercise of direct, structural  and governmental power. It requires international technical expertise and capacity, and attempts to persuade or force local elites to comply with liberal or neo-liberal institutions as they are under construction. Statebuilding’s aim is to develop an institutional framework of a state which will begin to tame the forces of violence and offer the possibility of a future neo-liberal state as a constructive member of the international community. Normally, however, it is aimed at producing the basic framework of a neo-liberal state in a procedural and technocratic sense, and is less concerned in norms or civil society, as with examples from Afghanistan to Liberia. Ultimately, neo-liberal statebuilding indicates the development of a ‘small’ state with significant security capacity. This combination means that the state which comes into being is externally dependent and subject to international capital which often provokes some internal resistance. As a result, statebuilding tends to lead to a negative hybrid peace. 3. Peacebuilding in its liberal guise focuses on external support for liberally oriented, rights-based institutions with a special and legitimating focus on norms and human rights, civil society and a social contract via representative institutions embedded in a rule of law. Peacebuilding exercises governmentality and its focus is more directly on building peace rather than building a state as passport for peace in the future. This support steers the institution-building project towards

Introduction  9

international norms, assuming that these are universal and therefore widely acceptable. In its very early form it was more focused on localised dynamics of peace. Later on, by the 1990s, it focused on universal, liberal norms, as in democracy and human rights. It parallels statebuilding but is normatively broader, more focused on a rightsbased peace than context-specific understandings of security, sovereignty, local cultures of peace and their interconnectedness. There are two alternative modes of liberal peace leading, in theory, to different types of state. Firstly, the liberal mode implies social democracy and so a strong/​large and interventionist state focused mainly on material redistribution and rights. Secondly, a trusteeship mode that enables external oversight and control of liberal institutions, creating protectorate-style states, as with BiH. Either tends to rouse much resistance and therefore lead to a negative hybrid peace. There is a missing dimension at the local scale: local peace agency or ‘peace formation’. That it has been ignored arises partly from the inherent biases of northern, rational, compliance-oriented, problemsolving theory. The historical dominance of the West has been naturalised through such dominance. Any positive form of peace agency at the local scale has also been ignored. This oversight has occurred because the types of agencies, networks, and activities that peace formation represents are small scale, fragmented and disaggregated, informal, ontologically different, sometimes non- or only partially liberal, rather than being representative of large-scale industrial mobilisation, secular, rational–legal, and official. This is not to romanticise the capacity of individuals, families, communities, societies, or their networks, nor liberation, emancipation, or resistance, but to accept that they have a fundamental role to play in the dynamics of politics and the development of institutions and rights (especially under any deepening democratic framework). This implies the following: 4. Peace formation processes can be defined as the mobilisation – formal or informal, public or hidden, indigenous19 – of local agents of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, development, or peace actors in customary, religious, cultural, social, or local governance settings. It should not be confused with state formation. They exercise subaltern, critical agency through a range of local to internationally scaled networks. They seek to find ways of establishing peace processes and the dynamics of local forms of peace in everyday conflict settings, in their social and historical context, from which political institutions, norms, law, rights and processes of redistribution may emerge. These actors are influenced by the international as well as also being constitutive of hybrid forms of peace at the state, regional and global level. They

10  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda operate in relation to local understandings of politics and institutions, welfare and economics, social and customary resonance and identity, law and security, framed also by external praxes of intervention and its norms for state–society relations. This occurs through non-violent, politicised processes, representing resistance and critical agency, as well as co-optation and compliance. They offer some socio-­historical continuity but are also interested in transformation, drawing on external influences. This is not to romanticise the local, or its related peace-formation processes, but to accept the primacy of their epistemological basis for any type of viable peace.20 From a peace-­formation perspective, the role of the state and the international is to build everyday peace which has to be contextual if it is to be sustainable.21 Peace formation represents a site in which the new and progressive politics of emancipation are being contested from the local to global scales, for the twenty-first century (extending the liberal-international, liberal-institutional, and rights-based approach that shapes much of the twentieth century). In an agonistic way these four cornerstones of this matrix, representing several phases of an interdisciplinary and intermethodological dialogue about the international, state and peace spanning at least forty years, point to the same thing: the emergence of a peaceful and positive hybrid order. This order rests on harmony, pluralism, and relative equality, rather than on structural violence, identity discrimination, inequality, or even a benign hegemony. Sociology, anthropology, development studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, as well as economics, politics, and international relations have all played a role in this debate and its interwoven methodologies.22 It points to a hybridised epistemology for peace in simple terms. Positive hybrid peace requires ‘. . . unity and diversity, conflict and consent, integration and exclusion, substantial identity and openness to indefinite change . . . to quote Balibar.23 Understanding peace formation in its relation to the other three dynamics is probably key to the sustainability of any peace and state that emerge. Yet it is also the most challenging aspect of the whole process of creating a viable and legitimate order or peace. A peace dominated by the processes of local-scale peace formation and also connected to externalised peacebuilding is likely to be more viable, particularly if each actively shapes the other. One that is dominated by statebuilding or state formation is likely to be very conservative, security oriented, and is unlikely to survive in the long term because it will lack both international and broad local legitimacy and resonance (as the state will tend to be elite dominated and authoritarian). Eventually, such inequalities, whether in political structures, class and social hierarchies or in material resources will cause enough tension for the system to

Introduction  11

lose its legitimacy. A peace dominated by liberal peacebuilding rests on external support and international, rather than local, legitimacy. It may survive as long as the international normative consensus is supported in a material manner by international organisations or external states. It results, however, in a poorer-quality peace in the local context – as so many post-cold war cases of intervention have shown. Peacebuilding and statebuilding may appear to offer an efficient shortcut to the neoliberal state and liberal peace. Their attempts to connect with local peace agency should not come at the expense of peace formation’s autonomy, identities, and local ownership.24 All the frameworks for peace, from the international to the local, require pluralism and equity. Peace formation implies a reconstruction of political community, the state, and international organisations from the bottom up if they are to be representative, democratic, and responsive to the situations of their subjects in local, state, regional, and global contexts. Ultimately, peaceformation processes also connect to a postcolonial transnational civil society. Such resistance and critical agency can be seen as contributing to a local and international conversation about the impact of hegemony, colonial praxis, global economic governance, and the reconstitution of rights, needs and identity. This conversation is carried on along transversal, transnational networks and connects both the liberal and the local, the global north and south. These are driving the emergence of new peace networks in subtle and unscripted ways.25 These networks normally transcend the state as well as any northern consensus in postcolonial and subaltern fashion, however. They operate via the international system itself, through communications, trade, civil and global civil society, donors and agencies, IFIs, NGOs, and even academia where such critical agency is now exercised on both a global and a local scale.26 They are dynamic and offer legitimacy for the polity at both levels, in cultural, social, political, and economic terms.27 They draw on local, and sometimes international, forms of legitimacy and operate from platforms that the state – when not representing the consensus of its citizens or international norms – finds difficult to engage with or countermand. Increasingly, they critique the state, international organisation, financial institutions and donors, reminiscent of the subaltern critique of imperialism.28 The United Nations, World Bank and other international organisations tend to react by adjusting their strategies and policies to reflect the intent of those peace networks to do more for those who need assistance without doing harm. This convergence ensures local ownership and prevents trusteeship from emerging. Nevertheless, they are only partially successful. What success emerges out of this process depends upon peace-formation dynamics as much as it hinges on international engagement. Local processes of peace formation are often in partial opposition to

12  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda statebuilding and liberal peace processes, as well as to violent forms of state formation. This is not to suggest that local agency represents an ideal subject but that ‘less is more’ in terms of intervention. It may be preferable to focus on the enablement of local actors who have longstanding knowledge, legitimacy and capacity but who do not exercise direct or governmental power. This would add legitimacy to the reform of the state, the nature of the peace, as well as to the relations between domestic and international actors. Executive decision-making power, extruded from international donors, agencies, IFIs, the United Nations, or foreign ministries for reasons of peacekeeping or humanitarian concern, should not seep into political, identity, social, cultural or economic realms reserved for local peoples to determine. Internationals may, however, need to deal with local or state-level exercises of power where they are producing direct and structural violence in order to allow peace formation to prosper. Clearly, a positive hybrid peace is preferable, given that an internationally oriented peace would lack local legitimacy (because it is internationally designed), and a negative hybrid peace would probably lack local and international legitimacy. The objective would be to find a progressive interrelationship between peace formation, peacebuilding and statebuilding that mitigates violent forms of state formation and other types of local violence as well as creating a supportive international political and economic environment. Solving conflicts and making peace cannot be carried out by focusing only on the state or on norms but must also tie in with local social practices and tackle the injustices and inequalities maintained by the international system. Peace formation does not depend on idealised local subjects nor on benevolent internationals. Instead, different political struggles interact to determine the nature of peace, institutions, norms, rights, and the state, and run from the local to the global, leading to key narratives of legitimacy. The smaller the gap between local and global narratives, the more the universalist impulse of the international is shaped by the multiple particularisms of the local and their interactions. Power relations determine the overall shape of the hybrid peace and the form of state that emerges. Given that power circulates and includes domination and resistance, local agency plays an important role in shaping both peace and the state. This is not a matter of enabling hegemony through neo-native administrations to have its way (as in the liberal peace and neo-liberal state model) but a way of understanding how the local to global architecture of peace is transforming and redefining the contemporary framework of emancipation. State formation, statebuilding, peacebuilding, and peace-formation approaches, when taken together, offer the possibility that an emancipatory peace can emerge from the constraint of predatory forms of power. This emancipatory peace requires the exercise of governance in the inter-

Introduction  13

ests of the wider population, a more inclusive definition of international norms, the adjustment of instruments and policies to meet the identity, rights, and needs of local populations, and the effective support for legitimate forms of authority. Taken together, they imply that an emancipatory and hybrid peace demands the reform of the overall system of relations, from the local to the global, in the interests of historical and distributive justice in order to settle old conflicts and pre-empt new ones. The realist strand of the literature on state formation has strongly influenced the statebuilding and peacebuilding literatures and policies. The historical, sociological and anthropological strands have more or less been ignored because they contradict the right to executive and unaccountable authority of the internationals as well as their romanticised perspectives of the dynamics of local agency (as mainly negative). The reason why peacebuilding and statebuilding are externally driven and dependent is because there is a general perception that local agency is devious, that the state which emerges from its unalloyed development tends not to conform to liberal–democratic norms, and that its conflicts spill over into the international system. Indeed, similar perceptions are also often held of peace formation or civil society actors: they are apathetic, not innovative, and express their peaceful agency only because of the opportunities that external actors bring to the conflict environment. There is little appreciation among internationals, and certainly not among state-formation agents, of the risks local agents take for being part of civil-society and peace-formation activities, of its inherent weight and legitimacy despite this. There is little understanding of the ways in which pre-existing social networks, political systems, party systems, kinship systems, custom and social hierarchies may act to sanction those involved openly in peace formation. Similarly, there is little understanding of how peace-formation agencies emerge and are able to operate, given their embeddedness in these local, transnational, and transversal frameworks. They tend to bridge the liberal peace/​ neo-liberal state with local, sociopolitical, and historical frameworks and mitigate direct, structural and governmental power. Hence, they are deployed to support subaltern agency rather than invoking resistance. This is the reason why peace formation is so often hidden and is a slow process. This implies a realisation of the potential of such networks in terms of: how well they understand and can countermand power and violence, even subtly: how they navigate around contentious issues; how they maintain peace discourses and activism despite ill-matched external involvement and their intensely politicised environment; and how exposed they are to the range of sanctions which the agents of conflicts often bring to bear on those who deviate from nationalism and existing political hierarchies. All this makes it unsurprising that peace formation

14  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda is often the great hope of international actors for progress but is also little understood and often hardly visible. Indeed, it has become fashionable for international actors to penalise peace formation and to exert sanctions on its actors and organisations. Donors are withdrawing their funding for civil society to support states and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) instead, arguing that civil society has to be ‘leaner’ and more productive since the global financial crisis makes it unlikely for funding patterns to be sustained. This paradox puts peace formation at the centre of peace processes in terms of legitimacy but often last in terms of power and external support. Rather than conceiving of peace as a long-term societal project, internationals tend to ask for efficiency and observable outcomes on a short-term basis. Donors urge civil society organisations to ‘self-help’, to become ‘resilient’, to operate and become sustainable in a donor market place. They place few expectations on the state to support such activities, however, and do little to improve the structural conditions in which peace formation operates. This contradicts international support for civil society and undermines their subtle, but significant, capacity for peace.29 Given that peace-formation processes wield little direct or governmental power, it may well be the case that external support is vital if they are to make the transition from a localised to a state-level process. The national level is also where peace formation may be modified to reflect a compromise on existing norms and power structures (which may also be embedded in a conflict system), a social contract and international norms. What is most urgent, however, is to begin to understand the hybrid forms of politics and peace that emerge from the interaction of complex local formation processes and external building processes. The linkages between peace formation and external support may well be vital for its ability to counter violence in and around the state, and to create a framework for a locally legitimate and emancipatory peace.30 What this means in practice is a range of both uncomfortable compromises between international norms and standards and local patterns of politics, as well as a range of often ignored opportunities for a positive hybrid peace. The subsequent chapters outline these dynamics and the way they have played out, often in very different ways, in a range of contemporary conflict-affected societies.

A brief outline of the chapters Chapter 1 looks at the pros and cons of peace formation in Northern Ireland, a case where many would suppose that international, elite-level and social claims had moved close together during the peace process,

Introduction  15

having been at least partly reconciled mainly by various international and state-level initiatives. Roger Mac Ginty translates this as a form of oligarchy between domestic political parties and the British and Irish governments which did its best to stage-manage popular input. Indeed, the agency of local actors was encouraged when deemed useful but was ignored if it fell outside of the intentions of the elite peace oligarchy unless it threatened a reversion to violence. At the same time, however, party politics managed to channel popular support into the peace process, even as popular legitimacy for the outcomes of this process was waning. As Mac Ginty argues, this level of the peace process – elite negotiations and party politics – has not brought about reconciliation. Power-sharing was more about power than co-operation. Indeed, there was little concern about social reconciliation in the process which effectively preserved ethnic mobilisation dynamics, at least until 2005 when reconciliation issues where finally addressed in detail at the policy level. Little has been implemented, raising the question of where a deeper form of peace may lie or where it may come from? Thus, everyday life continues in the absence of practical reconciliation. ‘Getting by’ and ‘pursuing mutual goals’, attending public events or other such activities are perhaps where reconciliation will eventually lie as everyday life often requires co-operation despite the inadequacies of the formal political process. Such mutual dynamics might well be seen as a basis for peace formation though they have yet to become conscious peace activities. One of the key issues this book raises is what can bottom-up peace formation achieve if it remains separate from the state and other formalised power structures, lacks resources, and remains unrecognised by elite or external actors? The Northern Ireland case suggests that peace actors will seek to bypass the political establishment if so but that their efforts will remain marginal. In Chapter 2, Jasmin Ramović, Stefanie Kappler and Roberto Belloni critique the (neo-) liberal peace agenda in Bosnia–Herzegovina and the region, arguing that local politics and international intervention continue to be somewhat oppositional. They offer a rather more positive picture than Mac Ginty does in Chapter 1. The 2014 protests have pointed to a range of issues which are not even on the international actors’ agendas even though they are related to material and concrete issues across the country. This has thrown into question the Dayton Agreement, the legitimacy of intervention, and local ownership, foregrounding questions relating the objectives of politics and the nature of legitimate authority in Bosnian society as a more autonomous political framework than that imagined by the European Union or foreign donors, one which is not just critical of nationalists in the region and country but also the emancipatory claims of external actors where they do not directly speak to the concerns of the local populations and its

16  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda many different groups. They offer some insights into the mobilisation of these local, autonomous voices in extremely difficult circumstances. In Kosovo, rather similar dynamics pertain, according to Gëzim Visoka in Chapter 3. It involves often ignored grassroots and civil society initiatives. Many have retained their distance from sensitive national political dynamics and take a longer-term perspective. Donors tend not to value such processes highly because their impact is not visible or immediate. Yet they have been instrumental in building networks and trust in local politics, particularly for the younger generation, for women, former combatants and socially excluded groups. Visoka argues that this has had a limited impact on national politics, specifically with regard to ongoing European Union negotiations and with Serbia. His conclusion is that peace formation has more potential than has so far been realised. Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou argue in Chapter 4 that the Cyprus peace negotiations are assumed to be adversarial by definition with little sense that a peace process means that compromise is a basic principle which all involved must accept. Being socialised into the governmentality of negotiations, society and elites are enslaved by this adversarial perspective. In other words, the respective societies have not been prepared to accept the reality of peace. In an act of peace formation itself, the work of a women’s commission, with participants from all communities, illustrates how closely different forms of equality are intertwined in peace processes. Gender equality cannot be realised without a harmonisation of rights between the two ethnic groups. This, in turn, requires a reconsideration of the citizenship regime as part of a future peace agreement. Given the contextual and empathetic dimensions this would introduce to the long stalemated peace processes in Cyprus, their approach would ‘. . . pass through and surpass liberal values’. In Chapter 5, Sandra Pogodda and Oliver Richmond examine the emergence of everyday state-formation movements. With the peace process discredited through the abuse of the power imbalance between the conflict parties, pockets of local agency in Palestine have shifted their emancipatory struggle from peace towards creating the conditions for a viable and inclusionary state. This chapter introduces and analyses the concept of everyday state formation31 as the capacity (and limitations) of non-violent grassroots movements to delineate the political space of an emerging state by pushing back external coercive power and the governmentality of pacification. Given the risk of independence movements turning on to themselves after achieving sovereignty, grassroots initiatives are examined here as platforms to overcome political fragmentation and create societal consensus around the rules, design and extent of a future state. Everyday state formation illustrates the internal tensions of contemporary statebuilding: without reconciliation across multiple scales – local to global – the complex interactions of structural,

Introduction  17

governmental and subaltern power will tend to build societal fragility into emerging state structures. Chapter 6 examines the signals for peace formation in Afghanistan. Martine van Bijlert argues that divisions in Afghan society have long been managed through co-operation across different groups to maintain social, economic and political capital across networks of factional relations. She illustrates a range of ‘conflict-calming behaviours’ that try to circumvent zero-sum politics, including customs and norms of reconciliation, mediation, face saving, and forgiveness, which are also built into what would be regarded as good leadership. From the local to the national, there is an institutional and normative framework for the greater good based upon compromise. Not all of it is savoury but it represents historical norms and institutions that should not be ignored in any transitional process. Even so, it is more or less ‘unintelligible’ from an external perspective which is unable to comprehend the intricacies of complex sociopolitical power structures. Indeed, Martine van Bijlert argues that Afghan political bargaining is a more sophisticated form of peace formation than the negative everyday peace described by Roger Mac Ginty in his chapter. She terms it ‘everyday diplomacy’, adept at maintaining complex power relations but clearly also regularly breaking down and limited in its prospects of counteracting the negative effects of failed statebuilding, violent state formation and ineffective peacebuilding. Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom discuss in Chapter 7 international peacebuilding and local agency in Sierra Leone. They ask whether it is tactical or strategic. What they have observed in Sierra Leone is that peacebuilding and statebuilding have not made a genuine attempt to adjust to context. They still do not facilitate equal representation and rarely address structural constraints beyond political power-sharing. They give the examples of organisations such as Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone as agential and innovative local actors which have built extensive local–global networks more in sync with local realties and ideas and within the limits of the standards set by international actors. They argue that their agency is thus both strategic and tactical: able to create spaces for locally driven peace initiatives yet disciplined by donors. International actors still refuse or fail to incorporate figures of authority on the ground, bypassing social configurations of power, including the state (as with the recent Ebola outbreak), preferring civil society and private sectors. Chapter 8 turns to the case of Cambodia. Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes argue that local peace-formation activities represent a site of intense contestation partly because they represent a challenge to the state and existing modes of governance. State–society, village and family relations remain in dire need of repair after the conflict which e­ ffectively

18  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda constrains peace-formation agency to operate under a ‘veil of silence’. Closely linked is the restoration of cultural norms as a site of competition between interveners, elites and villagers, all of whom have recognised culture as an important site of legitimacy. Given the loss of memory about customary practices, their revival has been captured by elites who use them as a power base rather than as a nexus to transform social relations at all three levels. The authors also point out that new frameworks of peace formation are emerging, however, perhaps more in line with the current neo-liberal and technological era, with the rise of a new generation less linked to the social organisation and conflicts of the past. Post-liberal accountability mechanisms might be counter-intuitive and operate within institutional constraints, yet they might be surprisingly effective. In Chapter 9 Paula Lopes outlines the role of peace formation in Timor Leste. She argues that the partners of the United Nations mission were not representative of broader society and, in particular, of everyday life where traditional and informal governance remains most relevant. The international presence created expectations which it had no intention or capacity of meeting, especially vis-à-vis the social demand for speedy justice and development. The introduction of formal governance structures in parallel to traditional informal institutions has created new sites of competition over power while also enabling synergies for a sustainable peace. Tensions emerging from this competition have prompted some communities to build bridges between newly created state security institutions and traditional justice mechanisms. Consequently, the state might have converged more with society than internationals actually intended. In Chapter 10 Volker Boege illustrates how, in the Solomon Islands, very significant agency lies at the social level for peacemaking. Such actors have substantial legitimacy, capacities and effectiveness, including chiefs, church leaders, women and youth leaders. He argues that their contribution surpasses that of the state which is gradually improving as a result of external support. Relationships between the people are crucial to a durable and legitimate peace, and many arise from ‘nonstate local providers of peace and order’. Boege argues for complementarity between such dynamics and externals but also indicates that, so far, collaboration has been ad hoc, informal and sporadic, meaning that the country is more or less dependent on external actors for its current liberal peace order which is far from being grounded. Perhaps this is not an oversight: a level of dependency is required by international actors to produce relatively homogeneous state units based upon international, centralised and, perhaps, hegemonic conceptions of rights, law and trade which would be able to co-operate easily by virtue of their similarity. Peace formation suggests a highly differentiated patchwork

Introduction  19

of locally formed polities which would then each have to negotiate a web of co-operative relationships with other very different polities, both internally and externally. Which is more conducive to positive and emancipatory forms of peace? In the Solomon Islands, Boege argues that people neither want to return to traditional modes of everyday governance exclusively nor are unmodified Western institutions in demand. Instead, even people in remote villages want a state that is in line with their own traditions of governance and responsive to everyday needs.

Summary of emerging themes The examples above illustrate some of the key dynamics of peace formation. All the chapters show how limited the reach of international peacebuilding, statebuilding, development or strategies for justice is into conflict-affected communities. They show how and why, with what effect, and with what methods social actors develop their own strategies for, and vision of, a more advanced form of peace. The chapters point to a far more complex construction of legitimacy and political authority, both already in existence and desired, than many theorists or policymakers have noticed so far. The different cases point to how deeply culture, context and justice matter locally, and how dense are the entwined networks of duty and responsibility from local to global scales, as well as the expectations this entwinement produces. This means that the modern state is forming in different ways to those often expected in state formation literature. The relationship between persistent local agency working towards peace and the liberal international projects related to rights, law, political institutions, and the global economy is far from smooth. Nonetheless, this tension creates some space for peace formation as well as ‘everyday’ forms of state formation, and far denser connections between local, state and international actors’ interests in peace than ever before in history. The interaction, however, of localised worldviews and lifeworlds with state elites or the liberal international community means a long-standing process of mediating very significant difference, of identity, experiences, and positionality. A small social organisation or non-governmental organisation may be funded by an international donor, or a wealthy private individual, or not at all but it may receive international recognition for its endeavours. It may also do more to improve the quality of peace on the ground than top-down, elite, far-off policies or actors. The co-construction of peace in local and state contexts, and the concurrent blockages these entanglements highlight, are crucial for a better understanding of peacemaking in international relations. The acute differences revealed in these interactions may be productive but they may also be radicalising.

20  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda Clearly the internal perspective is very different from state or international perspectives of peace and politics. Peace formation offers a historical and social positionality from which to develop peace with a level of legitimacy. It often begins with an attempt to repair disrupted local social relations. As it begins to engage with sensitive and political issues, it needs to maintain a very low profile until it is ready to move into public spaces, network beyond the local, and attempt to shape the state or the international policies towards peace in a particular state. Peace formation appears also to increase in scale over time after violence ceases as social organisations emerge, critique the varied sources of conflict and tension, innovate, network, institutionalise, and seek to build peace from inside out and bottom up. Our case studies offer a glimpse into the varied political landscape of peace formation initiatives. What emerges is a wide range of variations in scope, aims and strategies. While this diversity reflects the multitude of shortcomings inherent in the liberal peace as well as the range of grievances experienced across different sectors of society, it also indicates the coexistence of competing or mutually exclusive local peace projects. In Kosovo, for instance, some grassroots initiatives seek to facilitate reconciliation through inter-ethnic co-operation while others pursue a form of peace which is based on ethnic separation; some align their politics with the liberal peace while others create parallel institutions to the state in an effort to undermine liberal peacebuilding interventions. These contradictions point to an epistemological issue at the core of peace studies in general and the analysis of peace formation in particular. Any attempts to identify definitively the direction and nature of local peace projects might be based on essentialisation, disregarding the complexity and contradictions on the ground. Hence, our investigation into the manifestations of peace-formation processes should be seen as the starting point for a debate on the multifaceted nature of these processes rather than as their definitive characterisation. Visibility of peace-formation processes and their internal contestations is thus a crucial issue. Peace formers who are adept at building networks across scales in innovative ways or with unexpected partners, for instance, might draw more attention to their activities than exclusively localised forms of peace formation. Such visibility and the support gained from building networks come at the expense of autonomy, though. Many peace formers value transnational networks but also want autonomy and see civil society as important but also too externalised. Peace-formation initiatives in Sierra Leone illustrate that striving to build bridges between the local and global puts local peace formers under pressure constantly to mediate local peace agendas with international concerns. Having to respect donors’ red lines means limiting the political space wherein legitimate local solutions to societal

Introduction  21

tensions can be found. Exclusionary practices and association of peace formation with the often discredited sphere of civil society could be the consequence. Given that local credibility is peace formation’s strongest currency, some local peace initiatives thus prioritise autonomy over access to international support – a choice which, in return, limits the effectiveness of peace-formation processes. Peace-formation initiatives’ quest for autonomy, justice, pluralism and equality may even position them in direct opposition to international peacebuilding missions. In cases such as Timor Leste and Kosovo, some peace-formation initiatives continue the struggle for self-determination with mobilisation now focused on independence from externally driven peacebuilding machineries. The latter’s attempts to govern societies according to liberal blueprints may prioritise short-term pacification over long-term strategies for reconciliation. By contrast, reconciliation requires societal consensus building regarding difficult questions as to how far justice for past wrongs can go without paralysing the political process or establishing new forms of oppression. Divergent strategies to ensure pluralism and equality need to be weighed against each other in terms of their short- and long-term impact on societal fragmentation. Peace formation might mobilise in rejection of the liberal peace’s bias towards the representation – rather than reconciliation – of identity differences. In Bosnia, for instance, peace formation aims to overcome ethno-nationalism which has been nurtured by identity-based forms of political representation. In other cases, local mobilisation across identity barriers exists alongside local peace initiatives’ pursuit of group-based interests. Such variation suggests that peace formation can manifest itself not only in positive but also negative forms. The former strives for sustainable peace processes through consensus building across different segments of society. By contrast, the latter seeks a group-specific vision of reconciliation that harbours the risk of causing grievances within other societal groups, fuelling identity conflicts, and constituting new forms of domination. A distinction between those two forms is particularly difficult in conflict contexts in which the pursuit of group-specific interests forms a response to a long history of discrimination against said identity group. Peace formation is thus part of negative and positive hybrid peace frameworks, being subject to local and other scalar tensions. It often bridges differences but also offers an alternative, rather than mainstream, discourse. It is often not supported by the state or by international actors but starts on a subsistence footing before branching out. It often plays a counterbalancing role against local or elite entrepreneurs of violence, or the blueprints internationals bring with them. These are some of the positive dynamics that have emerged. More negatively, it is difficult often to differentiate between peace

22  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda formation, resistance which may be less averse to the proscription of ­ violence, and regressive political and social economic systems. Furthermore, the claims of peace formation for subaltern rights and resources, not least for services from the state, indicate a form of statehood that international actors would be very reluctant to create (partly because they might have to pay for it). The character of state that peace formation indicates ought to emerge is more of a social democracy, with contextual, cultural and historical underpinnings, rather than a neo-liberal democracy. It is thus unlikely for peace formation to draw support from state elites who would either see it as an opportunity for social control or as potentially standing in the way of their material and political power. Legitimacy and justice are entwined in local, social, rule of law, and international forms, sometimes in an uncomfortable manner. Our case studies, moreover, highlight how important and inherently complex the relationship between peace and the state is. Even in remote villages in the Solomon Islands people tend to regard functioning state institutions as a prerequisite for realising their notions of peace. External statebuilding, however, has largely failed to repair state–society as well as intercommunity relations. Detached from its customary, historical and cultural context, external attempts at institution building have often empowered predatory elites, rendering the state a machinery for the abuse of elites’ power rather than the institutional manifestation of a social contract. In cases such as Timor and the Solomon Islands, imported state structures have led to a parallel functioning of formal and informal authoritative frameworks. Given the contextual knowledge needed to create legitimate state institutions, everyday state formation might appear to be the way forward. Such agency delineates the political space of state institutions, can help to create connections between traditional forms of community governance and national institutions, points to already existing forms of social contracts, and incorporates local cosmologies into the state-formation process. Through everyday state ­formation, the very essence of the state (its underlying rationality, the reach of its institutional machinery and the nature of its social contract with the population) would be subject to renegotiation from the bottom up. Yet, as the Afghanistan and Cambodian cases show, seeing the local as the solution to governance failures at the national level might underestimate the political economy of power that penetrates every layer of society. As long as multiple layers of loyalty turn the state into a mere reflection of corrupt, biased and chauvinistic governance practices at the local level, the local turn would fail to remedy the current shortcomings of the imported state. Hence, a fundamental overhaul of governance practices at the national level requires a change of governmentality within society at large.

Introduction  23

Some forms of everyday state formation might pursue the same objectives as peace formation, only through strategies firmly focused on governance institutions and processes. The relationship, however, between everyday state formation and peace formation is too complex to categorise everyday state formation a subtype of peace-formation agency. Everyday state formation is primarily focused on emancipation rather than on the balancing of conflicting interests which peace requires. It tends to affect conflict dynamics but often as a side effect of the renegotiation of power inherent in emancipatory struggles. In emerging state contexts (such as Palestine) everyday state formation might pursue strategies that clash with the other conflict party’s notions of peace – while being essential to overcoming the ‘rightlessness of statelessness’ of those demanding autonomy. Both peace formation and everyday state formation share their marginalised positionality in the face of systemic obstacles to local agency, though. Given that the state system is shaped by direct and structural power vested in the international level, everyday state formation and peace-formation agency need to create alliances at the international scale to realise their aims. Peace formation ranges across politics, economics, culture and identity into emotional and creative areas. It helps to repoliticise peace by creating platforms for debate as a starting point for networks, mobilisation and a rethinking of responses to conflict structures. This means that it is creative and close to the nexus of power that causes conflict. Yet, it lacks power to turn creativity into better solutions or, indeed, forms of state, or to overcome existing power structures which actually need conflict to maintain themselves. Quite often, we also see, for example, with a range of social enterprises that spring up in conflict-affected societies and, indeed, with revolutionary movements, that peace formation offers a very low-level and hidden discursive framework for imaging a better peace and improving one’s everyday life but it is not expected to have a major impact on the public framework of conflict, the state itself or the power structures that sustain the conflict. It may also be therefore slightly defeatist to point to peace formation as a crucial site of political agency, given its limitations (as all the authors in this study acknowledge). Peace formation starts locally, may be personal or community based, and so have little capacity to overturn long-standing social, cultural, economic or international power structures, norms of practices it identifies as inimical to a positive hybrid peace. But its discursive capacity is significant and may eventually herald structural and political reform. To critique peace formation for its lack of power also misses the point that, in a democratic context, claims are made for peace in a manner that indicates legitimacy, coexistence, pluralism, solidarity, justice and equality, framed by identity and history: they extend into broader networks which infiltrate the state and the

24  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda international very slowly. Counterinsurgency-style responses are far from appropriate responses to peace formation dynamics but they are often signs that the state or external actors do not properly understand, or are unwilling to accept, peace formation’s implications. These claims are significant indicators that might be enabled with careful engagement and partnership from external others. We hope that the chapters which follow assist in this endeavour, foregrounding the important roles of local actors working from their own positionality to engage with and countermand the structures of violence while maintaining both local and international legitimacy and working on their states to follow suit.

Notes   1. This introduction draws on Oliver P. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).   2. Roland Paris and Timothy Sisk, The Dilemmas of Statebuilding (London: Routledge, 2008).  3. Roland Paris, At War’s End (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Oliver P. Richmond, The Transformation of Peace (London: Palgrave, 2005).   4. Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter Publishers, 1988).  5. Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London: Routledge, 2011), Appendix.   6. Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12 (1983).  7. The term ‘local’ refers to the ‘infrapolitics of peacebuilding’: its fragmented, often disguised and localised agencies and capacities. We use the term ‘local-local’ to indicate the diversity of communities and individuals that constitute political society. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 178; Doreen Massey, ‘A global sense of place’, in Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 146–56.   8. Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).   9. Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanity Books, 1973), p. 17. 10. Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Critical agency, resistance, and a post-colonial civil society’, Cooperation and Conflict, 46 (4) (2011), 419–40; Oliver P. Richmond, ‘De-romanticising the local, demystifying the international: aspects of liberal–local hybridity in Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands’, Pacific Review, 24 (1) (2011), 115–36. 11. Ken Menkhaus, ‘Governance without government in Somalia’, International Security, 31 (3) (2006), 74–106.

Introduction  25 12. Paul van Tongeren, M. Brenk, M. Hellema and J. Verhoeven (eds), People Building Peace II (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005); Stefanie Kappler and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Peacebuilding in Bosnia: resistance or emancipation?’, Security Dialogue, 42 (3) (2011); Rachel Seder, ‘Reframing citizenship: indigenous rights, local power and the peace process in Guatemala, accord’ (1997), ; Josh Trindade, ‘Reconciling conflict paradigms: an East Timorese vision of the ideal state’, in D. Mearns, Democratic Governance in Timor Leste: Reconciling the Local and the National (Darwin, Australia: Charles Darwin University, 2008); Laura Zanotti, ‘Cacophanies of aid: failed statebuilding and NGOs in Haiti’, Third World Quarterly, 31 (5) (2010), 757; Andries Odendaal, A Crucial Link: Local Peace Committees and National Peacebuilding (Washington, DC: USIP, 2013), p. 35; Carolyn Hayman, ‘Ripples into waves: locally led peacebuilding on a national scale’, New York: Peace Direct/​Quakers UN Office (2010), 3. 13. Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Peace formation and local infrastructures for peace’, Alternatives, 34 (4) (2013). 14. Andries Odendaal, A Crucial Link: Local Peace Committees and National Peacebuilding (Washington, DC: USIP, 2013), p. 19. 15. See, for example, Mary B. Anderson, D. Brown, and I. Jean, Time to Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of International Aid (Cambridge, MA: CDA, 2012). 16. Charles Tilly, ‘War making and state making as organised crime’, in P.  Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–86. 17. Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut Nustad, State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 18. Veena Das and Deborah Poole, Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004). 19. R. Mac Ginty, ‘Indigenous peacemaking versus the liberal peace’, Cooperation and Conflict, 43 (2) (2008), 139–63. 20. Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The romanticisation of the local: welfare, culture and peacebuilding’, International Spectator, 44 (1) (2009). 21. Confidential Official Source, Personal Interview, UNDP, New York, 7 February 2012. 22. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanity Books, 1973); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Ilan Kapoor, The Post-Colonial Politics of Development (London: Routledge, 2008). 23. Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), p. x.

26  Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda 24. Andries Odendaal, A Crucial Link: Local Peace Communities and National Peacebuilding (Washington, DC: USIP, 2013), p. 7. 25. Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Eirenism and a post-liberal peace’, Review of International Studies, 35 (3) (2009), 557–80. 26. See the collection of essays in Miles Kahler (ed.), Networked Politics: Agency, Power, and Governance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 27. Bernhard Knoll, The Legal Status of Territories Subject to Administration by International Organisations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Rodney S. Barker, Political Legitimacy and the State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 28. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Homi Bhaba, op. cit. 29. For example, see the Cyprus instance, House for Cooperation, UNDP, EU Commission, USAID, etc., Personal Interviews and Field Notes, Nicosia, November 2011. 30. Andries Odendaal, op. cit., p. 23. 31. Sandra Pogodda, ‘Everyday state formation in pre-state and revolutionary societies’ (forthcoming).

1 Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland Roger Mac Ginty

formation /​fɔːˈmeɪʃ(ə)n/​ n. formation; pl. formations 1. the action of forming or process of being formed. 2. a thing that has been formed.

Introduction On Good Friday 1998 most of the main parties to Northern Ireland’s violent conflict reached a major peace agreement. The accord involved significant constitutional, administrative and security reforms. In addition to a power-sharing devolved Assembly for Northern Ireland and many other provisions, the Good Friday Agreement also provided for the establishment of a Civic Forum: A consultative Civic Forum will be established. It will comprise representatives of the business, trade union and voluntary sectors, and such other sectors as agreed by the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister. It will act as a consultative mechanism on social, economic and cultural issues. The First Minister and the Deputy First Minister will by agreement provide administrative support for the Civic Forum and establish guidelines for the selection of representatives to the Civic Forum.1

The Civic Forum met twelve times in 2000–02 but was not invited to meet again after a collapse of the devolved institutions.2 It was conveniently forgotten about and kicked into the long grass. In any event, it was largely made up of appointees of the main political parties. The story (or non story) of the Civic Forum is indicative of a wider issue found in many peace processes: the locking out of citizenry from the political

28  Roger Mac Ginty process. In many cases, this process of locking out occurs simultaneously with an elite political narrative that refers to popular input and the public endorsement of any peace accord. Crucially, and in some very rare cases, citizens have realised that they have been effectively locked out of political and peace processes and seek ways of being heard and shaping an evolving political dispensation. Using Northern Ireland as an example, this chapter seeks to unpack the tensions between formal processes of peacemaking and peace consolidation conducted by governments, political parties and much of civil society, and processes of peace formation that connected more readily with popular mood, needs and aspirations. What emerges is a story of several peace processes that were able to overlap at times but often did not. The unpacking of the Northern Ireland peace process is informed by a power analysis or a concern to ask the question: where did power lie? The answer to this question points to a peace oligarchy or the concentration of power (political, economic, discursive, symbolic) in the hands of internal and external elite actors. At the same time, other forms of power – often linked with the everyday, the social and the cultural – were not so easily accessed by elite actors. Rather than a chronological narrative of a very long peace process (beginning from at least the militant group ceasefires of 1994), the chapter will mount and sustain an argument that the peace process and subsequent formation of a power-sharing dispensation amounted to a centrifugal process that drew in those on the margins, leaving very little space for alternatives and dissent. This process continued through the 1990s and 2000s drawing an ever-widening circle of actors into the peace process mainstream.3 But evidence is mounting that the peace process contains a number of structural defects which mean that it is destined to deliver a stalemate and is unable to address the core issues underlying the conflict. This chapter tells the story of this ever-widening circle of peace-process orthodoxy and the squeezing of space for dissent and alternatives. By squeezing this space, the room for peace formation – or bottom-up conciliation – was constrained. Before proceeding, it is worth noting that there is a danger that we invest too much retrospective coherence into the Northern Ireland peace process. Twenty years down the line, we may be tempted to see the peace process – especially in its early days – in terms of discreet actors making rational choices in pursuit of strategy. In reality, and as many of the now emerging diaries and memoirs reveal, all of the actors in the peace process were ‘making it up as they went along’.4 There was a good deal of trial and error, and misunderstanding and miscommunication. No actor was able to make and maintain a strategy in isolation from other actors. Instead, the peace process was a space defined by hurly-burly, dynamic, long periods of stasis, speculation, frustration and clashes of

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  29

aspirations, expectations, and time frames. The following analysis has been written with the benefit of hindsight but even the distance of a few decades is not enough to make sense of a still ongoing process. This chapter proceeds with three sections. Section 1, ‘The only game in town’, illustrates the point that the peace process drew in a greater number of actors as it took off, matured and reached fruition in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. Section 2, ‘The people’s peace process?’, considers the extent to which the peace process was participatory, ‘locally owned’ and popular. Certainly the discursive framing of the peace process, and some events, pointed towards a participatory process, yet there is strong evidence of a ‘lockout’, or the concentration of power in a number of elite hands and the controlling of the public narrative of the peace process. Section 3 considers the prospects for peace formation or bottom-up and communal peacebuilding in the context of a peace process that provided a shrinking space for ­alternatives and dissent.­

The only game in town After becoming British prime minister in May 1997, Tony Blair’s first trip out of London was to Northern Ireland. There he made a speech meant to restart a Northern Ireland peace process which had been parked by John Major’s Conservative government. In remarks directed at pro-united Ireland militants and their political party, Sinn Fein, he said: I am ready to make one further effort to proceed with the inclusive talks process. My message to Sinn Fein is clear. The settlement train is leaving. I want you on that train. But it is leaving anyway, and I will not allow it to wait for you. You cannot hold the process to ransom any longer.5

Blair’s message echoed many other similar statements made during the peace process: it was the only game in town. The alternative, it was made clear, was a status quo of continued stalemated violence, with securitised responses from the British government. The message from the British and Irish governments, that established themselves as ‘custodians’ of the peace process, was that the peace process was to be an inclusive space in which parties could explore possible constitutional and political outcomes and benefit from any opportunities that might accrue. This move towards an ‘inclusive’ peace process marked a step change from the British and Irish governments.6 Over the previous two-and-a-half decades, multiple attempts had been made to kick-start negotiations between the antagonists.7 All these negotiations

30  Roger Mac Ginty were based on the idea that only moderate political parties could be included: that is; parties that eschewed violence by non-state actors. All these attempts failed because the veto holders were left outside and were able to stymie any political agreement. The peace process of the 1990s was different. It was based on the idea of including the veto holders (the militant groups) so that any agreement would have a chance of survival. For entry, the militants had to agree to ceasefire and, once multiparty negotiations began in earnest in late 1997, then all parties had to sign up to principles of non-violence and reach an electoral threshold.8 In many ways the peace process was an imaginary that participants had to buy into. At first, the list of those who believed that a peace process was possible, let alone had any chance of delivering a comprehensive peace accord, was very short indeed. The peace process began within Irish nationalism with secret talks between the leaders of the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party and Sinn Fein.9 These talks expanded to include the Irish government. Simultaneously, the British government, despite its rhetoric of ‘never talking to “terrorists”’ was in secret, unofficial talks with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the pro-united Ireland militant group linked with Sinn Fein.10 These early talks were exploratory. The prospects for success looked bleak, with continuing militant violence, state repression and human rights abuses, and political parties using traditional scripts. When news of these subterranean talks leaked, most of Northern Ireland’s Unionists (pro-British and mainly Protestant) were suspicious. They saw any peace process as being a concession process that would necessarily involve loss. This view prevailed among many Unionists throughout the peace process and into the post-peace accord period.11 David Trimble, leader of the largest Unionist political party during the multiparty negotiations, noted this scepticism in his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, ‘I am personally and perhaps culturally conditioned to be sceptical of speeches which are full of sound and fury, idealistic in intention, but impossible of implementation; and I resist the kind of rhetoric which substitutes vapour for vision.’12 Yet the British and Irish governments were able to mobilise significant material, symbolic and framing power to reinforce the message that the peace process was the only game in town. They were able to add substance to the peace process imaginary through the power of governments to award legitimacy to talks processes, to identify the venue, timetable and format for talks, to identify the chairman for the talks, and to ensure that the Good Friday Agreement would also be an internationally recognised agreement between two sovereign governments. The peace process imaginary became a widening circle over a period of time as political parties, churches, civil society, business and international actors all became involved with it and (to varying degrees)

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  31

endorsed it. While the political parties in Northern Ireland hoped to extract different benefits from the peace process, there was no doubting that the peace process had an allure which many found difficult to resist. It was a site of international attention (visits from Bill Clinton, invitations to the White House, a Nobel Peace Prize and so on) that offered forms of legitimacy and display that had been unimaginable just a few years before. It offered repeated invitations to 10 Downing Street and attention from senior figures in the British and Irish governments. It offered a chance for Northern Ireland’s political class to show their electors that they were serious politicians who could rub shoulders with international leaders. There were material benefits, too, in the form of offices and administrative support for the talks participants. There were, of course, many bumps in the road. The ceasefires collapsed and there was spoiler violence; there were changes of personnel in the British and Irish governments, and the Northern Ireland political parties were keenly aware of the risk of ethnic outbidding – or being outflanked by parties from within their own group who accused them of weakness or treachery.13 The electoral cycle was also unkind, with municipal, national and European elections demanding the attentions of political parties and militating against intergroup conciliation. After the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Assembly collapsed, or was suspended, on a number of occasions as it fell victim to distrust between Nationalist and Unionist parties. Yet, over the longer term, the peace process took root. It went from being a speculative and exploratory affair, which was confined to a handful of individuals, to a publicly acknowledged and internationally endorsed formal political process that was a strategic priority for British and Irish governments. As will be elaborated on in the next section, much of civil society came on board and was largely supportive of the peace process. The media were also generally supportive. While generally being pro-Unionist or pro-Irish Nationalist in editorial orientation, the vast majority of the media in Britain and Ireland was pro-peace process. The chief point of this section is that the peace process became an ever-widening pool of growing legitimacy. It was difficult for Northern Ireland’s political parties to resist the allure (and possibility) of the peace process. Unusually, bipartisanship prevailed in the British and in the Irish parliaments, with political parties supporting the respective government’s handling of the process.14 Even the largest group of ‘refusniks’, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), could not forever resist the promise of the peace process and the subsequent power-sharing government. The DUP maintained that the peace process was essentially a one-way process of concessions to Irish Nationalists. The 1995 annual party leader’s speech by DUP leader Ian Paisley makes clear his ­detestation of the peace process:

32  Roger Mac Ginty With every fresh [British government] meeting with IRA/​ Sinn Fein, with every new twist in the much-worked-over formula of the Civil Service communications, with every new ingredient added to the politicians’ double-talk there is one message that rings out loud and clear to the murder gangsters, their cohorts and fellow travellers, and that is: ‘Violence pays. Your bombs are stronger than the Unionist ballot boxes. Your bullets are more influential than votes and your battalions of gunmen more beneficial than elections won . . .’ Is it any wonder that the IRA will not yield a single weapon or surrender one ounce of Semtex?15

Given such a position, it was unsurprising that the DUP refused to participate in the multiparty talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement and urged voters to reject the agreement when it was put to people in a referendum. Only a narrow majority of Northern Ireland’s Unionists endorsed the agreement but Unionist disenchantment with the agreement grew after 1998 as the power-sharing administration collapsed amid the failure of Nationalist and Unionist politicians to build trust. Yet, rather than wreck the Good Friday Agreement, the Democratic Unionists sought to make it work to their advantage. The agreement was altered by a subsequent accord (the 2006 St Andrews Agreement) that paved the way for the Democratic Unionists to share power with Sinn Fein. The DUP was in the tent with what they had described a decade earlier as ‘murder gangsters, their cohorts and fellow travellers’. There is no doubting the continued enmity between many Nationalist and Unionist politicians but they have largely bought into the peace process project. They were able to do so because they could sell the peace process and subsequent political institutions to their constituencies (Unionist parties told their electors that the peace process was a vehicle for securing the Union while Nationalist parties told their electors that it was a further step towards a united Ireland). What is interesting is that very few actors have adopted and maintained a resolutely abstentionist position. The peace process was, essentially, the only game in town and the rewards for remaining on the sidelines, in the long term, were negligible.

The people’s peace process? The Northern Ireland peace process offered very many opportunities for public engagement, or at least the appearance of public engagement. Yet, as will be argued, much of this public engagement was constrained. It operated within boundaries largely set by the formal political process. At first, and for understandable reasons, the peace process operated in secret. Initial talks were exploratory and deniable. After decades of

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  33

‘othering’ their opponents, the notion of engaging with them – while violent conflict was still going on – was toxic. When reports of talks became public, all sides had to work within their own constituencies to justify talking with ‘the enemy’. British Prime Minister John Major had told the House of Commons that face-to-face talks with Sinn Fein or the IRA ‘would turn my stomach’ and thus had some explaining to do when it emerged that his officials had been engaged in detailed talks with the IRA for some time.16 The notion that a peace process was possible took root only slowly. Enmities were so deep and long-standing that confidence-building measures could only go so far. But the notion that violence could end, and that the human costs of the conflict could be reduced, captured the imagination of many in the media and civil society. Peace process optimism was much more discernible among prounited Ireland Catholic Nationalists than among pro-United Kingdom Protestant Unionists. This imbalance has been maintained, although enough Protestant Unionists were convinced of the possibility of the peace process to, at least, give it a chance. The peace process presented multiple opportunities for public endorsement. Note, this was endorsement of a process that was designed and maintained by elites rather than more meaningful forms of involvement. Three means of endorsement are worth identifying. The first was that the peace process involved representative democracy in the sense that the governments were joined in talks by representatives of political parties. The four main political parties (two Nationalist and two Unionist) have been mainstays of the peace process (though Unionists more reluctant than Nationalists).17 When multiparty talks began in earnest in 1997, an electoral hurdle was established to enhance the legitimacy of attendees. The electoral hurdle was set at a deliberately low level to accommodate pro-Union militants who had modest electoral support. Membership of the peace process via representative democracy has become copper-fastened by the establishment of the power-sharing assembly in which the four main parties are permanently in government with one another. Representative democracy has, of course, many advantages but it is predicated on the notion that political parties are truly representative. This assumption bears scrutiny. The peace process involved small teams around the leaders of the political parties. These small teams then reported back to the wider political party and made media announcements. Such a pattern (small group negotiations and deal making via political parties) more or less continues in the era of the power-sharing government. Transmission of ideas and opinions from electors to party leaderships is by no means automatic or easy. Moreover, there was, and is, a good deal of central control in the political parties which tended to flatten out dissent or varying opinions.18 Parties worked hard to make sure that their members and ­representatives

34  Roger Mac Ginty were ‘on message’. Some of the parties did experience serious dissent and breakaways,19 but, for the most part, the oligopoly of the four main parties has been maintained. In the four assembly elections held since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was reached, the four main parties polled over 80 per cent of first-preference votes between them. This figure has been slipping but 80 per cent still remains an impressive figure of major-party electoral dominance. Their institutionalised position at the heart of the peace process meant that public input was largely channelled through parties. Political parties are, of course, open to the discipline of the electorate and there were regular local, national, assembly and European elections during the peace process. Yet, parties are imperfect mediation devices. They filter messages rather than relay them in unchanged formats. A second way in which there was public input into the Northern Ireland peace process was through a referendum on the Good Friday Agreement. Held simultaneously in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, it was a chance for citizens to endorse or reject the peace accord. In the event, 71 per cent supported the agreement in Northern Ireland, with 29 per cent against, on an 81 per cent turnout.20 There was 94 per cent approval in the Republic of Ireland. The referendum was held on a straightforward question (do you accept or reject the agreement?) and so can be clearly identified as an opportunity for mass participation in the peace process. A hardcopy of the agreement was sent to every household in Northern Ireland. Yet, it is worth noting that there has been one referendum during the course of a peace process that has lasted two decades. Moreover, it centred on a question formulated by political elites about an accord formulated by the political elites. Certainly, many Unionists who voted yes in the referendum subsequently regretted that decision and told opinion pollsters that they would vote no in a rerun of the referendum. In 2005, for example, the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey reported that only a minority of Protestants (39 per cent) would vote yes if the Good Friday Agreement referendum was to be run again. Given that the actual referendum was a one-off, they did not have such a chance. Moreover, it is worth noting the pitfalls associated with the referendum device for a complex multidimensional conflict.21 A referendum offers a simple binary choice. This seemed overly simplistic for a conflict which involved multiple nuances. Depending on political stance, many people would have favoured certain aspects of the agreement but would have been wary of other aspects. Yet, the referendum offers a blunt yes/​ no choice in which the agreement was to be accepted or rejected in its totality. There is no doubting that the referendum was a useful procedural device at a particular stage of the peace process but it cannot be seen in the same light as ongoing public scrutiny and involvement.

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  35

A third way in which there was public input in the peace process was through civil society. Northern Ireland has a large and active civil society which could be seen at many points in the peace process. It mobilised during the 1998 referendum, held marches and vigils for peace – particularly in response to violent incidents – was prominent in lobbying political parties and the governments, and was adept at gaining media coverage. Moreover, peace groups and peace projects sprang up throughout Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland, and worked on issues connected with peacebuilding and reconciliation. Yet, scratch the surface of civil society activism in the peace process and a story emerges of the capture of large swathes of civil society by the British and Irish governments.22 To put it crudely, but accurately, much of civil society was bribed (or incentivised) to engage – f­ avourably – with the peace process. The Northern Ireland peace process was relatively unusual in that very large amounts of money were made available to civil society organisations from the British and Irish governments and the European Union.23 The last provided in excess of 1.9 billion euros from 1995 onwards. A pro-peace civil society was created through grant money, with community groups reinventing themselves as ‘crosscommunity groups’, or simply setting up shop to become eligible in a massive job-creation scheme under the rubric of peacebuilding and reconciliation. This is not to say that a pro-peace lobby did not already exist (there were long-standing, and very brave, groups urging conciliation during the worst days of the violent conflict).24 Instead, it is to say that a donor-created layer of ‘peace’ groups was funded by the architects of the peace process. Academia was not immune to this, with government funding, directly and indirectly, a significant number of research projects which were largely supportive of the peace process, the assembly and the formal political process. In the interests of disclosure, the author of this chapter has been involved in a number of publicly funded projects on ‘lessons learned’ from peace processes.25 Funding came from the European Union and Northern Ireland’s Community Relations Council. At a minimum, the projects – which were conducted in the early years of the peace process – were intended to normalise the idea that a peace process was possible. Government, to this author’s knowledge, did not directly interfere in the research process but, by tightly defining the parameters of the research, it was often clear that serious critical engagement with the concepts and practices behind the existing peace process was not encouraged. The issue of government funding research which should be generally supportive of government aims is not new. It echoes the radical critique of peace studies made by Herman Schmid in 1968:

36  Roger Mac Ginty peace research becomes operationalised into identification with the interests of the existing international system, that is the interests of those who have power in the international system. So peace research becomes a factor supporting the status quo of the international power structure, providing the decision-makers of the system with knowledge for control, manipulation and integration of the system.26

Over forty years later, Schmid’s warning on the capture of the research community has relevance to Northern Ireland. In a blog post about a British government-funded study on ‘dissident’ Irish republicans, two authors note how the British social science funding body (the Economic and Social Research Council) and the technocratic imperative of neoliberal universities (as seen through a research census called the Research Excellence Framework) combine to produce research that reinforces, rather than questions, power: there is the much broader issue of the role of the ESRC, which allocates its funding on the basis of ‘impact assessments’, and the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which channels academics into producing research which has a viable ‘outcome’ in terms of public policy. Independent, critical research is thereby relegated and denigrated as the focus is placed on ‘useful’ projects that are designed to help government departments. The logical consequence of this obsequious deference to power is not only effectively a stultifying functionalism in academic circles – occasionally it leads to the obscenity of noteworthy ‘academics’ offering, in effect, to work for the security services of a coercive state.27

Northern Ireland’s civil society was expected to be compliant, supportive of the peace process and keep dissent to a minimum. Many NGOs, attracted by peace-supporting funding streams, became GONGOs – government-organised non-governmental organisations. Existing organisations that were at least sceptical of the peace process, or even hostile to it and capable of causing it difficulties, were encouraged into the peace process ‘tent’ through cash injections. Thus, the Orange Order, a sectarian Protestant organisation which is resolutely pro-United Kingdom, was paid by the Irish government to employ an education officer and engage in outreach activities.28 The Orange Order is implacably opposed to the Irish Republic playing any role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Yet, the allure of lucre is strong. Nationalist and Unionist organisations, which were positively uncivil, were given money by the British and Irish governments (and the European Union). The governments were well aware that these organisations were not plural, civil or interested in the rights of outside group members. Yet, for the governments, the survival of the peace process was to be prioritised over keeping the idea of civil

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  37

society as a virtuous space. There are good arguments for the prioritisation of pragmatism over principle, though the governments rarely explicated this. Civil society, in the form of civil society organisations (CSOs), flourished in tandem with the peace process. Generous funding from the European Union fuelled a growth in the number of CSOs. This was supply rather than demand led. Without donor support, the vast majority of pro-peace and reconciliation CSOs, programmes and projects would not have existed. They provided employment but it is not clear that they aided the peace process in any measurable way. The governments and political parties were well insulated from most of these organisations. Nor is it clear that formal peacebuilding and reconciliation activities through CSOs had any impact on fostering intercommunal reconciliation. The best that can be said about the vast majority of CSO activity during the peace process is that it did no harm. This is not to denigrate the hard work and commitment of many engaged in the CSO sector. It is, instead, to point to how most of the CSO sector operated in a cantonment – parked in a place where it could make noise, go through the motions of consultation with the governments and political parties, but effect little change. Many CSOs folded when funding streams dried up. The most effective of the CSOs, in terms of gaining media and, to a certain extent, political attention, focused on victims’ issues. Ultimately, though, little headway was made on victims’ issues. There was no truth and reconciliation process nor any agreement on compensation packages. But, away from the artificially created CSOs, Northern Ireland had a rich associational life. As befits a deeply divided society, many forms of association (sport, cultural pursuits and friendship networks) operated within communities. Though composed solely of members of one community or the other, most forms of association adopted a responsible approach to the peace process. To the extent that any of them offered an opinion on political matters, they tended to be supportive of the peace process or at least of efforts towards elite-level toleration. The main churches (Roman Catholic, Methodist, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian) ministered to their own communities and pressed on issues that were important to them but, at the elite level, they engaged in activities aimed at bolstering the centre ground. It became common for the leaders of the main churches to issue joint communiqués aimed at defusing tension and denouncing violence. The organisations which did best in wresting concessions during the peace process were those that were already politically well connected. Thus, for example, the professional association of the police force was able to obtain extremely generous compensation and pension packages for police officers who would be affected by police reform. The

38  Roger Mac Ginty ­ rofessional association had the ear of the two main Unionist political p parties, and was well connected to permanent government. Similarly, former Republican militant prisoners were also able to negotiate preferential terms (for example, immunity letters from the British government) but this was because they were plugged into Sinn Fein and thus effectively had a seat at the talks table. There was very little, in fact virtually no, spontaneous public propeace activity. When demonstrations were organised (for example, in response to violent incidents that threatened to derail the peace process) these were usually initiated by established organisations with mobilisation networks, such as the trades unions. Other displays of pro-peace activism tended to be corralled through established means such as the ballot box or political parties. The key point of this section has been to illustrate that, while there has been popular input into the peace process, this has often been in formalised and constrained ways. It cannot be argued that it was a people’s peace process. It was an elite peace process with public aspects but the origin, direction and institutional outcomes of the peace process have been restricted to a select group of political and security stakeholders. There are, of course, practical reasons for the restriction of the peace process to elites; for negotiations to be manageable there is a limit to the number of people who can be around the table. For any chance of an outcome to talks, there has to be a limit to the number of participants.

Shrinking space for alternatives Thus far, the peace process has been depicted as an ever-widening circle of actors who, over time, bought into the possibility of a peace process, the possibility of a peace accord, and the possibility of a post-accord set of governing institutions. Actors who ‘signed up’ to the peace process shaped and constructed it. They turned it from being a putative imaginary into an imaginary that had visible manifestations, such as militant ceasefires and consequent changes in quality of life. As the peace process was ‘the only game in town’ political and militant actors were faced with a simple binary choice: to be in the peace process or to stay outside it. The British and Irish governments, and their backers in the form of the United States and the European Union, made it clear that there was a single ‘approved’ peace process and that there was not an alternative peace process waiting nearby. Over the long term, the vast majority of political actors joined the peace process. The Democratic Unionists, who had steadfastly boycotted the multiparty talks leading to the Good Friday Agreement and who urged their supporters to vote no in the referendum, staged a

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  39

spectacular U-turn and joined in the power-sharing government with their erstwhile enemies. This did not mark a reconciliation. It is fair to say that the Democratic Unionists despise Sinn Fein, their government partners. Yet they made a strategic decision to co-operate with Sinn Fein and enjoin (and lead) a system of government which was created from the peace accord they opposed. The DUP narrative on why they changed their mind was highly Jesuitical and linked to concessions they believed they wrestled from the British government. Ultimately, though, the chance to lead the power-sharing government (because they were Northern Ireland’s largest political party) was not something they could let go. Power won over principle. So who were the ‘hold-outs’ – the actors who shunned the opportunities of the peace process and maintained their positions over the longer term? There were hold-outs within both Nationalism and Unionism but, given the fact that most actors were supportive of, or at least complicit in, the peace process, then these were lonely positions to maintain. On the Nationalist side, the hold-outs were small numbers of pro-united Ireland supporters who did not accept that the Good Friday Agreement met their ultimate aim of a united Ireland. Their position was logically consistent. The Good Friday Agreement did not end British rule in Ireland. It paved the way for the disarmament and extinction of the Irish Republican Army, the principal pro-united Ireland militant group. Such absolutist views, however, did not suit a peace process which involved constructive ambiguity and the convenient overlooking of inconvenient facts. Two groups, the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA) and the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) split from the IRA. Both groups were comparatively small, were hugely penetrated by the British and Irish intelligence services, failed to gain much public support and were unable to ‘spoil’ the peace process. The groups did cause upset (most notably with the Omagh bombing that killed twenty-nine civilians a few months after the Good Friday Agreement had been reached). It was the atrocity with the largest single death toll during the Troubles. Interestingly, these breakaway groups very quickly became labelled as ‘dissent republicans’ or simply as ‘dissidents’ by the governments, the police, the political parties and the media. The use of the term, which echoes the term ‘irregulars’ deployed during the Irish civil war, suggests a discursive orthodoxy at the heart of the peace process. It is a marker of a mainstream and outliers. This position of othering the ‘dissidents’ was relatively easy to maintain given the violent campaigns waged by breakaway Republicans and the fact that a major peace accord was in place. But the violent campaigns did not pose an existential threat to the peace process and the subsequent Good Friday Agreement institutions. The violence was contained, yet the existence of ‘dissident’ groups was a useful mobilising tool for mainstream peace process actors. At key

40  Roger Mac Ginty moments, it provided enough cross-community bonding to enable the peace process and its political institutions to survive. Crucial in the story of othering the ‘dissidents’ was the role of their erstwhile colleagues in Sinn Fein and the IRA. Both organisations had a history of maintaining a controlled self-narrative. Sinn Fein worked hard during the peace process to brief its own members on developments, and to encourage uniformity of opinion. The use of the term ‘dissident’ by leading members of Sinn Fein popularised the term among the wider Catholic–Nationalist population. Indeed, Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister and a former member of the IRA, called breakaway Republicans ‘traitors’ and castigated them as enemies of the peace process.29 The ‘dissidents’ were unable to develop a serious political or media presence that could engage with mainstream opinion. Much of the media, and the British and Irish governments, portrayed them simply as nihilistic ‘wreckers’ without a political agenda. On the Protestant–Unionist side, the hold-out was the Democratic Unionist Party until it entered the power-sharing administration in 2006. The party represented a major share of Protestant–Unionist opinion yet, during the initial euphoria (and surprise) that the Good Friday Agreement had been reached, they were portrayed by their political rivals, and many in the media, as dinosaurs who would say no to everything. In the post-agreement years, as the power-sharing assembly suffered from chronic mistrust between Nationalist and Unionist parties, the DUP rejectionist position became the majority view within Unionism. The largest Unionist party (the Ulster Unionists) suffered defections and electoral seepage to the DUP to the extent that the DUP became the largest Unionist party. Yet, despite becoming Unionism’s largest party, the DUP entered into power-sharing government with Sinn Fein – something they had criticised their in-group rivals for doing. After the DUP ceased to be the hold-out within Unionism, a breakaway party – Traditional Unionist Voice – emerged. Like the ‘dissident’ republicans, its position was that the peace process involved unacceptable compromise. In the eyes of Traditional Unionist Voice, the Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent institutional arrangements marked a travesty in relation to Unionist goals. According to them, the agreement endangered Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom. Indeed, the language used by Traditional Unionist Voice in 2014 was very similar to that used by Ian Paisley in his earlier quoted 1995 speech. They referred to ‘the perverse “peace process”’ and ‘endless pandering to IRA/​Sinn Fein’.30 TUV did gain some electoral traction but it did not threaten the hegemony of the four main parties. Rivals within Unionism and many in the media did make an effort to portray TUV as antediluvian, as unable to come to terms with a new political order that involved the acceptance of a peace process.

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  41

Concluding discussion: prospects for peace formation? This chapter contends that the Northern Ireland peace process, and the subsequent set of power-sharing political institutions, took the form of an oligarchy between political parties and the British and Irish governments. Popular input was corralled and stage-managed. When deemed useful it was encouraged but it was ignored at other periods. This analysis must be careful not to be too churlish. The peace process and attendant processes did bring significant change to Northern Ireland, not least in terms of quality of life (with the lifting of much of the aggressive security policies) and in stopping violent campaigns that cost about a hundred lives a year. As an imaginary, substantial numbers of people bought into the idea, and actuality, of the peace process. This public acceptance and support changed over time, and varied within and between the ethno-sectarian blocs. Generally, however, the four main political parties and the governments brought the greater number of people with them and so they were able to point to public support as a legitimating device. Yet, at the same time, the peace process is deserving of a critique, and many of its deficiencies are not unconnected with the limited public input in the process. The fundamental problem with the Northern Ireland peace process was that it did not bring about reconciliation. Indeed, it did not even attempt to encourage reconciliation between the two blocs. The elite-level bargain was an enhanced consociational deal in which Irish Nationalists could continue being Irish Nationalists and British Unionists could continue being British Unionists but they agreed to engage in the day-to-day running of Northern Ireland. While there was a notable and much publicised reconciliation between the first minister (the DUP’s Ian Paisley) and the deputy first minister (Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness), this rapprochement did not extend to other levels of their parties. Chronic mistrust between Nationalist and Unionist politicians has been maintained despite them serving alongside one another in the power-sharing assembly. This lack of elite-level reconciliation was mirrored in the attention that elite political actors paid to reconciliation between the two main communities. The Northern Ireland peace process was a multidimensional affair with a range of political, constitutional, security, economic and identity issues falling under its mantle. Yet, there was no coherent strategy for intercommunal reconciliation. One cynical response would be to note that ethnonational political parties have no interest in lessening interethnic division. Given that their principal mobilising tools are ethnic identification, then a process which would dilute identity would be counterproductive for their electoral aims. A less cynical view, however, might recognise that these political parties had reached a peace

42  Roger Mac Ginty accord (albeit contested and imperfect) and that it was in their interests to at least smooth the running of the grand consociational bargain that constituted the Belfast Agreement and the political institutions it established. To facilitate this, one might assume that political leaders would be interested in encouraging bottom-up reconciliation and dialogue. But this was not the case. The Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) assumed responsibility for reconciliation but did very little to promote that goal. It was not until 2005 (seven years after the Good Friday Agreement was reached) that a detailed reconciliation strategy was reached. But politics got in the way of this scheme and it was largely unimplemented. In 2012, a further reconciliation strategy was unveiled but, since the backdrop was permanent discord among the main political parties, its message has been lost. Sociological aspects of the peace process,31 such as dealing with the past or dealing with victims, have been sidelined, farmed out to toothless commissions of inquiry or so highly politicised that they have become toxic. Rather than routes to reconciliation and some form of ‘healing’, in the sense that individuals and communities feel able to move on, many potential reconciliation issues have become factories of grievance, deliberately stoked by political parties to antagonise their out-group rivals and to keep the intragroup flame burning. Any number of prefixes could be used to describe Northern Ireland’s ‘peace’: reluctant, fragile, slow, cold, frozen, bitter . . . Given such an unpropitious environment for elite-led reconciliation, there is some evidence of individuals and communities simply getting on with the business of life and, in some respects, engaging in reconciliation. Such activity is often ‘under the radar’ or a by-product of everyday cultural or economic activities. It is not advertised as ‘reconciliation’ or some other type of pro-peace activity. Instead, it is simply people getting by and pursuing mutual goals that might involve intracommunity activity. These activities are likely to be contingent on location, time of year, gender, class and many other factors. Part of this everyday reconciliation, tolerance, and conciliation may stem from a frustration with the formal political process to deliver reconciliation. But, in large part, it does not seem to be a conscious political decision on the part of participants. Instead, it is simply getting on with life. The examples of this everyday reconciliation and tolerance may seem marginal but, given the highly politicised nature of the society and the bifurcation of many areas of life (politics, education, geography), then these events and activities have a larger significance. Electoral turnout for the Northern Ireland Assembly is revealing and in keeping with other post-peace accord societies in which there is evidence of growing disenchantment with the formal political process. Turnout was 69.88 per cent for the inaugural election to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998. It has fallen in the

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  43

three subsequent elections to reach 54.5 per cent in 2011. This is significant for a society with a history of high levels of politicisation and electoral engagement and suggests a public frustration with the formal political process. One example of people simply getting on with things in a non-sectarian manner was the staging of the opening stages of the 2014 Giro d’Italia in Northern Ireland. This massive cycling event captured the public imagination. The Giro’s colour – pink – appeared throughout Northern Ireland; and, since pink is not traditionally associated with one side or the other, it was a baggage-free symbolism. Huge crowds, Catholics and Protestants, attended the stages. They did so, not as Catholics or Protestants, Nationalists or Unionists, but – for the most part – as interested spectators. The notion that a major public spectacle could be shared would have been anathema in the 1970s and 1980s given the security situation. In a sense, it is progress that such events can be held, that there is public confidence. An example like this one might seem inconsequential or marginal but, in the context of Northern Ireland, it is quite significant. It was joined by a range of other seemingly marginal events (for example, a street theatre festival, a Halloween gathering in Belfast city centre) that seemed to capture the public i­magination and transcend sectarianism. It is worth stressing that such events are fragile and highly context dependent, and must be seen against a backdrop of other less civic and civil street activity (for example, protests deliberately designed to antagonise ‘the other side’). Yet there are signs that some of the old mobilisation tricks used by political elites are losing their lustre. It has not been the case that the long-standing centrist political party, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, has been a huge beneficiary of the mood of antipolitics that seems to be emerging; its gains have been relatively modest. Instead, and as evidenced by the low turnout at the 2011 assembly elections, people are tuning out of formal politics. Whether this can be called ‘peace formation’ is worthy of debate. But it is significant that increasing numbers of people are deserting the old narratives, the established political parties, and a belief that formal political institutions are responsive and effective. The Northern Ireland case is in keeping with a number of other postpeace accord societies in which there have been significant declines in electoral participation. Bosnia, Mozambique and El Salvador, for example, have all experienced sharp declines in electoral participation and other signs of disaffection with formal political processes. They point to the phenomenon of poor-quality peace in which there is little opportunity or appetite for a resumption of conflict but the ‘peace’ leaves many people disaffected. The ‘new politics’ looks a lot like the old politics in that political elites are deemed to be separate from the bulk of

44  Roger Mac Ginty the population, and that mainstream politics seems incapable of delivering very much. Crucially, international systems (whether the orthodoxy of statehood or the strictures of international financial institutions) tend to reinforce this poor-quality peace. A key question is: what can bottom-up peace formation achieve if it remains separate from the state and other formalised power structures? In many societies, the state controls access to many resources (material and symbolic). If peace formation activities (for example, cross-communal people-to-people activities) occur ‘under the radar’, then they are likely to be cut off from resources. Yet, by being co-opted, peace formation activities may lose many of the qualities that they need to succeed: a low profile, organic origins, and freedom from electoral and budget cycles. It seems difficult to conceive of truly transformative peacebuilding if the macro political environment is not supportive of that. In Northern Ireland that environment does not exist so, while it is understandable that many inhabitants will seek to bypass the political establishment, their efforts will ultimately be limited.

Notes   1. Northern Ireland Office, The Belfast Agreement (also known as the Good Friday Agreement) (1998), Article 35, (last accessed 8 October 2014).   2. Northern Ireland Assembly, ‘The Civic Forum’, Research and Information Service Research Paper, 5 September 2013, NIAR 561–13, (last accessed 8 October 2014).   3. Aaron Edwards and Stephen Bloomer, Transforming the Peace Process in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008); Feargal Cochrane, Northern Ireland: Reluctant Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Roger Mac Ginty and John Darby, Guns and Government: The Management of the Northern Ireland Peace Process (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Paul Bew and Gordon Gillespie, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, 1993–1996: A Chronology (London: Serif, 1996); Thomas Hennessy, The Northern Ireland Peace Process: Ending the Troubles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Jonathan Tonge, Northern Ireland: Conflict and Change (London: Routledge, 2001).   4. George J. Mitchell, Making Peace (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Mo Mowlam, Momentum: The Struggle for Peace, Politics and the People (London: Coronet, 2001); Alistair Campbell, The Alistair Campbell Diaries, vol. 3, Power and Responsibility (London: Cornerstone, 2011).   5. Tony Blair, ‘Address by the Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair at the Royal Agricultural Society Belfast, 16 May 1997’.

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland  45  6. Eamonn O’Kane, ‘Anglo-Irish relations and the Northern Ireland peace process. From exclusion to inclusion’, Contemporary British History, 18 (1) (2009), 78–99.   7. Michael Kerr, The Destructors: The Story of Northern Ireland’s Lost Peace Process (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).  8. The principles of non-violence can be found at .  9. John Hume, ‘The acceptance of diversity: the essence of peace in the north of Ireland’, Fordham International Law Journal, 18 (4) (1994–95), 1084–91; Gerry Adams, ‘To cherish a just and lasting peace’, Fordham International Law Journal, 22 (4) (1998–99), 1179–95. 10. Anthony Wanis-St. John, ‘Back channel negotiations: international bargaining in the shadows’, Negotiation Journal, 22 (2) (2006), 119–44. 11. The Northern Ireland Life and Times surveys of political attitudes consistently show greater political pessimism among Protestant Unionists than among Roman Catholic Nationalists. The survey results can be accessed at . 12. David Trimble, ‘Nobel lecture’, 10 December 1998, Oslo, (last accessed 8 October 2014). 13. Cathy Gormley-Heenan and Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Ethnic outbidding and party modernization: understanding the Democratic Unionist Party’s electoral success in the post-Agreement environment’, Ethnopolitics, 7 (1) (2008), 43–61. 14. Paul Dixon, ‘“A house divided cannot stand”: Britain, bipartisanship and Northern Ireland’, Contemporary Record, 9 (1) (1995), 147–87. 15. Ian Paisley, Text of a speech by Ian Paisley, then Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to the DUP’s Annual Conference, in 1995, (last accessed 8 October 2014). 16. Anthony Bevins, Eamonn Mallie and Mary Holland, ‘Major’s secret links with IRA leadership revealed’, Observer, 28 November 1993. 17. Northern Ireland election result data can be found at . 18. Noel McAdam, ‘Edwin Poots’ [sic] attack on father figure Peter Robinson has badly backfired’, Belfast Telegraph, 25 September 2014. 19. Lee A. Smithey, Unionists, Loyalist and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 20. ARK, ‘1998 Referendum’, ARK Election website, 1998, (last accessed 8 October 2014). 21. Matt Qvortrup, ‘The history of ethno-national referendums 1791–2011’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 18 (1) (2012), 129–50; SungYong Lee and Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Context and post-conflict referendums’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 18 (1) (2012), 43–64. 22. For a fuller account of this see Chapter 8 of Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011).

46  Roger Mac Ginty 23. Sean Byrne et al., ‘The role of the International Fund for Ireland and the EU Peace II Fund in reducing violence and sectarianism in Northern Ireland’, International Politics, 47 (2010), 229–50. 24. Ann Le Mare, Ann and Felicity McCartney (eds), Coming from the Silence: Quaker Peacebuilding Initiatives in Northern Ireland 1969–2007 (York: Sessions, 2010). 25. John Darby and Roger Mac Ginty (eds), The Management of Peace Processes (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 26. Herman Schmid, ‘Peace research and politics’, Journal of Peace Research, 5 (3) (1968), 217–31 at 229. 27. Michael Hayes and Anthony McIntyre, ‘The Liverpool University research project on “dissident” Irish Republicanism – working for the British state?’, The Pensive Quill Blog, 6, October 2014, (last accessed 10 October 2014). 28. Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding, p. 201. 29. Henry McDonald, ‘Martin McGuinness says dissident republicans are trying to kill him’, Observer, 24 April 2009. 30. TUV, Manifesto 2014: Principled Politics at Home and Abroad, 2014, (last accessed 10 October 2014). 31. John Brewer, Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

2 Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´

Introduction It has long been argued that Bosnians are apathetic, apolitical and not capable of, or willing to, bring about political change. The international community has often accused Bosnians of being inert,1 emphasising how citizens could have a positive impact upon the local political process through the elections but have often failed to do so. As this chapter shows, however, often overlooked processes of political mobilisation have taken place in Bosnia–Herzegovina (BiH) because of, or perhaps in spite of, a system based on international tutelage. Cultural and social movements of resistance have existed in the country for some time but were barely channelled into official political processes. Such movements, as we argue, have laid the foundations for a wave of high-profile protests in many Bosnian towns in February 2014. These protests testify to Bosnian citizens’ attempt to reclaim their agency and suggest alternatives of how their economic, political and social needs can be met. Popular protests as well as bottom-up proposals have faced mixed responses by the international community. In fact, the protest movements have forced international actors to rethink the role of Bosnian citizens in the peace- and state-building jigsaw while, at the same time, clinging firmly to established top-down mechanisms of intervention. It is through the interaction between such competing processes that we can see the potential emergence of a post-liberal peace which, however, is still carrying the burden of two decades of intervention. This chapter takes an insider–outsider perspective in that one of the authors has been involved in the protest movement himself. These insider experiences are complemented through interviews as well as a

48  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´ long-standing engagement with international peacebuilding on the part of all authors. We have seen the recent protests as a fundamental change to previous patterns of political apathy as well as the ways in which the ‘everyday’ is politicised.2 At the same time, we acknowledge the continuities of international intervention linked to the power of the state. We see these interactions as particularly relevant in our analysis of agency that responds to the inadequacy of the ‘Liberal Peace’.3

Political agency in Bosnia–Herzegovina With respect to local agency, the assessment of Bosnians as ‘apathetic’ does not take into account the recent political history of the country, the disempowering role of the international community, as well as the presence of significant agencies and activities concentrated outside of the public sphere. To begin with, the first experience of mass-scale protests played an important role in depressing degrees of public political participation for years to come. It took place shortly after the country’s authoritarian regime was replaced by a democratic one and at a time when Yugoslavia started to crumble. A series of demonstrations for peace was held in this period, gathering an unprecedented number of people.4 The protests culminated on 5 April 1992 when approximately 100,000 people assembled in Sarajevo in front of the BiH parliament demanding peace. Sniper shots were fired at protesters, introducing the siege of the city and the cataclysm which was to engulf the entire country for three-and-a-half years. This traumatic experience has left a mark of deep frustration in the memories of Bosnian people by sending a message that the public is powerless when faced with the agenda of political elites.5 Both the conflict which ensued and the post-conflict years, dominated by nationalist politics, have served to engrain this message in the memory of all citizens and to restrict them to a voting body prey to manipulation by political elites. The fact that most jobs in the bloated civil service depend on political connections and patronage contributes significantly to passivity. Second, strong interventionism by the international community until 2006 left only minimal space for grassroots initiatives and consultations with local actors, and thus obstructed citizens’ activism. This heavyhanded approach achieved some short-term positive results and led key international actors to perceive BiH as a successful liberal peacebuilding project.6 The resulting reduced role of the international community after 2006 allowed the defects of the liberal peacebuilding to surface. The stalemate which has characterised BiH ever since confirms the limitations of international intervention which has been almost exclusively focused on issues relevant for the interveners themselves, such as

Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Liberal Peace  49

economic and political liberalisation, with local voices reduced to artificially created non-governmental organisations (NGOs).7 Third, the assessment of the Bosnian population as ‘apathetic’ is based on the assumption that political mobilisation happens in public spheres and visibly increases its energy over time. In the social movement literature, a number of reasons has been brought forward concerning why people protest, such as grievances, efficacy, identification, emotions and social embeddedness. What the bulk of social movement theory has long been doing, however, is to analyse the phenomenon from a rational choice perspective8 as well as focusing on the clearly visible manifestations of grievances and associated protest movements. The more hidden spheres of social mobilisation have not been sufficiently investigated in their ability to code and disguise agency in contexts where open protest may seem inappropriate or even dangerous. This is based on the insight that bigger social movements often emerge from hidden networks.9 Particularly in a context such as BiH, with a history of socialism and a risk of censorship, the public sphere has not always been the primary field of resistance. Some even ascribe this to the tendency of the Ottoman Empire to avoid building public spaces, at least outside mosques,10 which can be said to disincentivise open gatherings and publicly visible protest. Against this background, the vocalisation of grievances on the part of the population has traditionally not focused on public protest but has taken on a coded form in alternative circles. A number of informal or alternative spaces and venues has been in existence for some time. These spaces had served as microcosms of protest where political discourses countering the elites had emerged. Above all, cultural spaces and youth centres are particularly noteworthy as alternative arenas, and are discussed below.

Making space for change: the hidden histories of protest To begin with, cultural spaces have a particular standing in BiH. This has to be seen in the context of the former Yugoslavia in which culture was thriving. Even during the war and the siege of Sarajevo, the city enjoyed a vibrant cultural life, staging performances, exhibitions and other arts projects.11 Theatres were full as they also served as escape shelters from the atrocities happening in the city.12 Such dynamics have sown the seeds for cultural spaces acting as arenas where political discourses could be exchanged. This went hand in hand with the need of citizens to establish some kind of normality in their everyday lives in the chaos and abnormality of a wartime situation.13 This effort to establish, maintain and develop some sort of ‘free zones’ detached from but, at the same time, in constant relation with the official

50  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´ public sphere dominated by nationalist categories continued in the postwar period. For instance, the Duplex Gallery in Sarajevo moved in 2013 but before was in a location that was hard to find. This was a deliberate decision of the owner, not least as he viewed the gallery as a ‘space of resistance’ to challenge the ‘system’, that is, the system in which internationals engage with and fund Bosnian actors.14 At the same time, though this is an arts gallery in the first place, it is quite common to find a variety of people around the gallery discussing politics, including issues of social justice and the future of BiH. Such debates are deliberately kept away from the formal political sphere which is often perceived as corrupt and thus not worthy of serious discussion. Instead, discussions in the backyards of public areas, such as the one in which the Duplex Gallery was located, have seemed to absorb the energy that has long appeared to be missing from public debates. In that sense, though it may be counterintuitive to perceive an art gallery as a space of concrete politics, these alternative spaces have been able to re-politicise the everyday challenges as they arise in a peacebuilding context. Along similar lines, theatres have become increasingly socially active. Again, this is not least due to the crucial role that drama played during the siege of Sarajevo, including, for instance, the staging of Waiting for Godot, linked with the visit of Susan Sontag in 1993. Interestingly enough, the same play was staged again in 2009 under the auspices of the East West Theatre.15 One may interpret this as an attempt to demonstrate that as much as people had been waiting for the war to end in 1993, in 2009 many were waiting for this particular kind of peace to end as well. Similarly, the Sarajevski Ratni Teatar (Sarajevo War Theatre) hosts a number of politically engaged performances and exhibitions, such as the 2013 production Bio je lijep i suncˇan dan, a collection of Sarajevans’ stories about the siege. Such plays encourage people to reflect on their past and the ways in which it relates to the present. Interestingly, the theatre also hosts the Open University, a platform for public debate in the absence of public space in the country,16 where some of the most burning political issues have been discussed. While it may go too far to suggest that theatres have thus become platforms of politics, it can be argued that they encourage critical reflection which may or may not translate into political action. In addition to cultural spaces, youth centres comprise another example in which political mobilisation has taken place beyond the reach of formal politics. On the one hand, the audiences of youth centres are limited not only in terms of age but also in terms of attracting a particular type of young people who are said to be more ‘alternative’. As a result, it has been difficult for the centres to increase their outreach into wider communities.17 On the other hand, as the example of the OKC Abrašević (Youth Cultural Centre) in Mostar shows, the goal is not nec-

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essarily to represent or to reach out into society as a whole but, according to one of the centre co-ordinators, to ‘create a micro-society’.18 In that respect, a form of political mobilisation takes places which is fundamentally different from mainstream politics in its approach and direction. Indeed, the president of the youth council in Srebrenica has emphasised that she would not want to be a politician because with the youth centre she has a different way of bringing about change. In this regard, the centre is a space for resistance in which alternatives can be politically developed and in which people ‘can think and fight’.19 This is similar to the OKC Abrašević which is deliberately placed on the front lines to avoid being categorised as part of one or other communities. Unsurprisingly, one of the Mostar plenums, which followed from the numerous acts of resistance in Bosnian towns in February 2014 (discussed further below), took place in the OKC Abrašević, while the first Sarajevo plenum was held on the premises of the student radio at the university. Without identifying any causal link, it is nonetheless intriguing to ask to what extent these seemingly non-political spaces have acted as drivers of political mobilisation in 2014. Hence, while formal politics have long been based on the separation and division of communities along ethnic lines, these centres have acted as microcosms of an almost pan-Yugoslav nostalgia.20 The centres have brought together and mobilised young people beyond the nationalist discourses to create the basic stepping stones for co-operation along common interests, whether they be debate, cinema, music or other activities. For instance, this is evident in the youth centre Alter Art in Travnik where young people have come together, as musicians in the first place, since 1995. Though the centre does not necessarily see itself as a space for resistance, it nevertheless serves as a creative place in which ‘expression without restrictions’ is possible.21 This happens less specifically through political action but represents an attempt to restore the politically lost freedom through creative activities around the needs of the surrounding community. It is exactly this notion of free thinking and expression without restrictions that has been missing in the political sphere which has been seen by the population as constrained and lacking trust.22 Against this background, the ambition of cultural centres to repoliticise social discourses,23 or of youth centres to serve as microcosms of co-operation around particular projects, represent important mobilisation spaces for political action. It was only a matter of time before this kind of hidden political activity would erupt in the public sphere.

52  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´

Public protests in Bosnia–Herzegovina The protests that took place in Sarajevo in early 2008 have introduced a new dynamic which showed that Bosnians are starting to resist irrationalities imposed by the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA)24 not only in cultural spaces but also in the public sphere. A number of small-scale workers’ protests was held in the early to mid 2000s. Even though some of them were marked with hunger strikes, they received only minimum attention in the media and were to a large extent ignored by political elites. Only gradually workers’ frustrations merged with frustrations of pensioners and young people – who never even had a chance to find work because of the lack of job vacancies.25 These accumulating frustrations came to the fore at the beginning of 2008. In February of that year, Sarajevo experienced a wave of juvenile crime which culminated in the murder of seventeen-year-old Denis Mrnjavac. This triggered a wave of protests in which several thousand Sarajevans took part. Initially, the protesters demanded improved security but the focus quickly shifted on to the incompetence of ruling elites and their unwillingness to address issues which were of importance for the majority of the population. The public was not only disappointed because of the aggravated security situation in the city but also because of the general socio-economic situation, marked by high unemployment and a lack of prospect for youth – elements that to a significant extent underpinned the wave of juvenile crime.26 Protesters demanded the resignation of the prime minister of the Sarajevo canton government and of the mayor of Sarajevo both of whom denied responsibility, dismissed demands for their resignation and tried to discredit the demonstrators. In one instance, the prime minister even described the protesters as a ‘mob’.27 Protest marches continued for weeks along the main streets of Sarajevo, passing by the BiH presidency, canton government, Federation Court and Prosecutor’s Office, and mayor’s office. All protests were marked with the chanting of derogatory terms addressed at officials in these institutions. Though the protests were essentially non-violent, they escalated on one occasion and led to the throwing of stones at the building of the Sarajevo canton government. Gradually, however, the initial enthusiasm began to diminish and, three months later, the protests ceased. It seemed that little changed apart from the introduction of some shortsighted measures by the canton government and its pledges to build more correctional facilities for juveniles. In October 2008, however, the prime minister resigned, citing the poor performance of his political party in the municipal elections. Though never officially admitted, his resignation also came about because of his mishandling of the protests and the related fall in popularity of his party. Therefore, even though

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the protests seemed initially unsuccessful, they actually contributed to a significant change in government. The reduction in the popularity of the prime minister continued into the 2010 general elections when his party almost completely dissolved.28 As a whole, the main importance of these protests was their longterm nature. First of all, they provided a lesson to citizens and political elites by showing that the opinion of the public mattered and could even contribute to the resignation of the prime minister. Local actors rediscovered the agency at their disposal, the agency that had been suffocated by a Byzantine political system and a sense of powerlessness. Protests also set a precedent which would be followed by citizens in other parts of the country, as the following sections will show. Additionally, the non-ethnic cause behind these protests showed that many citizens share the same concerns, and that they identify predatory elites, rather than people from a different ethnic group, and the misfit policies of the international community as the main immediate causes of their misfortune. The non-ethnic nature of the citizens’ movement is perhaps best reflected in the protests that took place in Banja Luka (Republika Srpska) in 2012 for the preservation of the Pica Park. This park was set to be destroyed because one local businessman, with strong links to local political leaders,29 planned to build a residential and business complex. The protests soon outgrew their initial cause. The declaration of the informal citizen group, Park je naš (The park is ours), highlights injustices attributed to political elites, and is worth quoting at some length: We come at a time when the ruling oligarchy confirms that we, ordinary people, are the biggest losers of the war and the transition period. Under the disguise of ethnic interest, this oligarchy puts profit above people, personal interest above justice [. . .] this civil protest, as a manner of political battle, is not only a battle for the Park. It is here that the common sense, dignity and a right to a better life are being defended [. . .] the system makes us unequal on the basis of our nationality, race, and most of all on the basis of the class and economics. We have become mute, blind, without any rights, scared poor people. Enough of this!30

From May to September 2012 hundreds of Banja Luka citizens participated in protest marches. The marches were held along the main street, passing by administrative buildings of entity and city-level institutions. One of the protesters’ routines was to stop in front of them and shout ‘lopovi’ (thieves). While the park was eventually destroyed and part of the new building constructed, in June 2014 the businessman behind the project was sentenced to imprisonment – in a sense validating the protesters’ claim that the construction was marred by injustice.31 Another important protest took place in June 2013. It focused on

54  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´ personal identification numbers and became known as ‘baby revolution’ or ‘baby-lution’.32 In Bosnia, newborns are required to have an identification number in order to obtain documents such as birth certificates, medical cards and passports. The parliamentary assembly failed to adopt provisions regulating this matter and thus brought issuance of ID numbers to a halt for a few months. Belmina Ibrišević was one of the children born in that period who needed a passport to travel outside BiH to get a medical treatment which her life depended on.33 Political elites ignored calls from her family and from the media to solve the problem and, instead, saw the issue of identity numbers as a vital national interest which had to be defended by all means available. Meanwhile, another child, Berina Hamidović, became the first victim of the ID numbers row. She died on 13 June, just before she turned three months.34 Mothers of other newborns decided to act. On 5 June 2013 they arrived in front of the parliament building with their prams and babies and, together with three thousand other citizens, formed a chain around the building, with the intention of preventing parliamentarians from leaving it until the new law on ID numbers was adopted. This action brought immense public support for the protesters – demonstrating the presence in the country of a non-ethnic solidarity unseen on a similar scale after the conflict. Even though politicians again tried to defend their actions, with reference to national/​ethnic causes, they eventually adopted a new version of the law, which enabled the issuance of ID numbers.35 Apart from demonstrating through protests, Bosnians have also exercised their voting rights in the 2010 elections to bring about significant change. The Social-Democratic Party (SDP), which declared itself as nonnationalistic and focused on socio-economic issues rather than those of identity, received the majority of votes. The 2010 elections showed that, despite the fact that the Dayton-based constitution entrenched ethnic divisions, nationalist politics, corruption and patronage, some electoral change was possible. Soon after the elections, however, expectations of change via institutional means were disappointed. SDP politicians used the flawed political system to do what parties before them had done: striving to remain in power to enrich themselves and their affiliates.36 This, combined with a worsening economic situation in the country led to a climax of discontent which exploded in protests in February 2014. Led by laid-off factory workers, the protests began in Tuzla and were met with a brutal response from the police, provoking public outcry.37 The protests quickly spread to other major urban centres in BiH38 and some governmental buildings were set on fire, including the building of the Sarajevo canton government as well as buildings of canton governments in Zenica, Tuzla, and Mostar. Three days into the protests, canton governments of Zenica-Doboj, Tuzla, and Sarajevo resigned.

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They were followed by the resignation of the Una-Sana canton government a few days later. The protests quickly evolved into plenums which were informal citizen councils established throughout the Federation of BiH. The citizens who took part in plenums came from all walks of life: workers, pensioners, grassroots activists, artists, students and the unemployed were all involved in them. There was no formal leadership but the organisation of plenum activities rested on people who demonstrated the best organising skills and who had ideas on how plenums should be shaped. Plenum sessions were composed of two parts. In the first part, citizens had a chance to voice their concerns and requests – long ignored by the political elites and by international interveners. Everyone was given three minutes to do so. In the second part, the most common requests were adopted by plenums and sent to various levels and branches of government, demanding their immediate action.39 Eventually, the requests of all plenums were merged and submitted to the government of the Federation of BiH. From these requests it emerged that citizens were concerned mainly about issues linked to the appalling state of social justice in the country, including labour rights, ‘thieving privatization’, welfare and healthcare.40 These protests signal that citizens are breaking out of the vicious cycle imposed on them by a political system unresponsive to their demands and are demanding and beginning to implement a kind of peace in accordance with their history, culture and needs. By contrast, international NGOs, civil society actors often engineered by internationals, have failed to offer support to plenums or even to sympathise with their cause.41 The protesters have even called to condemn internationally funded NGOs because they are seen as tied to the status quo and to the (nationalist) stance that ‘there is no alternative’ to ethnic politics, nationalism, patronage and clientelism.42 Similarly, the mainstream media which, after the war, were heavily targeted by the international community, played a negative role during protests and plenums. There were very few media outlets providing accurate reports of the evolving situation. Many of the media served the political elites to spin the protests towards their agenda. In Republika Srpska, some media outlets published stories on the alleged, and unfounded, arming of protesters with the aim of preparing an attack on Republika Srpska.43 In the Federation the media reported President Izetbegović’s unverified claim that 12 kilograms of drugs had been found among the protesters, only to clarify later that the drugs were actually seized by the police in an unrelated operation. Additionally, some political parties tried to hijack plenums and protests in order to present themselves as the new, emerging subject who could replace the old, corrupt one. Members of political parties infiltrated plenums either to make sure that they could be seen as leaders of

56  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´ change or to undermine the plenums. The pressure from political parties was also manifested in the fact that some participants of plenums were coerced into abandoning them.44 Party members threatened participants with the potential loss of their jobs, with sending inspections to close their businesses, or with summoning them to police stations for hearings. The attempt to undermine plenums, along with the media harangue, showed how big the stakes were for political elites and how much they felt threatened by the citizens’ actions. As a whole, the pressure that political parties exercised succeeded in decreasing the number of citizens attending plenum sessions which gradually faded away. Overall, the achievements which came with this round of protests and with plenums showed the growing re-politicisation of the public sphere and influence of citizens. Apart from the immediate results evident in governments’ resignations, the protests provided a clear warning for political elites. They showed that public opinion matters much more than it did before 2008 when protests in BiH had (re)surfaced in the public realm. Protests demonstrated that citizens are becoming more organised in terms of articulating their requests and resistance to the limitations of the liberalised political system. The establishment of plenums provided a venue that citizens could use to voice their concerns and a medium through which they could take their concerns to appropriate institutions. Additionally protests, along with plenums, reiterated the importance of non-ethnic concerns among the population, and this is the main reason why they were met with approval throughout the country.45 More broadly, the heterogeneous group of the protesters and their supporters demanded nothing less than a new way of doing politics based on a shared concern and responsibility for the ‘commons’ and attention to socio-economic issues.46 As a whole, perhaps the greatest achievement of the February 2014 protests is the newly found sense that “change” might be difficult, painful, and slow to come, but is possible.

Local agency and international intervention High Representative of the International Community, Valentin Inzko, expressed well the discomfort common among international officials about the February 2014 protests when he suggested that, should the situation escalate, it might be necessary to send European Union troops to pacify trouble areas.47 This initial reaction was soon qualified in favour of an expression towards the citizens’ right to protest peacefully but, nonetheless, the reference to armed intervention revealed a profound confusion about the nature of the protest and how to address citizens’ demands. More than anything else, this type of statement highlighted

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two long-lasting and problematic priorities among international officials in their dealings with Bosnia. First, the international community has placed ethnic security at the top of its post-Dayton priorities – thus marginalising other concerns and values, including justice, economic and social rights and, above all, the promotion of non-nationalist politics. No doubt, this prioritisation has been largely due to the horrors of the war in the 1990s and the related concern to avoid a relapse into conflict. At the same time, however, Western anxieties about violence reflect a deeply ingrained orientalist or, to cite Maria Todorova, Balkanist orientation towards the region.48 This orientation plays into the hands of ethno-nationalist leaders who have been simultaneously working to preserve ethnic divisions while presenting themselves as the solution to the problems they contribute towards creating. In suggesting the possibility that the European Union could intervene to re-establish order and security, Inzko inevitably sided with the supporters of the status quo, that is, the very same nationalist elites Bosnian citizens have been protesting against. Second, and consequently, by accepting and accommodating distinct ethnic identities, the international community has focused primarily on stability instead of change.49 Though international officials have frequently called upon Bosnian citizens to ‘make change happen’ by rejecting nationalist programmes and world views at the polls (and, by extension, in every political, economic and social sphere), they have nonetheless been the staunchest guarantors of the nationalist ethnic (dis) order that emerged at Dayton. Not only have they stood behind the unresponsive, fragmented and ethnically based constitutional framework drafted by international lawyers but they have also contributed to the consolidation of nationalist power by turning a blind eye to the misuse of international aid and resources.50 As a result of this simultaneous, paradoxical role of both critics of ethno-nationalism and s­ upporters of those structures and practices feeding ethno-nationalist politics, international officials have failed to listen and relate to Bosnian citizens. They have blamed citizens for not abandoning their nationalist leaders altogether – thus not recognising that support for ethno-nationalist parties has been a rational response to a condition of fragmentation and fear.51 Perhaps most importantly, when Bosnians have expressed clear non-nationalist views and demands, as in the case of the February 2014 protests and in a variety of other instances described above, they have either ignored those demands or interpreted them as a threat to stability rather than as an opportunity for progressive change. This inability to recognise and support non-nationalist views has characterised the international community’s approach to Bosnia. Most international observers, journalists and, above all, civil servants and diplomats have focused their analysis of, and approach to, intervention

58  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´ relying on ethnic and national categories.52 For example, in commenting on the February 2014 revolts, Inzko pointed out how ‘Muslims’ were primarily involved. By so doing, Inzko involuntarily validated Bosnian leaders’ self-serving claim that the protests should have been understood as an ethnic problem caused by ‘hooligans’ under the orders of other ethnic groups and not as social and economic ones motivated by corruption and misrule. Faced with mounting criticism about his inability to interpret and act upon the situation, Inzko rectified his views claiming that ‘protests are not about who is a Bosniak, Croat, a Serb or an Other . . . [they are] about jobs and a normal, dignified life for all’.53 While this correction belatedly stated the obvious, it did little to restore legitimacy for international officials who are widely perceived as being either complicit with ethno-nationalists or aloof and unable to address citizens’ needs and demands. More broadly, the February 2014 protests revealed the bankruptcy of the international strategy based on an economic and political liberalisation formula. Neo-liberal restructuring is frequently criticised for privileging the few through privatisation and austerity programmes, and for failing to sustain economic recovery – in Bosnia as elsewhere. Less noticed is the important role micro finance has assumed within neo-liberal economic programmes. International interveners consider micro finance to be one of the most promising tools with which to unleash individual entrepreneurship while, in a neo-liberal fashion, making redundant state responses to poverty alleviation. Despite high expectations, however, International Monetary Fund and World Bank micro-credit schemes have had a destructive economic and social impact on Bosnia – contributing to plunging a growing number of people into poverty and to creating the conditions for the sudden outbreak of ­citizens’ ­dissatisfaction – as in February 2014. The micro-finance sector appeared initially to have some success by mid 2000s when nearly 400,000 micro-loans were granted. Loans that mostly underpinned consumption spending, however, led to growing individual debt and eventually resulted in the closing of micro-finance institutions54 and the collapse of the micro-finance sector. As a result, ‘many ordinary Bosnian people . . . feel that they have effectively been abused by the microfinance industry, not assisted to better their lives’.55 The impact on women has been especially damaging. In a country where a woman heads one in four households, micro-finance was expected to contribute not only to economic recovery and development but also to gender emancipation. Instead, women’s engagement with micro-credit contributed to their growing indebtedness, increasing default, and exposure to the humiliating court process required to sign off on their loans. The neo-liberal reformist zeal in the political–institutional arena ­similarly ended with a failure to achieve significant changes and improve-

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ments. For several years after the end of the war international officials engaged in assertive intervention, imposing legislation, removing obstructionist elected Bosnian officials and building a bureaucratic state apparatus. While this bold, forceful style achieved undeniable shortterm positive results, it had a limited effect on underlying power structures and on citizens’ daily struggle to make ends meet. Bosnians seemed to have barely noticed international efforts. Significantly, the early 2014 protests and plenums did not even address any of their demands to international institutions. While the protesters’ choice to focus their attention on local authorities undoubtedly reflected a negative assessment of the work of international organisations in BiH, it also confirmed an engrained attitude deriving from Bosnians’ long coexistence with foreign rule. Throughout roughly four centuries (1463–1878) they had lived as the westernmost province of the Ottoman Empire and later, for four decades (1878–1918), as a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In large measure, while formally ruled by others, Bosnians of all faiths have generally been self-governing in day-to-day affairs. According to historian Emily Greble, while not displaying particular forms of insolence or disrespect, ‘Sarajevans’ customary response to foreign rulers [was] ignoring them’.56 Given this type of response, it is unsurprising that the international imposition on Bosnia of a variety of measures has left most citizens fairly indifferent. The internationally perceived need to reach out to wider sectors of the population to favour domestic legitimacy of internationally sponsored institutions has led to a change of strategy. Since at least 2003, when the European Union solemnly and emphatically promised that the future of the region, including that of Bosnia, lies in the progressive integration into European institutions, international officials laboured to support domestic change without imposing it. Despite its persisting orientalist underpinnings reflected in the need of continuing external assistance and guidance embedded in the process,57 Europeanisation was expected to lead to the (more or less) voluntary adoption of liberal-democratic reforms by local elites without blatant top-down imposition by international officials. But even this strategy has failed to deliver change. The lure of getting closer to Europe has not convinced Bosnian elites of the need to abandon the most debatable ethnic guarantees, frequently turned into privileges for personal gain, and to reform their Byzantine, rights-violating constitution. In February 2014, as protests were breaking out in several Bosnian towns, the European Union Commissioner for Enlargement, Stefan Füle, held unproductive meetings with party leaders in Sarajevo but ignored the citizen plenums, only to announce a few days later that negotiations to amend the constitution in line with the European Court of Human Rights’ Sejdic-Finci ruling had failed.58 This fiasco was only

60  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´ the last in a series of international attempts to mediate among the parties and achieve the modification of the Bosnian constitution to comply with European Union standards and legislation. As a whole, ­neo-liberal institution-building has not led to the creation of an accountable state responsive to citizens’ needs. Perhaps more damaging for Bosnian citizens, institution-building has played into the hands of predatory Bosnian elites who have been able to highjack the reform process to preserve their control over their respective constituencies, and to take economic advantage from opportunities arising from the never-ending transition from war to a market democracy. As a participant in the 2014 events put it, expressing the views of many protesters, ‘the so-called post-socialist transition to liberal democracy has been experienced as a never-ending story of looting’59 within which ordinary citizens are stuck between a traumatic violent past and a future which still has to start – as expressed by the staging of Waiting for Godot mentioned above.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted that, with the arrival of the (neo-)liberal peace, the end of history has by no means been achieved.60 Politics thrives in post-intervention Bosnia, and the international community continues to play a crucial, if not always positive, role. What is encouraging, however, is the fact that the 2014 protests have given voice to a previously hidden political agenda which springs from the concrete needs of the population rather than from an ethno-nationalist discourse. The protests may have become less visible over time but they persist and are striving for structures of accountability which the international community had been unable to create in their twenty years of engagement. It was citizens’ initiatives that challenged the kind of peace born out of the Dayton Agreement which, in turn, raises questions about the legitimacy of intervention as well as the real meaning of local ownership beyond the top-down control mechanisms of seemingly bottom-up initiatives. Hence, the protests have cast light on a marginalised type of agency which has claimed back the ownership of peace on its own terms. It remains to be seen where this will lead, as well as the contestations involved in this process, but an important avenue has opened that might eventually challenge the participatory potential of Western democracies themselves.61 What is clear is that, successfully or not, such dynamics of peace formation challenge the peace infrastructure created in Bosnia–Herzegovina and beyond while pointing to the ever-present but often overlooked possibility of ‘non-professionals’ to equip peace with meaningful content.

Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Liberal Peace  61

Notes   1. Elvira Jukic, ‘Report highlights young Bosnians’ political apathy’, Balkan Insight (2012), (last accessed 2 May 2014).   2. Cf. David Ley, ‘Transnational spaces and everyday lives’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29 (2) (2004), 151–64.   3. R. Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (London: Palgrave, 2011).   4. In 1991 the protests for peace have culminated in ‘YUTEL zamir – YUTEL for peace’, a concert organised by the pan-Yugoslav newscast YUTEL. See (last accessed 4 September 2014).   5. Ljubica Spaskokska, ‘Landscapes of resistance, hope, and loss: Yugoslav supra-nationalism and anti-nationalism’, in Bojan Bilić and Vesan Janković (eds), Resisting the Evil: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Contention (BadenBaden: Nomos, 2012), p. 58. For a good discussion of anti-war activism in the former Yugoslavia and its legacy, see Bojan Bilić, We Were Gasping for Air (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012).  6. Tarik Lazović, ‘Christian Schwarz-Schillingotkriva: BiH bi se raspala da janisam 2008. godinespriječiozatvaranje OHR-a’, Dnevniavaz, 13 March 2011.  7. Roberto Belloni and Bruce Hemmer, ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina: constructing civil society under a semi-protectorate’, in Thania Paffenholz (ed.), Civil Society and Peacebuilding: A Critical Assessment (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2010), pp. 129–52.  8. Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones, ‘Mobilising citizens: social movements and the politics of knowledge’, IDS Working Paper No. 276 (2007), 11, (last accessed 26 June 2014).  9. Bettina Koehler and Markus Wissen, ‘Glocalizing protest: urban conflicts and global social movements’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27 (4) (2003), 947. 10. Confidential source, personal interview, Sarajevo, 6 September 2013. 11. C. Zelizer ‘The role of artistic processes in peacebuilding in Bosnia– Herzegovina’, Peace and Conflict Studies, 10 (2) (2003), 66. 12. Aida Pilav, Pozoriste Mladih Sarajevo, personal interview, Sarajevo, 31 March 2010. See also Asja Mandić, ‘The formation of a culture of critical resistance in Sarajevo: exhibitions in/​on ruins’, Third Text, 25 (6) (2011), 725–35. 13. Ivana Macek, Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 14. Interview with owner, Sarajevo, 23 April 2010. 15. Imogen Carter, ‘Desperately thanking Susan’, The Observer, 5 April 2009, (last accessed 26 September 2014).

62  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´ 16. Medina Malagic, ‘Start of Open University Sarajevo in beginning of December’, Independent Balkan News Agency (2013), (last accessed 26 September 2014). 17. Goran Bubalo, personal interview, Sarajevo, 2 September 2013. 18. Personal interview, Mostar, 5 September 2013. 19. Milena Nikolic, personal interview, Srebrenica, 2 April 2010. 20. Katie Hampton, OKC Abrašević, personal interview, Mostar, 18 March 2010. 21. Darko Saracevic, personal interview, Travnik, 2 March 2011. 22. David Chandler, ‘Building trust in public institutions? Good governance and anti-corruption in Bosnia–Herzegovina’, Ethnopolitics, 5 (1) (2006), 85–99. 23. Cf. Stefanie Kappler, ‘Everyday legitimacy in post-conflict spaces: the creation of social legitimacy in Bosnia–Herzegovina’s cultural arenas’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 7 (1) (2013). 24. See, for example, Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (London: Hurst, 2002); Roberto Belloni, State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia (New York: Routledge, 2007). 25. setimes.com, ‘Nezaposlenost omladine postaje ozbiljan problem u jugoistočnoj Evropi’, 17 July 2007, (last acc­es­ sed 18 August 2014). 26. Radio Free Europe, ‘Mladi i nasilje: problem društva, škole i porodice’, 26 October 2014, (last accessed 29 October 2014). 27. Radio Free Europe, ‘Političari zakovani za fotelje, “ostavka” im nije u rječniku’, 29 October 2013, (last accessed 20 August 2014). 28. Nezavisne novine, ‘Najviše mandata SNSD, SDP i SDA’, 4 October 2010, (last accessed 1 September 2014). 29. See BHT1, Crta – Političkimagazin, May 2014, (last accessed 26 August 2014). 30. Buka, ‘Deklaracijainicijative “Park je naš”’, 7 September 2012,  (last acc­­ es­sed 27 August 2014). 31. Nezavisne novine, ‘Potvrđena kazna, Mile Radišić odlazi na robiju’, 24 June 2014, . 32. Radio Free Europe, ‘“Baby-lution” protest continues in Sarajevo’, 11 June 2013, (last accessed 29 August 2014). 33. Elvira M. Jukic, ‘Bosnia’s feuding leaders give ground on ID row’, Balkan Insight, 5 June 2013, (last accessed 19 August 2014). 34. Oslobođenje, ‘U Beogradu umrla Berina Hamidović, beba bez JMBG broja’, 16 June 2013, (last accessed 19 August 2014). 35. Al Jazeera, ‘Parlament BiH hitno usvojio zakon o JMB’, 18 July 2013, (last accessed 26 August 2014). Unfortunately, it was too late for Belmina Ibrišević who died in a hospital in Germany in October 2013. 36. Deutsche Welle, ‘Još jedna izgubljena godina’, 25 December 2012, (last acc­ essed 29 August 2014). 37. An enlightening account of the reasons underpinning social and economic discontent, written by one participant, can be found in Emina Busuladžić, ‘Why?’, in Damir Arsenijević (ed.), Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), pp. 11–26. 38. Contrary to the widely held belief that protests have erupted only in the Federation of BiH, small-scale protests also occurred in Republika Srpska. 39. Oslobođenje, ‘Građani predali zahtjeve Skupštini KS: Ukinuti “bijeli hljeb” i beneficije’, 18 February 2014, (last accessed 30 August 2014). 40. See Plenum gradjana i gradjanki Sarajeva, ‘Zahtjevi Plenuma gradjana i gradjanki Sarajeva prema Skupstini Kantona Sarajevo’, (last accessed 8 August 2014). 41. Interviews with participants of the Sarajevo plenum. 42. Damir Arsenijević, ‘Protests and plenums: the struggle for the commons’, in Damir Arsenijević (ed.), Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), p. 48. 43. Press RS, ‘Demonstrantima obećano oružje za napad na RS’, 11 February 2014, (last accessed 23 August 2014). 44. Confidential interview with members of the Sarajevo plenum, 20 August 2014. 45. Klix.ba, ‘Većina građana podržava proteste, a nasilje predstavlja preveliku cijenu promjena’, 12 February 2014, (last accessed 22 August 2014). 46. Damir Arsenjivić (ed.), Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014). 47. Valentin Inzko, ‘EU-Truppen, wenn die Lageeskaliert’, interview, Kurier, 8 February 2014, .

64  Roberto Belloni, Stefanie Kappler and Jasmin Ramovic´ 48. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, updated edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 49. Laurence Cooley, ‘The European Union’s approach to conflict resolution: insights from the constitutional reform process in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Comparative European Politics, 11 (2) (2013), 172–200. 50. Roberto Belloni and Francesco Strazzari, ‘Corruption in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo: a deal among friends’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (5) (2014), 132–48. 51. John W. Hulsey, ‘“Why did they vote for those guys again?” Challenges and contradictions in the promotion of political moderation in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Democratization, 17 (6) (2010), 1132–52. 52. David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 53. Oslobođenje, interview with Valentin Inzko, 16 February 2014, . 54. See, for example, . 55. Milford Bateman, Dean Sinković, Marinko Škare, Bosnia’s Microfinance Meltdown, American Economics Association Annual Conference, Chicago, 6–8 January 2012, p. 6. 56. Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 63. 57. Tanja Petrovic, ‘Thinking Europe without thinking: neo-colonial discourse on and in the Western Balkans’, Eurozine, September 2011, . 58. Elvira M. Jukic, ‘Fule blames Bosnian leaders for rights logjam’, Balkan Insight, 18 February 2014, . 59. Haris Husarić, ‘February awakening: breaking with the political legacy of the last 20 years’, in Damir Arsenijević (ed.), Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), p. 67. 60. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, new edn (London: Penguin, 1993). 61. Cf. Stef Jansen, ‘Can the revolt in Bosnia and Herzegovina send a message to the wider world?’ (2014), (last accessed 13 February 2014).

3 Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo Gëzim Visoka

Introduction Over the past two decades, Kosovo has experienced extensive international involvement as the international community attempted to build a liberal peace and establish institutions, while trying to accommodate and transform ethnic cleavages and resolve the question of statehood. In general, most practitioners and scholars consider Kosovo a successful case of peacebuilding and statebuilding.1 While international peacebuilders often take the credit for this success, the peace-shaping role of local agency and dynamics is often ignored and underestimated. A closer look shows that the entire peace process in Kosovo is shaped by the interplay of international peacebuilding and statebuilding, local engagement in state formation and the reactionary state contestation dynamics. But the space for peace formation has taken place beyond these confrontational dynamics, at the everyday sites and through nonviolent civil society based initiatives. Peacebuilding and statebuilding attempts in Kosovo have not resulted in creating a sustainable peace grounded on local legitimacy, progressive politics, social emancipation and equality. In Kosovo, the liberal peace approach was preoccupied with immediate impact, motivated by self-interest, and has operated with a short-term perspective, thereby failing to engage sufficiently with local needs, interests and the potential for bottom-up peace formation. The suppression and exclusion of local agency, needs, and perspectives and popular representational politics have consistently backfired, triggering local resistance and alternative modes of peace formation. These local dynamics certainly constitute the transition from liberal to postliberal peace in Kosovo. This chapter examines the pitfalls of liberal peace in Kosovo, traces

66  Gëzim Visoka different forms and examples of local critical agency, and highlights some examples of peace formation. The chapter argues that traces of local peace formation in Kosovo have emerged in fragments as part of the complex configuration of interrelated, overlapping, yet conflicting and harmonising processes of international peacebuilding and statebuilding and local state formation, contestation and resistance movements. Notwithstanding the role of local resistance, another strand of local agency was crucial for peace formation, which operated under the liberal (emancipatory) peace agenda in Kosovo, leaning mainly on liberal normative frameworks and dependent on liberal blueprints and external donor support. Oliver Richmond defines peace formation as the most promising avenue for building a sustainable peace whereby local initiatives through non-violent dynamics negotiate and find pathways to form peaceful practices and utilise the international assistance to facilitate local peace formation.2 This chapter argues that traces of peace formation in Kosovo are more evident within civil society based peace initiatives rather than through formal local minority committees or reactionary social and political movements. A number of civil society peace initiatives, which combined liberal blueprints with local needs, interests and perspectives and worked with sensitive subaltern communities, have managed to fill the gap for local peacebuilding and unleash local potential for peace formation. They have been instrumental in overcoming the flaws of liberal peace and the destructive agency of local resistance, and in promoting non-violent pathways to peace formation. These revelations call for a rethinking of peacebuilding, donor aid, and development, and should stimulate further discussion on revitalising local agency and create space for peace formation at the everyday and institutional levels. This chapter proceeds by first outlining the mess liberal peace has created in Kosovo. It then provides illustrative examples of both critical local agency and non-violent civil society based initiatives in Kosovo. The chapter then analyses how these various local forms of agency perceived peace and the role could they play in peace formation. By examining these interrelated and parallel processes in Kosovo, the chapter seeks to shed light on the peace multitudes, evident in the different political agendas and strategies, for making, breaking and forming peace after the conflict.

The mess of (il)liberal peace in Kosovo To date, liberal peace has been the dominant conceptual and policy framework that has guided contemporary peacebuilding work in postconflict societies. While liberal peacebuilding has contributed to initiating post-conflict political, economic and social recovery, such as

Peace Multitudes: Kosovo  67

establishing new constitutional and institutional frameworks, developing electoral choice, and setting up basic public services, it has not succeeded in most cases (such as in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Timor Leste) to establish its primary goal – building a sustainable and lasting peace.3 Owing to its inherent interventionist nature and desire for stability and control, liberal peace has tried to re-engineer post-conflict societies by applying political and economic models that did not fit the local context, culture, and the democratic will of the local people.4 The story of liberal peace in Kosovo is a story of parallel struggles between externally set peacebuilding and statebuilding which was challenged by local state formation and peace formation dynamics. The international peacebuilding and statebuilding process in Kosovo temporarily interrupted, and later substantiated, the state formation process of Kosovo. The conflicting agendas of each of these aspects have undermined the peace process, leaving both external and local political agendas incomplete, fragmented and subject to constant contestation. Accordingly, traces of peace formation emerged in fragments as part of the complex configuration of these three interrelated, overlapping, yet conflicting and harmonising processes. The genesis of this incompatible dynamics is the Kosovo Albanian collective will for state formation and the Serbian desire to hold Kosovo despite the conflict that took place in 1999.5 When the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) was established in Kosovo parallel to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) military presence, the process of local state formation was transformed into a peacebuilding and statebuilding endeavour led by the international community. The liberal peace that was imposed over Kosovo initially, however, was not received well by Albanians and Serbs because all parties had different intentions and agendas regarding the fate of post-conflict Kosovo.6 So, in the context of post-conflict Kosovo, peacebuilding and statebuilding choices have emerged as a conciliatory alternative between Serbian claims for state preservation and Albanian claims for state formation, both rooted in violence, ethno-nationalist identity, power and materiality.7 Here one could argue that the international community invoked statebuilding to satisfy the Albanian majority in Kosovo while utilising peacebuilding as a tool to accommodate Serbs and minorities. For this reason, key peacebuilding activities included engineering multi-ethnicity as Kosovo’s collective identity, supporting local civil society, facilitating the return and reintegration of refugees, and fostering multilevel interethnic dialogue.8 On the other hand, key statebuilding activities involved building new local and national institutions from scratch while also trying to make laws, enforce them and establish a governance system in all sectors of life. Since its inception, UNMIK was given an unprecedented extensive

68  Gëzim Visoka peacebuilding and statebuilding mandate, including the authority to govern the territory, develop local political institutions, hold elections, build civil society, re-engineer Kosovo and make it a multi-ethnic society, and reconstruct the economy.9 The compromise strategy of ethnic power-sharing promoted elitist representation and thus made citizen participation peripheral. The agenda setting was a top-down process which did not take popular opinion into consideration but aimed at maintaining stability: the fewer people involved, the easier it was to control the situation.10 External actors in Kosovo did not have a realist understanding of post-conflict recovery in Kosovo, nor did they understand the local context. Equally, many local NGOs in Kosovo do not have a clear idea about how their projects contribute to peacebuilding, nor do they engage in conflict sensitivity and impact-assessment exercises. Multi-ethnicity has been the main framing of peacebuilding in Kosovo.11 Paradoxically, the space for interethnic interaction was created only through incentivising the returnees and making economic aid conditional on improving ethnic relations. These externally imposed technologies of peacebuilding, however, have been sources of ethnic confrontation on several occasions. The international community disregarded the most sublime aspects of everyday peace which are need-based encounters of both an ideational and material nature that may have little in common with peace perceived as multi-ethnicity, tolerance, and interethnic reconciliation. The lack of commitment among the international peacebuilders, who had insufficient local knowledge, created local resentment and resistance and undermined grassroots peacebuilding initiatives in Kosovo. What has emerged from the international attempts to impose a liberal peace is a variety of unintended hybrid outcomes in the democratisation and governance process, in managing ethnic relations, in building civil society and human rights regimes, in establishing the rule of law, and in reconstructing the economy. Statebuilding efforts in Kosovo have only partially managed to lay out the foundations of a democratic and functional state in Kosovo. Nevertheless, these efforts to building a modern liberal state did little to resolve local claims for Kosovo Albanian state formation and Serb state preservation. Within the United Nations-led provisional institutions in Kosovo, Albanian political elites in Kosovo tried to exploit statebuilding for state formation, as evidenced by the creation of legislation and political processes that would increase Kosovo’s domestic and international subjectivity and independence, while being de facto run by a United Nations neo-trusteeship. On the other hand, the Serb community promoted the status quo and aimed at preventing Albanians from turning the statebuilding process into a state formation process. So, parallel to internationally led peacebuilding and statebuilding, state formation in Kosovo kept advancing, as evidenced

Peace Multitudes: Kosovo  69

by the presence of nationalist discourses which exploited the statebuilding process to achieve state formation, changing the grounds of social identity, emergence of resistance from minority groups, and the creation of state-within-state structures.12 Though this did not stop peace formation from emerging in dissociated fragments, it certainly delayed the emergence of localised and organised peace formation initiatives which could prevent the re-escalation of violence by mitigating the negative consequences of international top-down peacebuilding and statebuilding, as well as bottom-up state formation and the state contestation dynamics.

Local resistance versus peace formation Most research on peacebuilding and statebuilding in Kosovo has tackled the question of local institutional agency.13 Less work is done, however, in exploring various local responses outside the institutional framework that has shaped peace in Kosovo through divergent agendas and strategies aimed at state formation, state contestation and peace formation. In understanding the peace process beyond the liberal peace, it is crucial to explore local dynamics articulated both in the form of open resistance to liberal peace as well as through grassroots civil society-based efforts to peace formation. While the critical local resistance was undertaken by Albanian as well as Serb groups in Kosovo for different motives, civil society initiatives aimed at peace formation have managed to transcend ethnic division and work together in solidifying an everyday and emancipatory peace in Kosovo. What follows in this section is an empirical comparison of local resistance versus peace formation in Kosovo. Responding to the gap in citizen activism created by donor-oriented civil society groups, and rejecting international governance, as well as the new local institutions, a new social movement emerged in Kosovo in 2004. Lëvizja Vetëvendosje (Movement for Self-determination, hereafter: Vetëvendosje) emphasised the need for ethical and accountable politics, local autonomy from external rule, and incorporated a nationalist discourse for popular self-determination and participatory democracy. Gradually, Vetëvendosje started to accumulate local popular support to defy the UN’s peacebuilding and statebuilding project in Kosovo in a quest to privilege a localised and non-violent state formation process. Over the years, Vetëvendosje moved from being a social movement, which promoted civil disobedience, to being a political party promoting strong republican peace in Kosovo. Vetëvendosje differed from other civil society groups in Kosovo. It rejected international donor support and proactively tried to delegitimise international United Nations personnel for their unaccountable practices, lack of empathy and care for

70  Gëzim Visoka local culture, needs, and interests. In pursuing its resistance ideology, Vetëvendosje set the focus of its discursive critique and action-based resistance towards the international governance of Kosovo, seen as the main obstacle to the right to internal self-determination, in which the citizens are the sovereign and not the spectator. The main strategy employed by Vetëvendosje towards UNMIK aimed at delegitimising the mission in the eyes of the local population, portraying its mandate as undemocratic, colonial, and constraining Kosovo’s freedom and self-determination.14 Between 2005 and 2007, Vetëvendosje continually organised activities which aimed at resisting the decentralisation plan that was set out as one of the most important peacebuilding issues to accommodate Serb interests and needs in Kosovo before resolving Kosovo’s final status. Vetëvendosje continuously reacted to the special status given to minorities. Though Vetëvendosje claimed to be a non-violent movement, its public protest often resulted in violent confrontations with police and in damage to public property. The influence of Vetëvendosje towards the international governance and local institutions in Kosovo was evident from the systematic exclusion, arrest and imprisonment of Vetëvendosje activists. After Kosovo’s independence, popular support for Vetëvendosje decreased and hence it modified its strategy to incorporate more moderate civil society voices, became more constructive towards international community, and joined the institutionalised political system by running for all local and national elections in Kosovo after 2010. Over the years, Vetëvendosje reduced its street actions and modified its resistance against ‘bad governance’, international interferences, and Serb interference in Kosovo within Kosovo institutions.15 Vetëvendosje managed to re-politicise politics in Kosovo. It profoundly shaped public opinion in Kosovo against this external renewed peacebuilding process. In particular, Vetëvendosje objected to the first agreement between Belgrade and Priština reached on 19 April 2013, considering it to be a painful concession against Kosovo’s national interest and an attempt to undermine Kosovo’s sovereignty, deepen further ethnic divisions, and create conditions for institutional chaos in Kosovo.16 Instead, Vetëvendosje argued that a locally led dialogue between the Kosovo government and the Serb community in the north of Kosovo should take place, rejecting Kosovo’s negotiations with Serbia on matters concerning Kosovo’s internal sovereignty, such as advancing Serb autonomy in Kosovo and placing conditions on Kosovo’s regional representation. With this, Vetëvendosje rejected a European Union peacemaking process and promoted a localised peace process on the grounds of advancing state formation dynamics. Similar practices were also undertaken by the associations of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) war veterans and the families of victims who have also articulated local resistance towards the decisions and actions

Peace Multitudes: Kosovo  71

of international governance in Kosovo, focusing on the UN-led transitional justice, welfare conditions of ex-combatants and their families, and Kosovo’s final status.17 Alongside the Albanian local resistance in Kosovo, Serbs also proactively resisted statebuilding, peacebuilding and state formation processes in Kosovo, while hindering and undermining peace formation dynamics. Their main role was contesting liberal peace and the new state which was emerging in Kosovo. Immediately after the conflict, in 1999, Albanians engaged in a wave of post-conflict violence and revenge which contributed to the perceived need for Serb parallel structures. These parallel Serb institutions in Kosovo provided security, governance, and development services to Serb populations living in enclaves though these areas were within the mandate of the international peacebuilding and statebuilding process in Kosovo. The legal limbo created within such enclaves gave rise to criminal activities, organised crime, smuggling, and trafficking of people and goods.18 Parallel structures initially began by safeguarding the division of Mitrovica, pressuring Albanians to leave the north, and threatening local Serbs to stop them from co-operating with the Albanians.19 Later, parallel structures expanded their activity to the fields of justice, education, healthcare, welfare, and public services. They effectively subsidised the state institutions ran by the United Nations in Kosovo for more than a decade. UNMIK tolerated these parallel structures owing to the sporadic ethnic violence committed by Kosovo Albanians, the hesitancy of the Kosovo Albanian leadership to integrate Serbs before resolving Kosovo’s final status, and the lack of security and space for joint coexistence and integration.20 Later on, efforts to replace these structures, via the decentralisation and creation of new municipalities, were partially successful. The Ahtisaari proposal sought to resolve the problem of Serb parallel structures, the inaccessibility of the north for Kosovo’s authorities, and Kosovo Force’s (KFOR’s) inability to provide sufficient security through the extensive decentralisation of local government, guaranteeing special rights and protection for Serb communities and other institutional and political privileges.21 Following Kosovo’s independence, Serb leadership in the north of Kosovo strongly opposed the implementation of Ahtisaari’s proposal, claiming that they did not accept Kosovo’s unilateral secession from Serbia. In 2011, Serb parallel structures launched an extensive resistance campaign, blocking roads throughout northern Kosovo, and engaging in violent confrontations with NATO peacekeepers, local police and the European Union police in Kosovo. As of 2014, these Serb parallel structures are gradually being dismantled as part of the EU-facilitated Belgrade–Priština Dialogue on the normalisation of interstate relations. Another strand of local agency primarily oriented towards peace

72  Gëzim Visoka f­ ormation has pursued a different strategy rather than the openly defiant acts illustrated above. In this regard, there are traces of a local infrastructure for peace formation operating within national and local governance institutions and among the civil society community. Despite many flaws, certain aspects of this local infrastructure have represented the most effective venue for peace formation in Kosovo. The formal infrastructure for peace in Kosovo was mainly oriented towards protecting, promoting, and representing the rights and interests of minorities within local and national government. The closest mechanism to a formal national peace infrastructure in Kosovo is the Communities Consultative Council (CCC) based at the Office of the President of Kosovo. The CCC was established after Kosovo’s independence in 2008 and is regulated by law, consisting of minority representatives from political parties and civil society organisations, aiming to give a voice to civil society representing communities and grant their representatives access to government policies.22 So far, the CCC has had limited impact in Kosovo because it was imposed by the international community as part of Ahtisaari peace plan, and the mainstream political leadership in Kosovo has marginalised CCC’s role by utilising it as a symbolic commitment to minority protection which served broader state formation dynamics.23 Driven by power and material interests, minority representatives reduced the importance and potential impact of this body, as evidenced by the poor organisation and co-ordination of its activities as well as its ineffective and insufficient capacity to contribute to drafting and revising legislation affecting minorities in Kosovo.24 Accordingly, CCC was largely ineffective because of the lack of political will demonstrated by Kosovo’s institutions and the inadequate representation of minority interests by community representatives. At the municipal level, communities’ committees consist of minority representatives situated within the municipal government structures. These municipal communities’ committees are responsible for reviewing the compliance of the municipal authorities with the applicable law on minority rights and for ensuring the implementation of provisions that promote, preserve and develop the ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identities of minorities.25 Beyond this, the municipal communities’ committees are responsible for promoting interethnic dialogue and serving as a focal point for addressing non-majority communities’ concerns and interests. Evidence across Kosovo shows, however, that these municipal communities’ committees had limited impact to date in promoting interethnic dialogue and in contributing to bottom-up peace formation. Communities’ committees have mainly undertaken projects for their own communities and no significant cross-community dialogue and co-operation have taken place at the municipal level.26 They have been partially successful in promoting linguistic rights at the municipal

Peace Multitudes: Kosovo  73

level and applied positive discrimination in providing fair employment in the civil service for ‘minorities within minorities’, such as Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities in Kosovo. While minority NGOs have utilised communities committees for funding opportunities, these representatives have made use of these mechanisms to generate in-group political support and sustain their political power and status.27 These local peace committees, however, have had a limited role in generating local positive peace as they are mainly dominated by power politics and ethno-nationalist agendas. Beyond these institutionalised mechanisms, most relevant cases of peace formation in Kosovo come from civil society platforms, networks, and initiatives which have operated mainly according to liberal blueprints and in compliance with donor conditionality. These civil society groups pursued a different strategy from peace formation compared with the local resistance movements examine above. They have tried to create space for peace formation through utilising local knowledge, capacity, and legitimacy to modify externally set normative frameworks with the sole purpose of addressing ethnic distrust and structural violence, overcoming the past, and reducing horizontal inequalities. They had higher leverage for peace formation, as they were appropriate mechanisms located between beneficiary communities and national power structures. As the examples below will illustrate, local peace initiatives have the potential to lever positive local agency, overcome the destructive agency of local resistance groups, and supplement the flaws and limitations of top-down, institutional, and power-driven peace in Kosovo. Nonetheless, this does not mean that they do not have weaknesses and flaws in their work. The Kosova Women’s Network (KWN) is a successful and influential organisation within the civil society-based national infrastructure for peace. The KWN consists of over eighty women’s NGOs and associations whose mission is to ‘support, protect and promote the rights and the interests of women and girls’ in Kosovo.28 KWN represents an encouraging example of a local infrastructure for peace in Kosovo which c­ontributed to peace formation, utilising feminist approaches of empathy, commonality, co-operation, and criticality. They have managed to integrate Albanian as well as other minorities within Kosovo by addressing issues that affect all ethnic communities, such as gender inequality and violence, women’s welfare, and patriarchal dominance. KWN worked to dispel the ethnically perceived ‘other’ and unite Serb and Albanian women in Kosovo and Serbia to promote their empathetic peace agenda to overcome the mainstream antagonistic peace processes in Kosovo and Serbia. KWN has co-operated with United Nations development agencies and international NGOs and local government to improve the institutional position of women during and after the United

74  Gëzim Visoka Nations administration, to increase women’s participation in local governance, and to improve women’s well-being and social position at the everyday level. KWN has mainly advocated the Western liberal peace agenda, especially the aspects concerning transitional justice, development, and women’s empowerment, while also criticising constructively the United Nations and other international actors for failing to involve women in peacebuilding processes, for failing to bring justice to war victims, and for failing to address key issues that concern the political and socio-economic well-being of women in Kosovo.29 Beyond its local impact, KWN is a good example of a local initiative which has inspired regional women’s peace initiatives that have become influential regional civil society actors on a range of peace and security issues. There are two successful examples of locally inspired regional peace initiatives in the Balkans. The first example is the Women’s Peace Coalition, formed by KWN and Women in Black Network Serbia in 2006, to advocate the inclusion of women in peacebuilding processes as equal partners and to promote the security of vulnerable groups.30 The Women’s Peace Coalition put pressure on the United Nations Special Envoy for Kosovo’s Final Status to address women’s issues in the peace process. KWN opposed official politics, seeing them as bringing ‘divisions and conflict’.31 Instead, the Women’s Peace Coalition continued working to build ‘trust, women’s solidarity, and mutual support toward the creation of lasting and just peace in the region’.32 A powerful example of this was the apology issued by the Women in Black Network Serbia ‘for the crimes and terror committed in their name by the Serbian regime against Kosovar Albanians’, noting ‘the importance of official apologies in the healing process as a necessary prerequisite for sustainable peace’.33 The second KWN regional initiative is the Regional Women’s Lobby for Peace and Security in South East Europe which advocated the enhancement of women’s rights in the region and strengthening trans-regional peace. An interesting example of a local initiative working on peace formation in Kosovo is Community Building Mitrovica (CBM). Established by international donors after the conflict, CBM works towards identifying, encouraging and facilitating joint actions of citizens in the divided city of Mitrovica in order to promote co-operation, coexistence and democratic values.34 CBM describes its work as a local initiative that ‘tries to empower communities to work together and establish the means for peaceful coexistence and provides facilitation and mediation for interethnic dialogue as well as advocacy with and for those promoting peace and social integration’.35 CBM work intends to prove that local people are interested in overcoming the divide imposed by political elites from opposing sides in order to reconstruct a joint life in Mitrovica. Though CBM has acquired most of its funding and projects from inter-

Peace Multitudes: Kosovo  75

national donors and has implemented top-down instructions, it has also managed to utilise these resources to support bottom-up initiatives and promote local peace processes, ethnic coexistence, human rights, and democratic standards. A number of factors were key to CBM’s ability to build a local infrastructure for peace, including: its multiethnic participants; good public reputation, knowledge of the situation, actors and structures; clear, original and empathetic projects; experience and practice-based learning; good networking with beneficiaries, donors, and other NGOs; and the ability to adapt to different circumstances, and impact-oriented projects.36 Utilising its status as an interethnic grassroots organisation, CBM has managed to reach out to Serb and Albanian communities in the north of Kosovo, identify their local concerns and advocate on their behalf. Over the years, CBM has gained the respect and credibility of both communities for its efforts to improve the lives of people by serving as a mediator between local governments on both sides of the divided city. Local peace initiatives undertaken by CBM have tried to bridge ethnic divides by working on addressing people’s communal infrastructural needs, strengthening civil society co-operation, working with local media and youth, and co-operating with local institutions. For instance, CBM launched Mitrovica Rock School as a ‘platform for bringing youth from Mitrovica’s different communities together and promoting interethnic co-operation in order to rebuild ties between Mitrovica’s communities, decrease tensions, address negative stereotyping and rebuild confidence’.37 CBM has also worked with women on both sides of the divided city and has developed entrepreneurship opportunities such as utilising traditional handicraft work as a suitable business for local women, as well as providing a space for local communities to overcome ethnic divisions on sensitive issues such as the return of refugees and reconstructing houses in the ethnically mixed areas of Mitrovica.38 Another successful example of peace formation in Kosovo, combining local–international hybridity, is the NGO Balkan Sunflowers (BSF). BSF is a Kosovo-based NGO, established in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, which promotes peace locally and internationally to contribute to social reconstruction and renewal projects in Kosovo.39 By organising educational, social and cultural activities, BSF is an exemplary organisation, involved in grassroots peace formation in Kosovo, that focuses on promoting understanding and further non-violent conflict transformation, increasing interethnic co-operation, encouraging social change through community activism, emancipating suppressed and excluded communities, promoting locally initiated and externally funded projects, and supporting bottom-up peace and development initiatives. Over the years, BSF has focused its efforts on working with Roma children, youth and women, and transforming their lives through p ­ roviding

76  Gëzim Visoka c­ ommunity-based projects that supported local activism, comprehensive education, and advocacy programmes. Focusing on the same people and geographical area has enabled BSF to ensure that people and families of these communities overcome their material and social vulnerabilities, build resilience and reach basic self-sufficiency. This long-term investment contributed to the formation of local multipliers, whereby participants took on and passed their skills and knowledge to younger generations. The placement of volunteers in communities has contributed to building empathy, overcoming alterity and transcending divides between local and international actors, and sharing experience and language skills. Operating entirely on a need-based philosophy, while also promoting right-based practices, BSF addresses key issues of subalterity among minorities. Its work demonstrates effective social reconstruction and the development of a peace infrastructure that enable communities to overcome conflict so that they can engage with other ethnic groups in private and official instances, as well as accessing public services and shaping political processes. Notwithstanding its dependency on donor support, BSF has managed to remain sensitive about its resources, trying to maximise direct impact on beneficiary communities while avoiding technocratic impediments and procedures that often reduce the impact of civil society and donors in post-conflict recovery. This is an example of a peace-formation initiative which worked, based on the principles of empathy and care, long-term commitment, creation of multipliers, volunteerism, transcendence and coexistence with difference, the utilisation of donor assistance and propagating a facilitative role rather than an imposing and controlling role.

Which peace is better? Rethinking peace multitudes These different local responses to liberal peace in Kosovo show multiple perspectives and approaches to peace which are caught between ethnonationalist conceptions of peace affiliated with the state, power and sovereignty, and other localised efforts oriented towards human security and community coexistence in diversity. For instance, Vetëvendosje’s conception of peace is not practised on the grounds of empathy, tolerance, concession, and autonomy, but on majoritarian power, identity domination, and statist/​realist notions of freedom, rights, justice, and peace. Its sense of peace is creating a state where the Albanian majority in Kosovo will dominate institutional, economic and social life while providing minorities with equal rights and proportional representation based on their demographic strength. Vetëvendosje does not support a peace based purely on compromise and coexistence, nor one with privileges and safeguards for minorities.40 Many believe that Vetëvendosje’s

Peace Multitudes: Kosovo  77

emancipatory priorities reflect the situation on the ground, which needs immediate change, but a closer examination of this emancipatory programme reveals a set of exclusionary practices. Some of Vetëvendosje’s obvious exclusionary practices towards minorities include: ridiculing and raising public anger over monastic lands set aside for Serbs; promoting boycotts of Serbian products; insulting Serbian municipal autonomy; using anti-Serb emotive messaging and war images; and advocating the elimination of reserved seats in parliament for minorities.41 Discursive and affirmative practices of Vetëvendosje, as articulated through media propaganda, public protests, and other public manifestations, could be considered more harmful – in terms of disturbing peace and social order in Kosovo – than a promising change for Kosovo’s society. The only aspect of Vetëvendosje that coincides with peace formation theory is its strong support for the international community to play a facultative role as they are against an international interventionist and neo-liberal approach to domestic affairs in Kosovo. Despite their self-established legitimate concerns, Serb parallel structures in Kosovo have challenged international peacebuilding and statebuilding process, prevented the integration of the Serb community within Kosovo’s society, nurtured organised crime and informality, and challenged the overall peace and stability in the country. They have promoted a frozen, ‘partitionist’ ethnic peace in Kosovo. The formation of Serb parallel structures consequently created the conditions for a frozen conflict in Kosovo, with the desire to gain a special political status. A confidential UNMIK report admitted in 2007 that ‘the spread of parallel structures contravenes UNMIK’s authority to implement its mandate, thereby violating SCR 1244 and establishing preconditions for a de facto partition of Kosovo’.42 These parallel structures intentionally prevented the activity of more moderate political factions within the Serb community in Kosovo, and obstructed their activity to part take in the political institutions created by the United Nations. While this institutional parallelism in the field of public administration, judiciary, education and healthcare provided basic security for Serbs in Kosovo, it consequently nurtured social divisions and undermined narrow chances for conflict transformation and reconciliation. Serbia’s government, however, justified this support for Serbs in Kosovo with reference to the failure of UN and Kosovo authorities to provide appropriate socio-economic conditions, freedom of movement, and political space for Serbs to exercise their rights.43 Accordingly, Serb parallel structures provided for a strategy of subsistence for the Serb community to resist the United Nations peacebuilding and statebuilding process and to obstruct the Kosovo Albanians’ state formation process, but have not contributed to i­mproving interethnic relations, coexistence, and reconciliation in Kosovo. Instead, they have often reinforced fear,

78  Gëzim Visoka mistrust, and misconceived prejudices, as well as entrenched in-group pressure and control. Accordingly, critical local agency and their forms of resistance and hybridity examined in this chapter illustrate that, in post-conflict recovery, there is no constant and linear transition process with clear lines of authority and compliance. Instead, they show that, in practice, peacebuilding is a continuous struggle for domination and counterbalance, thereby illustrating the local population as resilient subjects who adjust to the changing circumstances and opportunities in post-conflict societies. These influential examples of local resistance in Kosovo show that they have the potential to revitalise political life but such initiatives risk promoting exclusionary practices that could affect the subalterns who belong to minority and vulnerable communities. Exclusionary practices are reflected through promoting nationalist ideology and denying implicitly ethnic difference and pluralism in society. More importantly, the organised and sporadic local resistance has not contributed directly to peace formation in Kosovo, as it has opened up the space for contesting authority and creating alternative political arrangements mainly along the lines of ethnonationalist persuasions and less along the lines of emancipatory and conciliatory peace between different groups in Kosovo. On the other hand, the examples of civil society based initiatives for peace formation in Kosovo, on the grounds of progressive peace, reveal that the emancipatory wing of liberal peace, channelled through international non-governmental groups and global civil society, seems to have an important role for peace enablement through providing assistance to local agents and supporting local infrastructure for peace formation. What remains problematic, however, is the top-down, power-driven, and neo-liberal wing of liberal peace which is primarily interested in superficial peacebuilding at the institutional and national level. In this regard, peacebuilding interventions should not exploit local initiatives for peace formation as a new means of legitimising its policies or imposing further external conditions. Rather, they should have a more facultative and less exploitative role. These local initiatives for peace formation have provided important contribution in creating interethnic co-operation, dealing with the past at the community and everyday levels, providing support for social groups in need, and combining effectively need-based and right-based discourses at the everyday levels. They played a limited role at the national level, however, and have been disengaged in the most important political processes which have shaped structurally peace prospects in Kosovo, such as the definition of Kosovo final status, implementation of the Ahtisaari peace plan, and the recent normalisation dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia. This certainly calls for greater civil society involvement in national peace processes to

Peace Multitudes: Kosovo  79

balance the international involvement in peace negotiations and the local ethnonationalist political factions which are driven by power, ideology, and materiality. These positive local examples could provide an alternative momentum to national peace processes in Kosovo as well as influence regional and global peace processes.

Conclusion The disentanglement of peace complexity in Kosovo shows that peace formation has taken place in a contested, fragmental, and overlapping environment between international peacebuilding and statebuilding and local state formation and state contestation dynamics. These dynamics have undermined prospects for constructing a new social contract in Kosovo which would overcome violence, ethnic division, power/​ identity domination, and material inequality. Though these parallel processes have entrapped constructive and positive local agency, there are signs that informal local infrastructures for peace can bypass this impasse to serve as enablers of peace formation in Kosovo. As a result of divisive local resistance and exclusionary practices towards ethnic reconciliation and peace formation in Kosovo, a branch of liberal civil society rebranded its identity and formed networks and peace initiatives which utilised external funding to facilitate their locally rooted peace and reconciliation initiatives. While local resistance has promoted allencompassing post-dependency from liberal peace, civil society-based and substate local peace initiatives, on the other hand, have promoted strategic dependency utilising the normative and material benefits of liberal peace while adapting them to local contexts, needs, and interests. The local peace initiatives promoted by civil society groups, however, have focused their activity mainly at the grassroots and everyday level, and have been mainly detached from national peacebuilding. So, both processes have used different pathways to articulate local critical agency, challenge and overcome the flaws of liberal peace, and redefine peace in local context. Accordingly, this chapter has shown that the potential for peace formation was not among local resistance groups towards liberal peace but more among those civil society initiatives: that operated based on liberal blueprints and local rationales; that combined need-based and right-based approaches to peace and development; that operated at grassroots levels and supported everyday peace processes; that kept a distance from sensitive national political dynamics; and that retained a long-term focus on working with the same agents to build local structures which enable and form peace. These initiatives often do not make national and international news, and are often underscored by

80  Gëzim Visoka i­nternational o ­ rganisations and donors. Equally, their impact is not visible and immediate as desired by external peacebuilders and donors and local politicians. But these local initiatives have been instrumental in building networks and trust among civil society organisations, in reaching out and establishing dialogue with local authorities, in bringing together young generations while empowering women and respecting ex-combatants and socially excluded groups. What Kosovo perhaps now needs is a dynamic and active local infrastructure for peace with peace committees at the national and local level to create a new peace contract which should remain locally driven and externally assisted, and that would work in overcoming ethnonationalist conceptions of peace and open the space for a civic, conciliatory and transformative peace.

Notes  1. See, for example, Jock Covey et al. (eds), The Quest for Viable Peace: International Intervention and Strategies for Conflict Transformation (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2005).  2. Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Failed statebuilding versus peace formation’, Cooperation and Conflict, 48 (2013), 378–400.   3. Edward Newman et al. (eds), New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2009).   4. Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London: Routledge, 2011).  5. Marc Weller, Contested Statehood: Kosovo’s Struggle for Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).   6. Personal interview with a senior politician in Kosovo (Pristina, July 2012).   7. Covey et al. (eds), The Quest for Viable Peace.   8. UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999), UN Doc. S/​RES/​1244 (1999) (New York: UNSC, 10 June 1999).  9. Ibid. 10. Gezim Visoka and John Doyle, ‘Peacebuilding and international responsibility’, International Peacekeeping, 21 (5) (2014), 673–92. 11. Ian King and Whit Mason, Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo (London: Hurst, 2006). 12. Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 114–48. 13. King and Mason, Peace At Any Price. 14. Lëvizja Vetëvendosje, ‘History of Lëvizja VETËVENDOSJE (Movement for Self-determination)’, 3, . 15. Albin Kurti, ‘JISB interview: Kosova in dependence: from stability of crisis to the crisis of stability’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 5 (2011), 96.

Peace Multitudes: Kosovo  81 16. Albin Kurti, ‘Dorëzimi i pavarësisë me marrëveshje (Handing over independence with agreement)’, Pristina, 28 May 2013, . 17. KLA War Associations, Public Notice, 6 December 2005. 18. Crisis Group, UNMIK’s Kosovo Albatross: Tackling Division in Mitrovica, ICG Balkans Report No. 131 (Brussels: ICG, 3 June 2002). 19. Interview by author with a former commander of Kosovo Force (KFOR) in Kosovo (Brussels, 15 October 2013). 20. Interview by author with a former UNMIK regional administrator for Mitrovica (Washington, DC, June 2013). 21. See ‘Comprehensive proposal for the Kosovo status settlement’, 2 February 2007, annex II. 22. Assembly of Kosovo, ‘Law on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Communities and Their Members in Kosovo’, Law No. 03/​ L-047, Article 12 (Pristina, 13 March 2008). 23. Gezim Visoka and Adem Beha, ‘Minority consultative bodies in Kosovo: a quest for effective emancipation or elusive participation?’, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 10 (2011), 1–30. 24. Ibid. 25. Assembly of Kosovo, ‘Law on Local Self Government in Kosovo’, Law No. 03/​L-040, Articles 53–5. 26. Organization for Security and Co-operation in Kosovo (OSCE), Communities Rights Assessment Report (Pristina: OSCE, 2009), . 27. OSCE Kosovo, Communities Rights Assessment Report, 3rd edn (Pristina, July 2012), 35. 28. Kosova Women’s Network mission statement, . 29. KWN, ‘Through women’s solidarity to a just peace’, 2007, . 30. KWN, ‘Women in Black Network Serbia, KWN form Women’s Peace Coalition’, 2006 . 31. Regional Women’s Lobby for Peace, Security and Justice in Southeast Europe, letter to UN Security Council members, 19 April 2007, . 32. Ibid. 33. KWN, ‘Women in Black Network Serbia, KWN form Women’s Peace Coalition’. 34. Community Building Mitrovica, ‘CBM newsletter’, 1 (2) (July–December 2013), 7, . 35. CBM, ‘CBM 2011 annual report’, 3, . 36. Strategic Plan of CBM 2013–16, November 2013, 8, . 37. CBM, ‘CBM 2011 annual report’. 38. Ibid.

82  Gëzim Visoka 39. Balkan Sunflowers ‘What we did – past projects’, . 40. See, for example: Albin Kurti, ‘Etnizimi përmes multietnicitetit (Ethnisation through multi-ethnicity)’, Pristina, 8 January 2006, . 41. Gezim Visoka, ‘International governance and local resistance in Kosovo: the thin line between ethical, emancipatory and exclusionary politics’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, 22 (2011), 99–125. 42. UNMIK, ‘Development of new parallel structures in Kosovo – Serbian inhabited areas’, UNMIK Outgoing Code Cable, UNMIK-159 (Pristina: UNMIK, 15 October 2007), 1. 43. See statement by Dr Nebojsa Covic at the session of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, 27 August 2003, .

4  Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou

Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s finger­nails for wearing nail polish. Laura Bush, 17 November 20111

Introduction: liberalism, conflict and gender The address from which the quotation above is taken was made to the United States public a few weeks after the launch of strikes against Afghanistan, in the place of the president’s weekly radio address. It signalled the launch of a campaign, spearheaded by the wives of US President George W. Bush and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair in support of the war, which focused on the plight of Afghan women and children, placing their liberation as a target of the military intervention.2 At that point, the legality of the invasion was still questioned, the United Nations Security Council having not issued a resolution that expressly authorised such action.3 A week later, and days after the Northern Alliance had entered Kabul, the Cable News Network (CNN) described the changes with reference primarily to women’s rights, exemplified, amid references to education and healthcare, by the following sentence: ‘Nail varnish and lipstick have resurfaced from the back of women’s drawers, and are being worn by women who no longer need a man to accompany their trips beyond their front door’.4 This attention to mundane and recognisably modern and Western attributes of femininity to promote a politics of gender equality was just one of the many paradoxes of that war, and the War on Terror, in which it was couched. Critical analysis has pointed to that campaign on women’s

84  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou rights as exemplary of how ‘women’s bodies have been designated as a focal point for drawing distinctions between the free – those who have a capacity for self-government – and the unfree, whose incapacity for self-governance makes them targets [for violence]’.5 Liberalism is the discursive frame within which such paradoxes have been accommodated: paradoxes between the hailing of freedom and practice of violence, the hailing of equality and practice of orientalist oppression, and the hailing of legal order and the practice of flouting international law. Critical analyses6 and an ActionAid report7 have shown years later that Afghan women’s rights suffered a backlash after a brief period of improvement, the promises of the first ladies’ campaigns not having been delivered. The references to nail varnish and lipstick, it would seem, served not to bring ‘home’ the more urgent issues of education and healthcare. They served to mask those issues on which substantial and financial attention would be needed by trivialising the situation so that the target could be declared achieved as soon as troops marched through the capital – and with the simple ‘resurfacing’ of materials, such as lipstick and nail varnish, that were already there, and which therefore the Western alliance need not spend resources to provide. And if an orientalist discourse trivialised the issue of equality in Afghanistan, a condescending construction of ‘equality’ at home was also projected – those ‘homes’ which the message was being brought to were the homes of American and British housewives who, in turn, might be asked to register their approval in polls for the war. Gender rights were doubly marginalised and deprioritised over global war politics through the very same discourse that purportedly flaunted them. This problem, of the marginalisation of gender equality, precisely through its appearance in liberal discourse, is what we address in this chapter. The role of women and the gendered aspects of peace, security and development, are in many ways part and parcel of liberal peacebuilding. We want to argue that they can also forge paths into post-liberal peace formations in the sense given in the volume’s introduction. To do this, gender equality must be a commitment that goes beyond appearance. The adoption of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 could be said to have marked the incorporation of key tenets of gender rights discourse in the global liberal peace agenda. It has since become a landmark in women’s activism in that it extends from the international to the national and the local level, from the intergovernmental bodies to local women’s movements. The resolution is based on liberal principles of representation, participation, of women in all levels of peacebuilding and on democratisation in setting up new institutions and norms of gender equality in the post-conflict processes; it also recognises the specific protection needs of women and girls in conflict situations as well as the underutilised contribution women make to

Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus  85

conflict prevention, peacebuilding, conflict resolution and peacekeeping. This framing falls within the increasing attention on the contribution of civil society actors in governance in general, and in post-conflict situations more specifically,8 where it has been shown that peace agreements without the consent of the societies concerned will be short-lived.9 In addition, the resolution draws attention to the inclusion of a gender perspective in the United Nations programming, reporting and gender training in UN peace support operations and Security Council missions.10 Following Resolution 1325 six additional Security Council resolutions have been adopted, the last two in 2013. Of these, SCR 2122 (2013) mandates the implementation of stronger measures to include women in peace processes, both on the levels of the state and of relevant United Nations organs. Thus, issues of empowerment of women and their visibility, as well as acknowledgement of women’s agency, human rights and women’s voices, are some of the liberal peacebuilding foundations upon which these Security Council resolutions on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ build. As an example of liberal discourse, therefore, UNSCR 1325 could easily be dismissed as a tool for sidelining gender concerns precisely through highlighting them – calling on the United Nations and states to ‘check the gender box’ while the political landscapes continue to be marred by oppression and violence. Here, we want to modify this approach somewhat and consider whether UNSCR 1325, as an exemplar of liberal peacebuilding, can also hold prospects for overcoming its liberal limitations. We want to ask whether gender discourse can uphold the promise of peace formation by holding peacebuilders accountable to just, democratic and equal societies. This chapter tells the story of one attempt to use UNSCR 1325 as a tool in the transition from liberal to post-liberal peace. It might not by definition be a resistive force per se but it does provide the possibility of ‘resistance’ in the Foucauldian sense as a process in which ‘hidden, small-scale and marginal agencies have an impact on power, on norms, civil society, the state and the “international” . . . [agencies that are] often discursive and aimed at peaceful change and transformation’.11 Such forms of resistance, are often ‘hidden’ in the activities that theory likes to valorise under the term ‘the everyday’. This valorisation might, in fact, be mired by assumptions about difference when exoticising the ‘everyday’ of others that are not very different from the assumptions Laura Bush and CNN are making when they construct the Western ‘everyday’ of make-up (nail varnish and lipstick) as lacking in Afghanistan. It has been argued elsewhere12 that, in fact, a more anthropologically grounded approach to the ‘everyday’ might help us focus better on micro-processes from comportment to silence, gesturing, and actions that ever so slightly invert social norms. This, as Das has

86  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou argued,13 can help make concrete the ‘everyday’ in its banal violence (to paraphrase Arendt) rather than present it in an aura of philosophical sublimation. In this sense, resistance begins to look less like a ‘weapon of the weak’14 and more like a reflexive orientation towards Foucauldian forms of governmentality, and specifically what Foucault has termed ‘counter-conduct’. This notion of ‘counter-conduct’ allows us to see ‘resistance’ as already embedded within forms of governance – just as power is never, for Foucault, just a top-down property of domination, governmentality cannot be effective unless it folds into its workings the possibility of reflection and rejection. Such an approach to peacebuilding would require that we see post-liberal peace formation as already enveloped into liberal peace discourse. This is where the problem – and struggle – inheres: it is precisely about rescuing the potential of such counter-conduct from the stifling formulations of liberal norms. In the case of the group we study, it takes the form primarily of reflection on societal issues that concern us in the everyday but which are, at the same time, normalised within it. Thus, we want to explore this problem here in a self-reflexive way. Our main reference point is a ‘local’ peace initiative in Cyprus, mired with all the tensions identified by critical approaches: the entanglement between local and global; the problem of effect and recognition; the struggle with liberal norms and radicality. The feminist group we have been working within in the last seven years has staked its claims on critical reflections on local peace politics and feminist principles. By working outside the hegemonic discourse of nationalist patriarchy on both these counts, the group’s proposals have largely been overlooked. Yet exactly because its frame of reference has been UNSCR 1325, the technique of discounting them was not silencing, but the opposite: there has been access to negotiators on both sides of the conflict, brokered by the UN’s local representation, and a series of discussions with various officials involved in the negotiations. We contend that this technique of government conforms to the liberal logic that guides other processes, within and beyond peacebuilding. Liberal values, like the participatory democracy that the group’s efforts represent, are pronounced but, in that very pronouncement, the traditional forms through which adversarial conflict discourse has been built, are reaffirmed. In the case we describe, political changes taking place with a new round of negotiations inaugurated after the drafting of this chapter are putting these propositions to the test. By the time of publication in 2015, some of the group’s members were invited to participate in an advisory committee attached to the negotiations and focusing on gender quality. The extent to which this will entrench marginalisation through visibility, or offer a break from the structures we describe, is yet to be seen. In either case, the battle to be fought remains the transition into post-liberalism.

Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus  87

Liberalism as a conduit for traditional politics: the many guises of gender discourse An example from only the most recent round of negotiations illustrates the field within which the women’s group we are talking about operates. We dwell on this background at some length because it is instructive about the operationalisation of gender in peace discourse. That last round of negotiations was inaugurated in 2008 after the leaders of the two main left-wing parties (on opposite sides of the divide) were elected to the highest positions of authority on both sides of the island. The resumption of talks had come after a long freeze which had resulted from the rejection of a UN-brokered peace plan by the Greek Cypriot majority in 2004. That ‘Annan Plan’ had represented the closest the two sides had got to an agreement since 1964 when the first United Nations mediation efforts began. Having been hailed as a hopeful new beginning, the 2008-inaugurated negotiations round showed signs of strain early on. Different proposals put forward by the negotiators were leaked to the press, objected to by sections of the political leadership on either side, and eventually resisted at the negotiating table. Stalling ensued and the threat of stalemate lurked in the background. In early 2014, with leaderships on the two sides shifting to the conservative right following respective elections, a declaration was agreed which aimed to ‘re-start’ the negotiations (even though it was never announced that the 2008 round had ended) by putting down key principles on which the negotiations would proceed. These principles were based on the concepts of sovereignty, citizenship and representation, and were broad enough to satisfy competing claims by the two sides.15 By the end of the same year (November 2014), and amid claims that the preparatory stage of the talks had been completed, the president of the republic, Nicos Anastasiades, left the negotiating table, and instructed his appointed negotiator to do the same, in protest over Turkish naval actions against the republic’s efforts to utilise gas resources found off its coast. In the summer of 2015 negotiations resumed after the election to office on 26 April of Turkish Cypriot Mustafa Akıncı, a long-time peace activist and fringe-left politician. The exploration of gas reserves has been a point of contention since it began in 2011, and Turkey has pursued several activities of provocation and intimidation in the area and on an international platform. These have, in previous years, seriously strained the negotiation process. And, even though the abandonment of the negotiation table appears as a new step in the development of the stand-off, it proceeds on the same discursive premises cultivated over the previous years. Chief among these discursive patterns are the appeals to historical claims and masculine force. In an earlier stage, the dispute was aptly described as ‘sovereignty games

88  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou . . . entail[ing] male bravado and machismo’.16 The Republic of Cyprus has named two of its reserve areas after the Greek mythological goddess of love, believed to have been born of the Cyprus seas, Aphrodite, and after the king of the ancient Cypriot city state of Salamina, Onisilos, who led a war against the Persians. In 2011, Turkey, on the other hand, sent an exploration vessel to the area called Piri Reis after an Ottoman cartographer and, in 2014, a warship named after the Ottoman admiral Barbaros (known in the west as Barbarossa). While on both sides, an affront to the rights of the state is presented as the reason for the actions taken (the self is always a defender, not an aggressor), the language in which they are couched, in both instances, is the language of militancy – Onisilos and Barbaros are heroic figures because they had valiantly fought the enemy. The ways in which gender and liberalism come together in the discourse of the two sides is thus instructive. Turkey presents itself as protecting the rights of Turkish Cypriots to share resources but also as curbing Greek Cypriot behaviour which the Turkish Minister of European Affairs, Volkan Bozkır, described as that of ‘Europe’s spoilt child [Avrupa’nın s¸ımarık çoçug˘u]’.17 This is a disciplinary discourse couched in the frame of protection of the vulnerable (in this case Turkish Cypriots whose vulnerability emanates from the non-recognition of their state). It is also a discourse that refers back to the nationalist Turkish and Greek imaginaries of Cyprus as the ‘child’ of ‘motherlands’ (and/​or ‘fatherlands’). Reframed to reflect new political realities, this same discourse is now reformed – the child, Greek Cypriots, belong to a different guardian, the European Union, which has ‘spoilt’ them. The parenting of Greece and Turkey might for a moment appear anachronistic but the bad parenting by the EU silently repositions it. The liberal overcoming of nationalism, as the process by which the European Union has replaced Greece as ‘motherland’, is presented for the sole purpose of being discredited. In the preceding question, the minister voiced a similar ambiguity in the employment of liberalism and traditionalism in using the discourse of family law to describe relations between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. From the point of view of the Turkish state, there are here two separate states that correspond to the two peoples, and these are pursuing a metaphorical ‘marriage’ within a federation: Question: Isn’t it more appropriate to think of divorcing Greek Cypriots rather than marrying them? Answer: We are not married so that we would be thinking about divorce. It is not correct to qualify this as marriage, we are actually divorced. We are trying to get married. But in the light of past experiences of this marriage, the new foundations we build must be good ones. Because we need to take measures to prevent those past experiences recurring again. We need to determine

Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus  89 whether our desire to live together is really strong. If really a new Republic of Cyprus structure is to be established where a few years down the line principles are progressively not respected and atrocities against Turkish Cypriots take place again, this is something that neither Turkey nor the TRNC [Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus] will allow. (Authors’ translation)

If family law is the idiom for conceptualising the political situation, liberalism is its framing discourse. It is not any marriage we are talking about, but a liberal one: it is entered into with mutual consent, free will, and the ‘desire to live together’. Moreover, it is one that follows the experience of domestic violence and divorce. And precisely on this ethical basis of liberal conjugal relations, a political discourse of intimidation is built. What Turkey, and the TRNC (Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus) (mentioned as if by extension), ‘will not allow’ is potentially not only the establishment of a common state for Greek and Turkish Cypriots but also the ‘naughty’ behaviour of the republic, infantilised in the next sentence, as we have seen, as ‘Europe’s spoilt child’. This general threat (it will not be allowed), at once without substance but also potentially totalising, can be seen as an instance of adversarial performativity. The Turkish warship sailing near the drilling site may not be violating international law (even if it violates another state’s sovereignty) but it sends a clear sign of intimidation. It is noteworthy that one of Akinci’s first and most criticised declarations in office was to continue the family metaphor and speak of the need for ‘Turkish-Cypriots to grow out of their mother[land]’s lap’. On the other hand, the reactions within the republic and those of the government towards international actors have been equally performative and characterised by bravado – one that also combines liberalism and adversarial discourse. They consist of two dimensions: the international, focused on protesting against Turkey in international forums; and the local, focused on chastising anyone seen as Turkey’s proxy on the island. In both of these dimensions liberal values are pronounced and belied at the same time. On the plane of international law, while the republic proclaims that recourse to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is resisted by Turkey and uses this argument as proof of its righteousness, recent statements have suggested that such recourse should be pursued only after expert legal advice has been sought, signifying that perhaps this ‘righteousness’ may not be watertight. Furthermore, Turkey’s refusal to ratify the relevant international treaty relating to the dispute (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)) is presented as further proof of the republic’s placement on the right side of the law. The fact, however, that this very law allows states to choose which instruments to ratify when and which not falls beyond the purview of this discourse – and this chapter.

90  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou On the domestic front, on the other hand, an internal discourse has been developing that calls for the criminalisation of behaviour based on the logic of treason. The leader of the centre-nationalist party called for the closure of the crossing points on the UN-controlled Green Line as part of the measure to ‘effect political cost on Turkey and the pseudostate’.18 Failing this, he suggested that tourists using the airport outside northern Nicosia, which is not under the control of the republic, be fined when crossing to the south. In an extension of this discourse, Turkish Cypriots have also been presented by representatives of this and other parties in a highly racialist light as people who illegitimately feed on benefits and then claim portions of the proceeds from the natural gas finds. This view of Turkish Cypriots as parasitic on the state and its resources, infantilised yet again as Turkey’s ‘fifth column’, targets them as people rendering violence a thinkable possibility. Both those claims, regarding closure of the borders and withdrawal of benefits, were also put forward by the extreme right party the National Popular Front (ELAM) in a rare but well-publicised press conference which also asked for ‘the military forces to enter alert mode and reservists to be mobilised in to counter any Turkish threat’.19 Extreme as this call to arms may be, it follows on from a rhetoric of a number of mainstream parties which presented Turkish naval activities as ‘an invasion’ of the republic’s sovereignty, and extends this belligerent discourse into a realm where targeted violence against ‘traitors’, already identified by the liberal mainstream, becomes imaginable. But it should be remembered that all these arguments are formed within a discursive frame that puts international law as the ultimate claim to moral righteousness. It is from within liberalism that illiberal violence shows its face, much as in the case of Bozkır’s statements on what will be allowed and what will not. This recent example goes to show that liberal discourse cannot be taken as necessarily conducive to peacebuilding. It is, if anything, malleable, even to the point of sustaining arguments that might be identified as traditional, nationalist, illiberal. More importantly for our purposes here, it goes to show that processes of ‘bending’ liberal discourses beyond recognition often use gender as a conduit – be it in the metaphor of marriage or that of bullies, victims, or infantilised populations. So how can peacebuilding be reconceptualised using the liberal tools available?

UNSC Resolution 1325: towards liberalism or post-liberal peace? The Gender Advisory Team (GAT) was formed in 2009 by a group of women, academics and activists in gender and peace. This small group of women closely followed the negotiations and drew up suggestions

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for the negotiators on the mainstreaming of gender concerns in their discussions and the eventual constitution of a federated state. Using the framework of UNSC Resolution 1325, in its recommendations to the negotiators GAT has sought exactly the kind of reconceptualisation discussed above. In collaboration with the Cyprus branch of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), GAT organised two international conferences on Women and Peace. The first, in 2012, focused on several aspects of gender equality, namely governance and powersharing, citizenship, property, and economy. These themes had been included in the negotiations as separate ‘chapters’ for discussions, and GAT’s goal was to propose specific recommendations for legal and institutional parameters that the final agreement should include. Following this work, GAT turned its focus on issues of citizenship which it has since been exploring in depth. Perhaps the most important of the group’s contribution so far has been the opening of a public discussion on the participation of women in peace negotiations and peacebuilding processes.20 This opens up the concept of ‘activism’ more generally as a plural one, a question of multiple voices and multiple perspectives. The mental shift required here is thus considerable, because the dominant rhetoric on the Cyprus problem has defined the terms of the debate as ethnic.21 This exclusive viewpoint has marginalised other issues including gender. Thus, the political settlements as proposed over the years, even though they have appeared as gender neutral, have been far from that. UNSC Resolution 1325 is an important instrument for breaking this cycle.22 That the resolution is not an ideal text but rather a first step towards further action, has been pointed out by feminist critics: When I say Resolution 1325 was ‘our’ achievement – it may well be the only Security Council resolution for which the ground work, the diplomacy, and lobbying, the drafting and redrafting, was [sic] almost entirely the work of civil society, of non-governmental organizations. Certainly it was the first in which the actors were almost all women.23

Its success, at the very least, was that, on 31 October 2000, women and very few men got the most male-dominated body of the United Nations to devote an entire session to discussing women’s experiences in conflict and post-war situations. Much of this foundation work was laid decades earlier and a lot has been written about the backstage events that led to the adoption of 1325.24 For example, many women’s NGOs, from Africa, Asia and Europe, dealing with armed conflict, peace and security, agreed to the establishment of the ‘Transnational Advocacy Network’ and the ‘Women and Armed Conflict Caucus’ which was co-ordinated by Women’s International League for Peace and Equality

92  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou (WILPE) and led the process of drafting the final document. The strategies the women’s NGOs used were effective mostly because they exemplified a moment of global agency that was nevertheless rooted deeply in diverse local experiences. In this sense, the very adoption of UNSCR 1325 could be seen as an instance of already ‘post-liberal’ peacebuilding in the sense of countering the ‘conduct of population’, in the Foucauldian terms described above, in a platform as mainstream as that of the United Nations Security Council sessions. This success could be thought of as the result of a number of factors that attest to a moment of transition between liberal and post-liberal peace: • First, the women knew what they wanted, and had a clear theory on how to put the issues on ‘women and armed conflict’ on the main agenda of the Security Council. • Second, the environment was conducive to the consideration of gender issues. In that same year, in its twenty-third special session in March, government delegations to the General Assembly discussed further initiatives to implement the ‘Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action’, ending up with a declaration on ‘women and armed conflict’. The Bangladeshi Ambassador to the United Nations, Anwarul Chowdhury, was then the chair of the Security Council and, on 8 March, he made a powerful speech on the intersections between gender, peace and security and supported the women’s caucus in their pursuit of a Security Council open session.25 • Third, coalitions and alliances of women were formed, each undertaking different tasks: feminist academics sent books dealing with women, conflict, militarism, security and peace to all members of the Security Council to inform them that there is a plethora of literature from the field and the resulting theories that discuss the impact of war on women, girls and men, how these differing experiences invite us to rethink conflict resolution processes and policies; how women are disproportionately victimised and their bodies turned into weapons to humiliate the enemy; and how women rebuild broken homes and societies. The women’s NGOs which were stationed at the United Nations in New York were lobbying and kept in touch with members from the Security Council and other United Nations departments dealing with women’s issues; they sent messages to other NGOs at home to lobby their national governments about the importance of the women’s agenda and thus mobilise support from the relevant departments of their national governments and from women’s grassroots groups to this effect.26 • Fourth, a few days before the convening of the Security Council session in October 2000 a women’s working group created the ‘Arria Meeting’ in which Security Council members met representatives

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from civil society (Africa, Asia, Latin America). These women spoke very realistically and vividly about the experiences of women and girls in the conflicts of their torn societies, and also presented passionately the work of women in peace building at the grass roots. These four factors underscore the importance of a linkage approach between macro, meso and micro levels,27 that is, between the global, national, and local decision-making bodies, as well as linkages within civil society levels – academics with activists and grass roots with governments; and of course transnational coalition-building across countries and continents, as well as co-operation among women from various backgrounds who are differently positioned in relation to structures of power and experiences of war and conflicts. A second major lesson from the adoption of UNSCR 1325 is that achieving the ‘end’ is only the beginning of an even more difficult struggle for implementation. The second step is what is gradually making a change in women’s and girls’ lives. And it is what GAT currently struggles with. Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ remains central to much of the current written debate and advocacy work around the themes of women in war and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction. Today, there are many academic courses on women, peace and security that stress the intersecting of politics for peace with the varied and interconnected forms of violence against women,28 as well as stressing the dualism between women as victims of war and violence on the one hand and, on the other, focusing our attention on the tremendous agency of women in building and sustaining peace at all levels of government. ‘This dual construction of women as both “victims of war” and “agents for peace” is entrenched in the historic UNSC Resolution 1325 . . .’29 In terms of content, UNSCR 1325 acknowledges the specific effect of armed conflict on women, and women’s role in preventing and resolving conflict in the context of the Security Council responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. It consists of eighteen short points which cover three main themes: 1. protection which includes women’s rights, a clear understanding of gender needs in time of war, the protection of women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, and an end to impunity for such crime (Resolution 1820 further clarifies the process to deal with the perpetrators); 2. participation which means women’s work on peace must be included in decision-making at all levels in national, regional institutions, including significant posts in the United Nations itself, in all mechanisms for the prevention and management of conflict and in all negotiations for peace;

94  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou 3. the insertion of a gender perspective into UN peacekeeping operations and in measures of disarmament, demobilisation and ­reintegration after war. Out of 193 United Nations member states, according to Peacewomen, only fifty have produced a National Action Plan (NAP) on UNSC Resolution 1325. To this day, many civil society groups complain of inadequate funding for the implementation of the resolution. The development of gender-sensitive policies and legislation still remains a challenge for many countries where gender-based violence continues in the post-conflict situation.30 One of the criticisms of UNSCR 1325 comes from some members of WILPE who see themselves more as feminists and antimilitarists than the other key organisations which participated in the working group, and regret the fact that Resolution 1325 spoke only ‘fleetingly of women’s role to prevent war and makes no mention of ending war itself which is the main reason the UN was established’. Also the Resolution makes no mention of the gender regime that causes women’s victimisation in war and their exclusion from the peace process. No mention of structural and power-relations issues which are intertwined with militarism and male authority over women. The term ‘protection’ has also been challenged in the sense that ‘protection’ might encourage women’s passivity and assign the role of protection of ‘women and children’ to male soldiers as happened in Afghanistan and elsewhere, thus implying women’s victimhood in need of protection by men and ‘in the absence of a strong statement against war, this could be seen as simply trying to make war safer for women. Worse, states could cite the protection of women (as they did when invading Afghanistan) as a spurious legitimation of their militarist goal.’31 Another point of critique concerns the issue of representation. Though the resolution speaks about the under-representation of women, it makes no mention of the over-representation of men and provides no hint on men’s hegemonic masculinity as one of the causes of women’s insecurity. The focus should also have been on men and on the ‘frames’ all of us watch on our televisions showing only male leaders sitting at the negotiating tables. Carol Cohn32 and Felicity Hill33 have pointed out a number of omissions in Resolution 1325, particularly the ‘systems that produce wars’, and the pervasive complexities of gender regimes have been left out completely. They acknowledge that feminist transformation in the military and gender regimes cannot happen without really working at the deep causes of creating such regimes in the first place. And these are the new conversation and dialogues that the omissions of Resolution 1325 invite us to look into.

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UNSCR 1325 as a tool GAT’s work takes account of these limitations – yet the group has not considered the use of UNSCR 1325 as an impediment to its goals. It has, on the contrary, developed a critique of the current structures on the basis of the resolution’s philosophy. And it is here where the crucial step is. UNSCR 1325 was not used as a prescriptive text in a clause-by-clause implementation. It was taken as a foundational text for building a locally relevant set of measures. Feminists which GAT has met have suggested that its set of recommendations could be taken as a National Action Plan blueprint. This is an acknowledgment of the emancipatory potential of 1325 and perhaps also its difference from a number of other UNSC resolutions: the text itself is not a call to practice but a call to local application. This focus on 1325 as a tool, more than as a holy scripture, has allowed GAT to formulate recommendations which may be considered radical but which the leaderships are morally bound to listen to. In this regard, it has been of significant help that the UN’s Good Offices mission in Cyprus has been supporting the efforts of Cypriot women activists and scholars, feminists and others. They have thus facilitated GAT’s communication with the advisers to the Cypriot negotiators. They have also invited GAT representatives to two open-day events in 2010 and 2012 to mark the anniversaries of UNSCR 1325. During these deliberations, Cypriot women identified the following as obstacles to women’s participation in decision-making and in the formal or informal peace talks: • historical reasons, including the legacy of occupation of the island by foreign powers over the centuries including colonialism, and ethnic nationalism, forced separation of people and violation of human rights; • structural obstacles, such entrenched patriarchy and hierarchic, gendered institutions such as the family, religion, education and trade unions, weak political-party women’s wings and the hegemony of the media; • political obstacles, such as the male-centred culture in political parties, the gendered separation of private and public realms of life, gendered stereotypes and a hegemonic male discourse that leaves no space for women to voice their concerns and needs; • psychological factors, such as women internalising their oppression and secondary roles early on in their socialisation; fear of success and low self-confidence; normalisation of traditional stereotypical roles. Differences also emerged as Turkish Cypriot women articulated a host of other grievances which Greek Cypriot women do not experience

96  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou because they are members of the dominant community – and living in the Republic of Cyprus which is internationally recognised and enjoys membership of the European Union with all the benefits this confers. The participants developed seven key recommendations within the principles of Resolution 1325, addressed chiefly to the United Nations: • Support the development and implementation of a Cyprus-wide campaign on human security that would take into account the gender approach to security and define the concepts of security and safety from a women’s perspective; • Support women in decision-making processes and support women to influence the political structures in their communities, including advocacy for the promotion of at least 30 per cent quota as a temporary measure; • Support the training of women in decision-making; • Support rural women’s access to decision-making; • Facilitate a ‘women’s discourse conference’ on the Cyprus problem so as to inform and engage women from all communities on the peace process and create a safe space for their full and inclusive participation; • Peacemaking and peacebuilding should not only be about ceasefires but about transforming society from the bottom up. Women bring grassroots interests from community and households that should be taken into account in these processes; • Gender mainstreaming should be prioritised at all levels of public and private life. These recommendations have provided a first point of reference for the longer list of recommendations that GAT prepared and presented, alongside a detailed rationale for each of them. In the final section of the chapter we shall provide examples of some of these recommendations, evaluate their reception, and analyse the problems associated with their (non)reception. GAT has used a multilevel strategy bringing the local to the national, the global, the regional and the civil society. GAT started advocacy and lobbying at the national decision-making levels; GAT wrote letters to the Cypriot leaders, who were then the main negotiators, informing them about the sets of recommendations relating to governance, powersharing, property and citizenship chapters, and urged them to ensure that these recommendations are mainstreamed in the discussion of these issues and that GAT members were ready to engage in dialogue with any members of their teams. We also had several meetings with their advisers and engaged them concerning the incorporation of a gender-sensitive perspective in the negotiations. As a result of this, both negotiators

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appointed a gender focal point with which GAT remains in contact. GAT also built connections and alliances with the office of the United Nations secretary general’s representative in Cyprus who, on our behalf, sent our recommendations to Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon who had already met us at one of his visits to the island. This was an acknowledgement of the significance of GAT’s work. In fact, in his report on his Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus on 24 November 2010, he made specific mention of GAT’s contribution in line with Security Council Resolution 1325.34

Representation, citizenship and militarism The first of GAT’s concerns was about representation. GAT has formulated a number of recommendations on this point, with the most concrete suggestion being the introduction of a quota system in elections. The background thinking for this recommendation was that, because the negotiations have taken for granted the value of an ethnic quota system, they should have no conceptual barrier in seeing the introduction of gender quotas as a step towards greater representation. Women’s poor representation under current structures is easy to see and has been pointed out in numerous academic studies and international reports. This point has been readily accepted by many of the officials whom GAT has with over the years. Yet, and even though at the level of political parties women’s representation is now a matter of policy, the introduction of gender quota systems, both under the current structures and as part of a future arrangement, is resisted. We posit that this is an outcome of the continuing marginalisation of gender issues, even within the frame of gender equality – it is as if male politicians want to bestow equality on their female colleagues (and thereby also control it) but still refuse to consent to that equality being taken, and thus taken out of their control. Indeed, in Cyprus, women are marginalised at every level of the political and peace processes. No woman, from any of the communities in Cyprus, has to this day been part of the high-level negotiating teams that discuss the future of the island. The absence of women’s perspectives, and the dismissal of gender perspectives, indicate the shortcomings and deficit of democratic participatory process which will certainly influence the content of a future political solution and the composition of the institutional structures. In Cyprus there has never been an independent feminist movement, for a variety of factors, be these historical, political, structural or cultural. Gender ‘essentialisation’ is part of the nationalist narrative that women often reproduce while also participating in the multiple significations of the divide and the militarisation of the state: as supporters of a defence doctrine for security, by complying with the duty

98  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou to offer their sons to the military institution, by accentuating the ‘respectable’ motherhood syndrome, and narrating the ‘­glorious past’. While women are part of the perpetuation of the nationalist narrative, they are not part of the decision-making process on issues determining war or peace. The values of such a system are based on separation, hierarchies, use of violence (covert and overt), exclusion and the ­construction of ‘us and them’ dichotomies. Here we suggest that changes in the gender ordering in Cyprus will also beneficially affect concepts of democracy, human rights and equality. This change may bring about the development of a feminist movement in Cyprus as well as women’s solidarity which will help open up the debate on women’s rights and gender issues and connect their relevance to broader debates on issues of oppression, marginalisation, xenophobia and racial discrimination. A second point which GAT has probed in its recommendations has been the issue of citizenship. Here, the group’s concern was about the intersectional dimensions of exclusion and the ways in which ideal constructions of the ‘citizen’, as these are discussed in the framework of dividing power and determining membership of the polity, create inequalities for majorities, minorities and others. According to Sjoberg, feminists look to politics at the margins to find women and to see realities about their lives, their actions, and their suffering: ‘Feminists speaking women’s lives make it more difficult for mainstream politics to ignore them’.35 Within the public sphere, women’s experiences, local knowledge, and insights have not been adequately included in the peace processes, or in the peacebuilding efforts or in policy-making.36 GAT members envision a multicultural, democratic society based on gender equality where everyone has equal access to resources, equal opportunities for personal and social development, equal representation and participation, and where human rights and civic freedoms are respected. GAT acknowledges the existing differences among the differing Cypriot communities and has proposed that these be reflected in all relevant legal documents. More concretely, it has proposed that the citizenship regime be drastically rethought. According to the current framing, citizenship in the future state, which will operate as a ‘bicommunal federation’ with territories administered by the two main communities,37 will consist of two levels: that of the federal state and that of the ‘constituent states’. Because the make-up of the constituent states, which are the entities that will, with some territorial adjustment, approximate the current territorial set-up of a Greek Cypriot-run south and Turkish Cypriot-run north, it follows that rights of residence, work, and movement will be tied to rights of representation. In other words, civic and political life will develop chiefly on the level of the constituent states and will draw into its fold all rights of citizenship, including economic, social and cultural

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ones. GAT has proposed38 that this framework be rethought because it essentialises citizenship as something which emanates from the act of voting, itself defined in a Cypriot context as ethnically determined (to ensure that the north is Turkish Cypriot-run, it must have a qualified majority of Turkish Cypriot residents, which means that social and cultural institutions will cater for this Turkish Cypriot majority, and so on). Instead, while the political administration of each constituent state is a political matter to be settled within the negotiations, this determination should not mean, in GAT’s view, that freedom of settlement, residence, work, and the availability of cultural and social institutions should be constrained by it. Whether in a Turkish Cypriot-run north or a Greek Cypriot-run south, children should be able to learn both languages at school, follow the same curriculum, be made aware of cultural differences as regards Greek and Turkish Cypriot identities but also, beyond these, citizens should have as much opportunity to work and live anywhere on the island, irrespective of where they might register their vote. This set of recommendations39 flies in the face of the logic of ethnic separation but does not yield to the Greek Cypriot nationalist position which calls for a unitary state in order to dilute the possibility of Turkish Cypriot political representation. It sets different priorities for the system of governance, that emphasise education, family life, and social and cultural life, over electoral patterns and presumptions about them. It is for these reasons that we believe it has not been engaged with seriously, despite having been raised in meetings with officials, and often praised for its ‘idealism’. In other words, what is called for, in this set of recommendations, is a radical shift of governmentality which pushes the boundaries of the traditional liberal logic of representation yet, at the same time, remaining rooted within the framework of basic liberal rights (civic and political, economic, social, and cultural). Pushing these boundaries even further, GAT has also probed the topic of militarism as part of its call for a rethinking of the citizenship regime. On this, the group proposed an ideal of disbanding the armies altogether but, if not, alternative reformulations of their structure. Demilitarisation is a well-articulated call of many of the radical groups on the island, mostly positioned on the left, but is also articulated in Greek Cypriot rhetoric as something ‘our side’ aspires to but to which Turkish opposition is taken for granted. Yet in the negotiation talks, the restructuring of the army as an institution where the opposition between Greeks and Turks will not constitute a formative principle, has not been discussed. In this respect, GAT has proposed that such an army is envisioned, that its goals be redefined as the protection of citizens on the whole and not from ‘the other ethnic group’, and that it is redesigned as an integrated body at all levels (that is, including both Greek and Turkish Cypriots throughout the hierarchy and across units).

100  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou This is perhaps the stickiest of points, precisely because the mental leap required to envision such an army breaks with the key parameter on which the conflict has been staked: the opposition between the ‘Greek side’ and the ‘Turkish side’. Friendly audiences to whom these recommendations have been presented have asked: ‘Why would you have such an army then?’, our example of civil defence in the event of disasters not quite making the cut. Interlocutors from the state level, on the other hand, have pointed to this set of recommendations as something that ‘forgets’ what we are here for in the first place. ‘No one wants to spend 18 months in the military’, a Greek Cypriot official said, ‘but we cannot forget that there is an invasion and occupation opposite us and 40,000 troops ensuring it.’ Those very same forty thousand Turkish troops represent the ‘Turkish guarantee’ which Turkish Cypriot officials are reluctant to dispense with. What all of these reactions to the ‘radicality’ of GAT’s positions share is an ultimate admission that the governmentality of negotiations is a governmentality of conflict, not reconciliation. Like peace, liberalism governmentalises gender so that, despite the stated intentions of those at the helm, power structures remain intact.

Conclusion: resistance, reflection, radicality, and post-liberal peace The three examples of themes on which GAT has made recommendations to the negotiators, and the ways in which these recommendations are being received, illustrate a number of things about the ways in which peacebuilding in Cyprus is being approached. Perhaps the most disturbing point is the one just made, that is, that what is being approached in the negotiations and in the public perceptions of them is conflict, not peace. It could be said here that the problem which the liberal discourse perpetuates in this sense is the basic acceptance that the parameters of discussion are, by definition, adversarial. This perhaps can also explain why successive rounds of negotiations over the last four decades have covered extremely well and in remarkable detail the phase of position-setting, where the interpretation of the current situation (as this might have looked at different time in these four decades) has been discussed to exhaustion but, round after round, collapse has occurred at the crucial point of discussing the future, or ‘bargaining’ an agreement. Many analyses have, indeed, concluded that the reason the Cyprus negotiations have hit so many stalemates is that ‘the public’ has never been prepared for the compromises the bargaining stage may involve. What our experience shows is that perhaps it is not the issue of compromises which the public has not been prepared for but it is the very discourse of agreement – which is not to say that

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such a discourse would necessarily be rejected, it is simply that it lies beyond the scope of governmentality of the Cyprus negotiations. This is precisely where the stakes lie in the current round of negotiations, widely held to be the most promising yet. Our intervention therefore begins precisely here: given that, in GAT’s experience, it is the reflection on how concerns for the personal might drive visions of the political, we think that a feminist interpretation of ‘women’s participation in the peace process’, as UNSCR 1325 envisions, should be about expanding this framework. We would thus propose the creation of a commission made up of women from all communities of Cyprus, who are well aware and have a gender consciousness to intervene both in the official negotiations with concrete suggestions as GAT has done, to demand to sit at the negotiating table providing a feminist input and perspective. The Technical Committee on Gender Equality, set up in June 2015 to aid neighbours, is a start. Women can bring to the table both a civil society perspective and a gender-sensitive one. In this way, if this women’s commission has a clear feminist theory and clear target, as well as constantly building coalitions and solidarity not only across ethnic lines, ideologies and class lines and age but also across macro and micro levels, it will then certainly constitute a strong pressure group to transform the patriarchal, militarist culture in which gender roles limit what males as well as females can do. In effect, these gender roles enslave us in particular spaces and force us to be what others want us to be. In other words, a gender-equality perspective, and all that this entails, can liberate men and women to create a more just and diverse democratic society. The transition to ‘peace’ must, at the same time, pass through and surpass liberal values.

Notes   1. (last accessed 20 November 2014).   2. See (last acc­ essed 20 November 2014).   3. Relevant resolutions around that time contained ambiguous phrasing and the matter is still one of debate; see ; ; and .  4. Cable News Network (CNN), 24 November 2001, (last accessed 20 November 2014).   5. Victoria Basham, War, Identity and the Liberal State: Everyday Experiences

102  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou of the Geopolitical in the Armed Forces (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 51–2.   6. Katrina Lee-Koo, ‘“War on Terror”/​“War on Women”: critical feminist perspectives’, in Alex Bellamy, Roland Bleiker, Sara Davies, and Richard Devetak (eds), Security and the War on Terror: Civil–Military Cooperation in a New Age (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 42–55.  7. Anjali Kwatra, A Just Peace? The Legacy of War for the Women of Afghanistan, ActionAid, London (September 2011), (last acc­ essed 4 May 2015). See also a recent article in the Washington Post, (last accessed 4 May 2015).  8. See Maria Hadjipavlou, ‘The contribution of bicommunal contacts in building a civil society in Cyprus’, in Alice H. Eagly, Reuben Baron, Lee Hamilton, V (eds) The Social Psychology of Group Identity and Social Conflict: Theory, Application, and Practice (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004), pp. 193–211; Herbert Kelman, ‘Informal mediation by the scholar/​practitioner’, in John Bercovitch and John Rubin (eds), Mediation in International Relations: Multiple Approaches to Conflict Management (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 64–96; John Montville, ‘The arrow and the olive branch: a case of track two diplomacy’, in John MacDonald and David Bendahmane (eds), Conflict Resolution: Track II Diplomacy (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1987), pp. 112–27; Harold Saunders, ‘Officials and citizens in international relations’, in Vamik Volkan, John Montville, and Demetrius Julius (eds), The Psychodynamics of International Relations: Unofficial Diplomacy at Work, vol. II (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991), pp. 41–71.   9. See Maria Hadjipavlou-Trigeorgis, Identity Conflict in Divided Societies: The Case of Cyprus, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Boston, MA: Boston University, 1987); Herbert Kelman, ‘Interactive problem-solving: changing political culture in the pursuit of conflict resolution’, Peace and Conflict, 16 (2010), 389–413. 10. . 11. Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 420. See also Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Critical agency, resistance and postcolonial civil society’, Co-Operation and Conflict, 46 (4) (2011), 419–40. 12. Olga Demetriou, ‘Counter-conduct and the everyday’ (forthcoming). 13. Veena Das, ‘Ordinary ethics’, in Didier Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology (Chichester: John Wiley, 2012), p. 133. 14. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 15. See Joint Declaration text, 11 February 2014, (last accessed 4 May 2015). 16. See Costas Constantinou, ‘Escapades at sea: sovereignty, legality and

Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus  103 machismo in the Eastern Mediterranean’, openDemocracy (21 October 2011), (last accessed 4 May 2015). 17. Milliyet newspaper, 7 November 2014, (last accessed 4 May 2015). 18. Sigmalive, 13 October 2014, (last acc­ essed 4 May 2015). 19. ELAM press release, 6 November 2014, (last accessed 4 May 2015). 20. More on this and other aspects of GAT’s work can be found at . 21. See Cynthia Cockburn, The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus (London: Zed Books, 2004); Olga Demetriou, ‘The militarization of opulence engendering a conflict heritage site’, International Feminist Journal, 14 (1) (2012), 56–77; Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou, ‘A feminist position on sharing governmental power and forging citizenship in Cyprus: proposals for the ongoing negotiations’, Feminist Review, 107 (2014), 98–106; Maria Hadjipavlou ‘No permission to cross: Cypriot women’s dialogue across the divide’, Gender Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 13 (4) (August 2006), 329–51; Maria Hadjipavlou, Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminism, Gender and Conflict (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010); Maria Hadjipavlou, ‘Cyprus: peace is too precious to be left to men alone’, in R. Baksh, L. Etchart, E. Onubogu and T. Johnson (eds), Gender Mainstreaming in Conflict Transformation (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2005), pp. 117–31. 22. Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (London: Zed Books, 2007); ibid. Demetriou and Hadjipavlou. 23. Cynthia Cockburn, ‘Snagged on the contradiction: NATO, UNSC Resolution 1325, and feminist responses’, paper delivered to No to War – No to NATO, Annual Meeting, Dublin, 15–17 April 2011. 24. Cockburn, From Where We Stand; Carol Cohn, Helen Kinsella and Sheri Gibbings, ‘Women, peace and security’, International Journal of Feminist Politics, 6 (1) (2004), 130–40; K. Anwarul Chowdhury, ‘The intrinsic role of women in peace and security genesis and follow-up of UNSCR 1325’, Palestine–Israel Journal, 17 (3 and 4) (2011), 9–16; Felicity Hill, Mikele Aboitiz and Sara Poehlman-Doumbouya, ‘Non-governmental organizations’ role in the build-up and implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325’, Sign: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (summer 2003), 1255–69; Dyan Mazurana, Angela Raven-Roberts and Jane Parpat, Gender Conflict and Peacekeeping (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 25. Cockburn, From Where We Stand; Cockburn, ‘Snagged on the contradiction’; Chowdhury, ‘The intrinsic role of women in peace and security genesis’.

104  Olga Demetriou and Maria Hadjipavlou 26. Sandra Whitworth, Men, Militarism and Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 2004). 27. Maria Hadjipavlou-Trigeorgis, Identity Conflict in Divided Societies: The Case of Cyprus, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Boston, MA: University of Boston, 1987). 28. Shahrzad Mojab, ‘Introduction: women, war, violence and learning’, in Mojab (ed.), Women, War, Violence and Learning (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1–13. 29. Ibid. p. 2. 30. Mavic Cabrera-Balleza, ‘Is it time to walk the talk and fulfill the promise of UNSCR 1325?’, Palestine–Israel Journal, 17 (3 and 4) (2011), 16–25. 31. Cockburn, From Where We Stand; Carol Cohn ‘Mainstreaming gender in UN security policy: a path to political transformation?’, in Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen (eds), Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 185–206. 32. Cohn, ‘Mainstreaming gender’. 33. Felicity Hill, Women’s Contribution to Conflict Prevention, Early Warning and Disarmament (United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), 2003), (last accessed 4 May 2015). 34. UN Security Council, Report of the Secretary General on His Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus, 24 November 2010 (Doc. Ref. s/​2010/​603),

(last accessed 4 May 2015). 35. Laura Sjoberg, Gender, Justice and the Wars in Iraq: A Feminist Reformulation of Just War Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), p. 182. 36. Cockburn, The Line; Hadjipavlou, Women and Change in Cyprus; Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, vol. 2 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Sjoberg, Gender, Justice and Wars in Iraq; Simona Sharoni, Gender and the Israeli– Palestinian Conflict, The Politics of Women’s Resistance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995); Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 37. Text of 1977 high-level agreement, (last accessed 4 May 2015). 38. GAT, Women’s Peace in Cyprus: Recommendations of the Gender Advisory Team (GAT) on Implementing UNSCR 1325 Provisions on Women, Peace and Security (Nicosia: PRIO, 2014), (last accessed 4 May 2015). 39. GAT, ‘Towards a gendered peace: intervention in the negotiation process inspired by UNSCR 1325’, PRIO Cyprus Centre Policy Brief 01/​2014, Nicosia (last accessed 4 May 2015).

5 Peace Formation versus Everyday State Formation in Palestine Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond

Introduction As this book elaborates, peace and the state form through contestation at the local, national and international levels at the intersection of peacebuilding, peace formation, statebuilding and state formation. In the Israeli–Palestinian case, this contestation is especially severe because conflict parties’ notions of peace, and consequently of the state, are mutually exclusive. Consecutive Israeli governments have demonstrated that their understanding of peace implies Israeli control over Palestine with regard to security, economics and resources, borders as well as full control over Israeli settlements and their infrastructure.1 This contradicts the Palestinian understanding of peace based on mutual sovereignty, self-determination, territorial integrity and security.2 A reconciliation between those notions has not been achieved. Instead, Israel has used the asymmetry in structural and direct power between itself (with its high-tech military, wealth and close alliance with the United States) and the Palestinian Authority (as an aid-dependent, temporary governance mechanism without a military or effective representation of its interests in the United Nations Security Council) to impose its notion of peaceas-control on the Palestinians. In its pursuit, Israel combines the military pacification of Palestine with collective punishment of resistance, aimed at yoking a governmentality of self-policing onto Palestinian society.3 The ‘peace process’, which was supposed to bring about a permanent settlement between the conflict parties, has failed to do so or to mitigate the oppressive reality of Israel’s pacification strategy. Moreover, the Oslo Process has aggravated Palestinian dependence on its occupier,4 while serving as a veneer for continuous Israeli land grabs and military

106  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond oppression. Hence, ‘peace’ as a label has been discredited to the extent that many Palestinian grassroots initiatives refuse to be associated with it. Instead, opinion polls point to the establishment of a Palestinian state as the top national priority within Palestinian society.5 While popular preferences regarding the nature of this state – whether a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel is more desirable than the one-state solution – are divided,6 mobilisation to overcome the ‘rightlessness of statelessness’7 has rallied political agency at different levels. Hence, this chapter analyses local, non-violent state-formation processes in terms of their capacity and limitations in creating a viable basis for an emerging state in the face of national and international obstacles in the stateformation process. Imposing the category of peace formation on this type of agency would imply an act of epistemic violence towards those movements that refuse to be associated with the discredited ‘peace process’. Moreover, while most elements of the definition for peace formation (see Introduction) are applicable to the grassroots agency analysed in this chapter, there is also one ontological difference: peace formation has to seek accommodation between conflict parties’ divergent notions of peace in order to become sustainable. The types of agency analysed here as everyday state formation,8 by contrast, strive for independence from the other conflict party and thus seek consensus on the rules, design and extent of an emerging autonomy exclusively within Palestinian society. Such consensus-building faces challenges on multiple levels, ranging from the political division at the national level between the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip and the Fatah government in the West Bank, to societal disunity over the nature of an emerging Palestinian body politic and to international interference, fuelling these divisions. With the examples of independence movements in mind that descended into domestic violence soon after independence, this chapter analyses all three levels. In particular, however, it examines the capacity of grassroots initiatives in overcoming political fragmentation, bridging social fault lines and bringing about a stable foundation for a future Palestinian body politic. This chapter introduces the concept of everyday state formation and investigates grassroots initiatives as platforms on which to create societal consensus around the rules, design and extent of a future state to mitigate tensions within the emerging Palestinian body politic. Based partly on original interview material9 and partly on the analysis of secondary sources, the chapter presents everyday state formation as a useful concept to investigate the contribution of grassroots initiatives to the process of state formation.

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State formation, power and the local turn Central to this analysis are different types of power and their relation to emancipation and the formation of a state. To dissect the relationship between power and state formation we deploy three approaches.10 Firstly, direct or structural power is projected from its holders on to their subjects in a unidirectional manner, brooking no opposition.11 This view on power has traditionally shaped the state-formation debate in the disciplines of history and politics.12 Centralised governments were often the outcome of power struggles between the coercive capabilities of different elites.13 Modern forms of state formation or external statebuilding have been aimed at reinforcing the state’s infrastructure to allow political elites to exercise material – military and economic – power over weaker counterparts and the general population, inevitably provoking a complex mixture of compliance and resistance. Secondly, power as governmentality operates in a subtler manner through discourses and knowledge, as well as institutions. This type of power (also sometimes called ‘soft’ or ‘normative’ power)14 works through the naturalisation of beliefs as a subtle technology whose workings the individual is often unaware of.15 Governmentality denotes the use of governance by international and state actors to constitute their subjects, potentially against their will, in political, economic, and rights terms. Resisting governmentality and self-policing is thus a necessary condition for subalterns’ exercise of power. Finally, subaltern power implies that critical agency, resistance and everyday patterns of activity are able, to some degree at least, to subvert both forms of power.16 This may be exercised through guerrilla or insurgent tactics as well as through non-violent grassroots initiatives, hidden forms of resistance as Scott has outlined.17 Subaltern power may mitigate identity issues and inequality while promoting autonomy, selfdetermination and liberation, or custom. In the case of Palestine, external intervention through direct, structural and governmental power has systematically prevented the formation of a state. Starting with the British Mandate for Palestine (and its abuse by implementing the Balfour Declaration)18 to Israel’s military occupation and the internationally driven ‘statebuilding’ project, external forms of power have historically undermined local politics in the pursuit of security and geopolitical interests. Israel’s direct, structural and biopower has fragmented the territorial, social and political unity needed for the formation of a Palestinian state.19 Internationally financed statebuilding efforts meanwhile remain within the liberal peace and subsequent neo-liberal state framework:20 limited and focused on security and ­institution-building, rather than an emancipatory social contract and social justice.21 Even the liberal character of this enterprise is ­debatable,

108  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond given that neither democratisation nor trade liberalisation has been pursued, while security measures are solely geared towards Israeli needs.22 In addition, the internationally sponsored Israeli–Palestinian peace process has tried to establish a governmentality which aimed to make the current ‘matrix of control’23 acceptable as a step towards Palestinian sovereignty. The realisation that consecutive Israeli governments have used the Oslo process as a pacification strategy24 emptied of any emancipatory content has led to ‘ungovernmentality’. This largely uncoordinated form of subaltern resistance against the governmentality of pacification manifests itself in grassroots initiatives all across Palestine.25 Non-violent subaltern agency has so far received scant attention in the state-­formation debate, though. Anthropologists have identified cultural practices at the  heart of state-formation process but tend to be more concerned with the abstract nature of the state and its effects on the subject than with the role of subaltern power in shaping it.26 Where subaltern agency is the focus, it appears only at the margins of the state.27 While hinting at the possibility that states could be produced through everyday encounters,28 anthropological scholarship has yet to define the institutional and strategic pathways in which this happens, as well as the limitations of this agency. Of particular interest to this study are, thus, initiatives that play a vital role in the Palestinian state formation by pushing back the encroachment of the Israeli state, countering divisive political interference, helping to create the social foundation and identity of an emerging Palestinian state or simply support everyday life. This chapter argues that such everyday state formation implies an emancipatory form of subaltern agency which provides some navigation points from domestic consensus for external policy. Locally driven forces of state formation foreground cultural and identity issues, questions of historical justice, socio-economic inequality, and power sharing which conflict with Israel’s preferences. This highlights the legitimacy gap between the subaltern and international aid interventions. Understanding everyday state formation and its encounter with the liberal peace architecture demands serious attention to the way in which direct, structural or governmental power, exercised by states or internationals, disallows existing agency for emancipation and social justice. Everyday state formation offers innovation and navigation points for – local, state, and international – policymakers who seek to regain lost legitimacy by promoting Palestinian independence while being wary of the danger of post-independence fragility. Such innovation already exists, we argue, in many small corners where mobilisation for a viable Palestinian state proceeds in various ways, dealing with a range of issues and inequalities, and imagining how a viable order may be constituted.

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National elites in the state-formation process Divisions between the two governments in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip aggravate the possibility of promoting Palestinian statehood at the international level. Since Hamas’s election in 2006, the rivalling parties have been oscillating between attempts to establish unity governments, political rivalry and violent conflict. Outbreaks of inter-factional violence between Fatah and Hamas have cost hundreds of lives,29 while torture in Palestinian prisons became pervasive.30 In addition, interfactional structural violence perpetuates the repressive and discriminatory conduct of the occupation: campaigns of political arrests, the politicisation of the judiciary, the obstruction of political participation, crackdowns on political rights and civil liberties, as well as discrimination in public-sector employment.31 Structural violence is thus disruptive to civil society, political life and socio-economic development in the occupied Palestinian territories. After eight years of bitter rivalry and three failed attempts at creating a unity government, Fatah and Hamas signed another unity agreement on 23 April 2014.32 Accordingly, a technocratic government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, was sworn in in June 2014 and is supposed to rule the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while overseeing new elections in 2015. Given the continuing tensions between the two parties, doubts remain as to the durability of the unity government, though. Elections have again been indefinitely postponed, while Fatah and Hamas are competing over the control of the pledged reconstruction assistance.33 During the eight years long split between the Fatah-ruled West Bank and the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip, both movements have amassed structural and direct power with the aim of improving their respective positions in this internal Palestinian rivalry. Since 2006, the Hamas– Fatah rivalry has resembled a Tillyian process of state formation.34 Both governments, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, have: systematically failed to investigate killings and torture allegations, aggravating feelings of insecurity and lawlessness in the population; carried out campaigns of political arrests; constrained civil society and transferred jurisdiction from civilian to military courts.35 Human rights violations are employed tactically by Fatah and Hamas to repress their respective opponent and erode its organisational structure. Both parties’ waning legitimacy forced them into the latest unity deal, though. Hamas was increasingly isolated in the region and thus ran out of funding for its governance of the Gaza Strip. Severing its ties with the Assad regime in Syria cut off Hamas from Iranian support, while the destruction of the tunnel economy further reduced Hamas’s revenue basis.36 Fatah, by contrast, had come empty-handed out of the latest round of negotiations with Israel and without a strategy on how to end the Israel occupation.

110  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond In terms of the state-formation process, however, the unity agreement would only be a first step. In the interest of overcoming the current fragmentation into competing statelets and to promote national unity, the interim government would have to merge the currently separate governance structures of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, harmonise laws between the entities, and transform the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) into a shared body politic of all Palestinian parties. The agenda of statehood makes institutional reforms more significant: the institutional design of any statebuilding process at the moment of its inception appears to enshrine already materialised interests as a permanent feature of the regional and international landscape. In this sense, sovereignty creates a zero-sum game among domestic elites.

International interference and state formation Intra-Palestinian divisions have often been fuelled by external influences. Fatah’s crackdowns on Hamas, for instance, were often the response to Israeli and international pressure on the Palestinian Authority to do Israel’s bidding. Israeli politics have been playing a particularly divisive role, fragmenting Palestinian society politically, socially and geographically. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s open admission,37 that he would never allow a fully sovereign Palestinian state, makes Israel’s divisive interventions appear as a deliberate strategy to undermine Palestinian statehood aspirations. By withholding Palestinian taxes from the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government has been fuelling tensions between Fatah and Hamas. Additionally, Israeli security services have been using information technologies to foment divisions within Palestinian society.38 Israel’s technological control over Palestine39 has allowed Israeli security services to establish an all-pervasive system of surveillance, blackmailing Palestinians to become Israeli informants.40 Moreover, Israel’s settlement enterprise has been fragmenting Palestinian society geographically41 to the extent that two-thirds of Palestinians have naturalised the notion that an independent Palestinian state is no longer feasible.42 Cutting off communities from one another through continuously expanding settlements and settler roads, more­ over, reduces individuals’ social circles and, thus, additionally undermines Palestinian unity on a social level. Palestine’s dependency on foreign aid43 has allowed international donors to use their structural power and governmentality in divisive and manipulative ways. Traditionally, European Union and United States donor policies have toed Israel’s line on boycotting Hamas, fuelling political divisions through aid conditionalities and biased mediation processes.44 In contrast to previous attempts at Fatah–Hamas reconcili-

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ation, the European Union and the United States welcomed the current interim government, though, because it does not include any Hamas affiliates. Considering the need for elections and Hamas’s current popularity after the 2014 war on Gaza, technocratic governance is not a longterm solution, though. Caged in by their antiterrorism policies, neither the US nor the EU are able to support a future democratically elected government that includes Hamas because of the movement’s blacklisting as a terrorist organisation.45 In a hypocritical46 attempt to overcome the contradiction between their objective of democracy promotion and their security interests, the United States and the European Union agreed on the Middle East Quartet’s three conditions for dealing with Hamas: financial and diplomatic sanctions on Hamas would be lifted, if the movement renounces all violence, recognises Israel and adheres to previous diplomatic agreements. Hence, unless Hamas models itself on Fatah’s failed negotiation strategy, any unity government will be starved of European and American aid. In sum, the national reconciliation process is prone to manipulation by external actors and remains most likely to collapse under the financial pressure exerted by external actors. Thus direct, structural and governmental forms of power continue to fragment Palestinian society and undermine political unity. By limiting Palestinians’ democratic choices and funding unelected Palestinian Authority institutions instead, international donors are aggravating tensions between Palestinian society and its unelected leadership. Hence, external and domestic legitimacy remain irreconcilable. Local legitimacy for Hamas (as the only line of defence against Israel’s military occupation) clashes with external notions of legitimacy, backed by the structural and governmental power of Palestine’s biggest donors. Consequently, the PLO could only pursue international financial support for its state formation project at the expense of domestic legitimacy and inner Palestinian reconciliation. According to Ramzy Baroud, genuine Palestinian unity can be formed only at the subaltern level and requires a rethinking of Palestine as a concept: For true unity to take place, it has to be shaped entirely by Palestinian national priorities. It cannot be linked to aid, and tribal political allegiances. It should not be aimed to please the US and the EU or to accommodate Israeli security. True unity would have to go back to the original questions that split Palestinian communities in Palestine and around the world in the first place. It has to contend with important questions concerning Palestinian identity, national aspirations, resistance and the outlook of an entire generation that was born after the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993.47

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Everyday state formation in Palestine If direct, structural and governmental power has generated disunity and failed to bring about Palestinian sovereignty, can grassroots agency contribute to Palestinian unity and state formation? For a state to be stable and peaceful, it needs to be based on a societal consensus – on its institutional framework, territorial expansion, its identity and socio-economic orientation – and it requires institutions to mediate conflicting interests within society. This section analyses community-based state-formation processes in Palestine aiming to create these prerequisites and introduce a typology of everyday state formation. In contrast to the civil society sphere,48 peaceful community-based state-formation processes tend to be largely free of foreign intervention because foreign governments lack both the leverage and the interest to intervene in this space. Everyday state formation in the pre-state condition of Palestine constitutes a sphere in which local initiatives assume functions traditionally performed by the state, create societal cohesion as the basis for a viable state and defend historical rights. This ranges from defending borders and community territory against Israeli annexation through demonstrations and everyday practices such as farming in restricted areas, to defending Palestine’s historical positionality through the creation of new archives, and to strengthening communities as the foundation of an emerging state.49 By doing so, everyday state formation signals how the political space and institutional expansion of a durable state could look like while creating an enabling environment for this political project at the community level. Hence, everyday state formation exceeds the framework of resistance in which local political agency in Palestine is traditionally discussed. Resistance negates oppressive forms of power but it is often criticised for falling short of re-articulating the terms of power.50 Delineating the political space of an emerging state and creating its societal preconditions, by contrast, go beyond negating oppression. Similar to critical readings of resistance,51 everyday state formation could also be exercised in favour of a new hegemony or it may play straight into the hands of the old elites. This is particularly problematic in the sphere of state formation where a new coercive power emerges which could be hijacked and deployed against the very movements that enabled it. Hence, the subsequent typology aims to elaborate whether everyday state formation pursues emancipation, justice or social cohesion to ward off such risks. We shall distinguish between four varieties: mobilisation for national unity; assuming state functions; creating viable communities; and defending historic rights and conducting public diplomacy.

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Mobilising for national unity In response to national unity being blocked by elite interests, a Palestinian youth movement was formed under the name ‘March 15’. Its goal was to ‘get past the old identities – Fatah, Hamas, religious, secular, Israeli and Palestinian Arab’ to create a ‘one state’ movement, encompassing not only the populations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the Palestinian refugees abroad and the Palestinian inhabitants of Israel.52 By organising the largest unapproved demonstration in the Gaza Strip since the Hamas government came into office, March 15 was able to effect the swift resumption of unity talks.53 For March 15, though, overcoming the stalemate between Fatah and Hamas was only a means to the end of reinstating the democratic process in Palestine. The young activists did not believe in either party’s strategy for the future. They criticise Fatah’s ‘statebuilding’ as a facade, reject Hamas’s armed resistance for the consequences that it inflicts on the Palestinians, and deny the possibility of achieving statehood through United Nations recognition.54 For the young activists, reforming the Palestinian Authority holds no emancipatory potential either. They regard the PA as a subcontractor of the occupation, not an administration effectively working towards independence for its people.55 Hence, according to March 15 activists, the PA’s authoritarian tendencies are neither new nor surprising given that it represents the continuation of the occupation by other means.56 As an alternative they suggest a return to the pre-Oslo era which they associate with more effective local democracy, a more vibrant civil society and less economic dependence on Israel prior to the establishment of the customs envelope through the Paris Protocol.57 Most importantly, before Oslo – so the argument goes – Israel accepted the financial responsibilities of an occupying force and provided public services to the Palestinians. Forcing Israel back into direct occupation,58 while ending European and American subsidisation of the occupation, would make the occupation financially unsustainable. Reoccupation, however, lacks traction in the Palestinian population because of its exposure of Palestinian society to an even more brutal form of oppression. Moreover, the movement’s strategy seems to be based on a misguided understanding of the location of power in Palestine. As one ­co-ordinator of unarmed resistance groups put it: ‘These young people thought they would fight the same battle against a dictator as the Egyptians or Tunisians. But Abu Mazen is not the same kind. Most of the time you feel you have to force him to stay.’59 Abbas’s multiple resignation attempts and his bowing to structural power indeed point to a deeper structural problem. The PA’s dependency on foreign aid provides donors with ample financial and diplomatic leverage to manipulate Palestinian

114  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond politics.60 Divisive political decisions thus often appear to be a direct result of pressure exerted by donors. Abbas’s anti-Hamas measures61 or the PA’s reluctance to integrate Hamas’s security forces with the heavily US-sponsored PA security forces (the latter is a vital step in terms of state formation and political unity)62 serve as prominent examples. While Abu Mazen, Salam Fayyad, and Mohammed Dahlan have been associated with the policies which are fuelling inter-factional conflict, removing them from power might not change Palestinian politics as long as Western donors boycott Palestinian unity. Being unable to draw up a platform with mass appeal which engages with the structural power trap, March 15 all but vanished from public view.

Assuming state functions In the absence of fixed borders and a military to defend them, Palestinian territory is under constant threat of annexation by Israel. The most effective defence against this direct power, however, has emerged through non-violent tactics, such as the ‘Stop the Wall’ campaigns. Initiated during the height of the Al Aqsa Intifada in 2003, when Palestinian resistance was marked by suicide terrorism, the movement’s founders intended to return the methods of the Palestinian struggle to unarmed resistance. It realised that Palestinian resistance could not win ‘Israel’s game’ – an armed struggle against the most powerful army in the Middle East.63 Drawing lessons from the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) fight against apartheid, it became clear that international legitimacy was key to changing the asymmetry of power in favour of the Palestinians.64 External perception of Palestine’s independence struggle thus had to shift from suicide terrorism towards peaceful resistance against oppression. Unarmed resistance movements kept growing, even when the international headlines were dominated by the insurgency of the Al Aqsa Intifada.65 ‘Stop the Wall’ campaigns staged unarmed demonstrations against Israel’s separation wall which cuts through Palestinian territory in the West Bank, separates farmers from their income and reduces the territory of a future Palestinian state. The demonstrations in Budrus and Bi’lin attracted sufficient international attention and drew participation from international and Israeli activists to allow the movement to halt, and later reverse, some of Israel’s land grab. Many other campaigns are still continuing, yet they meet increasing IDF violence, lack the support of the PA and face decreasing public interest.66 Beyond simple acts of resistance, ‘Stop the Wall’ creates platforms for interethnic, cross-confessional and inter-factional collaboration through its appeal to the core Palestinian experience of the past century: being driven from ancestral land. Countering the experience of victimisation with political mobilisation constitutes an emancipatory and ‘unifying

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experience’, changes individuals’ perception of ‘the Palestinian other and the self’.67 The limitations of this type of everyday state formation lie in its dependence on external support, in particular international media attention and the participation of international protesters. Small-scale farming in Area C is another act of everyday state formation that defends community territory from Israeli encroachment. Area C contains 61 per cent of Palestine, connecting 227 villages and urban areas, while harbouring some of Palestine’s most fertile areas. As the largest contiguous territory within Palestine, Area C is crucial for the formation of a state. According to the Oslo accords, Area C was supposed to be gradually transferred back from Israeli to Palestinian control by 1998, pending a final peace agreement. Since a final peace accord has never materialised, some of the 150,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Area C have continued farming in defiance of Israeli restrictions. Beyond resisting Israeli authority, this agency generates the means to sustain rural communities as a form of sumud (steadfastness in the face of Israel’s occupation). Yet this form of everyday agency is constrained by direct and structural power. Farmers run the risk of seeing illegally built structures demolished and farmed land confiscated by Israeli authorities. Resistance farming has traditionally been supported by the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC) and more recently also by the European Union68 and the World Bank, since studies concluded that unleashing the potential of Area C would ‘provide whole new areas of economic activity and set the economy on the path to sustainable growth’.69 A neo-liberal appropriation of resistance tactics by structural power might aggravate the precariousness of Palestinian farmers, though. The PA has recently dispossessed small farmers of their land in pursuit of plans to build industrial parks on some of Palestine’s most fertile plains.70

Creating the basis for viable communities With regard to societal unity, protest movements, such as ‘Stop the Wall’, provide only a thin layer of unity. Their rationality of bonding, through a shared aspiration, intractably links notions of unity to the existence of a common enemy. After achieving Palestinian statehood, though, this bonding strategy is bound to crumble. In the absence of societal conflict-resolution mechanisms, Palestine could plunge from its struggle against the occupation into a struggle with itself. A future state, built on a deeply divided society, might generate its own resistance, pitting different notions of Palestinian identity, autonomy and rights against one another. This would provide Israeli strategists with opportunities to reverse Palestinian sovereignty. Local conflict-resolution initiatives are hedging against such risks. They take on any type of social conflict, mediate between the ­conflict

116  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond parties, provide trauma counselling, train individuals in conflict-resolution mechanisms and empower the weaker segments of society through psychological, social, economic and religious support. Teaching communities conflict-resolution mechanism provides the micro-level of society with coping mechanisms to navigate the pressure of the occupation and its side effects.71 Often trained in traditional conflict-mediation techniques (sulha), they aim to strengthen communities as well as intercommunity dialogues. The aim of strengthening communities as building blocks of the Palestinian nation gives these organisations a vital role in everyday state formation. Their political project is not limited to undoing the sociopsychological damage of the Israeli occupation. Indeed, they aim at a deeper reform of Palestinian society by levelling power asymmetries and anchoring conflict-resolution mechanisms in the very fabric of Palestinian society. Importantly, local conflict-resolution initiatives tend to maintain their distance with day-to-day politics and thus remain beyond the grasp of political elites. Equally, their inner-Palestinian reconciliation agenda is too localised, small scale and long term to pose a visible threat to direct power.

Defending historic rights and conducting public diplomacy Given that ‘history plays an important role in state formation, in legitimizing the origins of the state,72 governments tend to create and maintain their own archives. Through classification or declassification of files, rules of access, and even the cataloguing of information, archivists can control the writing of history to some extent. In the Israeli–Palestinian context, Israeli archivists use such strategies to prevent the recognition of Palestinian land claims and to rewrite the history of the nakba.73 Israeli national archives tend to be administered by the Israeli Defence Forces, rendering the writing of history a strategic resource in the conflict. Previously accessible material was frequently reclassified after ­critical Israeli historians published archival material which undermined the official Israeli account of historic events. In response, Palestinian historians started to collect material to substantiate their counternarrative and to record historical Palestinian claims regarding land, dispossession and the violence of Israel’s direct power. Gathering and publishing Palestinians’ accounts of past events are essential to assert historic rights and to expose different types of colonial strategies applied in occupied Palestine. Their emancipatory aspiration elevates this endeavour from resistance to everyday state formation. Because there is not one history of Palestine, the number of archival projects grows with the questions asked about the past.74 Any of those projects, however, highlights the accounts of some individuals

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while silencing others. Hence, archival projects raise the problem of representation75 in the attempt to solve it. Non-violent resistance has, over time, refined and diversified its strategies based on its insights into the modus operandi of Israel’s direct and structural power. Unarmed resistance is based on the realisation that Israel’s occupation rests not only on its military but also on its representation in the media and its international support. Recent public diplomacy campaigns have shown that these two pillars are linked and can be weakened. The outcry in the international media over the IDF’s killings of unarmed protesters on nakba-day 2011, the massacre on the Freedom Flotilla in 2010, as well as atrocities in the recent Gaza wars suggest that the international image of Israel’s occupation is changing. If portrayed in the international media, the peaceful provocation of IDF violence creates a moral conundrum for Israel’s allies. Granting military aid to, or allying with, an army which shoots at peaceful protesters, massacres children and attacks United Nations schools might be irreconcilable with many countries’ self-image of conducting a just foreign policy or possessing ‘smart power’. Consequently, such events may make the occupation politically too costly for Israel. By exposing direct power, the location of power can thus be changed. Such change does not happen easily, though. The first intifada (1987–93) illustrated that popular perceptions do not necessarily shift as radically as the media narrative. Years’ worth of television footage pitting Israeli tanks against stone-throwing Palestinian children radically changed the media portrayal of the conflict76 but only moderately altered public conceptions of the conflict.77 Hence, everyday state formation’s capacity to sever the alignment between structural, governmental and direct power might be limited.

Conclusion: reflections on national reconciliation, resistance and everyday state formation To create a viable Palestinian body politic some form of inner-­Palestinian consensus is necessary at different levels. The integrity of Palestinian state institutions cannot be restored without national reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. Palestinian society needs to agree on the rules, design and extent of a future state. Local conflict-resolution mechanisms are equally indispensable to prevent the violent outbreak of unresolved tensions within society. Moreover, this difficult internal harmonisation process is constantly challenged by the divisive interference of Israel and Palestine’s biggest donors. While the homogenisation of the local to state/​regional/​global order has appeared very unlikely, recent concessions may indicate donors’ growing recognition of the ­limitations

118  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond of structural, governmental and direct order in stabilising local political orders. And, in the interim, relative power drives politics in the absence of a practical and conceptual mechanism through which acute differences can be mediated without being eradicated, in political and economic terms and including justice across space and time. Resistance reflects a failure of governance in meeting democratic aspirations or demands for historical justice, socio-economic inequality, and emancipation. As a mechanism to effect the different types of intra-Palestinian consensus needed to stabilise an emerging Palestinian state, however, resistance provides limited tools. Resistance to a state or policy for not meeting its own normative or technical standards may not necessarily represent critical agency, in that it merely holds power up to its own standards or replicates it.78 Finding unity in resistance against Israel’s structural power and inappropriate international blueprints provides only a thin layer of societal consensus. While Palestinian resistance has come a long way from mirroring, and thus perpetuating, violence (that is, in the al-Aqsa Intifada) to turning power on itself through its reflection in the media and delineating its own peaceful state formation project, it is currently constrained by geographical, political and societal fragmentation. Given the risk of using resistance to establish new oppressive structures – as Fatah and Hamas individually did in their enclaves since 2006 – Michel Foucault advises that resistance should not result in new patterns or institutions of exclusion.79 By introducing the novel concept of everyday state formation, this chapter tries to illustrate that viable forms of grassroots agency are already working towards creating the conditions for an inclusionary state. In contrast to subaltern agency which strays into insurgency mode, everyday state formation retains a focus on societal and political unity and exceeds resistance by demarcating the political space of an emerging state. Yet, its effectiveness remains limited if structural, direct or governmental power fails to support it. Hence, in the circulation of power in state-formation processes, grassroots agency is easily unhinged by difference across domestic and external actors, even if the subaltern amasses the essential legitimacy they all require. As Foucault pointed out, emancipation or liberty produces new power relations and, therefore, new claims for emancipation.80 For Foucault, a ‘daily ethico-political struggle’ needs to ensue to create the conditions in which resistance can oppose domination and new forms of subjectivity can emerge for autonomy and equality.81 This requires platforms for internal ­consensus-building in the pursuit of a viable Palestinian state. In more general terms, some new conceptual insights may be gleaned from our interrogation of everyday state formation and the power relations it engenders. The obvious problems raised by Israeli exercises of direct, structural and governmental power, in terms of Palestinian

Peace Formation v. Everyday State Formation in Palestine  119

resistance and fragmentation, led external actors to create a ‘governablescape’ according to the liberal peace and neo-liberal state architecture. This is a space of pacification and neo-liberalism which has neither granted rights safeguards nor democracy or security to the stateless Palestinians. Both Israeli structural and donor governmental perspectives see the putative Palestinian state as an ‘ungovernable-scape’ where national unity is either unlikely or undesirable. Given the failure of the liberal peace and the neo-liberal state architecture to cater for Palestinian rights and needs, everyday state formation agency has developed numerous examples of Palestinian self-governance, some of which are suggestive of local and very persistent, subtle, but also effective, processes to create a viable basis for an emerging Palestinian state. From the external perspective, governmentality and structural power appear to be met by Palestinian ungovernmentality. Everyday state formation is more than a negation of governmentality, though, because it mobilises four conflicting goals: different notions of autonomy, sovereignty, unity, and reconciliation. Thus, northern and elite structural power is exercised to produce an illusion of governmentality: a space where both local agency and international governmentality is ineffective, enabling ever more invasive forms of intervention in the name of pacification on the part of the Israeli state. Ungovernmentality is a response to local and human erasure in the interests of northern or elite interests, culture, and ideology, reminiscent of colonialism. The local is erased from donor discourses to provide space for the postcolony to prosper according to the liberal peace and neo-liberal state architecture. However, ‘ungovernable-scapes’ – local agency/​systems which are not under Israeli or donor authority – continue to be self-governing, developing modes of unity and state formation at the community level. They are cognisant of their very limited structural and governmental power but they doggedly seek to influence the state and external forms of the power through their own subaltern means. Hence, a societal consensus on the shape, content and institutional layout of a future Palestinian state through everyday state formation is essential to prevent subaltern agency and exercises of power to control ‘ungovernmentality’ from continuing to wrestle futilely with each other.

Notes  1. Jeff Halper, ‘The 94 percent solution: a matrix of control’, Middle East Research and Information Project, 216 (2001).   2. Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 126.

120  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond   3. Examples of collective punishment are the siege of and frequent wars on Gaza in response to Hamas’s actions as well as Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) closures of neighbourhoods, mass arrests and house demolitions in response to the actions of individuals.  4. On the economic and governance dependence created through mechanisms such as the Paris Protocol, see Ibrahim Shikaki and Joanna Springer, ‘Building a failed state: Palestine’s governance and economy delinked’, Al Shabaka Policy Brief, 21 April 2015, .   5. See Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), Palestinian Public Opinion Polls, (last accessed 4 February 2015)   6. The notion of a two-state solution has lost appeal with the fragmentation of the territory by Israeli settlements. This scenario remains supported by a slim majority of Palestinians according to the latest surveys, however, see Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), ‘Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 52’ (5–7 June 2014), .   7. Hannah Arendt, ‘The perplexities of the rights of man’, in Peter Baehr (ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 31–45.   8. Sandra Pogodda, ‘Everyday state formation: subaltern agency in pre-state and revolutionary societies’, (forthcoming).   9. Between 2011 and 2012, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews in different parts of the West Bank. Interviewees were selected by their occupation or party affiliation with the aim of covering a wide range of grassroots organisations as well as individuals working for ministries, refugee camps, NGOs, electoral bodies and Palestine’s aid industry. Among the eighteen interviews used for this article, four were conducted in Arabic, the others in English. 10. For a framework on the relationship between peace and power see Oliver P. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 11. See, for example, Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter Publishers, 1998); Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in international politics’, International Organization, 59 (1) (2005), 39–75. 12. On the divergence of the state-formation debate in history and politics from sociological and anthropological approaches, see Oliver Richmond, ‘The legacy of state formation’, International Peacekeeping, 20 (3) (2013), 299–315. 13. Donald Kurtz identifies the ‘voluntaristic’ approaches of early hydraulic societies as an exception to the coercive character of state-formation processes: Donald Kurtz, Political Anthropology: Paradigms and Power (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), pp. 170–1. In a more detailed analysis of hydraulic societies in the Arab region, Ayubi concludes that these societies were governed by systems of total (despotic) power, though: Nazih Ayubi, Nazih, Overstating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 42–85.

Peace Formation v. Everyday State Formation in Palestine  121 14. Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); Ian Manners, ‘Normative power Europe: a contradiction in terms?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40 (2): (2002) 235–58. 15. Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (London: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 201–22. 16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271–316; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Critical agency, resistance, and a post-colonial civil society’, Cooperation and Conflict, 46 (4) (2011), 419–40. 17. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. 18. By deliberately ignoring the resistance of Palestinian society against the reconstitution of a homeland for the Jews on Palestinian territory, the British government violated the principle of self-determination as the cornerstone of the mandate given by the League of Nations: David Gilmour, ‘The unregarded prophet: Lord Curzon and the Palestine question’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 25 (3) (1996), 60–8. 19. On different aspects of Israel’s coercive, structural and bio-power, see Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007); Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009); Nigel Parsons, Nigel and Mark B. Salter (2008), ‘Israeli biopolitics: closure, territorialisation and governmentality in the occupied Palestinian territories’, Geopolitics, 13 (4) (2008), 701–23. 20. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding. 21. Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 149–80. 22. Sandra Pogodda, ‘Inconsistent interventionism in Palestine: objectives, narratives, and domestic policy-making’, Democratization, 19 (3) (2012), 535–52. 23. Halper, ‘The 94 percent solution’. 24. Mandy Turner, ‘Completing the circle: peacebuilding as colonial practice in the occupied Palestinian territory’, International Peacekeeping, 19 (4) (2012), 492–507. 25. Mazin Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 26. Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut Nustad (eds), State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 27. Veena Das and Deborah Poole, Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fee, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004). 28. Krohn-Hansen and Nustad, State Formation, pp. 12–13. 29. Between October 2006 and August 2010 more than 470 Palestinians had been killed in inter-factional fighting; see Michele Esposito, ‘Quarterly

122  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond update on conflict and diplomacy: 16 May–15 August 2010’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 40 (1) (2010), 127–66, 145. 30. Torture of Palestinians in Fatah-administered prisons was already rife under President Arafat: Cheryl A. Rubenberg, The Palestinians – In Search of a Just Peace (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003). After Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, Hamas mirrored those practices in its prisons (see consecutive annual reports of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 2007–14, ). 31. Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Annual Report 2013 (2014), 63–94, . 32. This agreement comes in the wake of the Mecca Accords of 2007 and the Cairo Agreements of 2009 and 2013. For more details see International Crisis Group, ‘Palestinian reconciliation: plus ça change’, Middle East Report, 110 (2011), . 33. Elhanan Miller, ‘Abbas: no reconciliation with Hamas before elections’, Times of Israel (13 October 2014), . 34. Charles Tilly, ‘War making and state making as organized crime’, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–91. 35. Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Annual Report 2010 (2011), . The director of a human rights monitoring agency in the West Bank reported that his organisation’s report on the inter-factional killings of 2007 was politically exploited by both parties (interview, 7 July 2011). 36. On the tunnel economy and its demise see Nicolas Pelham, ‘Gaza’s tunnel phenomenon: the unintended dynamics of Israel’s siege’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 41 (4) (2012), 6–31. 37. David Horovitz, ‘Netanyahu finally speaks his mind’, Times of Israel (13 June 2014), . 38. Peter Beaumont, ‘Israeli intelligence veterans refuse to serve in Palestinian territories’, The Guardian (12 September 2014), . 39. Helga Tawil-Souri, ‘Digital occupation: Gaza’s high-tech enclosure’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 41 (2) (2014), 27–43. 40. For an insider account of these practices see ‘Any Palestinian is exposed to monitoring by the Israeli Big Brother’, The Guardian (12 September 2014), . 41. For an illustration of the geographical fragmentation of Palestine since 1946 see Stuart Littlewood, ‘Richard Falk interview’, Counter Currents (2013), . 42. See PCPSR, ‘Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 52’.

Peace Formation v. Everyday State Formation in Palestine  123 43. According to a Palestinian economist, over the past fifteen years 50 per cent of the Palestinian Authority budget has been financed by foreign aid: Jon Donnison, ‘Fragile stability of aid-dependent Palestinian economy’, BBC News (27 May 2011), . 44. David Cronin, Europe’s Alliance with Israel: Aiding the Occupation (London: Penguin, 2010); Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2013). 45. Alvara de Vasconcelos (ed.), A Strategy for EU Foreign Policy, ISS Report No. 7, European Union Institute for Security Studies, 8 (2010), ; Ben Smith, ‘Hamas, Fatah and the Middle East Quartet principles’, Parliament Briefing Paper (London: House of Commons, 17 May 2011), 6, . The EU’s blacklisting of Hamas is currently under appeal. 46. The three conditions imposed by the Middle East Quartet oblige Hamas to adhere to standards, which the government of Israel continues to violate without facing financial sanctions from the US or the EU, that is, ­ non-violence and honouring their obligations under previous agreements. 47. Ramzy Baroud, ‘Defining Palestinian unity’, International Policy Digest (10 June 2014), . 48. The NGO sector in Palestine stands accused of being co-opted by donor agendas, dominated by local elites and removed from its social basis; see Rema Hammami, ‘Palestinian NGOs since Oslo: from NGO politics to social movements?’, Middle East Report, 214 (2000), 16–19, 27, 48; Tariq Dana, ‘Palestinian civil society: what went wrong?’, Al-Shabaka Policy Brief, April 2013, . 49. This typology could be expanded to other roles traditionally assumed by the state, such as providing protection, shelter or promoting food independence of communities. 50. Judith Butler, ‘Subjection, resistance, resignification: between Freud and Foucault’, in John Rajchman (ed.), The Identity in Question (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 229–49. 51. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, [1976] 1998); Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Penguin, [1970] 1996); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory Population (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 374–75; Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, [1967] 1994), p. 170; Gene Sharp, Politics of Non-Violent Action (Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1973); Robert B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1988); Michael Randle, Civil Resistance (London: Fontana, 1994); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

124  Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond 52. Joe Klein, ‘A new Palestinian movement: young, networked, nonviolent’, Time (31 March 2011). 53. Karl Vick, ‘On the run, the Palestinian youth movement may yet get its way’, Time (27 March 2011). 54. When asked about Fatah’s two-year statebuilding plan, one activist responded: ‘It is hard to talk about something that doesn’t exist’ (interview, Birzeit, 6 July 2011). 55. Interview, youth activist, Birzeit (6 July 2011). This argument is in line with Edward Said’s early observations on the terms of the Oslo accords: see Edward Said, ‘The morning after’, London Review of Books, 15 (20) (1993), 3–5. 56. Indeed, accusations of growing authoritarianism within the PA are as old as the PA itself: see Glenn E. Robinson, ‘The growing authoritarianism of the Arafat regime’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 39 (2) (1997), 42–56. 57. Interview, youth activist, Birzeit (6 July 2011). On Palestine’s economic dependency on Israel after the Paris Protocol see Oren Gross, ‘Mending walls: the economic aspects of Israeli–Palestinian peace’, American University International Law Review, 15 (2000), 1539–626. 58. Currently, Israel’s military occupation operates mainly through the control of checkpoints, policing the expanding settlements and surveillance. 59. Interview, Budrus (6 July 2011). 60. Tamer Qarmout and Daniel Beland, ‘The politics of international aid to the Gaza Strip’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 41 (4) (2012), 32–47. 61. For an account on the interplay between US interests and the interests of PA politicians in overthrowing Hamas after the 2006 election see David Rose, ‘The Gaza bombshell’, Vanity Fair (April 2008), . 62. See Yezid Sayigh, ‘Policing the people, building the state: authoritarian transformation in the West Bank and Gaza’, Carnegie Papers (February 2011), . 63. Interview, co-ordinator of unarmed resistance for the Northern West Bank (6 July 2011). 64. Interview, co-ordinator of unarmed resistance for the Northern West Bank (6 July 2011). 65. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine. 66. A co-ordinator of unarmed resistance in the Ramallah area complained that non-violent resistance was not only suppressed by the IDF but also undermined by the PA whose politicians were ‘so concerned about images of stone-throwing kids that they tend to prohibit resistance initiatives’: interview (6 July 2011). 67. Interview, co-ordinator of unarmed resistance for the Northern West Bank (6 July 2011). 68. The European Union has, for instance been sponsoring a €3.3 million project to improve sustainable livelihoods of livestock holders in thirty communities in Area C: see PARC, ‘List of ongoing projects’, .

Peace Formation v. Everyday State Formation in Palestine  125 69. World Bank, ‘Palestinians access to Area C key to economic r­ecovery and sustainable growth’ (8 October 2013), . 70. Vivienne Sansour and Alaa Tartir, ‘Palestinian farmers: a last stronghold of resistance’, Al Shabaka Policy Brief, July 2014, . 71. According to the director of one such organisation, most conflicts which play out in Palestinian society are a side effect of the oppressive conditions created by the occupation: interview (15 March 2012), West Bank. 72. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 2. 73. Shay Hazkani Chris Gratien (2014), ‘The politics of 1948 in Israeli archives’, Ottoman History Podcast, 166 (19 July 2014), . 74. Beshara Doumani and Chris Gratien, ‘Writing the history of Palestine and the Palestinians’, Ottoman History Podcast, 170 (15 August 2014), . 75. Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. 76. Anne-Marie A. Daniel, ‘US media coverage of the Intifada and American public opinion’, in Yahya R. Kamalipour (ed.), U.S. Media and the Middle East: Image and Perception (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995), pp. 62–72. 77. Fouad Moughrabi, ‘American public opinion and the question of Palestine’, ADC Issue Paper, 22 (Washington: American–Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 1988); Alvin Richman, ‘American attitudes towards Israeli– Palestinian relations’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 53 (1989), 415–30. 78. Brent L. Pickett, ‘Foucault and the politics of resistance’, Polity, 28 (1996), 457–8 at 445–7. 79. Michel Foucault, ‘The thought from outside’, in Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot (eds), Foucault/​Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), pp. 7–60, at p. 38. 80. Michel Foucault, ‘The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997). 81. Ibid. p. 463.

6 Afghanistan’s Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts Martine van Bijlert

Afghanistan’s confused intervention The United States-led intervention in Afghanistan has gone through several iterations. What started out as a military operation in response to the September 11 attacks, quickly morphed into a large United Nationsmandated state-building undertaking which included large-scale programmes in the field of disarmament and security-sector reform, rule of law, counter-narcotics, civil service reform, human rights, gender mainstreaming, anticorruption and institution-building. The stated focus on state-building and liberal peace was, however, undercut by the ongoing ‘war on terror’ and its reliance on non-state auxiliary forces, while the enormity of the challenge led to a dizzying array of actors and programmes, often with widely diverging agendas.1 Donors were driven by different kinds of motivations2 and often sought to recreate the Afghan state in their own image.3 Initially, it seemed, many state builders believed that ‘all good things [would] come together’ by themselves4 and that an analysis of crosspurposes or unintended consequences was unnecessary. Over the years, however, it became painfully clear that, rather than building a stable state which could replace the power politics and violence of the past, the intervention was creating new patterns of impunity and providing new opportunities to be corrupt or violent.5 The immensely expensive reform programmes did little to address or prevent this, as they were often overly technical and were routinely co-opted, circumvented, exploited or merely humoured (either because their designs were impractical or

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because, if implemented, they would have re-ordered the distribution of power, prestige and resources). The expansion of the International Stabilisation Assistance Force (ISAF) beyond Kabul and the increased civil–military co-operation (defence, development, diplomacy), which many donor nations then employed, led to a greater appreciation of how the different strands of intervention may be affecting one another. The ISAF expansion also meant that several nations, which until then had not played an active role in the military counterterrorism operations, were suddenly dragged into an armed conflict to an extent that they had not expected. As the insurgency grew in strength, the dysfunction of Afghanistan’s state and the mistakes made by international military were increasingly viewed as problematic. In late 2006, for instance, a joint analysis of the growing insurgency by the Policy Action Group (an informal working group made up of government ministers, ambassadors and international military commanders, chaired by then President Hamed Karzai) identified predatory local government and mistaken international targeting as among the main reasons for the upsurge in antigovernment conflict.6 ‘Good governance’ – in terms of who is appointed to senior positions and how they are allowed to behave – was identified as a crucial component for both state stability and counter-insurgency. The increased attention for governance at the local level resulted in a proliferation of ‘subnational governance’ programmes after the early years of institution-building which had focused almost solely on the central government in Kabul. These programmes focused on introducing institutional reform to (pilot) provinces and districts through new admininsurgency istrative systems and merit-based appointments.7 As the ­ gained strength, the attention for the subnational level was increasingly framed in the light of a counter-insurgency effort which focused on visible government presence through the streamlining of subnational service delivery, the filling of vacancies, and the ferrying of government officials to their places of work or to remote areas on field visits. The Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG) drafted a massive and overambitious subnational strategy which included an intricate rollout of councils, committees and community defence forces through its Afghanistan Social Outreach Program (ASOP), provincial development plans partially based on yearly cycles of community consultation and the introduction of e-governance (that is, Internet) to all districts.8 There was a recurring conviction among the rotating military leadership that the international and Afghan military were on the verge of ‘breaking the back of the insurgency’, and all that was needed was a decisive final push. This culminated in the 2010–11 US military surge which was accompanied by a limited civilian surge and a large increase in spending. The United States and its partners appeared to be

128  Martine van Bijlert i­ncreasingly invested in the actual outcome of their interventions and more responsive to its adverse effects; there were renewed – but s­ hort-lived – efforts to tackle corruption, sideline predatory partners, and deal with unsustainable or harmful aid interventions. Ultimately, however, the goals of short-term stabilisation, military strategy and logistical necessities remained dominant. Under the influence of persistent local realities – including the dependence of the military on local strongmen to protect, assist and supply the troops – the quest for ‘good governance’ was gradually replaced with a focus on ‘Afghan good enough’. The original state- and peacebuilding ambitions had collapsed into an overall stabilisation paradigm.9 On the one hand, this meant that everything became the military’s business.10 It also meant that the nature of the intervention, and the narrative accompanying it, changed. Claims of building a functioning democracy and a stable state were watered down, and the agenda became one of control rather than of emancipation.11 David Chandler (2010) describes such post-liberal interventions – that privilege differences over universality, intervention over autonomy and governance over government – as ‘duplicitous’. Duplicitous because they, on the one hand seek to ensure that a state can autonomously govern itself while, on the other hand, intrusively shaping it to fit outside expectations in case they ‘lack an adequate understanding to cope with freedom without this leading to conflict or oppression’.12 As the military and civilian efforts became intertwined and as counterinsurgency and stabilisation paradigms became the dominant ones, the war-fighting effort started to borrow explicitly from the vocabulary of peace. Sometimes this reflected a genuine embrace of conflict sensitivity. Carter’s study of the main narratives informing the stabilisation effort in Helmand, for instance, found a minority-view narrative that saw stabilisation in terms of localised conflict management and the ‘reparation of war-torn social fabric’.13 Among the military there was sometimes a very pragmatic understanding that violent conflicts which are avoided or solved, no longer have to be fought. But the dominant underlying aim of applying concepts such as conflict sensitivity, reconciliation and the management of grievances usually remained the crushing of the enemy.

How to view the Afghan state The ways in which the Afghan state has not lived up to the state-building designs have been fairly extensively documented, both in reportage and analysis. Some of the contextual factors which were underestimated from the outset included: the entrenched war economy; the prevalence of patronage politics; the institutional patterns shown by a ‘rentier state’; the fact that the main conflict had not ended; and the multitude of sim-

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mering local conflicts ready to latch on to new forms of competition and contestation. The international state-builders also brought with them their own set of peculiarities, including: the tendency to both assume they would be working with a clean slate and that institutions would immediately behave as intended; the tendency to treat most problems as intellectual exercises needing technical solutions rather than political renegotiations; and the systematic mistaking of process for progress.14 To understand how the Afghan state works, it is, of course, important to take into account the forces that drive it: the politics of posturing and exclusion; the pervasive patronage networks and confusing multiple layers of loyalties; the political economy of power; the largely unchecked corruption; and the capture and criminalisation of large parts of the state.15 Many have already commented on how the ‘natural state’, as described by North et al. (2005), vividly illustrates the interplay of cooptation and exclusion that is a driving dynamics in Afghan politics: privileges are given in exchange for political support, in particular to those who can threaten the status quo, while those outside the ruling and co-opted elite are preferably kept at subsistence level. The inherent insecurity in the system makes it resistant to reform, for fear of descending ‘into the hell of disorder’.16 Though statebuilding-programme documents sometimes described such realities under the headings ‘Context’ or ‘Challenges’, they were rarely reflected in the actual plans or expected outputs. In the diplomatic realm, and later in the counter-insurgency and stabilisation efforts by the military, there was greater appreciation of the importance of power dynamics and political competition but the analysis was often based on simplified dichotomies. Early on in the statebuilding effort, the Afghan state was largely seen through the lens of a centre–periphery divide. In this view, the main challenge to the writ of the government was constituted by local warlords and strongmen who tended to be better armed, better resourced and able to better mobilise a following than the central government. At the time, the chosen solution was to incorporate and co-opt them and, in doing so, neutralise the threat. As a result, the situation changed – though the analysis did not always follow: rather than being a threat ‘from the outside’, these strongmen became a source of internal fragmentation caused by a mismatch between de jure and de facto power.17 Later on, in response to a growing insurgency, and under the influence of counter-insurgency and stabilisation paradigms, the state was seen as a presence that needed to be extended into the ‘ungoverned’ and contested territories. This led to a series of programmes aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ and encouraging local populations, who were viewed as ‘sitting on the fence’, to choose a side in the conflict. This focus on the consolidation and expansion of the government’s

130  Martine van Bijlert presence was based on the idea that ‘ungoverned spaces’ could only lead to trouble. Districts without a government presence, or with g­ overnment officials who were unable to venture very far from the centre (or sometimes even from their office), were viewed as cut off from the government. Interestingly, however, they were usually not cut off from the many competitions over the resources that are tied to the state. This is, for instance, illustrated in the case of Gizab district, in southern Afghanistan, which had been in Taliban hands since 2005. It then became briefly famous for its so-called anti-Taliban uprising in 2010 which was optimistically touted, by the United States military, as the beginning of a larger movement.18 The reason for the original Taliban takeover in 2005, interestingly, had been a tussle with the central government over the district’s administrative status. When the lobby in Kabul failed, one of the dominant landowning families had preferred to hand the district to the Taliban, rather than be part of the newly established, Hazara-majority province of Daikondi. In 2010, the district was returned to ‘government control’ which was largely administered by the same landowning family. The conflict over the administrative status of the area continues to fester and has already resulted in several instances of violence between government forces, under the guise of anti-Taliban operations,19 and protests that prevented the district from being included in voter registration in 2013 and the presidential elections in 2014. The view of the state, as something external that needs to be actively brought to the people, is usefully complemented by Jean-Francois Bayart’s discussion of what he calls the ‘politics of the belly’.20 In this view, the state, with all its state-building strategies and institutions, is treated mainly as a means to accumulate wealth. It manifests itself as a ‘rhizome’, an entity with roots and shoots that sprout up everywhere, rather than a single tree with different branches. According to Bayart, the precariousness of the state is not, in the first place, caused by its distance to the people – a central tenet of the Afghan government’s analysis of popular discontent (a gap, it argued, which can be solved through service delivery and increased responsiveness) – but rather a function of its intertwinedness: ‘the precariousness of national political equilibria is not a manifestation of the organic inadequacy of the State, nor even a supplementary proof of its extraneity. On the contrary, it reveals its narrow symbiosis with the grassroots that sustain it.’21 Bayart describes the intermingling of formal political systems and informal networks as a historic process of the fusion or ‘reciprocal assimilation’ of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ elites22 – an observation also relevant for Afghanistan. The idea that new forms of how to be a state have not simply been imported, but have rather been transplanted and ‘grafted’, also matches what has happened in Afghan society where the different iterations of the state have not only been captured and co-opted but have also become deeply

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entangled with the nation’s political, psychological and socio-economic fabric, to the extent that they have become difficult to separate. An example of such ‘grafting’ has been the (re)introduction of elections to Afghanistan’s state system (parliamentary elections were first introduced by Zaher Shah under the new 1964 constitution). Every round of post-2001 elections, so far, has proven controversial and marred by both fraud and the politics of posturing.23 This sometimes leads casual observers to conclude that elections don’t ‘work’ and that the country would be better off if they were replaced by more indigenous or hybrid systems. Apart from the fact that other political systems would probably be manipulated in similar ways, this view discounts the ways in which elections have become embedded in Afghan political life.24 Though the elections are protracted and nerve-racking affairs that leave large parts of the electorate and the political class bruised and bitter, they have also become an important vehicle in which to channel political energies and competition through intricate processes of alliance-building and political horse-trading.25

Hybridity: trying to enlist local customs The Afghan state-building effort did not achieve its stated aims. It also, obviously, did not leave society untouched. The massive influx of money, the reordering of power and privileges and the simple demographics of new generations of young entering the fray have changed the ways in which politics are done and peace can be pursued. But, because the many years of policy and programmatic language have conditioned observers to expect progress, change is often overlooked – particularly when it is difficult to classify as either success or failure and cannot be linked to an external intervention. Much of the hybridity and institutional multiplicity which characterises Afghanistan’s institutions is a result of the mismatch between the intervention and the underlying patterns of power. But there has also been intentional hybridity – sometimes thoughtfully, often for reasons of short-term expediency. An early example of intentional hybridity is the country’s early national consultation process. The Emergency Loya Jirga in 2002 and the Constitutional Loya Jirga in 2003 eased the transition to the current political system by combining the traditional standing of the loya jirga (grand council) with the more modern add-ons of representative election of delegates and facilitated working group discussions during the gathering. There have been several jirgas since and the method has by now been perfected to ensure that the organisers can roughly get the outcome they want (although the gathering is never fully under control). The most recent one was called in 2013 to decide

132  Martine van Bijlert on whether Afghanistan should sign the Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States.26 In many ways, the modern loya jirgas are as much ‘add-ons’ that are grafted on to the system as the elections that were discussed earlier. Other notable examples of hybrid programming often only surfaced after the original state-building templates were found wanting and implementers realised that many Afghans continued to use traditional systems. This was particularly pronounced in the field of justice and dispute resolution (see, for instance, Wardak and Hamidzada, 2012; Coburn and Dempsey, 2010). Small-scale examples of hybrid forms of justice which seemed to work often led to grand plans for large-scale projects or spin-offs in other geographical areas and a countrywide proliferation of local councils – despite common-sense warnings that ‘the great variance in community dynamics challenges the notion that any single theory or model of intervention can be universally applied throughout the country’ (Gaston et al., 2013). Initially, part of the regular peacebuilding agenda, justice and dispute resolution was increasingly incorporated as part of the counter-­ insurgency and stabilisation analysis, wherein the counter-insurgency was framed, not just as a battle of perceptions or a battle over hearts and minds but specifically as a ‘battle over governance’.27 The Taliban, and the justice they were said to deliver, are in this view often romanticised (see, for instance, David Kilcullen’s description of the Taliban, quoted in Goodhand (2014), as an armed ‘rule of law movement’). Customary dispute resolution was also explicitly included in the design of the nationwide Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP). The APRP was part incentive-based demobilisation, part community outreach and was funded through a large United Nations Development Programme-administered trust fund with a proposed budget of 221 million dollars.28 The programme, which had been largely designed by the international military, was administered locally through Provincial Peace and Reintegration Committees. In the absence of an actual peace process, however, the programme mainly satisfied the need of donors to be seen to be doing something. The design of the APRP included a local grievance-resolution component as part of the reintegration of former fighters. But though it conceptually acknowledged that much of the fighting was driven by local conflicts, it did not actually identify ways in which the programme might effectively address this. More importantly, by locating the grievance resolution at the most local of levels, the programme ensured that it would remain largely ineffective, as most conflicts transcended the purely local – usually involving powerful patronage networks extending all the way into the presidential palace or the ranks of the international military. This is a point also made by Gunning: different levels of political violence have different drivers of

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conflict which need to be understood and interconnected – the understanding at one level cannot be simply translated to another.29 Like reconciliation initiatives before it, the APRP suffered from the fact that it could not address the sense of unprotectedness which actual fighters who wanted to join would face – both from the Taliban and their enemies within government circles. Apart from the large numbers of non-combatants or irregularly armed non-insurgents, who joined either for the incentives or to escape prosecution, the reconciliation programmes generally attracted either minor commanders or commanders who had fallen out with the Taliban leadership. Many of them joined only if they could immediately remobilise and rearm legally – and thus protect themselves – by joining one of the iterations of pro-government auxiliary forces. Over the years the dominant narrative became one of the Afghan state as deeply corrupt, factionalised and dysfunctional, shaping a counterinsurgency doctrine rooted in an image of an unpopular government and an alienated population As a result, there was a conscious turn towards local partners, in particular, local commanders and tribal elders who were often seen as possessing intrinsic legitimacy and local knowledge which the government lacked. But viewing state and non-state, and state and local, as separate proved to be an unhelpful simplification that disregarded how intricately networked Afghan society is. It also disregarded how many of the problems that plague the Afghan state – patronage, corruption, exclusion – can be found at the local levels, too. The idea of ‘dealing with the tribes’, in general, appealed to many internationals who often overestimated their coherence and authority. The problem was not that the engagement itself was misguided – local actors are, after all, natural partners for local interventions and tribal leaders are logical places to start consultations. The problem was rather that the act of engaging local actors was often, in itself, seen as a solution for complicated problems, with tribal leaders and consultation mechanisms sometimes ascribed an almost mythical status in terms of legitimacy and mobilising power. As many found, local does not necessarily mean legitimate or separate from those in government (or from the insurgency), nor does it involve being intrinsically easier to deal with, less corrupt or more amenable to peacebuilding. Many leaders at the local level, particularly those who presented themselves, turned out often to be equally preoccupied with power and patronage and were rarely untouched by whatever was complicating the dealings at the national level. Local politics, it turned out, was also contested, complex and intricately networked; whoever engaged with it threatened to become party to the various competitions.30

134  Martine van Bijlert

Voice and discontent The Western-led intervention in Afghanistan has had a wide range of both detractors and defenders, leading to a cacophony of opinions and commentary. It has also elicited a range of reactions inside Afghanistan, with many Afghans torn between deep disappointment over what liberal peace looks like in practice and fear of what might happen if the international military and aid workers did, indeed, leave. This seems a potent example of what Mac Ginty calls ‘[p]erhaps the most insidious compliance tool operating in favour of the liberal peace . . . the notion that the liberal peace is the “only deal in town”’.31 Alongside efforts of the internationals and the state to influence the ‘local’ – by upholding, consulting, co-opting or sidelining local actors, and by seeking to ‘win hearts and minds’ – the ‘local’ has also sought to influence the politics and trajectory of the intervention and the country’s future. A salient feature has been the steady trickle of selfproclaimed intellectuals, politicians, community leaders and otherwise concerned citizens presenting plans on how to put their country back on the path to stability – with usually fairly conceptual ‘to do lists’ (appoint the right people, fight the drug trade, truly disarm the militias, stop wasting money) – and international diplomats and policy-makers that the government has co-opted, and aid money squandered by networks of former commanders, drug traders and fashionably suited, but corrupt, returnees.32 Initially, much of the criticism from Afghans was fuelled by concerns that the international state-builders were not sufficiently aware of the country’s intricacies and of the consequences of their actions. Over the years, as little improved, patience began to wear thin. The conversations shifted, and many Afghans started to conclude that the internationals were not just ignorant but, rather, indifferent or, worse, complicit. Over time, conspiracy theories – for instance, on how the international military was artificially prolonging the war to justify a continued presence – seemed better suited to explain where Afghanistan was going than the insistence that the security deterioration and the booming corruption were simply the result of good intentions gone wrong.33 Unfavourable reactions to the Western-led state-building intervention have included: wide-ranging criticism on the mass wastage of funds; the partnering with, and strengthening of, corrupt, violent or simply incompetent local actors; the use of Afghanistan as a laboratory to test all kinds of theories and methods of aid delivery, social engineering and counterinsurgency; the failure to abide by their own stated principles of democracy and integrity; the obsession with pushing women into the public domain, long before they may be safe there; the imposition of a free market economy in a society that needs mechanisms to look after

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its vulnerable; the obsession with traditional structures, when formal structures don’t seem to work; the insistence on purely technocratic principles, when the problems are largely political (for example, relying on formal reform processes to address politically protected abuses). There is also a palpable growing local impatience with how international analysts and journalists portray Afghanistan in the media and in expert briefings, with their focus on the exotic, the dysfunctional, and the presumed need to be guided and helped by Western internationals (see also van Bijlert 2014).

Peace formation and conflict calming – the ‘everyday’ level Most analysis of Afghan politics focuses on the forces that threaten to pull apart the country, such as the ethnic and factional fault lines, the many local grievances and the widespread dissatisfaction over government corruption. There has been some attention to the centripetal forces, in particular, the attraction of being connected to the centre in terms of resources, privileges and respectability. But little analysis has focused on the conflict-calming dynamics in Afghan society. Though Afghanistan is known as an honour- and revenge-based culture, it also has a cultural idiom of reconciliation, civility and magnanimity. It is bolstered by social norms of conflict mitigation, the wide prevalence of cross-factional relationships and a range of behaviours that seek to prevent insults, disagreements and obligations of revenge from escalating into open violence and protracted conflict. It is not necessarily the dominant dynamic, but it is a strong one, and its effects are felt throughout the political arena. Without it, Afghan politics would probably be more volatile than is currently the case. At the ‘local or everyday’ level, there is a constant hum of individuals and communities who are trying to ‘keep the peace’. This is generally not systematic or organised but, rather, based on individual or collective convictions and rooted in a desire not to see past violence repeated. Examples include the many forms of mediation which community elders engage in to defuse conflicts and prevent revenge from being exacted, to retrieve hostages before they are harmed, to restore honour and placate the anger of powerful or aggrieved actors, and so on. This behaviour is partly codified (in terms of who should take the initiative, how should mediators be asked, what symbolism may be used) and largely improvised. Some of the more controversial harmful traditional practices, such as giving female relatives in marriage to compensate for killings (baad), are also aimed at preventing cycles of violence. The conflict-calming behaviours seek to mitigate prevalent conflictprovoking dynamics. Afghan power politics is often characterised, for

136  Martine van Bijlert instance, by an outside–insider dynamic in which losers are marginalised and weakened to the point that they will not be able to make a comeback.34 Though it is an often-used tactic, it is also frowned upon, particularly if the losers have shown themselves to be co-operative. One of the triggers for the early resurgence of the Taliban insurgency was, in fact, the humiliation and violence that many former Taliban commanders suffered at the hands of pro-government commanders after they had laid down their weapons and gone home.35 In terms of its political structure, Afghan society is often portrayed as deeply divided. It has, indeed, seen years of violent conflicts which pitted factions and communities against one another along ideological, ethnic, factional and geographic lines. The effects are still felt and are being replicated in political rivalries, suspicion and open violence – particularly as insecurity fuels the fear of marginalisation (among all groups). This does not mean that Afghanistan is divided into distinct groups which have little contact or histories of co-operation. On the contrary, relationships in Afghanistan represent vital political and socio-economic capital, particularly for those who are not at the pinnacle of power. The many regime changes, or shifts in power locally, and the need to be as well and as widely connected as possible, have resulted in an intricately networked society, made up of intersecting, multilayered webs of cross-factional relations. This is facilitated by the fact that loyalties are neither fixed, nor singular, because those who want to be politically active usually need to be nimble. This is possibly most visibly played out during election periods when political actors try to determine how best to play their cards in a protracted process of two-way political courting. New alliances are forged, interests groups split (often tactically), deals are negotiated and reneged on – all the while, adding to the history of loyalty and betrayals that will help inform the next round.36 Goodhand (2014) makes the point that technocratic approaches to peacebuilding threaten to ‘inadvertently stifle productive statebuilding processes’, like rent-seeking and political bargaining, as they are ‘unintelligible to a liberal peacebuilding framework’.37 Though Afghanistan’s political bargaining is obviously not only stabilising in its effects, it is definitely much further along the peace-formation continuum than the everyday peace of ‘grudging coexistence’ as described by Mac Ginty (2014).38 It is more vibrant and active than that, and is done by some with considerable gusto. In terms of influencing government behaviour, for those with less direct power or influence Afghanistan has a well-developed culture of lobbying and petitioning that can connect the village level to the centre, sometimes all the way up to the presidential palace. At the bottom of the ladder, the petitioning form (arizeh) is one of the main ways in which citizens interact with the government. A few steps up is

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petitioning in person, often in the form of a tribal delegation or other kind of representation making the rounds in Kabul and in provincial capitals (a delegation can be spontaneous or, alternatively, instructed and hand picked by the powerful; stories abound of elders finding they are part of a d ­ elegation lobbying for something they do not agree with). Disgruntled groups can resort to demonstrations (sometimes by closing off main roads) and the setting up of protest tents at key juncture – with varying success. There has also been a proliferation of registered social associations, tribal unions, NGOs and political parties. This was partly driven by the hope that there would be funding – in particular, the newly registered democratic political parties had, in the early post2001 years, expected to be the natural counterparts for the West. But a lot of the mobilisation is also part of domestic–political attempts to create a following that is worthy of courting or co-optation. Afghan civil society has also taken note of social movements in other parts of the world, with some of the opposition leaders and social media-based youth organisations dreaming of initiating large-scale mobilisation along the lines of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or the Arab Spring. The wider appeal and potential, however, have so far remained very limited.39 The petitioning by large parts of the population, though for many mainly a coping and survival mechanism, falls under the label of ‘everyday diplomacy’, particularly where individuals and communities actively seek to intervene on behalf of their security needs.40 Important examples include tribal delegations, in the past, asking both the Taliban and the international military to refrain from passing through their areas in an effort to minimise the risk of violent clashes and to lessen the pressure (both sides demanded assistance and threatened repercussions if provided to the other side).

Prospects for peace formation? Afghanistan’s peace transition, which has not yet led to peace, is a mixture of all four processes as described in Richmond’s introduction to this volume. The contours of state formation are clearly recognisable in the factionalised and racket-like nature of large parts of the government.41 The international state-building interventions, initially aimed at ‘fixing’ the consequences of three decades of war by creating functioning state institutions, soon saw itself confronted with new forms of violent competition which were directly related to the international presence and government behaviour. The largely technical state-building approach strengthened bureaucratic processes in parts of the government but did not manage to establish the efficient and impartial institutions it was

138  Martine van Bijlert aiming for. The result has been an ‘institutional multiplicity’42 in which, one could argue, the state-formation processes are dominant. The peacebuilding track, with its focus on external support for rightsbased government institutions, was an important component of the intervention’s narrative, focusing on freedoms and women’s rights (often to the detriment of the women it meant to help). The actions of many of the international actors, however, did little to ensure that rule of law was, indeed, strengthened, civil society and non-violent political actors were, indeed, listened to and the rights of citizens were, indeed, protected – even in their own actions. It is difficult to imagine that, in the complicated muddle that has emerged, local peace formation – defined here as the mobilisation of local, often critical, peacebuilding agents – could make a big difference. The desire to find and fund possible local peace or development infrastructures, and the urge to scale whatever seems to show promise of success, have often prevented possible local initiatives from developing mobilising power beyond the immediate funding.43 Local and personal peacebuilding initiatives, such as elders reaching out to fighters within their networks and persuading them to lay down their weapons, have remained without effect as, in the absence of a wider political process, they merely became part of the constant back and forth of fluid loyalties. The mobilisation of the desire for peace beyond the immediate networks is proving difficult. This desire does, however, fuel a wide range of behaviours that prevent and calm at least some of the potential conflict.

Notes  1. See, for instance, Astri Suhrke, When More is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan (New York and London: Hurst, 2011).   2. Goodhand and Sedra identified four types of motivations: political–­strategic, political profile, technical professional, ethical–principled. Jonathan Goodhand and Mark Sedra, Bargains for Peace? Aid, Conditionality and Reconstruction in Afghanistan (The Hague: Netherlands Institute of International Relations ‘Clingendael’, Conflict Research Unit, 2006), .   3. Martine van Bijlert, ‘Imaginary institutions; statebuilding in Afghanistan’, in Doing Good or Doing Better? Development Policies in a Globalising World (The Hague: WRR/​Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy, 2009), .   4. Goodhand and Sedra, Bargains for Peace.   5. Stephen Carter and Kate Clark, No Shortcut to Stability: Justice, Politics

Afghanistan’s Post-Liberal Peace  139 and Insurgency in Afghanistan (London: Chatham House, 2010), .  6. For examples of predatory government and mistaken targeting fuelling the insurgency, see Martine van Bijlert, ‘Unruly commanders and violent power struggles: Taliban networks in Uruzgan’, in Antonio Guistozzi (ed.), Decoding the New Taliban. Insights from the Afghan Field (New York and London: Hurst, 2009).  7. Martine van Bijlert, Between Discipline and Discretion: Policies Surrounding Senior Subnational Appointments (Kabul: Afghanistan Research and Analysis Unit (AREU), 2009).  8. Independent Directorate of Local Governance, Sub-national Governance Policy (Kabul: Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, 2010), .  9. See also William Robert Carter, ‘War, peace and stabilisation: critically reconceptualising stability in southern Afghanistan’, in Stability, International Journal of Security & Development, 15 (2013), 1–20. 10. This was, for instance, reflected in the increasing involvement of the military in the realms of governance, institutional reform and rule of law (but also economics and business development). Apart from infrastructure programmes, such as the construction of district centres, courthouses and prisons, the military sought to provide mentoring, training, planning and management support to their local counterparts in the different provincial departments. At the centre, ISAF advisers were dispatched to key ministries and government institutions, as governance was seen as a stabilisation issue. 11. See also Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Against stabilization’, in Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 1 (2012), 20–30, . 12. David Chandler, International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 4. 13. Carter described the dominant view of stabilisation as a ‘liberalist fusion of state-building and counterinsurgency’ with a varying emphasis on reconstruction and the temporary provision of services, overcoming insecurity (insurgency and crime), winning the support of the population or enhancing the social contract between citizen and state: Carter, ‘War, peace and stabilisation’, 11–12. 14. Martine van Bijlert, ‘Imaginary institutions; statebuilding in Afghanistan’, in Doing Good or Doing Better? Development Policies in a Globalising World (The Hague: WRR/​Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy, 2009), . 15. Van Bijlert, ‘Imaginary institutions’. See also Charles Tilly, ‘War making and state making as organised crime’, in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–86.

140  Martine van Bijlert 16. Douglas C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast, The Natural State: The Political-Economy of Non-Development (Los Angeles: University of California, 2005). 17. Hamish Nixon, Subnational State-Building in Afghanistan (Kabul: Afghanistan Research and Analysis Unit (AREU), 2008), . 18. Martine van Bijlert, The Revolt of the Good Guys in Gizab (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), 2010), . 19. Martine van Bijlert, Trouble in Gizab; The Fight Everyone Chose to Ignore (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), 2011), . 20. Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 21. Bayart, State in Africa, p. 221. 22. Bayart, State in Africa, p. 262. Bayart singles out kinship as the dominant form of informal networks but, at least in Afghanistan, this should also include other strong forms of affiliation, such as factional ties or relationships of reciprocal favours. 23. With the possible exception of the first election in 2004 which, in many ways, was ‘a popular referendum on the Bonn Agreement and the country’s new beginning’ rather than a political contest. Scott S. Smith, ‘The 2004 presidential elections in Afghanistan’, in Martine van Bijlert and Sari Kouvo (eds), Snapshots of an Intervention: The Unlearned Lessons of Afghanistan’s Decade of Assistance (2001–11) (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), 2012), . 24. Martine van Bijlert, How to Win an Afghan Election; Perceptions and Practices (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), 2009), . 25. For details on political brokers and alliance building, see van Bijlert, How to Win an Afghan Election. For a discussion on the different possible functions of an election, see William Maley, Making Elections Count (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), 2010), . 26. See Kate Clark, A Yes, a Maybe and a Threat of Migration: The BSA Loya Jirga’s Last Day (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), 2013), . 27. Goodhand and Sedra, Bargains for Peace. 28. UNDP Support to Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP): 2010–2015 (2011), . 29. Jeroen Gunning, ‘A case for critical terrorism studies?’, in Government

Afghanistan’s Post-Liberal Peace  141 and Opposition, 3 (2007), 363–93, quoted in Carter, ‘War, peace and stabilisation’. 30. See the example of Gizab where American Special Forces, stationed in different provinces, had supported two sides of a local conflict. They ended up engaged in combat against pro-government forces. Martine van Bijlert, Trouble in Gizab. 31. Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Hybrid peace: the interaction between top-down and bottom-up peace’, in Security Dialogue, 4 (2010), 399. 32. A new word was coined to reflect the frustration: NGO-salari or NGOlordism (alongside warlordism, druglordism and gunlordism) indicating the large networks of international NGOs and national implementing partners which were seen as pilfering aid meant for the country’s reconstruction and its poor. 33. As illustrated by former President Karzai’s recent comments on United States intentions: ‘Whether it is conspiracy or incompetence doesn’t really matter to me in the end. Both make it very difficult to work with America. In the end, though, I’d rather deal with a conspiracy, because at least there is something to understand . . . If you slap me once, and then tell me that is not your policy, I will understand. But if you slap me again and that’s not your policy, I will begin to doubt you. And if you slap me again and again, and keep saying that it’s not your policy, eventually, as far as I’m concerned it is your policy.’ Scott S. Smith, ‘If you love something, set it free’, Foreign Policy (online) (20 February 2015), . Though former President Karzai was the head of state, he clearly saw himself as a ‘subversive local voice’ vis-à-vis the international onslaught of assistance and pressure. 34. Martine van Bijlert, ‘Imaginary institutions’. 35. Martine van Bijlert, ‘Unruly commanders’. 36. For a general discussion of political courting and the role of political brokers, see van Bijlert, How to Win an Afghan Election. For a discussion of the courting process in the 2014 election, see Kate Clark and Gran Hewad, Dancing to Power: Getting an Afghan Presidential Ticket Together (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), 30 September 2013), . 37. Jonathan Goodhand, ‘Winning hearts and minds? Reconstruction, governance and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’, (draft) paper presented at Justice and Imagination: Building Peace in Post-Conflict Societies, Mount Holyoke College, February 2014, . Goodhand quoted from Inge Amundsen, George Giacaman, Mushtaq Husain Khan (eds), State Formation in Palestine: Viability and Governance during a Social Transformation (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). 38. See Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday peace: bottom-up and local agency in conflict-affected society’, in Security Dialogue, 6 (2014), 548–64. 39. See, for instance, Thomas Ruttig, Another Day without an Orange Revolution (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2009), ; Gran Hewad, First Flickers of an Afghan Facebook Reform Movement (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2009), ; and Gran Hewad and Thomas Ruttig, The Green Trend Mobilisation and a Possible New Rift in Jamiat (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2009), . 40. See Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday peace’. 41. See also, Charles Tilly, ‘War making and state making as organised crime’. 42. Jonathan Di John, ‘Conceptualising the causes and consequences of failed states: a critical review of the literature’, Working Paper No. 25, London School of Economics, Crisis States Research Centre (2008). 43. See also Richmond’s comment that ‘peace infrastructures . . . bear significant potential as long as it is internally and not externally shaped’: Oliver Richmond, ‘Missing links: peace infrastructures and peace formations’, in Barbara Unger, Stina Lindstrom, Katrin Planta and Beatrix Austin (eds), Peace Infrastructures – Assessing Concept and Practice (Berlin: Berghof Foundation, 2012), pp. 21–30.

7 International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom

Introduction Just before the West Africa Ebola outbreak reached Sierra Leone, the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, visited the country, praising what he called ‘enormous strides towards peace, stability and long-term development, [calling Sierra Leone] one of the world’s most successful cases of post-conflict recovery, peacekeeping and peacebuilding’.1 The official UN version of the last decade in Sierra Leone stands in stark contrast not only to the obvious fragility of the country exposed by the Ebola outbreak and the devastating toll it has taken in terms of lives and opportunities lost2 but also with regard to the situation felt on the ground prior to the outbreak. In its operational plan for 2011–16, updated in 2012, the Department for International Development (DFID) spells out the context of a weak state in a fragile region – a country that remains one of the poorest in the world, near the bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index, and unlikely to meet any of the Millennium Development Goals before 2015.3 It is therefore in the light of this understanding of the situation on the ground that we should also see that the ‘local peacebuilding’ initiatives have either been established by the international community or received support from such sources to protect and safeguard what is still a fragile peace. Even, however, if most but not all funding for peacebuilding initiatives in Sierra Leone comes from international sources, this does not mean that efforts on the ground are completely controlled from above. The landscape of peacebuilding is complex and, therefore, difficult for foreign agencies to navigate or understand, let alone control, and a number of different outcomes are thus produced. Some are intended,

144  Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom some are unintended, and most materialise in a slightly different version from that originally planned. The implementation of some projects and programmes is supported by a baseline study which requires some planning or at least an idea about what is needed on the ground; others simply happen because they could happen. Regardless, however, of the planning process and the involvement of local actors and communities in it (or the lack of such), local actors still have a degree of agency that may affect outcomes. The agency of local actors is limited and constrained, and often takes place under a certain degree of coercion, but this is the case for most types of agency. Thus, what is more important is the space for autonomous manoeuvring that local actors have and how they are able to define their agency: is it mainly as the tactical agency of the weak or are they also able to imagine their agency as strategic, thus implying that long-term planning is possible and certain factors can be controlled?4 The latter may be difficult in any setting where the power relations between the actors involved are highly unevenly distributed but this unevenness becomes even more manifest in the post-conflict phase of peacebuilding because it brings local organisations into a symbiotic but hierarchical relationship with representatives of international organisations (governmental as well as non-governmental). Local peacebuilding is undoubtedly difficult and challenging but being an international ‘peacebuilder’ is not easy either. The romantic notion of grateful locals welcoming the expats who have come to assist them in achieving peace vanished a long time ago. Instead, the daily life of most expat peacebuilders consists of long working hours, routine tasks, stifling bureaucracy and the relative isolation of the bunkered compound owing to the increased fortification of international aid operations, peacebuilding included.5 The population whom they supposedly have come to serve is kept at arm’s length, separated from the international experts in peacebuilding by such means as walls, fortifications and private security guards. The local environment is simply seen as too dangerous to operate freely in.6 As difficult and challenging as the life of an international expert in peacebuilding may be, the life of most locals living in the midst of this is even more precarious. Not only must they live with the continued consequences of the conflict which brought the international experts in peacebuilding to their doorstep in the first place, they also need to work out what the resultant peacebuilding activities mean to them. It is misguided, therefore, to expect local responses to externally implemented or sponsored peacebuilding activities to be uniformly positive or unambiguous about such activities.7 Instead, for many there is confusion and frustration that can lead to outbursts of anger, as when people feel that the projects and programmes aiming at peacebuilding are not having the

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desired effect on their lives. This is evident in Sierra Leone where 60 per cent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day,8 and the Ebola outbreak of 2014–15 has only made things even worse. What consequences the Ebola outbreak will have for long-term peace and security are hard to predict at this time of writing but it undoubtedly displays the complexities of the encounters between the ‘international’ and the ‘local’ as it has brought to the fore different ideas and responses to disaster management. This is an issue we shall return to towards the end of this chapter. First, however, as the chapter proceeds, we shall analyse two local–global peacebuilding initiatives – Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone – that have made an attempt to address some of the issues glossed over by the international community.9 By doing so, we make an attempt to understand the complex field in which these two organisations have to manoeuvre and the compromises that must be made to achieve external funding. We shall also argue, however, that owing to the very fortified nature of contemporary external peacebuilding, which effectively isolates international staff from extensive engagement with locals, this also opens up a space for autonomous manoeuvring from local innovative actors such as Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone who are able to build extensive local–global networks. This provides for an agency that allows for some autonomy but it is an autonomy that has to operate within certain boundary frames of how post-conflict peacebuilding should be approached.

From liberal peace to post-liberal peace International peacebuilding and statebuilding have mostly taken place in post-conflict settings in the global south. International actors who tend to be associated with the liberal international order have played a leading role in most of the peace support operations in states emerging from violent conflict. As reflected in their policy documents, internationally supported peace accords and peacebuilding practice, their peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction efforts have generally emphasised Western liberal practices, values and norms, including rule of law, individual rights, democracy, liberal institutions and constitutions, economic liberalisation and a modern civil society assumed to be capable of producing durable peace – what has come to be called liberal peacebuilding.10 There appears to be a consensus among scholars and policymakers that, on the whole, liberal peacebuilding has not achieved the intended goal of helping war-torn societies transform from states of violent conflict to self-sustaining peace and economic development. In response to this challenge, the World Bank has suggested the building and strengthening of legitimate institutions (formal and informal) and

146  Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom governance to provide jobs, citizen security and justice which are significant to break cycles of violence.11 Some critics of liberal peacebuilding have argued, however, that peacebuilding strategies should be contextualised witnessing academic debate on contemporary peacebuilding and statebuilding shifting from the ‘liberal peace’ towards concepts such as the ‘everyday’, ‘local agency’, ‘hybrid peace’, ‘peace formation’ and ‘post-liberal peace’.12 In post-conflict environments, individuals and social groups have shown that they are not passive recipients of the liberal peace but have expressed various forms of agency including co-opting, resisting and modifying some of its elements. This, according to Richmond, is resulting in the liberal peace being shaped towards local–liberal h ­ ybridity – what he calls ‘post-liberal peace’ – which has a potential for a more progressive and emancipatory peace.13 As this chapter will show, however, while the contemporary liberal peace project in Sierra Leone may appear to present itself in a slightly less intrusive form, it is still a far cry from enabling us to speak about a post-liberal peace in the country, and the Ebola outbreak and the subsequent international responses also contribute to this.

‘Building’ peace in war-torn Sierra Leone When violent conflict first broke out in the Mano River Basin in the late 1980s, the international community’s perception of these wars was influenced both by Robert Kaplan and Mary Kaldor’s writings, interpreting the conflicts as primary examples of ‘new wars’, that is, wars primarily constituted by a combination of primordial tribalism and opportunistic warlords who manipulated ethnic sentiments for their own selfish purposes.14 The following quote from a 2001 International Crisis Group (ICG) report on the civil war in Sierra Leone and its connection to Charles Taylor’s Liberia is a vivid illustration of the dominant mind-set of the international community and contributed to an approach to the post-conflict peacebuilding that privileged courts and legal procedures over dialogue and local reconciliation, thereby also blowing into oblivion the work of the locally based Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission.15 Diamonds have also fuelled the terrible civil war in which a nihilistic movement known as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), led by a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, has battled against every government that seized or otherwise obtained power in Freetown since 1991. Sankoh, widely thought to be a psychopath, has repeatedly committed atrocities against civilians. He has been supported in his ambitions by the equally brutal and unscrupulous

Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone  147 Charles Taylor, now president of Liberia. Taylor who won power in Liberia through war and now seeks to dominate the Mano River Basin, which includes Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.16

The logical conclusion therefore reached by several policymakers and key external stakeholders, among them the United Kingdom’s Tony Blair, was therefore that, once these ‘evildoers’ were removed, arrested and placed behind bars, the most serious issues concerning the war would be sorted out. There was little reason to be concerned with underlying issues, grievances and politics in general, and the international community could concentrate on rebuilding Sierra Leone in its liberal image without a major need to revisit the underlying causes of war.17 This also had important consequences for the post-conflict landscape of peacebuilding as it entailed that there were little if any real support and commitment from the international community to facilitate a debate about what went wrong and how it could happen that citizens killed each other in such great numbers, with such cruelty and with little regard for the human value of other citizens. This personalisation of the causes of war made it possible to sweep difficult questions concerning elite and popular participation under the rug, and it can clearly be questioned whether this sets the foundation for long-term stability. The liberal peace therefore became the globalised solution to Sierra Leone’s assumed causes of conflict as well as continued fragility.18 Since the end of the civil war, significant international efforts and resources have been applied to state-building and peacebuilding initiatives that promote the liberal peace. These include efforts aimed at rebuilding, developing and supporting a modern civil society (primarily NGOs) as a vehicle for promoting the democratisation process in Sierra Leone. According to Williams and Young,19 the traditional liberal story offers three crucial elements of civil society: 1) it is an example of liberal commitments to equality and freedom and, in this arena, individuals have the freedom to pursue their own interests in free association with others; 2) as an arena for criticism, and open and free debate, it functions as a check and balance on the power of the state; and 3) it is an arena for the cultivation of particular attitudes and personal virtues, such as civic engagement, accountability, tolerance, self-reliance and co-operation, crucial for sustaining liberal social life. Civil society has been considered an essential element to the process of building peace in societies emerging from violent conflict and it is also associated with liberal peace theorising,20 consequently making civil society organisations appear as more efficient and appropriate tools for development and peacebuilding than working with the state. Liberal agents, such as the World Bank, have therefore sought to work with, and work through, local civil society organisations in post-conflict peacebuilding and development programmes.

148  Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom In post-war Sierra Leone, international donors have been involved in transferring ideas and practices of civil society as found in Western liberal democracies. A liberal civil society, it is believed, through monitoring and advocacy, can provide a check on the excesses of the Sierra Leonean state as well as influence state policies, sensitise the society on liberal values and practices such as democracy, good governance, human rights, development and rule of law. This means that most international actors have preferred to work closely with the elite-based and professionalised local NGOs who could easily appropriate the global language of liberal values in their efforts to promote a liberal peace in Sierra Leone. This narrow NGO-centric view of civil society by international actors has tended to marginalise or exclude local groups based on affective ties, such as secret societies and other grassroots groups, including ethnic development associations whose ‘organisational forms and operation logic mirror indigenous cultural practice’.21 Thus, little attention has been paid to grassroots groups, such as Sierra Leone Market Women’s Association and the Motor Bike Renters’ Association which do not conform to international standards.22 Despite such groups having been successful in lobbying the government of Sierra Leone for legislative change, they are often viewed as a threat to the liberal state. As such, international donors have encouraged and supported the development of modern non-affective groups considered to be essential for promoting public interests and for holding the state and its agents to account, thus ‘promoting and developing the liberal version of what is civil’.23 Western donors have paid some attention to indigenous organisations only when this suits their liberal agendas or is conducive to the process of building a liberal state and society – ‘bad’ domestic social forces are to be discouraged and ‘good’ ones encouraged and supported. Yet, recent research has shown that local groups based on affective ties, such as secret societies, continue to be highly regarded in rural Sierra Leone and are considered legitimate forms of local governance that can play a vital role in peacebuilding and promoting participatory development.24 These associations come in various forms and have different names throughout Sierra Leone and the Mano River Basin but the most common and important form is the Poro, that is, the men’s association par excellence, and the Sande which is the equivalent female association. These associations guard the ownership and use of supposedly supernatural medicines, and employ particular rituals, sign, symbols and forms of knowledge that are withheld from non-initiates. They are not secret in any other way, however. Their existence and general purpose are known to any adult person and, despite modern education (albeit rudimentary in many places) and upheavals such as the civil war, the wide range of the associations’ activities makes them still an important and, at times, a dominant social force. Historically, they have regulated

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the harvesting of forest products (as, for example, nuts for making palm oil), fishing, trade, carried out dispute settlements and tried to regulate war (as an arbitrator but also as an initiator as, for example, the role played by the Poro in the Mende Rising in 1898 against the colonial hut tax).25 Their current role and power are not as absolute and dominant as they used to be but these associations, and the political and cultural life around them, mean that they still matter locally and often have considerably more legitimacy than the local professionalised NGOs. The introduction of the idea of formal NGOs and community-based organisations (CBOs) in Sierra Leone has resulted in the creation of two publics, namely, the modern civic and the traditional local publics.26 The locals have developed terms to distinguish them. For instance, the Mendes use the terms puu hindae (‘white-man’s business’), which equates to the civic public, and kondi hindae (‘our local affair’) which relates to the traditional public.27 Many local people view the puu hindae (NGOs) as corrupt and not worthy of their support (which may include refusal to provide materials for development projects such as quarry stones and sand).28 The lack of legitimacy, trust and confidence in such NGOs also came out during fieldwork conducted by one of the authors of this chapter (Patrick Tom) in the south and eastern parts of Sierra Leone in 2009 and 2010. For example, tribal authorities (TAs) pointed out that NGOs refuse to be accountable and transparent to the communities, that they bring their own contractors (their ‘friends from Freetown’), ignore local contractors, ‘most of the money is not coming for us, [as] they are eating it’, and that state officials are part of the corruption as contractors bribe them.29 Furthermore, the TAs noted that district councils sometimes allow NGOs to carry out projects in the chiefdoms without first consulting the chiefs, and this has often been met with resistance from the chiefs who feel that as the highest traditional authorities in the chiefdoms, they need to be consulted and respected. As such, if they are not consulted, chiefs often refuse to co-operate with NGOs conducting peacebuilding and development activities in their chiefdoms.30 This has seen some projects failing largely due to such power struggles between local councils and chiefdom authorities. Moreover, conflicts have often emerged between NGOs and communities who demand payment from the NGOs for construction materials, such as sand and quarry stones, that the community supplies to NGOs for projects in their community. There are suspicions that, when NGOs apply for project funds to donors, they include costs of material, such as sand and quarry stones, in their budget, yet communities supply such material to them free of charge. In response to this, local communities demand accountability from these NGOs and, at times, refuse to supply them with free construction material and ­community labour.

150  Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom There have even been cases where NGOs have imposed projects when the community needs a different project. For instance, NGOs have provided infrastructures, such as crop-drying floors and grain stores, in a community where people need, say, a mosque rather than crop-drying floors, and, in some communities, people have turned the crop-drying floors and grain stores into places of worship and ‘goat shades’ respectively.31 And, where the locals feel an NGO imposed a project on them, they avoid it and identify it with the name of the NGO. Chiefs do not always resist, however, as they have allowed development projects in their chiefdoms, even when NGOs impose them on the communities, if they benefit the chiefs.32 In addition to critiquing local organisations, the TAs dismissed the claim that the locals lacked capacity and, for them, this was an excuse to bring in expatriates (‘their own brothers from Europe’) to do NGO work which locals could do because there are local people who are better qualified than some of the technical advisers. At times, local communities have openly resisted the sidelining of the ‘indigenes’33 in holding key positions in projects in their chiefdoms.34 Moreover, local and international NGOs’ ‘sensitisation’ programmes and training workshops on issues such as gender equality, property rights and some aspects of children’s rights, which have targeted men and community leaders, have, at times, witnessed men resisting them by either walking out of the workshops in protest or by disagreeing with the NGOs.35 While women’s and children’s rights issues are very important, men who resist them view such rights as an imposition from outside (‘human rights are for whites’ or ‘it’s Western culture’) and they also want to be consulted. Moreover, they feel that women’s and children’s rights are being prioritised over theirs. The initial approach of some local NGOs involved in peacebuilding activities in post-war Sierra Leone was to prioritise interventionist models of peacebuilding which sought to establish a particular kind of society (and state) as people were told to adopt, for example, democratic values and human rights, and to ‘put aside’ established cultural norms and traditions because the outbreak of the civil war had been attributed to them.36 NGOs, however, encountered resistance from the villagers who were opposed to the undermining of their traditions and customs and the imposition of ‘Western culture’ on them. Professionalised NGOs based in Freetown also work closely with international donors, contributing to the lowering of their legitimacy in rural communities, and local people criticise them for being out of touch with local realities. To gain local approval, some NGOs have shifted their approaches to peacebuilding and this should be understood as a tactical move to manage their legitimacy. This has involved reconciling international and local peacebuilding agendas, advising on and facilitating peacebuilding activities, rather than taking a leading role, thus creating hybrid approaches

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to peacebuilding which are more acceptable to the locals. For example, while local NGOs, such as Hope Sierra Leone, Advocacy Movement Network and Fambul Tok, have maintained close relations with international donors, they have also made tactical decisions to work closely with influential local people, such as religious and secret society leaders, youth leaders, teachers and chiefs, as co-ordinators who understand the local culture and can inform them on the local situation as well as act as mediators and receive human rights training. In this case, such NGOs have managed to make use of local institutions in their peacebuilding efforts and, at the same time, ensure that they are satisfying international peacebuilding agendas.

Resistance and collaboration – Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone Fambul Tok (a Krio term which means ‘family talk’), is a Sierra Leonean organisation that was established in 2007 in response to the failures of Sierra Leone’s attempts to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) run in parallel with the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The result was that, when the TRC concluded its work in 2004, it received a number of criticisms, including that it was top down, ‘too Western’, too ‘official’, and that it ‘failed to elicit apologies from perpetrators’.37 In addition, the TRC and the Special Court for Sierra Leone failed to reach those who lived on the margins of district headquarters and the state and who constituted the bulk of war victims. As such, there was a need to engage in peacebuilding activities which would promote social healing and bottom-up approaches to peacemaking. Fambul Tok, which operates mainly in rural communities, draws on traditional approaches to conflict resolution and community healing through family dialogue, arguing that it ‘challenges the neo-colonial concept that Africa needs to be “saved” by the West, and explores community-based traditions as a viable form of building sustainable peace, that has proven – in Sierra Leone – to be more successful than Western efforts to heal divided communities’.38 Thus, the organisation facilitates traditional cleansing ceremonies (done according to the traditions and norms of the community in question) and brings perpetrators, victims and other members of the community together to engage in bonfire truth-telling and ‘family talk’ aimed at promoting forgiveness and reconciliation, and addressing the root causes of conflict at the local level, as well as restoring the dignity of war victims. The programme involves traditional and religious leaders, male and female secret society leaders and a village youth chairperson who continue to play mediation roles in their communities after the reconciliation ceremonies. Such local actors are also trained in human rights and conflict resolution indicating the interface between the local and the liberal peace.39

152  Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom Fambul Tok is a local organisation, but it is also global, and much of its success in obtaining funding to carve out a niche for itself rests on its ability to communicate with different audiences. It was established as a collaborative effort between John Caulker (Sierra Leone) and a United States-based human rights activist, Libby Hoffman, who already had established an organisation in the United States, the Catalyst for Peace, which had been involved in attempts to mobilise resources for peace in a number of countries. It was through this connection that the widely acclaimed documentary film, Fambul Tok, was made, and much of the media-savvy approach of Fambul Tok was made possible through its ability to build global linkages that effectively places the organisation somewhere between the local realities of Sierra Leone and a world of global consumers and supporters of peacebuilding. This has clearly ­contributed to the manoeuvrability and agency of Fambul Tok but it also means that it constantly needs to negotiate its local agenda with international concerns, suggesting that even, if the organisation has agency, it is an agency that depends on: 1) the general nature of how peacebuilding is implemented, for example, increasingly through local partners; 2) arguing and constantly proving its local credentials; while 3) still operating within acceptable and recognisable global frames of peacebuilding. Hope Sierra Leone was founded in 1999 by John Bangura who lived as a refugee in Denmark. Through the support of friends in Denmark and other Sierra Leone refugees, Hope Sierra Leone was started with the establishment of a ‘peace and reconciliation farm’ that brought together ex-combatants and members of local communities. This initial work was expanded in 2005 with the implementation of the ‘Moral Foundations of Democracy’ programme and the ‘Post-Elections Media and Governance’ project in 2008. As in the case of Fambul Tok, the agency of Hope Sierra Leone also rests on its local–global connections and its exposure to the global consumers and supporters of (liberal) peacebuilding, illustrated by various narratives it has produced concerning the alleged transformations in John Bangura’s life from hatred to compassion and reconciliation. One illuminating example is the tale told about him in Michael Henderson’s book, No Enemy to Conquer: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009) that supposedly traces the personal and emotional journey of John Bangura from a victim, a refugee harbouring sentiments of hatred and revenge to a person who has come to embrace forgiveness and reconciliation as the only viable way forward for his war-torn country. While Hope Sierra Leone has stressed the value of indigenous culture and values in enhancing societal reconciliation and solving political and social challenges, the organisation has also deliberately included international peacebuilding agendas in its local activities. For instance, Hope

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Sierra Leone’s peace initiative, ‘Moral Foundation for Democracy’, involved the use of some of the main concepts of liberal language, such as democracy, human rights and rule of law, in its campaign to promote tolerance, coexistence, non-violence and respect for diversity and cohesion, together with traditional ways of resolving conflicts, including chiefs offering prayers to ancestors for peace, unity and protection. In November 2010, Hope Sierra Leone facilitated what it called a ‘heart to heart dialogue’ in Mattru Jong (Bonthe District) which brought state officials, political opponents, and ordinary people, as well as traditional leaders from Bombali District (northern Sierra Leone) and Bonthe District (southern Sierra Leone), together to engage in a dialogue aimed at promoting peace and reconciliation between the two regions as well as in the local community. At this ‘heart to heart dialogue’, Hope Sierra Leone pointed out that it believed in tradition, that ‘we do not lose focus’, that ‘we are not Britain or America’ and ‘we need to deal with the issues between ourselves’ thus,40 placing the local community at the centre of peace. Yet, even though it allowed local leaders to take a leading role and used traditional approaches to peacemaking, the peace initiative also brought in elements of liberal peacebuilding, including human rights, democracy and the rule of law, producing a hybrid approach to peacebuilding, which plays to different audiences at the same time, thus placing the organisation somewhere between a local Sierra Leone and globalised versions of peacebuilding.

The Ebola disaster emergency responses and the lack of local ownership The path which organisations, such as Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone, attempt to take is not one easily travelled because, though their local–global connections offer them possibilities (funding), there are the constraints that come with this type of funding. This is difficult in the day-to-day peacebuilding process but becomes even more of a problem when the juggernaut of international disaster relief is rolled out, as was the case during the autumn of 2014 when the international community at large finally started to respond to the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. As of 25 January 2015, there have been over 22,000 confirmed cases of Ebola virus in the three affected countries and, in Sierra Leone, 9,575 deaths have been reported.41 Sierra Leone is, therefore, the country most affected. The outbreak began in the village of Meliandou in Guinea in an area bordering Liberia and Sierra Leone. From this initial epicentre the Ebola virus spread to several villages in Guinea, before reaching

154  Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom Conakry, the capital, and across international borders into Liberia (Lofa County) and Sierra Leone (Kailahun District). The area where the outbreak began was seen as remote and isolated but is, in fact, located at the intersection of major trade routes to and from the Gola Forest, the savannah areas and the coastal regions. The role of these trade routes as a major vector of the epidemic could have been better anticipated if the local economy’s intense involvement in cross-border commerce had been better understood and local organisations with such in-depth understanding had been brought into the international operations from the very beginning. Sierra Leone is a farming country with impoverished, but relatively self-reliant, villages. In such societies, marriage and funerals constitute inescapable social obligations, tied to land rights. This is of crucial importance in a situation where land rights are everything – they signify immediate survival as well as the only guarantee for continued existence.42 For example, when the woman in a marriage comes from another village, she is considered a ‘stranger’ who gains access to land through her husband’s lineage. If she is widowed, she will be strongly encouraged to take another husband from the same lineage. If she rejects that, she may be required to return to the village where her brothers maintain their own land rights.43 This customary tradition is meant to avoid the merging of land rights between two families when a marriage is severed by death. Funerals are therefore important, not just to mark the passing of a person but also serve as the ‘unmaking’ of the marriage, and for families to publicly reassert their land rights and decide whether a union is to be continued, for example, ‘remade’, or to be dissolved finally with the woman returning to her own community. This also requires that a funeral be conducted properly. The body must be washed – particularly dangerous for Ebola transmission – and the more important the dead person was, the greater the number of people who will take part in this process. If the deceased is a man, his head is supposed to be shaved and covered with the mud formed from the washing of the body (this is supposed to free the widow from the attention of the dead husband’s spirit and thereby prepare her for remarriage or a return to her brothers). This may also be a likely risk for Ebola transmission. The local knowledge needed to understand the crucial role that these practices play in farming communities in Sierra Leone is not only important for understanding how Ebola may be spread but also to assess the risk-communication strategies of the government and international partners, because they have obviously not worked effectively. One reason for this may have been that, as the behemoth of international disaster aid was eventually rolled out, it was with such urgency and haste that it left little if any opportunity for bringing on board local actors, who could have been efficient go-betweens, and who could have helped

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the international emergency planning and implementation with the local knowledge needed to understand the crucial role that burials play in these communities.

Some concluding remarks: local–global; opportunities and constraints? International actors have exported the liberal peace model from the West to societies emerging from civil conflict with the expectation that the ‘hosts’ would accept it as it is. They have used conditionalities to enforce compliance by host countries to their peacebuilding agendas. Yet, as we have highlighted in the case of Sierra Leone, such international actors often have limited knowledge of the host country’s political and social history, local peace agendas and complex local dynamics, as well as little day-to-day contact with the local populations they are supposed to serve. To a certain extent, some of these limitations are currently being recognised. It would be wrong to assume, however, that we are about to face a shift of paradigmatic proportions. Rather, what we are much more likely to see is an attempt to adjust the current liberal framework to different local contexts. This is also taking place in Sierra Leone, and it does add a level of possible autonomous agency to some local actors within the field of peacebuilding. This is not a space that facilitates equal representation, however, and, even if such a space can be identified, it is still constrained by the continued existence of the liberal paradigm, albeit in a slightly less intrusive form. This is evident from the examples of Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone. The combination of the questioning of some of the features of the liberal peace, with the increasingly defensive nature of contemporary external peacebuilding that effectively isolates international staff from extensive engagement with locals, has opened up an agency of manoeuvrability for local innovative actors, such as Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone, who are able to build extensive local–global networks. The local and the global embodied in the same organisation provide for funding and agency but the agency is one that is constrained by the global connections, making these organisations ones that can take a slightly different approach, slightly more in sync with local realties and ideas, but still within the limits of what is acceptable by the standards set by the globalised world of peacekeeping. It is therefore an agency that is independent and subordinated at the same time. As we have seen, this provides for an agency which allows for some autonomy but it is an autonomy that has to operate within certain boundary frameworks of not only how the conflict, but also p ­ ost-conflict

156  Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom peacebuilding initiatives, are to be approached. It is, and has to be, locally grounded, because this is increasingly requested, but it also needs to have that touch of a globalised vision of a liberal peace which promises a route to modernity that, by and large, is in sync with the basic values of liberalism broadly defined. Local actors and organisations which can accomplish this double role will thrive in the current climate, and may also gradually be able to broaden their autonomy and scope of action but never beyond what their funders deem to be internationally acceptable. Thus, at least in the case of Sierra Leone, the liberal peace may present itself in a slightly less intrusive form but it is still a far cry from enabling us to speak about a post-liberal peace in this case. This is also evident as Sierra Leone is battling to control the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Several actors, the Department for International Development (DFID) included, still struggle to find ways of incorporating figures of authority on the ground, such as paramount chiefs and the secret societies, as well as local populations in their assistance strategies, preferring to bypass them and the state and work with the formal civil society sector and the private sector in the construction of community care units.44 In the haste to contain the outbreak, a number of important actors are still ignored and just their presence seems to be lacking from the plans the international community is making for Sierra Leone.45

Notes   1. United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone (UNIPSIL), Drawing Down – the End of UN Peace Operations in Sierra Leone (Freetown: UNIPSIL, 2014), p. 1.   2. See World Health Organization (WHO), One Year into the Ebola Outbreak (Geneva: WHO, 2015).  3. Department for International Development (DFID), Operational Plan 2011–2015 DFID Sierra Leone, Updated June 2012 (London: DFID, 2012), p. 3.   4. On tactical and strategic agency in Sierra Leone, see Morten Bøås, ‘Youth agency in the “violent life-worlds” of Kono District (Sierra Leone), Voinjama (Liberia) and Northern Mali: “tactics” and imaginaries’, Conflict, Security & Development, 13, 4 (2013), 611–30.  5. See Mark Duffield, ‘Risk management and the fortified aid compound: everyday life in post-interventionary society’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4 (4) (2010), 453–74.   6. See Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Kathleen M. Jennings, ‘Service, sex and security: gendered peacekeeping economies in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’, Security Dialogue, 45 (4) (2014), 313–30.

Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone  157  7. On local responses to peacekeeping missions, see, for example, Béatrice Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below: UN Missions and Local People (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2006); Laura Zanotti, Governing Disorder: UN Peace Operations, International Security and Democratisation in the Post-Cold War Era (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); and Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).   8. See United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Sierra Leone at a Glance (New York: UNDP, 2014).   9. This partly draws on fieldwork conducted by one of the authors (Patrick Tom) in Freetown, eastern (Kailahun and Kenema) and southern (Bo city, Mattru Jong, and Tinkonko and Imperi Chiefdoms) parts of Sierra Leone in November–December 2009 and November 2010. The research used research methods including participant observation, interviews, conversations and group discussions with a range of local and international actors. To protect the respondents, we do not use their names, except where one consented to it or gave the information at a public meeting. 10. For a comprehensive overview of the liberal peace, see, for example, Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Oliver P. Richmond, The Transformation of Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 11. The World Bank, Conflict, Security and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011), . 12. Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding; Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace; and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Peace formation and local infrastructures for peace’, Alternative: Global, Local, Political, 38 (4) (2013), 271–87. 13. Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace. 14. See Robert D. Kaplan, ‘The coming anarchy’, The Atlantic Monthly (February 1993), 44–76; and Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 15. See Rosalind Shaw, ‘Memory frictions: localising the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 1 (2) (2007), 183–207; and Tim Kelsall, Culture under Cross-Examination: International Justice and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16. International Crisis Group, Managing Uncertainty (Brussels: ICG, 2001), p. 2. 17. Morten Bøås, ‘Hunting ghosts of a difficult past: the International Crisis Group and the production of “crisis knowledge” in the Mano River Basin’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4) (2014), 652–68. 18. Christine P. Cubitt, Local and Global Dynamics of Peacebuilding: PostConflict Reconstruction in Sierra Leone (London: Routledge, 2012).

158  Morten Bøås and Patrick Tom 19. David Williams and Tom Young, ‘Civil society and the liberal project in Ghana and Sierra Leone’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 6 (1) (2012), 7–22, at 8. 20. Cubitt, Local and Global Dynamics. 21. Mohamed Sesy, Colin Hughes and Andrew Lavali, The Civil Society Landscape in Sierra Leone: Understanding Context, Motives and Challenges (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007), p. 3. 22. Cubitt, Local and Global Dynamics. 23. Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace, p. 28. 24. See Cubitt, Local and Global Dynamics; Christine Cubitt, ‘Constructing civil society: an intervention for building peace?’, Peacebuilding, 1 (1) (2013), 91–108; and Andrew Lavali, ‘The reliable route to poverty reduction in Sierra Leone: NGOs or secret societies’, Concord Times, Freetown (31 October 2005). 25. See Kenneth Little, ‘The political function of the Poro, part I’, Africa, 35 (4) (1965), 349–65. 26. Lavali, ‘The reliable route to poverty reduction’. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. TAs group interview, November 2009. In Sierra Leone, Tribal Authorities represent twenty tax payers and are found in all chiefdoms. Depending on the size of the chiefdom, it can have more than a thousand Tribal Authorities: for example, the Nongowa Chiefdom in Kenema (group interview, Tribal Authorities, 28 November 2009). In addition, Tribal Authorities act as chiefdom councillors and elect the paramount chief. 30. Article 24, Section 2 of the Public Order Act of 1965 authorises paramount chiefs to disallow the convening or holding of public meetings in their chiefdoms. 31. Interview with anonymous project officer (December 2009). 32. Tribal Authorities group interview (November, 2009); interview with anonymous project officer (December 2009). 33. The concept refers to those people originating from the community in question. 34. Interview, anonymous project officer (December 2009). 35. Tribal Authorities, group interview (November 2009). 36. Interview, anonymous NGO official (November 2010). 37. Lyn S. Graybill, ‘Traditional practices and reconciliation in Sierra Leone: the effectiveness of Fambul Tok’, Conflict Trends, 3 (2010), 41–7. 38. Fambul Tok, About Us (2015), 2, . 39. For a detailed discussion of this interface see Patrick Tom, ‘In search for emancipatory hybridity: the case of Sierra Leone’, Peacebuilding, 1 (2) (2013), 239–55. 40. Hope Sierra Leone, Newsletter November 2010, Freetown. 41. World Health Organization, One Year into the Ebola Outbreak. 42. See Morten Bøås and Kevin C. Dunn, The Politics of Origin in Africa (London: Zed Books, 2013). 43. See Mariane Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, History and the

Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone  159 Everyday in Sierra Leone (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 44. DFID has also established a £5m Emergency Ebola Response Fund (DEERF) which is managed by GOAL, an international humanitarian agency. Some of the conditions for funding stated in the application guidelines prioritise international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) over the ‘local’: 1) ‘Direct funding to government systems is not permitted’; 2) ‘Indirect support to government is permitted in partnership with an INGO. In this case donation in kind of goods is the preferred mechanism’; and 3) ‘National NGOs may apply for funding only in partnership with an International NGO’. See GOAL, ‘DFID Ebola Emergency Response Fund application guidelines’, revised 12 January 2015, . 45. See also, Paul Richards et al., ‘Social pathways for Ebola virus disease in rural Sierra Leone, and some implications for containment’, paper conditionally accepted by PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases for publication prior to formal review and posted to Speaking of Medicine on 31 October 2014.

8  Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia? Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes

Introduction Identifying local approaches to peacebuilding in Cambodia is complicated not only by the extraordinary violence of the war but also by the specific targeting of social, cultural and economic relations for eradication. The most violent part of the decades of upheaval from 1965 to 1996 was the infamous Khmer Rouge (Democratic Kampuchea) regime from April 1975 to January 1979. This regime implemented an extreme form of collective production, banning nearly all previous social associations in favour of agricultural communes in which discipline was terrifying, food inadequate and violence ubiquitous. During this time alone, around 1.7 million people, out of a population of seven million, died of causes ranging from execution and genocide to overwork and unaddressed famine. Before this, Cambodia had endured a decade of unprecedented bombing by the United States, making Cambodia one of the most heavily bombed countries in history.1 This not only killed thousands but also prompted massive internal displacement, further exacerbated after 1975 by the Khmer Rouge’s repeated forced relocation of entire villages and towns. The latter included the forced evacuation of three million people from Phnom Penh in 1975, an event which alone ranks as one of the largest population movements in history and is thought to have caused 20,000 deaths.2 Following the Vietnamese invasion in January 1979, the country was plunged into chaos. Hundreds of thousands of people, who had been forcibly relocated and separated from their families, took to the roads, searching desperately for lost family members, leaving perhaps half the

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villages in the country deserted.3 In the chaos, a further famine broke out and around half a million refugees crossed into Thailand, giving rise to a border network of refugee camps that was to remain in place for more than a decade. More than 350,000 of these camps’ inhabitants were repatriated to Cambodia by the United Nations during the peacekeeping mission of 1991–93. Some of these camps were controlled by, and housed, Khmer Rouge and other resistance fighters who continued the war against the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Throughout these years, local agency was evident in efforts by Cambodian people to cope with the immensity of the events overwhelming them. For example, much initial restoration of basic infrastructure and rudimentary services, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, was the result of local agency as much as central direction. Cambodians who recall that era talk of the spontaneous re-establishment of schools. Educated people had been targeted by the Khmer Rouge, schools had closed and few teachers survived. In 1979, anyone who could still read was charged with educating village children, without resources, using the shade of a tree as a classroom. Restoration of roads was undertaken by groups of neighbours pooling resources and rebuilding by themselves – a practice that continues in Cambodia today. Nevertheless, throughout postcolonial Cambodian history, Cam­bo­ dian governance has been characterised by high levels of surveillance and repression. This has been accompanied by an explicit concern by elites to manipulate ideas of the Cambodian tradition into a politics of populist authenticity that significantly affects possibilities for emancipatory forms of peace formation. The level of disruption and dislocation of the 1970s was such that it is misleading now to think of local peace formation as operating in an authentically indigenous space that somehow maintained coherence throughout. The Khmer Rouge’s efforts to create a ‘Year Zero’ in 1975, though unsuccessful, did significantly weaken the social, cultural and economic underpinnings of Cambodian daily life. Consequently, elite and international forces have since been overwhelmingly dominant, implementing heavy-handed systems of surveillance while evidence of subaltern agency is fragmentary, producing local peace-formation efforts that are disorganised, episodic and heavily oriented towards the search for support from more powerful allies. This chapter begins by examining mechanisms of disruption and surveillance that have been imposed upon Cambodian society since the 1970s. It then outlines initiatives since the war which suggest sporadic local attempts to use ideas about tradition as a check on power. It highlights the difficulty associated with a context of continuing authoritarianism and attempts by populist elites to co-opt and politicise the re-emergence of cultural symbols. Two areas are examined here: the

162  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes reform of village-level political structures and the restoration of Buddhist rituals.

Surveillance and disruption in Cambodia during the war Though Cambodia has virtually always been ruled by oppressive authoritarian regimes, the Khmer Rouge are unusual both in terms of Cambodian history and worldwide comparisons. The intense surveillance systems they put in place sought to remake not only Cambodian society and economy but also every Khmer individual. Khmer Rouge strategies of surveillance were focused on the idea of the Organization (angkar), a mysterious authority that guided the revolution. Demands made of the people, in terms of surrendering possessions and enduring hard physical labour, were made in the name of the Organization. A commonly heard slogan warned that ‘the Organization has the eyes of a pineapple’ – meaning many eyes that looked in all directions and saw everything. This sense of powerful, perpetual surveillance was accompanied by a threefold attack on the foundations of Cambodian village life: the family, religion, and ties to the land.4 Pre-war Cambodian society was built around autonomous households, linked through personal networks of reciprocal obligation rather than through collective identification with structured social entities.5 The family was thus the central social institution. The Khmer Rouge regarded close family bonds as a threat to the regime and a corrupting influence on the young.6 Household farms were broken up, with family members allocated to large anonymous collectives. Family dining was banned in favour of communal food halls. Work teams were segregated by age and gender, with children and teenagers sent to work far from their parents. Where children and parents remained in the same commune, children were encouraged to spy on their parents and report disobedience. Extramarital sexual relations were severely punished; Angkar arranged marriages between young adults in compulsory mass ceremonies that dispensed with traditional rituals. The Buddhist religion was similarly suppressed. Monks were forced to disrobe; sacred objects were burned; temples were destroyed or converted into storerooms, torture centres and prisons; and rituals were forbidden. Revolutionary morality, dispensed by Angkar, took the place of traditional ceremonies and teachings. The regime also repeatedly relocated entire villages. The evacuation of Phnom Penh was one example but many other deportations of towns and villages took place throughout the period. Such relocations were difficult, emotionally and p ­ hysically, for villagers whose subsistence depended on detailed knowledge of their land and its seasonal variations of rainfall, silt and floodwater.

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Though implemented with varying degrees of severity in different regions and at different times, most Cambodians shared a common experience of radical disruption of modes of life and interpersonal relationships, and subjection of all of these to back-breaking, impersonal labour and intensive surveillance, with severe punishments, including execution, the penalty for disobedience. The attempt to stamp out both interpersonal relationships and individuality was far-reaching. Kiernan reports that many of survivors attributed their survival to the fact that they adopted a strategy of never looking anyone else in the eye.7 Nevertheless, there is evidence of resistance to Khmer Rouge rule. This included ‘everyday’ infractions, such as stealing food or using hidden stores of jewellery to pay bribes, which is documented by oral histories as having occurred throughout the Khmer Rouge era. Open resistance was rare, initially, in part because of surveillance and in part because many supported the goals of the revolution.8 As rule became harsher and starvation set in, conspiracies against the regime became increasingly widespread. After the toppling of the regime by the invading Vietnamese in 1979, some of these disruptions were reversed. Family life re-emerged but Buddhism and traditional forms of agriculture were slower to recover. The Vietnamese-backed regime was suspicious of organised religion and continued to attempt to collectivise farming, though more loosely. There was effective resistance to that: families began de facto to re-occupy their own plots of land and, when socialist planning was finally formally abandoned at the end of the 1980s, it was essentially recognising a situation which already existed on the ground.9 The new regime was thus prepared to compromise but within certain limits, and it was effective in putting down roots into the villages under its administration. Over the course of the decade, a network of party and state officials emerged at local level linked by personal relations of loyalty and patronage, and maintaining control through a mixture of violence and corruption.10 The local administration was responsible, among other things, for village security, conscription of young men into the army and fulfilling unpopular state rice-purchasing quotas. This created a system of rule in which ordinary Cambodian villagers were highly reliant for their survival upon good relations with local officials. These could be achieved by offering support at crucial moments, making strategic gifts, such as fruit and drinks, and through straightforward payments of cash bribes. The stability, such as it was, of the regime that emerged in the 1980s was heavily reliant upon the ability to get the population to invest heavily in relations with local-level authority as a means to ward off the worst effects of higher-level state policies.11 Thus, this era saw the embedding of relations of dependence, corruption and violence into local state–society relations.

164  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes

The local in post-war Cambodia Cambodia’s civil war wound down following the end of cold war. A peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s overlaid the concerns of the liberal peace on to the Phnom Penh regime’s ten-year state-building mission: ushering in elections; a new constitution permitting freedom of movement, association and religion; and a free-market economic system based upon property rights. The mission failed to maintain a ceasefire but, over the next few years, remnants of the Khmer Rouge insurgency defected to the newly elected government or were defeated on the battlefield, bringing an end to the war in 1996. The so-called ‘liberal peace’ delivered a highly predatory regime. The party associated with the 1980s Phnom Penh regime, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), embraced the principles of private sector-driven growth: leasing and selling state assets, including huge tracts of land and forest, to business cronies at cut-rate prices; awarding lucrative state contracts to tycoons willing to support party programmes; and making the repressive powers of the state available to business allies when disputes emerge with villagers, workers or activists.12 The result has been a dramatic increase in economic inequality and a wave of post-war armed violence in the context of forced evictions and repression of protests and pickets. Following its shock defeat in the 1993 United Nations election, the CPP used its control of local authorities to map out a new electoral strategy. Close surveillance of the voting population combined with party sponsorship of village development projects, funded by the emerging class of Cambodian business tycoons. Villagers were enrolled automatically as party members and required to demonstrate their loyalty and gratitude to the party in regular gift-giving sessions from which households identified as pro-opposition were excluded. This strategy was effective in the post-war years in ensuring that households supported the CPP, at least in public. Local authorities interviewed during this era stated confidently that they knew which households were loyal to the CPP and that these households would be invited to participate in planning exercises and development-strategy meetings. Households which were identified as proopposition had more difficult relationships with local authorities, tended to be excluded from the benefits of development projects, and were vulnerable to problems such as land grabbing. In a context where impartial state mechanisms were absent, reliance on the village and commune chief’s goodwill to provide support in everyday concerns, such as conflicts with neighbours or access to welfare, meant that villagers were reluctant to mark themselves out as pro-opposition.13 As such, the introduction of competitive electoral politics into Cambodia in the 1990s prompted a response from the dominant party that resembled, to some extent, its

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response to insurgency in the 1980s – intense surveillance and the cultivation of relations of dependency and control at the household level. Demilitarisation after the end of the war has altered these dynamics somewhat. By the mid 2000s, villagers were much less afraid of local authorities than they were in the early 1990s.14 They were still reluctant openly to challenge them, however, because of the significance of local leaders as gatekeepers for wider opportunities and resources, with the poorest households the most reluctant to do so.15 Many legacies of the past remain unaddressed: there is a deep accountability deficit, associated with institutionalised corruption and national development strategies, that centres on asset-stripping of Cambodia’s natural resources to the benefit of the wealthy. In national elections held in 2013, a surprisingly strong showing by the opposition parties exposed a deep sense of popular discontent that is routinely well hidden. This context poses three problems for considering subaltern agency in peace formation. First, the extent of disruption of village and family relationships entailed disruption of society that lasted long after the end of the war. The need to repair such relationships has rarely been explicitly articulated because there have been no formal national truthtelling or reconciliation initiatives. Peace formation thus takes place in Cambodia under a veil of silence. Second, the deliberate targeting of key elements of Cambodian culture for destruction under the Khmer Rouge, and attempts by contemporary political elites to co-opt it as it reemerges, have created a highly contested politics of authenticity around Cambodian tradition. Claims to ritual knowledge or moral authority, at local as well as national level, are highly politically charged. Third, decades of close surveillance of village-level affairs by local authorities personally and politically loyal to the dominant party, against a background of political violence, entail that hidden transcripts are kept very well hidden in a context of ongoing contestation over predatory development strategies. Peace-formation efforts are likely to be silent and unspoken, or manifested in slight shifts in the use of gestures or terms of respect among neighbours. This is particularly difficult for outsiders to document, though Cambodian researchers have now begun to do so.16 This chapter will review two particularly significant areas in which peace formation may be observable in Cambodia: local government reform and the re-emergence of religious rituals and festivals.

Local government reform in Cambodia: a space for peace formation? Over the past fifteen years, a decentralisation reform programme has introduced elections for subnational levels of government in Cambodia.

166  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes In particular, local elections were introduced in 2002 to elect governing councils at commune level in a move hailed by international donors and the Cambodian government as deepening democratic development.17 Recent research suggests that these relations have transformed since the first commune elections in 2002. One study argues that relations between commune authorities and rural villagers have shifted from a relationship of fear, in the 1990s, to one of respect, after 2002.18 This shift may reflect a demilitarisation of relationships but it does not necessarily imply democratisation, or opportunities for emancipatory politics. Though commune elections have put in place some new faces – including some female faces – commune councils remain dominated in practice by elderly men who have been there since the early 1980s.19 Indeed, for the CPP, interest in local governance reform has primarily been about strengthening its grassroots network of party officials who can control and mobilise rural voters on behalf of the party. This is reflected in the design of reforms. For example, commune councils are directly elected through a proportional representation system using lists of party-nominated candidates, a system that awards parties disciplinary control over elected councillors. The winning party in each commune gains the powerful commune chief’s position. Though most commune councils have representatives from opposition political parties, the CPP dominates in 1,611 of the 1,633 communes today, therefore controlling almost all of Cambodia’s commune chiefs.20 This has consolidated the CPP’s reach and access to rural voters. Links between central and local governments are underpinned by the powerful patronage networks of the CPP which pervade the executive branch and the state bureaucracy at all levels. For much of the period since 2002, opposition parties have been highly fragmented and disorganised, their leaders harassed and forced into exile, precluding them from having a significant impact. Though formally, opposition councillors participate in local government, the system has de facto been ­dominated by the CPP. Understanding this entails examining the substance of local authorities’ relations with villagers. The voting record shows that, given the choice, villagers have mostly supported existing leadership groups within villages, rather than voting in new individuals. Detailed qualitative fieldwork undertaken after the 2007 election in a commune affected severely by land-grabbing suggests an explanation. The commune chief had been complicit in taking land from eighty-five local families, prompting significant local conflict, yet was voted back into power. His re-election is partly attributable to the limited range of options available to the dispossessed in Cambodia. For the families affected, the most likely source of effective support in their campaign for the return of their land was from the CPP itself. Some of the families had contacts with high-ranking

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party members in Phnom Penh, and intervention by these patrons was considered to be their only realistic recourse. Such intervention was only likely, however, if the villagers demonstrated their continued loyalty to the party. A vote for the opposition would ensure that their appeals went unanswered, and that party resources would be used to protect the miscreant from any retribution attempted by an opposition commune chief.21 This example reflects the extent to which exploitative systems of governance continue to tie villagers into relationships of dependence with the CPP and its local chiefs. In a context marked by violence, surveillance, and distrust between households, investment in relationships of dependence with a known leader who is effective in protecting and rewarding supporters makes sense. Where villagers have so invested, they are unlikely to unseat the local leader electorally, even if they abuse their power. Indeed, abuse of power is likely to prompt increased efforts to invest in the relationship. Local governance reform has produced a context characterised less by democracy than by a complex mix of tradition and modern practices, democratic and undemocratic institutions, and rules-based and patrimonial governance. This is exemplified by the emergence, since 2002, of new modes of responsiveness and accountability within the dominant Cambodian People’s Party itself, which differ from the liberal ideal but nevertheless function. A key institution is the Party Working Group, a party institution existing in each district of Cambodia, consisting of about a hundred people from different levels of central and subnational government.22 This group works together to identify local development projects and gain funding from them from higher-level party organs. Newly elected commune councillors are assigned positions in this structure and are expected to work with the working group to ensure that villagers’ demands are met and party projects are successful. This fusing of state and party structures and networks is regarded by some analysts as a culturally relevant precursor to the deepening of democracy and a potentially significant brake on a mode of development often categorised as predatory.23 Pak, for example, reports that locallevel officials take great pride in their achievements in delivering projects and that increasingly participatory processes are used to ensure these projects are well targeted and appreciated. Patrons who fail to provide development goods for their villages, and consequently risk alienating potential voters, are reportedly subject to party scrutiny and potential disciplinary action.24 A significant caveat to this picture is the reality of exclusion of, and violence towards, individuals who do not display loyalty and the reality of ongoing dispossession and asset-stripping of Cambodian resources.25 It is nevertheless evident, however, that rural villagers understand the

168  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes politics of personalism and engage critically with it. For example, a study of local leadership in three communes revealed that villagers address local leaders using traditional kinship terms, such as ‘ming’ (aunt), ‘pou’ (uncle) or ‘ta’ (grandfather). This emphasises familiarity as well as implying a paternalist obligation on the part of local leaders.26 Significantly, the study found that a different set of terms ‘mae’ (mother) and ‘euv’ (father) is reserved for leaders whom villagers consider have lived up to expectations of ideal paternal care.27 Only one person of the forty-six leaders identified by villagers in the study actually was referred to as ‘euv’ in the three communes, implying that forty-five others fell short of the ideal. The local leader addressed as ‘euv’ was a village chief described by villagers as ‘transparent and not greedy’,28 implying criticism of other leaders for rapacious demands for bribes. The award and withholding of legitimacy is thereby embedded in the language villagers use to address and discuss their leaders. Though these strategies for awarding or withholding legitimacy are extraordinarily weak, they nevertheless appear to be clearly perceived by local powerholders. In a different study, a former warlord, turned provincial governor, interviewed in the early 2000s commented on the satisfaction he gained from seeing children in villages running up to him and calling him ‘uncle’, since he shed his military associations and became identified with local development funding instead.29 Postwar Cambodian elites appear to value highly such interactions, to the extent of stage-managing them if they are not spontaneously forthcoming. The CPP, contra its avowedly socialist origins, has invested much effort in restoring hierarchical honorifics and forms of address since the 1990s, as a means of bolstering the supposedly traditional element of patronage relationships. Though weak, these strategies do appear to exert pressure on commune leaders. A common complaint observed in surveys of commune chiefs is the high personal stress associated with being caught between the imperative of sometimes conflicting obligations to constituents, on the one hand, and to the party hierarchy on the other.30 There is also some evidence of commune councils using their popular legitimacy, on which the central government and party heavily depend, to challenge the party hierarchy. For example, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has publicly acknowledged the political significance of commune councils, commenting in a public speech that, ‘We at the central level should not look down on communes because our positions are the results of communes’ hard work’.31 In fieldwork conducted shortly after this speech was delivered, Eng observed a commune chief using this quote strategically to request funding during a meeting with senior officials from provincial and national levels. Though decentralisation has hardly revolutionised local government in Cambodia, it has

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given rise to new opportunities for the oblique challenge of authority, legitimacy and hierarchy.

Religious rituals and institutions as spaces of contestation The impact of the Khmer Rouge era on cultural and religious practice was profound, leading to a ‘pervasive’ sense ‘among Khmer that their culture has been lost’.32 The mass murder of individuals with cultural and ritual knowledge and the deliberate destruction of written materials and ceremonial objects have created a sense of cultural dislocation such as to raise ‘the anxiety that the Khmer people will cease to exist’.33 In the twenty-five years since the end of the Khmer Rouge period, cultural practices have been recovered and renewed, though in a new political context offering new political constraints and opportunities.34 New religious movements and the re-establishment of customary festivals illustrate attempts at peace formation but also comprise a site where both liberal interveners and local elites contend with local actors for control. Khmer Buddhism has been regarded as an essential aspect of Khmer identity since the birth of Khmer nationalism in the early twentieth century.35 The attack on Buddhism by the Khmer Rouge regime, however, and restrictions on religious organisation during the 1980s produced significant anxieties over the authenticity of contemporary religion. The restoration of the Cambodian monkhood after the Khmer Rouge era is an example. Buddhist scripture decrees that monks can be ordained only by existing monks; the absence of monks in 1979 was therefore problematic. The new regime organised the ordination of seven new monks to found a new Cambodian Buddhist order, bringing ethnic Khmer monks from Vietnam to perform the ceremony. This allowed the restoration of religious practice in Cambodia but opened the way to accusations that the senior monkhood were ‘Vietnamese monks in Khmer robes’, a taint that has ‘been difficult for these monks to break free from’.36 In the early post-war years, international donors in Cambodia envisaged using monks as a vehicle for promoting liberal values such as human rights. A number of donor-funded programmes examined whether monks could be suitable candidates to take the role of human rights trainers, and Buddhist organisations participated.37 Interviews with human rights activists and religious figures in the 1996 suggested that, for many of the Cambodians involved, the Buddhist aspect of the projects was more important than the human rights aspects. The comments of two of Cambodia’s most senior monks suggested that human rights were being co-opted into a Buddhist framework, via such projects, rather than vice versa:

170  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes Buddhism is like human rights. Let us begin first with life. Buddhism says not only should we not kill – but we should save life. Second we must abstain from stealing, from taking property from other people. Third we should respect other people. We should abstain from adultery – love our own wife and our husband and do not cheat. We have to be truthful. Fourthly we should not cheat people through telling lies. Not insult them. Not be talkative. We should talk very truthfully, lovingly, usefully. We have to speak kindly, with loving-kindness, compassion in speech, balance and equanimity in speech. We must speak in the right place at the right moment with the right person.38   The important part of human rights is the moral part. Human rights are the same as Buddhist principles. For example, Buddhism says don’t kill. And also human rights say we have the right to live. Also possession – the right to possess property. Buddhism says don’t steal. And also respect for women’s rights, like for example rape. Buddhism says don’t commit adultery. And if you are in government then you shouldn’t lie to the people. So Buddhism says you cannot use verbal abuse to give dishonour to people. And the fifth principle is don’t drink. Because if you drink you may violate human rights because you lose your temper. So those five principles relate very closely to human rights . . . In fact, maybe Buddhism is better than human rights because it says we should respect not only humans but the lives of animals too.39

Human rights activists embracing the new constitution, interviewed in the same era, characterised the situation in very similar terms: Human rights are very similar to Buddhism . . . like the Buddhist is not allowed to kill, not allowed to say bad things, lie, drink alcohol – that’s a good way for the Buddhist people.40   We teach people that human rights are similar to Buddhism. When I teach people, I put up a poster which talks about Buddhism, tells the people about sin. And when people in Cambodia hear about sin, it scares them.41

In the early post-war years human rights were seen as concomitant to Buddhism primarily because they offered a means of social control, in an environment when violence was routine and everyday, rather than primarily as a check on government power, as in liberal political theory. A less donor-driven post-war Buddhist movement was the Dhammayietra peace march, led by the Ven. Maha Ghosananda, a Cambodian monk who had studied in India and the United States and been a Buddhist leader in the border refugee camps during the 1980s. The first march took place in 1992 and was repeatedly annually for ten years. The marchers were largely Buddhist monks and nuns, walking a predetermined route through remote or war-torn regions, in a demonstration of non-violent action. The first march began in the border

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refugee camps and led back into Cambodia, finishing in Phnom Penh. At a time when insurgency continued in the north-west, the march took considerable risks but was respected by combatants, demonstrating the triumph of peace and faith over violence. Organisers described the enthusiasm and emotion with which villagers in war-torn areas received the march, and there were reports of soldiers on the front lines also laying down their weapons to receive blessings. The march made extensive use of Buddhist symbolism, planting Bodhi trees along the route, and maintaining a regime of monastic observance and meditation during the journey. Central to the Dhammayietra was the Buddhist concept that peace would come from efforts by individuals to tame their own worldly desires, as a precondition for the restoring of external relationships. At the same time, through symbolically linking remote parts of the country to the centre of Phnom Penh, the movement placed emphasis on Cambodian territorial integrity as a key aspect of peace. Though unprecedented in Cambodian tradition, and heavily influenced by Gandhiism and other international peace philosophies, in bringing together the themes of peace, cultural revival and national unity, the Dhammayietra symbolised, for Cambodians and for many international observers, the awakening of Cambodia from the nightmares of the war.42 The spirit of reconstruction, which the Dhammayietra represented, was echoed in the reintroduction of village festivals and the birth of new religious movements across Cambodia. The return of cultural festivals and the resurrection of community practices, such as labour sharing, have been described across Cambodia and regarded as contributing to rebuilding social cohesion in the aftermath of the war.43 Eve Zucker’s account of a harvest festival held in a village in the south-west of Cambodia in 2003 suggests both the potential of and constraints on such festivals in rebuilding intra-village relations.44 The festival she observed took place in a poor village on the edge of a Khmer Rouge insurgent area. The village had been repeatedly displaced between 1975 and 1999, and had suffered internal conflict during the war. Families had informed on one another to the Khmer Rouge, prompting numerous executions, and contemporary relations remained distrustful as a consequence. Zucker observed that the holding of the festival did bring some families together in collaborative relations to prepare, fund and organise the festival but that other families remained uninvolved. She also reported that although the festival itself prompted a feeling of unusual levity in the village, things quickly returned to normal. Zucker concludes that the staging of the festival for the first time since the war established a feeling of continuity with a remembered pre-war golden age, and thus both held out hope that village relations could be restored while simultaneously reminding villagers vividly and bitterly of what had been lost.45

172  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes More broadly, the post-war era saw a flowering of new religious movements across the country.46 John Marston argues that this represented not recovery of a lost past but blossoming of religious experimentation with the potential to reimagine culture and nation in an emancipatory way. He documents one movement which emerged in 1995 around the figure of a religious ascetic called Tapas’ who claimed the power to turn clay into stone. The movement’s main achievement was the construction of a clay replica of the world famous Angkor Wat temple complex, considered by Cambodians to be the symbol of the Khmer civilisation, and believed by some to have itself been originally made of clay, transformed into stone by a magical giant. The movement attracted large numbers of devotees and funding from within and outside Cambodia. Its star waned after several years, however, when transformed objects that had been promised failed to materialise.47 Marston regards the movement as one strand of a broader exploration within Cambodia of how religion and culture might be revived. The movement did not fit easily into recognised Cambodian Buddhist tradition but it ‘claimed to be a resurrection of the past and of something essential about Cambodian culture’ while, at the same time, being unprecedented. As such, ‘part of the excitement it generated derived from its attraction as a new synthesis. It was fuelled by the freedoms of a new political and economic order, while it stood both as a critique of this order and a form of symbolic agency in relation to it.’48 The movement existed in an awkward relationship to local and central authorities who neither fully recognised it nor stood against it. According to Marston, the abbot from a nearby temple commented that in the 1980s, Tapas’ would have been thrown into jail but nowadays his ‘rights’ had to be respected.49 Marston concludes that the cult’s attraction emanated from its claims to symbolic agency at a time when Cambodia was dominated by external interveners and violent elites. The claim to possession of the magical powers of the builders of Angkor resonates through Cambodia’s modern history. The iconography of Angkor has been harnessed routinely by Cambodian royalty, and the Angkar of the Khmer Rouge period similarly made frequent reference to Angkorean greatness. The cult of Tapas’, however, claimed that legacy for an ordinary villager. Furthermore, Marston comments that Tapas’ decision to reinterpret the tradition itself represented an emancipatory move: ‘The fact that religious practice then had to be reinvented in relation to new social circumstances meant that what should or should not be practiced was open to conscious decision in a way that released new possibilities’.50 For Marston, both the cult of Tapas’ and the Dhammayietra movement ‘attempted to provide Cambodians agency in relation to their national future in a situation where there seemed to be little other possibility of providing real agency’.51

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Subsequent studies of religious rebuilding in Cambodia have been less optimistic, perhaps reflecting the closing down of such agency over time as power relations in the new socio-economic order have consolidated. By the end of the 1990s, Cambodia had entered an era of economic boom in which funding the restoration of pagodas became a fashionable occupation for the nouveau riche. The renaissance of Buddhism became sucked into a new patronage economy and an important plank of the CPP’s populist approach to rule. Many temples in Cambodia were rebuilt using funding donated through party hierarchies, and bear the CPP’s devada (angel) symbol prominently on their walls. Alexandra Kent describes how temple-building in Cambodia, previously a community obligation, has become a commercial business. Ground-breaking ceremonies, held at the start of the construction process, ‘have become important scenes for the enactment of a new kind of political theatre in which power is demonstrated and relations of economic dependency regimented’.52 Kent describes the strategic approach taken by temple officials when considering the choice of official to preside over the ground-breaking ceremony of a new project. She cites a district official from Battambang province, discussing his advice to the head monk of a new temple in this regard. The official commented that it would be important to invite a CPP official to preside because: I just want the pagoda to get support and protection from the CPP . . . Since almost everything in the country is under the control of the CPP, we have to be flexible. If we don’t invite CPP officials to attend the ceremony, that means they will ignore us for ever. The relationship between the pagoda and the local authorities will be cut off and if we have a problem they won’t come to help us because we don’t support them.

The same official went on to explain that so far the provincial authorities had refused to register the temple and had questioned its land title – a remark which, in the context of rampant land-grabbing in contemporary Cambodia, is profoundly threatening.53 This account suggests that, as power relations are consolidating in post-war Cambodia, opportunities for emancipatory forms of peace formation are narrowing. A similar interpretation can be placed upon an account by Erik Davis (2011) of rural–urban relations as expressed during the ‘hungry ghost’ festival of Phchum Ben. During this festival, Cambodians return to their home villages to provide gifts to the dead who are portrayed as hungry ghosts who will cause trouble if not appeased. Like other religious festivals, Phchum Ben was proscribed by the Khmer Rouge regime and began to revive only in the 1990s. Davis describes how, in 2005, he travelled with a group of Cambodians from Phnom Penh to a rural area for Pchum Ben only to find that the urban

174  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes group faced derisory and mocking comments from villagers shouting, ‘Here come the hungry ghosts!’ when they arrived. Davis argues that the villagers’ jokes about hungry ghosts – which the urbanites did not find in the least funny – derive from the premise of Pchum Ben itself. Living Cambodians spend most of the year asking for blessings from the ghosts of their ancestors. At Pchum Ben, the relationship is reversed and the ghosts ask for food from the living. Davis argues that the joke plays on a conception of urban Cambodians as parasitic on the work of rural Cambodians and refers to a post-war political economy in which inequality between urban and rural areas has dramatically widened. For rural Cambodians, the appropriation of the image of the hungry ghosts to denigrate the urban visitors represented a humiliating joke which, for the urban travellers accompanying Davis, rather spoiled the affirming intent of the whole business.54 The episode illustrates the ways in which the revival of culture is inextricably linked to the emergence of a new socio-economic and political order in Cambodia.55

Conclusion The resurrection of relationships in the context of local government represents a site of intense contestation in Cambodia as in other postconflict contexts. In Cambodia, however, the extraordinary violence with which cultural ritual itself was attacked during the war entails that culture itself has become a similar site of contestation. Indeed, the restoration of state–society relations and the restoration of cultural norms have occurred alongside one another, and have become inextricably intertwined, as interveners, elites and villagers, in their attempts to reinvent cultural practice, have all attempted to do so in ways that serve their own ends. Competition for power in contemporary Cambodia has entailed the selective drawing on half-remembered custom as a means to promote one’s own status and authority. Arguably, liberal peacemakers have fared relatively badly in this context but ‘subaltern agency’ has also been relegated to the realm of cruel jokes, short-lived cults and the sly withholding of particular honorifics. The winners in this cultural realm have been elites who have poured money into festivals and cultural restoration projects and, in doing so, have narrowed significantly the opportunities for using new interpretations of former cultural practice as a basis for imagining progressive political change. Cambodia is currently undergoing a profound demographic change, however, as the post-war generation reaches adulthood. The relevance of temples, festivals and ordinations in ordering social relations is rapidly receding. The recent history of Cambodia was not taught in Cambodian

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schools during the 1990s and 2000s because of the inability of former combatants to agree on how it should be portrayed. A new generation, whose knowledge of the past is sketchy, has now reached adulthood. The old Khmer culture, which many sought to reconstruct in the 1990s, is gone, not just because of the war but because of the emergence of this new generation. Young people in Cambodia are far more mobile, far more urban, far better educated and far more internationally oriented than their predecessors. New sites of resistance are emerging in comics, on Facebook, and in the lyrics of Khmer rap artists. The relationship of these to both the spread of neo-liberal values and ongoing intra-elite struggles will be decisive in the emergence of a new Cambodian political order in the next decade.

Notes  1. Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, ‘Bombs over Cambodia’, The Walrus (October 2006), (last accessed 20 September 2007).  2. Martin Stuart Fox and Ung Bunheang, The Murderous Revolution (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 1998).   3. Evan Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 38–9.   4. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1997), p. 167; John Marston, ‘Democratic Kampuchea and the idea of modernity’, in Judy Ledgerwood (ed.), Cambodia Emerges from the Past: Eight Essays (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, Southeast Asia Publications, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), p. 55.   5. May Ebihara, Svay, A Village in Cambodia, PhD dissertation (New York: Columbia University, 1968).   6. Alexander Hinton, ‘Purity and contamination in the Cambodian genocide’, in Judy Ledgerwood (ed.), Cambodia Emerges from the Past: Eight Essays (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, Southeast Asia Publications, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), pp. 60–90.   7. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1997), p. 250.   8. Ibid. p. 213.   9. Vivienne Frings, ‘Cambodia after decollectivization (1989–1992)’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 24 (1) (1994), 49–66. 10. Evan Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 67–8. 11. Serge Thion, Watching Cambodia (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2000); Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge. 12. Caroline Hughes, The Political Economy of Cambodia’s Transition, 1991– 2001 (London: Routledge, 2003).

176  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes 13. Ibid.; Caroline Hughes, ‘The politics of gifts: generosity and menace in contemporary Cambodia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, symposium on ‘Cambodia: reassessing tradition in times of political change’, 31 (3) (2006), 469–89. 14. Joakim Ojendal and Kim Sedara, ‘Korob, Kaud, Klach: in search of agency in rural Cambodia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 37 (3) (2006), 507–26. 15. Thon Vimealea, Ou Sivhuoch, Eng Netra and Ly Tem, Leadership in Three Cambodian Communes (Phnom Penh: Cambodia Development Resource Institute, 2009). 16. Pak Kimchoeun, A Dominant Party in a Weak State: How the Ruling Party in Cambodia Has Managed to Stay Dominant, PhD dissertation (Canberra: Australian National University, 2011); Thon Vimealea, Ou Sivhuoch, Eng Netra and Ly Tem, Leadership in Three Cambodian Communes (Phnom Penh: Cambodia Development Resource Institute, 2009); Eng Netra, The Politics of Decentralisation in Cambodia: The District Level, PhD dissertation (Clayton, VIC: Monash University, 2014). 17. A commune is a group of villages and the lowest level of state administration in Cambodia. 18. Ojendal and Sedara, ‘Korob, Kaud, Klach’. 19. Kim Sedara, Democracy In Action: Decentralization In Post-Conflict Cambodia, PhD dissertation (Goteborg: University of Goteborg, 2012); Kim Ninh and Roger Henke, Commune Councils in Cambodia: A National Survey on Their Functions and Performance, with a Special Focus on Conflict Resolution (Phnom Penh: The Asia Foundation and Center for Advanced Study, 2005); Thon Vimealea, Ou Sivhuoch, Eng Netra and Ly Tem, Leadership in Three Cambodian Communes (Phnom Penh: Cambodia Development Resource Institute, 2009). 20. National Election Committee, Results of Commune Councils Election 2012 (Phnom Penh: Government of Cambodia, 2012). 21. Thon Vimealea, Ou Sivhuoch, Eng Netra and Ly Tem (2009), Leadership in Three Cambodian Communes. 22. David Craig and Pak Kimchoeun, ‘Party financing of local investment projects: elite and mass patronage’, in Caroline Hughes and Kheang Un (eds), Cambodia’s Economic Transformation (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2011), p. 225. 23. Ibid. 24. Pak Kimchoeun, A Dominant Party in a Weak State: How the Ruling Party in Cambodia Has Managed to Stay Dominant, PhD dissertation (Canberra: Australian National University, 2012). 25. Caroline Hughes, ‘The politics of gifts: generosity and menace in contemporary Cambodia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Symposium on ‘Cambodia: reassessing tradition in times of political change’, 31 (3) (2006), 469–89. 26. Thon Vimealea, Ou Sivhuoch, Eng Netra and Ly Tem, Leadership in Three Cambodian Communes. 27. Ibid. p. 37.

Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia?  177 28. Ibid. p. 39. 29. Caroline Hughes, ‘Friction, good governance and the poor: cases from Cambodia’, International Peacekeeping, 20 (2) (2013), 144–58. 30. The Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL), Assessment of the Second Term of Decentralization in Cambodia: Commune Council Performance and Citizen Participation 2007–12 (Phnom Penh: COMFREL, 2013), 19; Kim Sedara, Democracy in Action: Decentralization in Post-Conflict Cambodia, PhD dissertation (Goteborg: University of Goteborg, 2012); Caroline Rusten, Kim Sedara, Eng Netra and Pak Kimchoeun, The Challenges of Decentralisation Design in Cambodia (Phnom Penh: Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI), 2004). 31. Quoted in Eng Netra, The Politics of Decentralisation in Cambodia: The District Level, PhD dissertation (Clayton, VIC: Monash University, 2014), p. 239. 32. Judy Ledgerwood, May Ebihara and Carol Mortland, ‘Introduction’, in May Ebihara, Carol Mortland and Judy Ledgerwood (eds), Cambodian Culture since 1975, Homeland and Exile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 1. 33. Ibid. 34. John Marston, ‘Clay into stone: a modern-day Tapas’, in John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie (eds), History, Buddhism and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), pp. 170–96. 35. Milada Kalab, ‘Cambodian Buddhist monasteries in Paris: continuing tradition and changing patterns’, in May Ebihara, Carol Mortland and Judy Ledgerwood (eds), Cambodian Culture since 1975, Homeland and Exile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 57; Anne Hanson, ‘Khmer identity and Theravada Buddhism’, in John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie (eds), History, Buddhism and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), p. 41. 36. Ian Harris, Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), p. 192. 37. Hughes, Caroline, Human Rights in Cambodia: International Intervention and the National Response, PhD dissertation (Hull: University of Hull, 1998); and ‘Human rights out of context (or, translating the Universal Declaration into Khmer)’, in Nigel White and Dirk Klaasen (eds), The UN, Human Rights and Post-Conflict Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 191–212. 38. Ven. Maha Ghosananda, personal interview with Caroline Hughes, Phnom Penh, May 1996. 39. Ven. Tep Vong, personal interview with Caroline Hughes, Phnom Penh, June 1996. 40. Human rights lawyer, name withheld on request, personal interview with Caroline Hughes, Phnom Penh, January 1996. 41. Provincial human rights activist, name withheld on request, personal interview with Caroline Hughes, Phnom Penh, January 1996. 42. Caroline Hughes, The Political Economy of Cambodia’s Transition,

178  Eng Netra and Caroline Hughes ­1991–2001 (London: Routledge, 2003); Kathryn Poethig, ‘Locating the transnational in Cambodia’s Dhammayatra’, in John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie (eds), History, Buddhism and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), pp. 197–212. 43. Eve Zucker, ‘Trust and distrust in a Khmer highland community after thirty years of war’, in John Marston (ed.), Anthropology and Community in Cambodia: Reflections on the Work of May Ebihara (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Press, 2011), pp. 79–104. 44. Eve Zucker, Eve, ‘Transcending time and terror: the re-emergence of Bon Dalien after Pol Pot and thirty years of civil war’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Symposium on ‘Cambodia: reassessing tradition in times of political change’, 31 (3) (2006), 527–46. 45. Ibid. 544. 46. John Marston, ‘Clay into stone: a modern-day Tapas’, in John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie (eds), History, Buddhism and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), pp. 170–96. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. p. 171. 49. Ibid. p. 183. 50. Ibid. p. 187. 51. Ibid. p. 188. 52. Alexandra Kent, ‘Purchasing power and pagodas: the Sima monastic boundary and consumer politics in Cambodia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38 (2) (2007), 342. 53. Ibid. 349. 54. Erik Davis, ‘Imagined parasites: flows of money and spirits’, in Caroline Hughes and Kheang Un (eds), Cambodia’s Economic Transformation (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2011), pp. 310–29. 55. See also Judy Ledgerwood, ‘A tale of two temples: communities and their wats’, in John Marston (ed.), Anthropology and Community in Cambodia: Reflections on the Work of May Ebihara (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Press, 2011), pp. 124–5.

9 Timor-Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding United Nations Peace Efforts from Within Paula Duarte Lopes

Introduction Among the existing criticisms of external interventionism in cases of post-violent conflict contexts, a recurrent one highlights the disregard for local dynamics of governance, both peaceful and violent. Peace interventions have progressively become action plans where the core concept is ‘peace as governance’. This has led to a very technical approach to peacebuilding, focusing on institution, state and capacity building always geared towards governance, presented as a means to peace. This technical approach is usually implemented from the outside in, that is, externally promoted, implemented and monitored, and following a topdown approach. Consequently, after the intervention, the intervened country is left with an institutional architecture focusing on democratic governance and security which has been externally transposed into the national context. And even when the local elites have participated or were heard regarding this model, the main problem remains the potential unsustainability of the process, with the new institutions lacking local embedment and legitimacy and, often, competing or even clashing with existing local dynamics of governance and peacebuilding. These dynamics have been addressed from different perspectives but all build upon some analysis of local agency. Among these studies, one finds concepts such as hybridity, or frictions. Hybridity characterises situations in which the interaction between international and local norms, actors and practices results in new arrangements.1 Tsing has proposed to study frictions as processes characterised by ‘unexpected and unstable aspects of global interaction’.2 Both concepts focus on dynamics that result from the interaction between international and local norms,

180  Paula Duarte Lopes actors and practices, mainly during the process of peacebuilding, characterised by a strong international presence in the country. This presence is usually organised in the form of peace missions. What happens to these processes after peace missions exit, however, opens new avenues for research along these lines. Hybridity and frictions may still constitute valid and viable lenses of analysis but focusing on what locals do, once the imposing presence of the United Nations (or the European Union or other international organisation, for that matter) is lifted, allows the local agency to be studied from a different point of view. The underlying logic of international–local interaction is still valid but a deeper and wider space to tap into local norms and practices exists. It is from such a standpoint that this chapter addresses the concept of peace formation, understood as local norms and practices which contribute to building peace, not from a technical and interventionist point of view but based on the locals’ own values and principles. Again, hybridity and frictions may still make sense but the dynamics under scrutiny here focus on how elites and local leaders recuperate their own and specific governance and dispute-settlement principles and practices and give them legal standing within the legal and institutional framework inherited from the peace mission presence. Consequently, these efforts are not a direct result of the interaction between international and local norms, actors and practices, in a strict sense; and, also, these efforts do not reflect unplanned or awkward processes of the global interaction. These are intended as informed and purposeful decisions to rescue and recuperate local norms and practices which are considered vital to embed the efforts towards the overall objective of building a sustainable peace. Departing from hybridity and frictions and engaging with peace formation provides valuable insights regarding sustainable alternatives of externally led peace efforts. The analysis of local values and practices of peace and violence on their own terms contributes with potential intersections between externally led interventions and local dynamics. This analysis on their (the locals’) own terms requires researching beyond the external interventions’ model and practices, engaging with local values and dynamics that promote both violence and peace. Timor-Leste illustrates these dynamics well. Having hosted five back-to-back United Nations missions, including a Transitional Administration and an Integrated Mission, the local governance and dispute settlement dynamics were disregarded in the efforts developed by the United Nations to bring peace to the country. Some ad hoc attempts to include local dynamics in the statebuilding design adopted did not achieve the results envisioned, namely the election of the chiefs of the municipalities (sucos). Consequently, only after the last United Nations peace mission exited, did the Timorese government have some space and time to seriously address this gap between the external institutional

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architecture created and the existing traditional structures still functioning. Not all intervened countries have the capability to include local decision-making and procedures into the new ‘modern’ institutional architecture. Consequently, the argument presented in this chapter suggests that, to promote a sustainable peace, United Nations interventions – ­peacekeeping, statebuilding and peacebuilding – should address the tensions arising from building a new institutional architecture by taking into account, from the planning phase of the mission, the existing local governance and dispute-settlement structures and dynamics even when they do not match UN norms, principles and practices. Engaging with local peace-formation dynamics contributes to an increased legitimacy of the externally led peace efforts. In this way, United Nations efforts can become embedded in local dynamics, providing a stronger and more sustainable effort towards peace. This is not to say that including the local will automatically lead to a sustainable peace process: certain variables are crucial for the final outcome of these interactions, namely the process of inclusion, and the speed and the resources available for that effect. It is also not to say that all that is local will contribute to peace. Making an effort, however, to understand peace, governance, security and development from the locals’ standpoint (instead of from New York and donor governments) will undoubtedly contribute to a better understanding of what might (or might not) work regarding the peace efforts developed. This chapter includes several examples from Timor-Leste, such as: the United Nations attempt, with the Timorese elites’ agreement, to democratise local leaderships through elections (which did not work); the recognition and acceptance of the elections’ results without resorting to violence (which was successful); the competition between conflict-management functions held by the Timorese National Police and local leaders (which is still ongoing); and the most recent efforts to include in the national legislation values, principles and procedures from the local governance regime (which has yet to be evaluated).

Building an independent governance structure in Timor-Leste Timor-Leste hosted five United Nations peace missions from 1999 to 2012. These missions had different mandates from the UN Security Council, including peace enforcement, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The first mission, United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET)3 organised the popular referendum to decide if Timor-Leste would become an autonomous territory within Indonesia or an independent country. As a result of the landslide victory of the vote for independence (78.5 per cent of the votes), widespread violence erupted throughout the territory. UNAMET’s mandate had to be reinforced, including military and police

182  Paula Duarte Lopes components.4 A peace-enforcement mission, the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET), ended up having to support UNAMET to restore peace and security and provide humanitarian assistance.5 The United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), governed the territory from 1999 to 2002, centring its mandate on three components: governance and public administration; humanitarian assistance and emergency rehabilitation; and military forces.6 UNTAET was tasked with building the country and preparing it for independence, scheduled for May 2002. UNTAET thus became responsible for the administration of Timor-Leste, with executive, legislative and judicial powers, until its independence. The focus on building a democratic state reflected the top-down (outside-in) nature of the United Nations model of intervention. The depth and extent of this mission not only created the foundations of the Timorese state but also structurally influenced all subsequent missions as well as the template used by the Timorese government for consolidating the state to this day.7 After independence, two other UN missions followed before the integrated mission was created. The United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) was mandated to support the newly independent Timorese state with the restoration of its independence, following up on work initiated during UNTAET: stability, democracy and justice; public security and rule of law; and external security and border control.8 In 2005, the United Nations downgraded its involvement in Timor-Leste to a political mission (United Nations Office in Timor-Leste – UNOTIL) which was ultimately revealed to be a premature development given the fragile institutional, political, economic and social context. The emergence of violence led to a more robust intervention and finally, in August 2006, the United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) was established,9 aiming at the development and capacitation of institutions, building on progress made at the level of governance, continuing the process of transfer of responsibilities to the Timorese, and focusing on economic and social development. Since the beginning, the intervention in Timor-Leste demonstrated a preventive concern but this was not only inadequate in the real situation but also reflected a significant temporal hiatus between decision-making and implementation. According to Lothe and Peak, with UNMIT, the approach did not change: the international community returned in greater numbers, but with essentially the same model that, apparently, had not served it so well in the years before, namely large public sector development programmes and a heavy emphasis on imparting ‘capacity’ through technical assistance.10

Nevertheless, the 2007 parliamentary and presidential elections took place ‘in a generally peaceful atmosphere’,11 despite the politically vola-

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tile situation associated with growing tensions within the security institutions which eventually set the context for the attempted murders of President Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão in February 2008.12 The rapid normalisation after the instability, which these events generated, showed that the underlying situation was more stable and predictable than initially assumed. Still, UNMIT’s last mandate was extended considering the fact that presidential and parliamentary elections were being held during 2012. It was hoped that, though the Timorese government would be fully responsible for the organisation and conduction of the electoral cycle, the UN’s presence would contribute to deterring any potential violence associated with the elections.13 The 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections were described by national and international observers as free and fair.14 UNMIT activities were described as revealing significant progress in the transition process, especially concerning public security.15 In May 2012, Timor-Leste celebrated the tenth anniversary of the restoration of its independence. After a decade, and with a United Nations mission still present in the country, Timorese political and security institutions were functioning, civil society was slowly organising, and the economic situation had improved with incoming resources from the Oil Fund. Structural problems remained at all these levels, however. The process of ‘Timorisation’ – the local level assuming responsibility for decision-shaping, making and implementation – had been taking place, with the transfer of competencies from the UN mission to the central authorities and with a clear reduction in the size of UNMIT. According to the Acting Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General (UNSRSG) to Timor-Leste, Mr Finn Reske-Nielsen,16 TimorLeste was considered stable and in the course of development, allowing the decision to withdraw UNMIT by the end of 2012 and leave a political delegation in the country, mainly with a monitoring mandate. In Díli, political authorities, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs or the Chief of Staff of the Office of the President, and opinion-makers, such as parliamentary advisers and former president and prime minister, agreed that it was time for UNMIT to leave,17 not least because that would symbolise international recognition that the country was able to follow its own path. Still, as Lothe and Peake argue, ‘[in] Timor-Leste, as elsewhere, stabilisation has proven unable to contend with the “underlying” causes or drivers of conflict, including persistent political cleavages, ethnic and community divisions, and social and economic inequalities’.18 The holding of free and fair elections, though constituting a positive signal, is not sufficient to assure a democratic path.19 After the parliamentary elections of 2012, the new government faced the task of controlling corruption and putting in place an inclusive reform programme.

184  Paula Duarte Lopes ­ apacity-building, both in human and material terms, has been referred C to as the main challenge for an independently run Timor-Leste. This is acknowledged by the local authorities, and was visible in the preparations for UNMIT’s successor after its withdrawal, as well as initiatives to further bilateral co-operation.20 The central problem, however, remains local limited learning experience and insufficient acquisition of analytical decision-making and policy-implementation skills. This issue refers directly to what has been called one of the main faults of the United Nations’ presence in Timor-Leste, that is, its inability to capacitate. In the words of Lemay-Hebert, ‘local actors have to be recognized as true partners in the statebuilding process rather than mere recipients of foreign aid’.21 The liberal agenda has unreflexively promoted Western values as superior to non-liberal local and customary procedures,22 thus not taking into account the coexistence between the formal and the informal as a reality in Timor-Leste where official and traditional are part of daily life. Local understandings about UNMIT in the current context point to the fact that it fulfilled its mandate, and that it was time to withdraw because it was already hampering the affirmation of the country’s full sovereignty by maintaining a strong administrative advising-dependency structure and a strong foothold in Timor’s everyday politics.23 Dealing with the parallel functioning of formal and informal systems remains a central feature of Timorese society, characterising everyday life in terms of governance in different dimensions, such as justice, rule of law or public order, an issue with which the United Nations has always had difficulty dealing. For a better understanding of the evolving course of Timor-Leste, analyses have to focus now beyond the interaction between the international and the local during the United Nations presence. It is crucial to unpack the dynamics that followed UNMIT’s exit in order to understand local agency better when facing the hybrid arrangements and the frictional processes inherited from the United Nations presence in the country. Potential instances of peace formation are discussed below as a means to contribute to these almost impossibleto-­disentangle simultaneous and continuous dynamics between external and local, elites and local people, high politics and everyday lives.

Sucos’ elections: locally embedding democracy? Before analysing examples which illustrate the dynamics of peace formation, this section constitutes an example of United Nations peacebuilding attempting to embed its democratic governance framework in pre-existing local structures. In 2004, with the UN’s counselling and recommendation, legislation was passed to define an electoral process

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for both leaders and councils of the Timorese traditional territorial unit denominated Suco.24 This decision reflected, to a certain extent, the UN’s efforts to take into consideration local traditional governance structures. To provide a substantiated analysis of the implications of implementing this local electoral legislation, it is important briefly to present Timorese local governance structures. Three aspects seem essential to better grasp the underlying values and principles of Timorese traditional local governance.25 First, historically, in traditional Timorese societies, kinship and marriage constitute an important basis of social relations,26 creating tight extended communities. Second, these different communities are intertwined but hierarchically organised, with clear tasks and positions ascribed/​expected from different individuals/​ families, depending on their genealogical line. And third, leaderships, including political leaders, require the ‘support and legitimation of the ancestral powers’.27 Another important aspect of this traditional governance system is that, though it has evolved over time, it has also persisted through both Portuguese and Indonesian rule. Consequently, if the 2004 local electoral legislation, on the one hand, recognised the importance these traditional leaders and authorities had in Timorese society, on the other, it constituted a clear attempt to democratise local governance according to modern liberal principles.28 Electoral liberal democracy was defined for a traditionally patriarchal, elder-based, sacredly empowered governance system, not only allowing for anyone to run for office (including women),29 but also defining by law, that suco councils had to include two adult women, a young man and a young woman, as well as a female or male elder.30 In this process, gender and generational concerns were addressed by law and quickly applied without consideration for local norms, values, principles and practices. This is not to say that gender and generational concerns are not important or should/​could be disregarded. The issue goes beyond this matter. Altering norms, values, principles and practices by decree is not the most sustainable and efficient way of promoting change. Elections were held in 2004–05 and 2009. Results reflected different dynamics. Regarding gender issues, in 2004–05 and 2009, 1.5 per cent and 2.2 per cent of sucos elected female leaders. These results reflected some openness to the role of women in political structures but it also reflected a still highly patriarchal governing system and society.31 In some sucos, elections resulted in two parallel structures: the elected democratic local governance structure and the traditional one. In these cases, in some sucos, the former became subordinated to the latter and, in other sucos, the former became powerless. Also, in other sucos, traditional leaders either ran as suco leaders themselves or chose candidates they preferred, maintaining, therefore, their effective power after elections. ‘According to local perceptions, political leadership had

186  Paula Duarte Lopes to be based on ancestral legitimacy.’32 Both Portugal and Indonesia had tried to change Timorese traditional governance structures but without success. The UN ignored both the historical evolution of this system as well as the importance of the role of the sacred in legitimising political leadership. Democratic rule assumes that everyone is equal and should be represented equally in government structures but, in Timorese society, hierarchy is deeply rooted and leadership requires a sacred ritual endorsement. Consequently, the democratisation process of Timorese traditional governance structures had to raise issues of legitimacy. These dynamics reflect the cumbersome, hasty approach that usually characterises United Nations peace missions in these processes. This so-called recognition of traditional governance structures resulted in diverse and divergent outcomes which, on the one hand, did not fully comply with the liberal peace model regarding electoral democracy and, on the other, disrupted traditional governance structures without effectively providing a viable and sustainable alternative. This example is one of many that can be found in the literature analysing the limits and shortcomings of these ‘local turn’ attempts by United Nations peace missions.33 An important aspect to bear in mind is that these attempts are usually initiated and recommended by the peace mission, that is, promoted and applied externally and top-down, thereby stifling local governance structures that might have the potential to contribute efficiently to a sustainable peace and to embed United Nations and hybrid peace efforts. Governments’ margins of manoeuvre during peace missions are always restricted and rigorously monitored by the international actors. Of course, after peace missions leave, international actors, namely aid donors, still monitor national policies and dynamics but governments’ agency increases dramatically. In the case of TimorLeste, it should be noted that, while the UN peace mission was still present, the Timorese government was able to negotiate and alter certain dynamics to protect and promote Timorese objectives.34

‘Pact of Peaceful Election’: locally embedding democratic results Implementing democracy in Timor-Leste was a challenge from the very beginning because it was not just a matter of returning to a democratic regime. Timorese people did not have the tradition or experience of living in a democratic framework. Two basic tenets of liberal democracy – individual equality and party competition – do not resonate with traditional Timorese values, principles and practices. As explained above, Timorese society is organised based on a hierarchical system. Moreover, the tight extended communities, also mentioned above, have endured

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over time and continue to base their decisions on a communitarian consensus rather than on opposing parties or factions. Nevertheless, after the 1975 electoral experience, which led to violence between opposing parties and was followed by Indonesian occupation, the 1999 Popular Referendum organised by the United Nations was a positive electoral experience. Timorese people voted and chose independence from Indonesian rule, and the UN guaranteed the effectiveness of their choice. Consequently, Timorese people confer on elections a strongly positive symbolic value. Nevertheless, as political party politics began to evolve and development expectations were late in being addressed, electoral turnout fell and tensions between opposing groups rose.35 During the consolidation of a new state, juridical norms go hand in hand with the need for consensus-building and the social acceptance of those norms, requiring the voluntary compliance of the population.36 Following this logic, before the 2012 presidential elections, still under UNMIT but already during its downsizing period, the ‘Pact of Peaceful Election’ was organised in search of a general social acceptance of the new state’s practices. The National Electoral Commission organised a campaign promoting peaceful elections for 2012 as part of its Electoralrelated-Conflict Prevention and Peace Strengthening Programme.37 The campaign included high-level meetings in all thirteen districts (sorumutus) and included the participation of representatives of suco councils, traditional leaders, civil society organisations, political parties, and district authorities, among others.38 The process culminated in Díli with a final meeting of all the actors involved in the electoral process who ­committed themselves, and those they represented, to a peaceful electoral process. Moreover, they also pledged their commitment to ­accepting the electoral results in a peaceful manner, contributing to the unity, peace, development and stability of the country.39 The process included the signing of a ‘pact’ but, most importantly, all the meetings began with a traditional ceremony in which representatives of the elders offered betel leaves and arecas to the candidates and political parties representatives as symbols of peace. These ceremonies called upon an order of spiritual forces, the sacred or lulik, bringing the electoral process closer to the Timorese traditional values and principles. The ceremonies included the consensus for a peaceful acceptance of the elections’ results and had to be concluded after the elections.40 This example shows how ‘pacification ceremonies’ can contribute to peace formation without the need to adjust the electoral process or traditional customs and without creating an awkward encounter between modernisation and tradition. On the contrary, the Timorese tapped into a traditional ritual, rooted in cultural and spiritual beliefs, that promoted peace among the population and conferred an added value to the electoral process underway.41 By calling upon the

188  Paula Duarte Lopes sacred, the ritual implies that breaking the peaceful consensus would cause the perpetrator, their families and descendants to be indebted to their community. While still being coercive, this mechanism is better understood and accepted than legal penalties such as sanctions or fines.

Tara bandu: locally embedding justice Tara bandu is a traditional Timorese practice ‘that enforces peace and reconciliation through the power of public agreement’.42 The process of forming tara bandu constructs ‘communal agreement or a type of “social contract” that outlines the behaviours and practices that members of a community deem to be appropriate and want to enforce’.43 Though there are various types of tara bandu across Timor-Leste, based on ethno-linguistic differences, they all reflect certain similar characteristics. Tara bandu usually includes a large public ceremony, and its legitimacy is largely dependent on the level of local consultation and engagement in the generation and consecration of the terms of the communal agreement.44 Breaking the conditions of a tara bandu can include physical sanctions as well as abstract spiritual consequences depending on the cultural context. These traditional practices have been passed orally from one generation to another. Currently, however, tara bandu is often codified on paper, so as better to preserve and document each set of its norms, principles and practices. The creation of a modern justice system is considered essential for a society based on the rule of law and respect for human rights,45 and ‘there are clear limits to the extent that customary institutions can satisfy the requirements of a liberal, citizenship-based democracy’.46 Consequently, although the constitution of Timor-Leste (2002) ‘recognises and values the customary norms and practices of Timor-Leste as long as they do not violate the constitution and the specific customary law legislation’ (Article 2, 4.), this is a rather restrictive way of addressing the traditional system. The current judicial system was drafted during the UN Transitory Administration47 but it still does not effectively encompass the whole territory today. A court of appeal, with the responsibilities of a supreme court of justice, and four district courts (Díli, Oecussi-Ambeno, Baucau and Suai), as courts of first instance, constitute the overall structure in effect today.48 Consequently, the formal judicial system remains concentrated in Díli, the capital, and those three cities. ‘The formal system is totally new to the people, who are used to a traditional system to which they still appeal.’49 According to the former president of the Court of Appeal of Timor-Leste, ‘as long as there is not a formal justice system capable of responding to the needs [of the population], it is better to allow the informal system to function

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without interference’.50 And he added that ‘as long as [the informal judicial system] resolves conflicts and re-establishes stability, it should be maintained’.51 In fact, ‘culture and traditional practices continue to represent the primary means of conflict resolution and peace building in most Timorese communities’.52 Tara bandu holds an effective potential to contribute, with a bottomup traditional practice, towards the creation and maintenance of a safe and peaceful environment. The underlying logic of tara bandu is diametrically opposed to the modern legal system. The former is anchored in the integrity and higher good of the community whereas the latter is based on an individualistic approach to rights and obligations. The fact that, increasingly, tara bandu is being overtly used as an alternative means of justice reflects a deep-rooted framework and understanding of justice. In 2013, former Minister of Justice, Dionísio Babo Soares, stated that it was time to confer legal standing on traditional practices such as tara bandu.53 After the UNMIT left, the Timorese government has been developing efforts to codify legally tara bandu within the modern legal system created during UNTAET. These efforts will provide legal legitimacy to the spiritual legitimacy that tara bandu already possesses, building a bridge between formal and traditional judicial systems.

Community policing: locally embedding security The dynamics within the security sector in Timor-Leste have been characterised both by hybrid outcomes and by frictional processes.54 The UN’s technical approach to the creation of a national police force – Polícia Nacional de Timor-Leste (PNTL) – included, from the very beginning, a recruitment strategy that led to a diverse, and sometimes divergent, type of police officer. These officers included former combatants, former Indonesian police officers, and young men without any security training or experience: people with different backgrounds who had held different positions during the fight for independence, with different allegiances and different expectations. Additionally, everyone also had different and intense loyalties towards their communities and ­traditions, norms, principles and practices.55 The United Nations did not take these dynamics into account, focusing instead on the creation of a modern police force that complied with international standards of psychological and physical training. The personal, social, political and economic aspects of these police officers’ daily lives did not form part of the equation. The 2006 incidents were partially a result of these divergent expectations and loyalties which spiralled into violence within and between the PNTL and the military forces.56 In people’s everyday lives, the traditional methods of dispute

190  Paula Duarte Lopes settlement remain central, and parallel to the PNTL activities. On the one hand, the police are perceived as being distant from the communities’ norms and practices and, on the other, the judicial system still does not reach out to the entire country, existing only in the main urban centres. Consequently, often when the PNTL arrives at an incident scene, the problem has already been ‘solved’ through traditional dispute-settlement mechanisms;57 at other times, however, the police are regarded with suspicion by the local population, resulting in a lack of co-operation. These dynamics reflect a constant interaction between two different frameworks of authority that still coexist without completely contradicting each other. In fact, in many instances, traditional authorities recognise the legitimate role of the PNTL, even though they ‘solve’ the community problems, but they still call the PNTL to inform them of the incident and how it was resolved. Conversely, too, PNTL officers tend to recognise the legitimacy and authority of local leaders because they are themselves members of those communities and individually bound by those same norms, principles and practices. These interactions, where mutual recognition takes place and co-supporting dynamics exist, suggest the possibility of a synergy towards a sustainable peace. After the UNMIT’s exit, some PNTL commanders have built on those traditional practices in order to embed the police work within the communities under their jurisdiction. Community policing constitutes a set of initiatives taken by district police commanders according to the security situation in each community. A report by Fundasaun Mahein58 on initiatives on community policing in Bobonaro, Aileu, Liquisa and the Maritime Police Unit show different arrangements being put in place to embed the PNTL work in local communities. In Bobonaro and Aileu, the PNTL established community policing councils (CPC) whereas, in Liquisa, they use the term voluntary security. In both cases, these community policing initiatives include ‘the police, community leaders, female and male youth, veterans and community members’.59 These are joint security arrangements between the PNTL and the local communities, giving local people a sense of belonging and an opportunity to exert their agency on security matters. The CPC’s activities include a ‘community-oriented security system’ in which the community commits to maintain security, prevent crime and create and maintain peace.60 The CPC resorts to the traditional justice system (tara bandu, see above), which constitutes an incentive for local people to engage effectively with PNTL because they recognise, understand and participate in the existing traditional dispute-settlement mechanisms. The voluntary security model provides security and information-sharing, and discusses ways of creating and maintaining a safe and peaceful environment.61 These are initiatives that emerge at the local level, based on traditional

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community practices. The interaction with the PNTL provides communities with the opportunity to participate, engage in and commit to their respective community’s security, exerting their agency in these matters. As the Fundasaun Mahein states, these activities aim at creating a peaceful and safe environment within the community, serving as a social force for conflict prevention.62

Conclusion Peacebuilding has been criticised from different angles: one size fits all, outside in, top-down, technical, imperial, democratic institutions, neoliberal markets. The underlying recurring issues, in my understanding, are twofold. On the one hand, the United Nations model of intervention to promote peace is based on an encounter between the UN vision of peace (liberal peace model) and the local sociopolitical–economic dynamics in the intervened country which, by definition, is asymmetrical. The UN model, even when including local specificities, is always considered superior and, therefore, preferable to whatever governance and dispute-settlement structures and dynamics may already exist locally. This results from various dynamics but one can distinguish between two types based on distinct levels of analysis. Domestic motivations for international interventions are usually associated with humanitarian aspects, regarding the suffering and human rights violations of the local people. Assuming that the UN model is preferable is grounded on the fact that the previous governance model led to the violent conflict; consequently, the UN mission is to bring peace, stability and prosperity, against the existing framework. Besides all the possible criticisms this assumption may generate, a straightforward one is linked to the difference between contexts that underwent violent dynamics owing to occupation by foreign forces and contexts that underwent violent dynamics because of internal disagreement among different factions. International motivations for external interventions are grounded on the assumption that democratic countries do not, or seldom ever, fight each other. Consequently, the United Nations bases its interventions on a two-pronged motivational framework: domestic considerations of an essentially humanitarian nature and international concerns with regional and international peace and security. In either case, the role assigned to local governance structures is always, even in the best-case scenario, supplementary, and, in the worst-case scenario, non-existent or even an obstacle. On the other hand, the impact this model has locally is undermined or needs to be qualified or put into perspective because of three gaps it encompasses. First, there is a lack of any legitimacy that speaks to issues

192  Paula Duarte Lopes of representation and authority. The local elites, who are usually the key partners in UN interventions, do not necessarily represent the population as a whole. They have been, or are, socialised with UN discourses and narratives as well as with their procedures, contributing to the distance between the frameworks being created and the local structures of governance and dispute settlement. Consequently, institutions, governing structures and skills and competences are agreed upon based on the UN model, without engaging with local traditional, sometimes informal, governance and dispute-settlement structures. This creates modern governing institutions that local people do not necessarily perceive as legitimate and, consequently, do not engage with. Secondly, there is a lack of praxis which reflects, and is inherently associated with, the first lack, the distance between what is legally and institutionally created and what is practised in people’s everyday lives. Traditional and/​or informal ways of continued governance, of guaranteeing public order, of managing conflict and applying justice are simply ignored, dismissed, considered an inconvenient anomaly to be gradually dismantled and corrected according to the new legal and institutional frameworks created. And thirdly, there may be a difference in the expectations of the external and the local actors. External actors need success stories and need to make interventions efficient without creating dependence. Local actors, the elites, want to remain in power and capitalise on the connections and relations developed with the international community for their country’s benefit (as well as their own). But local actors also include the population at large whom Richmond calls ‘the subaltern’.63 These anonymous people want two things: justice and development as quickly as possible. There is always a certain level of endurance, which varies from country to country, from society to society, but these are the two most important things people expect as peace dividends. The people want justice regarding both the atrocities lived through and witnessed throughout the violent period as well as for the daily illegal activities they may be victims of, such as robberies, assault, rape, intimidation and racketeering. If the new modern legal framework is not able to address these issues swiftly and firmly, with justice and impartiality, people will resort to their local ways of managing them. These dynamics will create two ways of keeping public order, which may or may not clash with each other’s principles and values, but will surely raise the suspicions of the population at large and engender a sense of alienation from the new framework. Consequently, the new legal and institutional framework may grow further away from the reality of justice in the country; may be instrumentalised, based on different groups’ interests, resorting to the new justice framework only when they perceive greater gains than if they used the traditional justice framework; may progressively become

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obsolete since the lack of local embedment will determine its irrelevance; may create and fuel structural tensions based on constant and fierce clashes with the dynamics of local justice dynamics. UN peace missions, especially those that include multidimensional mandates, need to address local dynamics in a constructive manner. The implementation of a technical, external, top-down approach does not guarantee a sustainable peace and, in fact, creates frictional processes that may undermine peace efforts. Peace efforts need to be locally embedded and appropriated so that local people are able to maintain and strengthen the UN’s work after it leaves the intervened country. The examples discussed reflect Timorese agency in building locally recognisable peace and legitimacy. Though maintaining the legal and institutional framework inherited from the UN, the Timorese are tapping into traditional practices anchored in community norms, values and principles in an effort to embed the UN and local elites’ peace efforts of the last fifteen years.

Notes  1. Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Oliver Richmond and Audra Mitchell (eds), Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-liberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).   2. Anna Lowenhapt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 3.   3. S/​RES/​1246 (1999).   4. S/​RES/​1262 (1999).   5. S/​RES/​1264 (1999).   6. S/​RES/​1272 (1999) and subsequent extensions.  7. Tanja Hohe, ‘The clash of paradigm: international administration and local political legitimacy in East Timor’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 24 (3) (2002), 569–89; Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, ‘Coerced transitions in TimorLeste and Kosovo: managing competing objectives of institution-building and local empowerment’, Democratization, 19 (3) (XXX), 465–85.   8. S/​RES/​1410 (2002).   9. S/​RES/​1704 (2006). 10. Elisabeth Lothe and Gordon Peake, ‘Addressing symptoms but not causes: stabilisation and humanitarian action in Timor-Leste’, Disasters, 34 (3) (2010), 427–43, 434–5. 11. Ana Gomes, Report of the Delegation to Observe the Legislative Elections in the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (27 June–02 July 2007) (Brussels: European Parliament, 2007), 8, (last accessed 26 March 2015). For a focused discussion on

194  Paula Duarte Lopes electoral violence see Timor-Leste Armed Violence Assessment, ‘Electoral violence in Timor-Leste: mapping incidents and responses’, TLAVA Issue Brief, 3 (2009), (last accessed 25 March 2015). 12. S/​RES/​1802 (2008). 13. S/​2012/​43. UNMIT’s mandate was to end on 26 February 2012 but the UN secretary general in his report to the Security Council recommended UNMIT’s mandate be extended until 31 December 2012. He alerted the council to the fact that the ‘upcoming elections could nevertheless reignite localized tensions among individuals and groups . . . UNMIT police will continue to stand ready to provide operational support to PNTL [Timorese National Police], if required and requested, during the electoral period and beyond . . .’ 14. European Union Election Observation Mission to Timor-Leste, 2012, press release (Díli, 9 July 2012) ‘Peaceful and well-organised parliamentary elections 2012 a step to democratic consolidation’, (last accessed 9 July 2012); Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, joint media release, (last accessed 9 July 2012). 15. S/​2012/​43, §64. 16. Interview by author with Finn Reske-Nielsen, Acting UNSRSG to TimorLeste, Díli, 6 July 2012. 17. Interviews by author with João Azevedo, legal adviser to the Timorese parliament, Díli, 28 June 2012; Zacarias da Costa, Minister of Foreign Affairs (2007–12), 4 July 2012; Fidelis Magalhães, Chief of Staff of the Office of the President, Díli, 28 June 2012; and José Ramos-Horta, President of the Republic of Timor-Leste (2007–12), Díli, 1 July 2012. 18. Lothe and Peake, ‘Addressing symptoms’, 440. 19. On the 2007 elections see the comprehensive analysis by Michael Leach, ‘The 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections in Timor-Leste’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 55 (2) (2009), 219–32. 20. Reske-Nielsen, interview; Azevedo, interview. 21. Nicolas Lemay-Hebert, ‘The “empty-shell” approach: the setup process of international administrations in Timor-Leste and Kosovo, its consequences and lessons’, International Studies Perspectives, 12 (2011), 190–211, at 206. 22. Oliver Richmond, ‘De-romanticising the local, de-mystifying the international: hybridity in Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands’, The Pacific Review, 24 (1) (2011), 115–36, at 116. 23. Azevedo, interview; Costa, interview; Magalhães, interview; Ramos-Horta, interview. 24. Suco is a community organisation formed on the basis of historic, cultural and traditional circumstances, having an area established within the national territory and a defined population. Lei 3/​2009, 8 July, Article 3, 1. 25. For a detailed discussion of traditional Timorese governance structures and their evolution see Tanja Hohe, ‘The clash of paradigms’.

Timor-Leste: Local Governance Structures  195 26. Ibid. 571. 27. Ibid. 573. 28. Patrícia Jerónimo, ‘Estado de direito e justiça tradicional. Ensaios para um equilíbrio em Timor-Leste’, in José Lebre de Freitas et al. (eds), Estudos em Homenagem a Carlos Ferreira de Almeida, vol. III (Coimbra: Almedina, 2010), pp. 97–120. 29. Lei 3/​2009, 8 July, Article 6, 2. 30. Councils also include the suco leader, all village leaders and a nominated liannai. Lei 3/​2009, 8 July, Article 5, 2. 31. See Lene Ostergaard apud Tsjeard Bouta, Georg Frerks and Ian Bannon, Gender, Conflict, and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005), p. 127. 32. Tanja Hohe, ‘The Clash of Paradigms’, 584. 33. Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The local turn in peace building: a critical agenda for peace’, Third World Quarterly, 34 (5) (2013), 763–83; Thania Paffenholz and Christoph Spurk, ‘Civil society, civic engagement, and peacebuilding’, Social Development Papers, World Bank Paper No. 36 (October 2006), (last accessed 25 March 2015); Hideaki Shinoda, ‘The difficulty and importance of local ownership and capacity development in peacebuilding’, Hiroshima Peace Science, 30 (2008), 95–115. 34. Maria Raquel Freire and Paula Duarte Lopes, ‘Peacebuilding in TimorLeste: finding a way between external intervention and local dynamics’, International Peacekeeping, 20 (2) (2013), 204–18. 35. Timorese electoral turnout is still very high when compared with other democracies but is has been steadily declining. Average turnout is 78.73 per cent but it has decreased for presidential elections from 81 per cent (2007) to 78.1 per cent (2012) and national parliament elections from 80.54 per cent (2007) to 74.78 per cent (2012). ‘Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste’, election guide, (last accessed 26 March 2015). 36. Carla Luís, ‘Eleições em Timor-Leste: o papel da participação popular na construção do estado’, in Maria Raquel Freire (ed.), Consolidação da paz e a sua sustentabilidade: as missões da ONU em Timor-Leste e a contribuição de Portugal (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2015), Chapter 8, pp. 243–72, 263–4. 37. UNMIT and UNDP, Compendium of the 2012 Elections in Timor-Leste, as of 15 March 2012 (Díli: United Nations Integrated Mission in TimorLeste and United Nations Development Program, 2012), 9. 38. Ibid. 39. CNE, ‘Candidates sign the “Pact of Peaceful Election”’ (1 March 2012), (last accessed 24 March 2015). 40. Carla Luís, ‘Eleições em Timor-Leste’, pp. 263–4. 41. CNE, ‘Candidates’. 42. Belun and The Asia Foundation, Tara Bandu: Its Role and Use in Community Conflict Prevention in Timor-Leste (Díli: Belun and The Asia Foundation, 2013), p. 7.

196  Paula Duarte Lopes 43. Ibid. p. 10. 44. Ibid. p. 10. 45. Xanana Gusmão, A construção da nação timorense. Desafios e oportunidades (Lisboa: Lidel, 2004), pp. 130–2. 46. Deborah Cummins and Michael Leach, ‘Democracy old and new: the interaction of modern and traditional authority in East Timorese local government’, Asian Politics & Policy, 4 (1) (2012), 89–104, 94. 47. UNTAET/​REG/​2000/​11, Section 4. 48. UNTAET/​REG/​2000/​14, Section 2. 49. Interview by author with Judge Cláudio Ximenes, president of the Court of Appeal of Timor-Leste, Díli, 3 July 2012. It should be noted that under Portuguese and Indonesian rule, Timorese people did live legally under a formal judicial system. Judge Ximenes’s words can be better understood if one takes into account the fact that these systems were imposed and, consequently, not fully accepted, and that the Timorese traditional system remained in effect. 50. Cláudio Ximenes, interview. 51. Cláudio Ximenes, interview. 52. Constantino da C. C. X. Escollano Brandão, ‘Culture and its impact on social and community life: a case-study of Timor-Leste’, Policy Brief No. 5 (Early Warning, Early Response (EWER), Belun and Columbia University’s Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR), 2012), 6. 53. Interview by author with Dionísio Babo Soares, Minister of Justice, Díli, 8 July 2013. 54. Maria Raquel Freire and Paula Duarte Lopes, ‘Peacebuilding in TimorLeste’, 204–18. 55. For a detailed analysis of these dynamics see Paula Duarte Lopes, ‘Reforma do setor de segurança em Timor-Leste e o seu contributo para a consolidação da paz’, in Maria Raquel Freire (ed.), Consolidação da paz e a sua sustentabilidade: as missões da ONU em Timor-Leste e a contribuição de Portugal (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2015), Chapter 6, pp. 183–214. 56. Paula Duarte Lopes, ‘Reforma do setor de segurança’, pp. 183–214. 57. Maria Raquel Freire and Paula Duarte Lopes, ‘Peacebuilding in TimorLeste’, 204–18. 58. Fundasaun Mahein, ‘Local initiatives on community policing: the initiatives of the District Commands of Bobonaro, Ailéu, Liquisa and the Maritime Police Unit’, Mahein nia Hanoin, 5, (15 November 2013). 59. Ibid. 4. 60. Ibid. 4. 61. Ibid. 4. 62. Ibid. 6. 63. Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Resistance and the post-liberal peace’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 28 (3) (2010), 665–92.

10 Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands Volker Boege

Introduction In July 2003, after several years of internal violent conflicts, the Solomon Islands (SI) became the target of the biggest peacebuilding intervention in the Pacific region to date – the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). This mission is generally presented as a success story of post-conflict peacebuilding and state-building. It can be seen as a paradigmatic case of a peacebuilding intervention that closely follows a liberal peacebuilding-as-statebuilding approach. RAMSI has embarked on an ambitious project of state reconstruction, including the reform of the state’s security sector, building the capacities of the central machinery of government and fostering the effectiveness of the various branches of the state apparatus. The underlying assumption is that a ‘proper’ state, that is, a state of the Western liberal ideal type, is the best guarantor of sustainable peace. Copious resources have been poured into the peacebuilding-as-statebuilding project in this small country, with its population of just over half a million, and the international interveners have, without doubt, something to show for their engagement, particularly with regard to maintaining negative peace as the absence of overt violence on a larger scale. Nevertheless, there are concerns regarding the sustainability of peace, especially what might happen when the internationals finally withdraw for good. RAMSI has been in SI for twelve years now. Such long-term commitment is laudable – other interventions have been criticised for their short termism, and rightly so. But the repeated extensions of the mandate, at the request of the host government and according to the wishes of the majority of the local population, albeit in successively

198  Volker Boege reduced form, also indicate an unease about what has been accomplished and how sustainable it will be in the absence of the internationals. Sustainability can, indeed, be questioned, mainly because the internationals’ focus on building the capacities of state institutions ignores the presence of a wide variety of non-state providers of peace and order in the local context which could provide the basis for the emergence of a positive hybrid peace. This chapter focuses on local peace agency, showing how locals have pursued their own indigenous processes of peace formation, detached from, and parallel to, RAMSI, albeit in its shadow. The chapter draws mainly on field research into community views on the capacities, effectiveness and legitimacy of international, state and local, non-state agents of peace and state formation, using the categories of incompatibility, substitution and complementarity to analyse the approaches and practices of these actors. It consists of three parts. First, a short overview of the conflict and the main features of liberal post-conflict peacebuilding is given. Then the contribution of local actors to peace formation, and their interactions with state agencies and international interveners, are explored. Thirdly, some general conclusions are drawn and reflections offered on the potential and limits for the emergence of positive hybrid forms of peace and order.

Violent conflict and post-conflict peacebuilding Between 1998 and 2003 SI endured violent conflicts that caused significant harm to relatively large parts of the population and severely obstructed the functioning of core state institutions. This finally triggered an international intervention which has been largely successful in terminating large-scale violence and restoring order. It is more doubtful, however, whether its long-term peacebuilding and state-building goals have been, or can be, achieved and sustained. During the ‘tensions’ – as the events of 1 ­998 to 2003 are commonly called in SI – violence was concentrated on the main islands of Guadalcanal, including the capital city of Honiara, and Malaita. The conflict was caused mainly by disputes over land between local Guale people of Guadalcanal and immigrants from Malaita, particularly in and around Honiara.1 The land situation was aggravated by population growth and growing unemployment in the formal sector. Competition over jobs and land escalated in the late 1990s. Anti-Malaitan resentment spread among the Guale, as the Malaitans were seen to be over-­ represented in politics, dominating business and state administration, and thus able to push the burden of social change on to the Guadalcanal population. A militant Guale movement emerged demanding the return

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of the Malaitans to their own island. As a response to attacks on Malaitans on Guadalcanal and their forced eviction, Malaitan settlers formed their own militia and fought back. Over time, Malaitan and Guale militias as well as the (paramilitary) police forces became entangled in increasingly complex and blurred violent encounters. The majority of the state security forces sided with the militias and the rest fell into disarray. State institutions became less and less capable of providing basic services to large parts of the population, while central government institutions and the state finances were hijacked by militant factions. This led to SI being labelled a ‘failing state’.2 The SI government asked for Australian assistance on several occasions but the Australian government initially rejected these requests. In July 2003, however, the response was positive. This change of attitude has to be seen in the context of the application of the fragile states discourse to the Pacific region following the terrorist attacks in the early 2000s (most notably 9/​11 and the Bali bombings in 2002). Fragile or failing states were now presented as a security issue with (potential) negative effects not only for the countries in question but also at the regional and international levels. Consequently, there was a greater Australian willingness to engage in interventions in the region. The SI state was said to be ‘on the brink of failure’, and this assessment was used to legitimise a military intervention with the purpose of preventing SI from becoming a failed or even collapsed state.3 Australia did not act on its own. Rather, it opted for a ‘co-operative intervention’, as the then Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, called it, enacted through the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – the regional organisation for the South Pacific – upon the invitation of the SI government, and endorsed by the United Nations. The intervention was carried out by military and police from twelve PIF member states. It has become the biggest peacebuilding intervention in the Pacific region to date.4 Though it is presented as a multilateral regional endeavour, it is Australia that leads and controls RAMSI. It would not have happened without Australia. Australia injects the bulk of resources, finances and personnel into this mission, and leading positions are in the hands of Australians.5 It is driven by an Australian agenda – a liberal peace agenda with restoration of law and order, economic recovery and building the machinery of government at its core. In July 2003, more than two thousand soldiers and several hundred police officers were deployed to SI. The intervention forces rapidly gained control over Honiara and the other hot spots in the country. RAMSI was a complete success in its first stage: militias and criminal gangs were disarmed and dissolved; militia leaders and other perpetrators of violence were arrested and charged; the law and order of the state restored and government finances repaired. The security ­situation

200  Volker Boege improved considerably. The vast majority of Solomon Islanders were grateful for the intervention and still support it today. From 2011 onwards RAMSI began to withdraw gradually; in mid 2013 its military component came to an end and its development programmes (in health, education, justice) were transferred to bilateral or multilateral aid programmes so that, today, RAMSI is basically a policing mission, with its Participating Police Force (PPF) assisting and training the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF), at least until 2017. RAMSI police is the only armed force in the country to date, ready to back up the local police when needed.6 RAMSI was conceptualised not as a mere police–military intervention with short-term goals but as a much more comprehensive endeavour also aimed at economic development, good governance and state capacity-building, particularly in the three pillars of law and justice, economic governance and the machinery of government.7 Australian officials were placed in front-line positions in central state institutions or were seconded as advisers with considerable influence on policy formulation and implementation.8 It has become clear over time that the developmental and state-building goals of RAMSI will be much more difficult to achieve than the immediate aims of halting violent conflicts and disarming militias and gangs. Moreover, the underlying causes of the violent conflicts have not yet been adequately addressed. Given that there is no exit strategy based on clearly defined criteria, it is difficult to determine the point in time when it could be declared ‘mission accomplished’ and RAMSI could be withdrawn entirely.9 Furthermore, over all the years of RAMSI’s presence in the SI, the general impression persisted that RAMSI is some kind of secondary government in SI, with an overdependence on RAMSI as the unwelcome result. Against this background, it is worthwhile exploring the relationships and interactions between the various actors involved in peacebuilding and governance in the SI in more detail.

Peace agents, their relationships and their interactions10 The peacebuilding-as-statebuilding agenda that guides RAMSI’s intervention is confronted with local realities not readily accessible to such an approach.11 It is important to note that, during the tensions, many SI communities beyond the capital city and the hotspots of violent conflict managed to maintain everyday life relatively undisturbed, based on a largely intact subsistence economy and local governance, with non-state actors in charge.12 This can be explained by the hybridity of political order in SI.13 Nominally SI is a constitutional liberal democracy, based on the rule of law and clear, formalised democratic procedures

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and institutions. This liberal democratic state system, however, though well established on paper, should not be confused with the realities of governance. State institutions and procedures have not permeated the country, its society or its communities in a way that would make ‘the state’ the only, or the dominant, framework for governance and maintenance of order. Nor have the mental concepts of ‘the state’, ‘the nation’ and ‘citizenship’ taken root in the minds of the people so as to provide the prioritised form of political identity. People see themselves first and foremost as members of communities rather than citizens, while state actors, institutions and processes are of little relevance to people’s everyday lives, particularly in rural areas where the vast majority live. By contrast, non-state customary institutions play an important role in the governance of communities. These institutions change in the course of the interaction with ‘outside’ forces, though: the intrusion of state agencies and practices have an impact on them and they are subjected to reformation as they engage with, respond to, those agencies and are influenced by state structures and processes – and vice versa.14 In other words: governance is hybridised. Hybridity of governance is of ­fundamental significance to peace formation in SI.

Chiefs, church, kastom In SI communities today, chiefs and church leaders are the key agents for the maintenance of day-to-day social order, dispute resolution and communal peace. Chiefs15 are situated outside the formal state system. Nevertheless, their governance roles are acknowledged by the state, and they are expected to govern their communities. As community leaders, they refer to kastom or customary law16 when dealing with conflicts, antisocial behaviour and other disturbances of the peace in the local context. They impose fines or decide on community work for perpetrators, facilitate negotiations and reconciliations between parties in conflict and make decisions – or contribute to decision-making – about compensation payments as a means of solving disputes. Chiefs usually do not have any means at their disposal to coerce people into compliance and are dependent on the willingness of community members to abide by kastom. As most Solomon Islanders are devout Christians, church leaders also play important roles. They can exert enormous moral pressure to prevent or negatively sanction deviant behaviour, and shame is a very powerful force in community life. Chiefs and church leaders generally work well together.17 And, while state institutions have only limited presence on the ground, the churches are everywhere. Church leaders typically ‘command much more respect than does the government’.18 Their responsibility and influence reach well beyond the ‘religious’ sphere. They are in charge of the sociocultural, mental and

202  Volker Boege spiritual wellbeing of communities and the relationships between social groups. In fact, ‘traditional leaders and churches effectively became the primary means of local governance when local government structures dissolved during the Solomon Islands breakdown’.19 Some chiefs and church leaders today note a loss of influence in their communities, particularly in (semi-)urban areas and among young people. Intracommunity disputes along intergenerational lines are on the increase, with chiefs complaining that the young are not listening to them any more. During the tensions, in some places chiefly orders had been ignored or chiefs had even been attacked by young members of the various militias. Today, alcohol and drug abuse and associated behaviour are cited as the main factors contributing to the unruly behaviour of youth. This is of particular concern in urban environments where customary forms of governance are weaker anyway. In Honiara and the few other urban centres, people from different localities with different kastoms live side by side. Owing to increasing levels of mobility, and inter-island migration and intermarriage, it is more and more often the case that different kastoms coexist in one place which then have to be reconciled. The challenges of cross-community dispute resolution can become overwhelming – as not least the escalation of Guale–Malaitan land conflicts as a main cause of the ‘tensions’ has demonstrated. Despite these challenges, kastom ways of conflict resolution and reconciliation have been used to deal with the effects of the tensions at the local level in many places.20 Villagers are engaged in reconciliation processes that are often instigated by church leaders and chiefs. Many local reconciliations have also been led by women, though women in most regions are allowed only to play limited public roles in the kastom context.21 Locals pursue their own customary processes of peacebuilding, detached from and parallel to RAMSI, albeit in its shadow. These highly localised, mainly inter- and intracommunal processes apply kastom ways of reconciliation, bringing together the conflict parties (the families and clans of victims and offenders and the community at large) for dialogue, and they culminate in kastom reconciliation ceremonies that include Christian elements, such as prayer or church services, thus making use of the shared Christian faith as a unifying force.22 During these ceremonies, an exchange of gifts (compensation) for damage done and wrongdoings committed takes place. The aim is the restoration of relationships between adversaries and thus restoration of social harmony between and within communities. ‘Most of the reconciliation work that has mattered has been local [. . .], led by chiefs, women, churches and militants from inside their prison cells.’23 This work at the grassroots is an indispensable underpinning of overall peacebuilding in SI – without it, peacebuilding at ‘higher’ levels in more formalised forms would lack

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its societal basis. The danger of relapse into violent conflict would be much bigger without local kastom reconciliation because root causes of conflict would be left unaddressed. Kastom dispute resolution has considerably contributed to peace formation, largely invisible to outsiders and detached from ‘official’ peacebuilding endeavours. Some more centralised peacebuilding efforts have, however, tried to engage with and support local approaches. These include efforts by the National Peace Council (NPC) or, later, the Ministry of National Unity, Reconciliation and Peace (MNURP) and the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). There has been some overlap and interaction between such state-sponsored initiatives and local peacebuilding: for example, MNURP-instigated provincial peace and reconciliation committees and symposiums, and public dialogue forums or peacebuilding workshops for chiefs.24 NPC/​MNURP community mediators and monitors, whose mandate it was to mediate conflicts and to support ongoing reconciliation processes at the local level through co-ordination and facilitation, have deliberately included chiefs in their work, thus contributing to the restoration of chiefly authority in places where it had been damaged during the tensions. Monitors used introduced ‘modern’ mediation techniques but they aligned them with local kastom ways of dispute resolution. International NGOs involved in peacebuilding – for example, by providing restorative justice training or mediation trainings (World Vision, United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Prison Fellowship International’s Sycamore Tree Program and others) – tried to do the same, as did civil society organisations, in particular, the churches and church-based networks and groups, such as the Solomon Islands Christian Association and its peace committee, the Tasiu (the Melanesian Brotherhood) or CARITAS, as well as NGOs such as Women for Peace.25 Locals acknowledge official recognition of their own peacebuilding efforts by the government and (I)NGOs and utilise initiatives, such as peacebuilding workshops for chiefs, as a way of re-empowering traditional authority and kastom. Local customary ways, however, can also be distorted by ‘modern’ influences. For example, the custom of compensation (replacing the tit for tat of violence through the exchange of gifts) has become increasingly commercialised, with monetary compensation replacing exchanges of customary forms of wealth (such as shell money, pigs, food), and with demands being made which are far higher than what used to be kastom practice, thus using the kastom of compensation as a pretext for extorting money, not least from the government.26 The traditional function of compensation, namely the restoration of relationships, can then easily be lost. ‘Competition for state compensation crushes reconciliation as something that can build peace by touching people’s hearts.’27 Furthermore, there are problems regarding the import of foreign

204  Volker Boege peacebuilding concepts and instruments into the SI societal environment. An example is the TRC.28 It ‘was not adequately contextualized or integrated with local approaches to reconciliation and peacebuilding and therefore fell short of its ambitious mandate’.29 Its main activities were statement-taking, compiling the data into a central database, conducting regional and thematic public (and closed) hearings, investigations, research and exhumations of bodies (with PPF assistance), and the elaboration of a final report. The TRC followed Western models which did not align with SI societal conditions and culture and thus were met with suspicion by the people on the ground. ‘Truth-telling’ for its own sake, in particular, encountered resistance, as disclosure about personal and sensitive topics in public or to outsiders contradicts kastom.30 The TRC ‘was limited to hearing a certain truth, framed by particular questions centred on human rights as defined in international law but not yet frequently adopted or accepted by Solomon Island communities’.31 In short: the TRC’s approach was incongruent with local kastom and protocols, not least with local kastom/​Christian understandings of ‘reconciliation’.32 As a result, the TRC was seen as an alien endeavour and as a government institution of not much use for the needs of the people.

Police, RAMSI, community officers The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) had its reputation severely damaged through involvement in the tensions, and it still has to win back the trust of the people. There is need for reconciliations between communities and police in the regions hardest hit by the tensions, particularly the Weathercoast region of Guadalcanal. The annual RAMSI (Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands) people’s surveys regularly find ‘a continuing and worrying lack of confidence in the RSIPF’.33 People frequently complain about instances of low-level corruption or about no, or slow, response owing to laziness or lack of resources and personnel. In fact, the RSIPF, as well as other formal justice agencies (courts, correctional services), face significant resourcing challenges. This hinders their presence on the ground and their effectiveness.34 People want, and expect, more from the RSIPF than is currently being delivered, and they want it to engage more with the communities and collaborate more closely with the chiefs. The police largely depends on RAMSI/​PPF. ‘Without the logistical support of RAMSI police, the RSIPF doesn’t have the capability to reach all parts of the nation.’35 In some communities, RAMSI was credited with improving the performance of RSIPF and seen to collaborate with local police. In most cases, however, RAMSI was seen to be working detached from RSIPF. RAMSI was also criticised for its lack of consultation with community members and leaders. While RAMSI’s contribu-

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tion to order maintenance is generally appreciated, and people noted that RAMSI was helping to prevent large-scale violence, they were also clear that RAMSI does not contribute to sustainable peacebuilding.36 Locals welcome RAMSI and, at the same time, criticise it because of its lack of understanding of local culture and kastom.37 Particularly in the first years of the intervention, RAMSI officers ‘brought an Australian police culture that did not seem to be based on building relations with those being policed, but quick armed interventions’.38 Over time, however, RAMSI became progressively more open to community engagement.39 One attempt to bridge the gap between state and international actors, on the one hand, and chiefs and communities, on the other, is the Community Officer Project. This community policing programme was launched with the support of RAMSI/​PPF in 2009.40 Community officers (COs), appointed by the communities, are supposed to collaborate closely with local leaders in maintaining peace and order and, at the same time, serve as a link to the state police. The project aims at strengthening access to justice and ensuring some level of police presence and support to all areas – including remote and rural locations. COs are supposed to respond to community needs. They do not have any powers of enforcement. They work with chiefs, church leaders and other local leaders, including women’s and youth groups, providing a formal link to the state (primarily police and courts). One can think of this type of community policing as a hybrid institution, formally incorporated in the state but, at the same time, answerable to local non-state institutions. It can become an important link between state and nonstate providers of security.

Incompatibilities, complementarity, collaboration The Community Officer Project is an exception to the rule: usually, state institutions, internationals and non-state community actors act in isolation. ‘The current situation is such that two worlds operate but barely interact.’41 People are not happy with this state of affairs. They are strongly of the opinion that all actors should engage in substantial collaboration. The question is whether this can be achieved, and, if so, how? There are no insurmountable obstacles to collaboration. At first sight, there seem to be certain incompatibilities regarding the approaches of state, non-state and international actors: for example, the relationship between state law and customary laws or between kastom and human rights, overlapping areas of responsibility or diverging understandings of participation and inclusion. But these issues are negotiable and they are being negotiated. That said, there are those, particularly among

206  Volker Boege international interveners, who have reservations regarding ‘traditional’ approaches which are seen to be illiberal and/​or violate human rights. Customary law is seen to be incompatible with women’s (and children’s) rights. While the validity of these concerns is not questioned here, it has to be noted that the position of women in the local customary context is not quite so simple. Women acknowledge that customary law is often the only available mechanism for maintaining peace, and that there are chiefs and church leaders who encourage and promote respect for women – and through the social controls of kastom women are, indeed, afforded a level of safety. Women (and young people) generally support the role and work of chiefs but suggested a need for reform or oversight to ensure that women and young people were not overlooked in decision-making and conflict resolution. Particularly women in leading positions in state and civil society, while supportive of drawing on local strengths for the provision of peace and security, are wary about the potential abuses this approach might fail to address adequately. Almost everyone who highlighted these problems, however, went on to explain that ongoing dialogue could overcome them. Substitutability is limited. Non-state actors do not, and cannot, entirely take on state functions, and state actors do not, and cannot, entirely substitute for non-state actors. It is neither an option that the chiefs take over the tasks of the police, nor vice versa. Similarly, restorative justice in the community context cannot completely substitute for punitive justice in the state context, nor would people be happy with a solely formal state-based system of justice or with customary law only. Rather, being aware of tensions between ‘government law’ and ‘kastom law’, they would prefer some kind of accommodation between the two.42 People think that customary processes of reconciliation have to be supported and recognised by state law. There is considerable complementarity. Given their limited resources and capacities, state actors are not in a position to cover the whole of SI so as to guarantee peace and order, and they will not be in the future. ‘The state system is heavily reliant on the kastom system when it comes to resolving or managing disputes at the local level.’43 State actors, such as the police, are aware that chiefs and church leaders are important for order maintenance. Chiefs and other community leaders, on the other hand, are aware that they need the support from state actors who can deal with situations and problems beyond the reach of the customary means available to chiefs. Among the populace in general, ‘there is a widespread perception that kastom/​ church and state justice systems can, and should, complement one another’.44 Communities expressed a desire for greater links and synchronicity between the work of chiefs and church leaders, on the one hand, and that of state agencies, on the other. Chiefs are willing to work with the police for order maintenance;

Post-Conflict Solomon Islands  207

they say ‘we do not have teeth to bite, so we need the police’ (Savo Field Research Report). The reality on the ground is currently characterised by complementarity in weakness, with a mutual tendency to expect and demand ‘complementary’ action from other actors when one’s own capacities are insufficient – for example, chiefs expecting more from police and police expecting more from chiefs. These findings – no insurmountable incompatibility, no substitutability, complementarity (in weakness) – in principle augur well for constructive co-operation. Complementarity (or mutual dependence) can form the basis of engagement and collaboration. Obstacles – such as the lack of information and communication, lack of mutual familiarity, limits to understanding ‘the other’, unrealistic expectations, and organisational deficits – can be overcome through dialogue and the pursuit of policies of positive mutual accommodation.45 Such a dialogue requires relational awareness on the part of the internationals, an openness for engaging with local culture and context, and with local conceptions of peace, political order and ways of knowing, relating and doing.46 A cross-cultural conversation has to be a two-way exercise in which not only the language of the one side (the international liberal) reigns and is enforced upon the other side but the local indigenous language(s) is recognised as equally valid and important, and all sides try to come to shared understandings. For this, much more modesty and willingness to learn on the side of the internationals are prerequisites. On the other hand, chiefs have to develop skills and knowledge for dealing with challenges of the ‘modern world’. Better education and training of chiefs, so that they can address new problems which arise in the communities because of rapid social change, as well as recognition of kastom and the chiefly roles by the state, are suggestions discussed by locals. In this context, the need to maintain the independence of the chiefly system, if it were to be more closely aligned with the formal state system, as well as problems regarding the relationship between a multitude of customary laws and state law have to be addressed.47 Finally, in order to improve the links between the internationals and local communities, locals strongly emphasised the need to establish some systems to ensure RAMSI/​PPF personnel were more transparent and accountable to local chiefs, church, women and youth leaders. This could be achieved by developing cultural memorandums of understanding between internationals and communities, community-based monitoring and evaluation of peace and order staff (including the possibility to lodge complaints), involvement of locals in the recruitment of staff, a set of transparent and enforceable rules of good conduct, and longer-term rotations to enable ongoing working relationships with communities.48

208  Volker Boege These measures could be implemented in the context of i­ nternational– local engagement, though it has to be acknowledged that the internationals are not completely free in shaping their interactions with the local sphere. They are in the country at the invitation of, and on the basis of agreements with, the SI government, and they cannot bypass the government. There might be interests at play, on the side of the government and the political class, that drag the internationals’ resources and activities in other directions. These actors, too, are not just passive recipients of the international liberal agenda but also have the capacity to influence and reorient it according to their interests. They stand to profit from the current peacebuilding-as-statebuilding approach in a very direct way (for example, in the form of the notorious Constituency Development Funds for parliamentarians – money they can spend in their constituencies at their discretion) and might not be overly interested in strengthening the position of local non-state actors. In fact, their position very much hinges on their role as the link between the national and local levels, in the form of clientelistic politics constituting patron–client relationships which pose a major hindrance to peace and state formation.

Conclusion In SI today, local peace agents with legitimacy, capacities and effectiveness can be found: chiefs and church leaders but also women and youth leaders. In comparison, state actors (such as the police and the courts) lack legitimacy, capacities and effectiveness but they are gradually improving, not least due to the support of international interveners (RAMSI/​PPF). The last also enjoy legitimacy (mainly because of their substantial contribution to the termination of the tensions), their capacities are strong, and they are effective, though their effectiveness could be increased by a meaningful partnership and enhanced collaboration with local actors and institutions. Until today, well into more than a decade of the international peacebuilding intervention, there remains a widespread feeling in the Solomons that RAMSI ‘is happening’ to the country and the people without real local ownership and with an overdependency on RAMSI. This, of course, renders RAMSI’s efforts unsustainable.49 For this to change, international interveners would have to overcome their state-centric mind-sets and parochial epistemological framework.50 Tarcisius Kabutaulaka was right when he said: ‘Moreover, in the Solomon Islands case, the focus on the state, while important, must not be allowed to overshadow other entities that could ­contribute p ­ ositively to peace building and nation rebuilding. It is necessary to restore not only a functional state but also relationships between people.’51 International

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actors will have to open up to ‘a significant broadening of the narrowtechnical state-building perspective’52 that still underlies RAMSI and other similar international interventions. This would also necessitate the renegotiation of the content and aims of the intervention with the government and other central state actors who might prefer just this narrow-technical state-building perspective because it serves their shortterm interests, securing their positions and associated personal benefits. The alternative is to work with local strengths beyond the realm of the state. This means acknowledging that there is no state monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force. It is hard to imagine that such a monopoly is achievable in the foreseeable future. Nor is it necessary or desirable. Hybrid forms of peace and order, in which capable and legitimate non-state local providers of peace and order figure prominently and in which supposedly separate and distinct spheres (such as the formal state justice system and the informal customary law, or state police and chiefs) interpenetrate and permeate, can provide effective and legitimate alternatives. In other words, there are ways of securing peace and order beyond the state (which does not mean: in opposition to or against).53 As has been demonstrated, complementarity could form the basis for more planned, organised and continuous collaboration which could then contribute to peace formation and the emergence of a positive hybrid peace.54 So far, however, the potential for planned collaboration has hardly been translated into actual practice. If and when collaboration occurs, it is more ad hoc, informal and sporadic. To change this would necessitate determined commitment and a fresh approach not only from the side of the internationals but also the political class of the SI. This, however, is not in sight. It can be assumed that when RAMSI finally leaves the country, little will have changed in the overall constellation of governance and politics in SI: on the one hand, a government and a ‘state’ which formally subscribe to Western liberal models of peace and governance; on the other hand, local communities which struggle to maintain their own notions of peace and order in their everyday village context, with the government and state hardly able to impose their agenda on the communities and to deliver meaningful services to them, therefore lacking legitimacy, and with communities hardly able to make their voices heard in the context of state and politics, mostly getting along without and despite the state. This state of affairs can be seen as a negative form of hybrid peace and order.55 As a consequence, there is widespread fear in the SI public with regard to ‘the risk of a resurrection of the tensions in some form’.56 The international interveners will have to take part of the blame for this. ‘The substantial level of donor assistance to Solomon Islands in recent years has not reached most parts of the country, however,

210  Volker Boege and there have been few attempts to engage, directly or indirectly, with those nonstate rule systems that remain critical to the management of everyday disputation in most rural localities.’57 The internationals have been obsessed with their peacebuilding-asstatebuilding approach which suited the political class but, at the end of the day, missed the needs and expectations of the people on the ground, leaving them with a state which confirms Richmond’s assessment that states resulting from statebuilding will remain as they are – failed by design.58 International interveners did not engage with local actors in ways that would have contributed to peace formation and the emergence of a home-grown political community beyond the model Western state and the liberal peace. Such an alternative approach would by no means imply doing away with the state altogether. Even in the most remote villages of SI today, people acknowledge the need for some form of a state as an institutional framework for the provision of services and protection, and as a reliable member of the international community of states, but they want a state that is more in line with their own traditions of governance and more responsive to their everyday needs. The Western liberal state, inherited from their colonial masters, has not proven to be that kind of state.59 The decisive weaknesses of governance in the SI lie ‘in the quality and clarity of linkages between village government – the level that matters most to most citizens – and more encompassing levels of government at the provincial and national levels. In a village society, strengthened national institutions that do not connect in an effective way to village governance have truncated traction.’60 Unfortunately, today the crucial link between the local and the national level of politics is clientelism, and this does not nurture peace and state formation, but parochialism. Ongoing debates about constitutional reform, federalism and decentralisation are an expression of the insight that the current model does not work and of the desire to develop a home-grown type of state. Solomon Islanders will need more time to discuss the right combination of kastom and state governance. Unfortunately, the fixation of internationals and national political elites on statebuilding as a technical exercise of building central government institutions hampers such a debate about fundamental reforms of the SI state. ‘Since RAMSI’s arrival over $2 billion USD has been spent as aid in Solomon Islands [. . .] All that in a country of approximately 600,000 people. The aid involved hasn’t gone completely to waste, but it has done little to solve the foremost problem Solomon Island faces: poor governance.’61 This problem cannot be solved by the liberal state-building approach.

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Notes   1. For an overview of causes and the course of the violent conflicts, see Clive Moore, Happy Isles in Crisis. The Historical Causes for a Failing State in Solomon Islands, 1998–2004 (Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, 2004); Sinclair Dinnen and Stewart Firth (eds), Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands (Canberra: ANU E Press and Asia Pacific Press, 2008); Matthew G. Allen, Greed and Grievance. Ex-Militants’ Perspectives on the Conflict in Solomon Islands, 1998–2003 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).  2. Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of Solomon Islands (Canberra: ASPI, 2003).   3. Matthew Allen and Sinclair Dinnen, ‘The North down under: antinomies of conflict and intervention in Solomon Islands’, Conflict, Security & Development, 10 (3) (2010), 313.  4. For a comprehensive overview see Jon Fraenkel, Joni Madraiwiwi and Henry Okole, The RAMSI Decade: A Review of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, 2003–2013 (2014), (last acc­ essed 4 November 2014).   5. The head of the mission, the so-called Special Coordinator is an Australian public servant, directly accountable to the Australian government. Some 95 per cent of the total cost of RAMSI is covered by Australia. Australia spent at least 2.6 billion AUD on RAMSI between 2003 and 2013; Jenny Hayward-Jones, Australia’s Costly Investment in Solomon Islands: The Lessons of RAMSI (Sydney: Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2014), p. 2.   6. At the time of writing, planning for rearmament of parts of the RSIPF is underway.   7. Sinclair Dinnen, ‘Dilemmas of intervention and the building of state and nation’, in Dinnen and Firth (eds), Politics, pp. 1–38.  8. For a concise and poignant critique of RAMSI ‘as a politically driven regime of state transformation’ see Shahar Hameiri, ‘State building or crisis management? A critical analysis of the social and political implications of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands’, Third World Quarterly, 30 (1) (2009), 49; Shahar Hameiri, ‘Mitigating the risk to primitive accumulation: state-building and the logging boom in Solomon Islands’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 42 (3) (2012), 405–26.  9. Hayward-Jones, Australia’s Costly Investment, p. 8. 10. The following is partly based on fieldwork conducted in SI between 2010 and 2012. 11. In fact, ‘the architecture and objectives of RAMSI could be said to have very little to do with the particular social complexities and historical antecedents of the conflict’, Allen and Dinnen, ‘The North down under’, 316. 12. Moore, Happy Isles in Conflict; Debra McDougall with Joy Kere, ‘Christianity, custom, and law. Conflict and peacemaking in the postconflict Solomon Islands’, in Morgan Brigg and R. Bleiker (eds), Mediating

212  Volker Boege across Difference: Oceanic and Asian Approaches to Conflict Resolution (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), pp. 141–62. 13. On hybrid political orders, see Volker Boege, M. Anne Brown, Kevin Clements and Anna Nolan, ‘On hybrid political orders and emerging states: what is failing – states in the Global South or research and politics in the West?’, Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series No. 8 (Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, 2009), pp. 15–35. 14. Allen, Greed and Grievance, p. 17. 15. ‘Chief’ is an ambiguous category in contemporary SI. Though it has become commonplace to refer to chiefs as ‘traditional’ authorities, chiefs, in fact, are a relatively recent sociopolitical category which emerged in the course of interaction between local indigenous societies and external actors – ­missions and the colonial administration. Today, there are different types of chiefs and different degrees of formalisation of chiefly roles. Chiefs can have different areas of authority and responsibility: for example, with reference to locality (village chiefs) or with reference to social relations (clan or lineage chiefs). In general, people on the ground accept them as legitimate leaders. Furthermore, a person who is a chief can, at the same time, be a church leader or a public servant or a member of parliament. So there is some overlap in public roles and this, of course, has an impact on how the chiefly role is interpreted and enacted; see Geoffrey M. White and Lamont Lindstrom, Chiefs Today. Traditional Pacific Leadership and the Postcolonial State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 16. Similar to ‘chief’, ‘kastom’ or ‘customary law’, is an ambiguous concept. It is not the ‘traditional’ customs of the pre-contact and pre-colonial past. Kastom has developed since the times of first contact and colonisation, incorporating exogenous influences into pre-colonial custom and adapting it to those influences. Kastom and customary law have evolved in interaction with the outside world, both distancing local ways of doing things from ‘modern’ introduced ways and absorbing certain elements of the introduced ways: in particular, Christian elements (Christianity today is generally seen as being part of kastom). Customary law is non-state, distinct from the laws of the state, but, at the same time, sanctioned by the state as a source of law in its own right (the SI constitution makes reference to customary law, albeit rather vaguely). It operates side by side with (and formally, though often not de facto, subordinate to) statutory law, which is generally seen as alien ‘white man’s law’. Though kastom derives its legitimacy from reference to tradition, to the ancestral rules of conduct, it is not unchangeable and static; rather, it is in constant flux. Being constantly exposed to external influences, it adapts to new circumstances and, consequently, there is continuous debate about what ‘true’ kastom is. Accordingly, kastom and customary law differ from place to place, and chiefs apply kastom differently. See Moore, Happy Isles; Roger M. Keesing, ‘Kastom re-examined’, Anthropological Forum, 6 (4) (1993), 587–96; Lamont Lindstrom and Geoffrey M. White, ‘Introduction: custom today’, Anthropological Forum, special issue, 6 (4) (1993), 467–73; Alan Rumsey, ‘The articulation of indigenous and exogenous orders in highland

Post-Conflict Solomon Islands  213 New Guinea and beyond’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 17 (1) (2006), 47–69; Matthew Allen et al., Justice Delivered Locally, Systems, Challenges, and Innovations in Solomon Islands (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013), pp. 34–43. 17. This is also a major finding of Allen et al., Justice Delivered Locally, pp. 65–7. Some denominations are strongly anti-kastom, however; in such cases the collaboration of chiefs and Church can be a problem. 18. Michael Goddard, ‘Justice delivered locally: Solomon Islands’, Justice for the Poor Literature Review (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010), 27. 19. Goddard, ‘Justice’, 25. 20. For examples see McDougall, ‘Christianity, custom and law’. 21. John Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2010), p. 82. There are some women chiefs, particularly in the matrilineal communities of Guadalcanal and Isabel provinces, and women at times are engaged in kastom dispute resolution (Allen et al., Justice Delivered Locally), pp. 41–3. Women also played crucial roles in overcoming violence and (re-)building relationships during and after the tensions, using their customary authority as mothers. There are many stories of courageous women moving between the roadblocks and bunkers of conflict parties, convincing young combatants to lay down their arms, initiating communication between parties, trading food and other essential supplies across front lines, and negotiating free access to markets for women of the different groups, as well as other forms of female collaboration across battle lines. In later stages of peacebuilding, and with the arrival of RAMSI, women lost influence at the supralocal level. For the role of women, see Helen Johnson and Katherine Webber, ‘Women, peace building and political inclusion: a case study from Solomon Islands’, Hecate, 34 (1) (2008), 83–99; John Maebuta and Rebecca Spence, Attempts at Building Peace in the Solomon Islands: Disconnected Layers, Reflecting on Peace Practice Project Cumulative Impact Case Study (Cambridge, MA: CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, 2009), pp. 28–9. 22. On the entwinement of kastom and Christianity and their complementary use in dispute resolution see McDougall, ‘Christianity, custom and law’. 23. Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows, p. 146. 24. Maebuta and Spence, Attempts, p. 29. 25. Renee Jeffery, ‘Enduring tensions: transitional justice in the Solomon Islands’, The Pacific Review, 26 (2) (2013), 153–75 (particularly 164–6); Maebuta and Spence, Attempts, pp. 23–7. 26. Jon Fraenkel, The Manipulation of Custom: From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Island (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004); ‘a government compensation culture has evolved as a shallow and quick fix’ (Braithwaite et al., Pillars, p. 148). 27. Braithwaite et al., Pillars, p. 148. 28. The TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) was launched publicly to great fanfare by Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa in April 2009. It was funded by international donors (Australia, New Zealand, the European Union and United Nations Development Program) and f­ ollowed

214  Volker Boege international standardised models of organisation and procedure. It operated from 2010 to 2012 and presented its final report to the SI prime minister in February 2012. This report has not been officially published yet. It was unofficially released, however, in 2013 by the report’s editor, Bishop Terry Brown, who had become frustrated by the government’s inaction regarding publication. On the debate about the TRC see Braithwaite et al., Pillars, pp. 86–91; Jeffery, ‘Enduring tensions’, 168–71. For a critical assessment see Louise Vella, ‘Translating transitional justice: the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, SSGM Discussion Paper 2014/​2 (Canberra: Australian National University, 2014). 29. Vella, Justice, p. 1. 30. Vella, Justice, p. 10. ‘Sexual violence, or other human rights violations such as killings, torture and ill-treatment, [. . .], were not topics that could be discussed easily, if at all’ (Ibid. p. 11). Asking direct questions on such sensitive issues in a SI context usually leads nowhere. Storytelling and sharing of stories are more appropriate approaches. 31. Vella, Justice, p. 11. 32. In the eyes of the locals, the TRC did use the term ‘reconciliation’ in a misleading way because it did not engage with processes of reconciliation as locally understood (Vella, Justice, p. 13). 33. Hayward-Jones, Australia’s Costly Investment, p. 11. 34. Matthew Allen, Long-term Engagement: The Future of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (Canberra: ASPI Strategic Insight 51, 2011). 35. Allen, Long-term Engagement, p. 16. The RSIPF is ‘still overwhelmingly dependent on RAMSI logistical and financial resources’ (Hayward-Jones, Australia’s Costly Investment, p. 11). 36. Moreover, it has been argued that ‘the RAMSI approach risks diminishing the space for local or indigenous approaches to peacemaking’ (Allen and Dinnen, ‘The North down under’, 302); there is a feeling among Solomon Islanders that ‘RAMSI had crowded reconciliation off the policy agenda’ (Braithwaite et al., Pillars, p. 81). RAMSI has not been directly involved in reconciliation processes. Occasionally, it lent some support, or was invited to be a ‘witness’, to local reconciliations, and it engaged in reconciliation ceremonies in instances where locals had become victims of RAMSI violence (Fraenkel et al., The RAMSI Decade, pp. 82–3). 37. An interesting point in this regard is the way RAMSI tried to impose ‘gender equality’: introduced as a concept from the outside and attempting to create new roles and status for women, it actually contributed to diminishing the customary peacebuilding roles of women; see Kate Higgins, ‘Outside-in: a volunteer’s reflections on a Solomon Islands community development program’, SSGM Discussion Paper 2008/​3 (Canberra: ANU, 2008), 4 and B. K. Greener et al., ‘Peacebuilding, gender and policing in Solomon Islands’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 32 (1) (2011), 1–28. 38. Terry Brown, ‘A few reflections on RAMSI’s tenth anniversary’, in Terence Wood and Stephen Howes (eds), Debating Ten Years of RAMSI. Reflections on the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (Canberra:

Post-Conflict Solomon Islands  215 Development Policy Centre, [no date] 2014, p. 10). See also Allen, Greed, pp. 165–6. 39. Clive Moore, ‘Moving forward by asking the right questions of the past’, in Wood and Howes (eds), Debating Ten Years, [no date] (2014), p. 28. 40. On the Community Officer Project see Bryn Hughes, Charles T. Hunt and Jodie Curth-Bibb, Forging New Conventional Wisdom beyond International Policing: Learning from Complex, Political Realities (Leiden and Boston, MA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2013), pp. 234–42; and Sinclair Dinnen and Nicole Haley, Evaluation of the Community Officer Project in Solomon Island, J4P Research Report (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012). 41. Higgins, Outside-in, p. 10. 42. Goddard, Justice, p. 17; McDougall, ‘Christianity’, 144. 43. Allen et al., Justice, p. 67. 44. Ibid. 45. Allen et al. found ‘a strong desire for more effective articulation between local and state systems that enhance the capabilities of both’ (Ibid. p. 70); in an everyday context, villagers in the SI pursue a pragmatic approach in dealing with the state/​ non-state dichotomy anyway, ‘combining the most efficacious elements of indigenous and introduced regulatory systems with reasonable efficiency’ (Goddard, Justice, p. 29); see also McDougall, ‘Christianity’, 143. 46. Morgan Brigg, ‘Wantokism and state building in Solomon Islands: a response to Fukuyama’, Pacific Economic Bulletin, 24 (3) (2009), 148–60. 47. Oliver Richmond, ‘De-romanticising the local, de-mystifying the international: hybridity in Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands’, The Pacific Review, 24 (1) (2009), 129. 48. With regard to RAMSI/​PPF personnel, Higgins says that she was ‘surprised not just at their lack of Pijin and disregard for kastom, but more so their lack of curiosity and interest in the places they were living’ (Higgins, Outside-in, p. 9). 49. Even today it is mainly the PPF (which de facto means the Australian Federal Police, AFP), not the local police, which is the backbone of statebased peace and order. Hence ‘the RAMSI years have been a period of recovery, but they have also fostered a sense of dependency and demoralization, particularly evident in the police force’ (Fraenkel et al., The RAMSI Decade, p. 8). 50. Hameiri, State Building. 51. Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka, ‘Australian foreign policy and the RAMSI intervention in Solomon Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific, 17 (2) (2005), 303. 52. Sinclair Dinnen, ‘Dilemmas of intervention and the building of state and nation’, in Dinnen and Firth (eds), Politics, p. 30. 53. Oliver Richmond, ‘A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday’, Review of International Studies, 35 (2009), 557–80; Oliver Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). 54. Richmond, Oliver P. and Sandra Pogodda, ‘Introduction: the ­contradictions

216  Volker Boege of peace, international architecture, the state, and local agency’, in this volume. 55. Ibid. 56. Fraenkel et al., The RAMSI Decade, p. 8. 57. Allen et al., Justice, p. 57. 58. Oliver Richmond, ‘Failed statebuilding versus peace formation’, in David Chandler and Timothy D. Sisk (eds), Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 130. 59. ‘Indeed, the independent state of Solomon Islands – “the government” – is seen by many Solomon Islanders as the successor of the colonial state and the inheritor of all its past wrongdoings’ (Allen, Greed, p. 185). 60. Braithwaite et al., Pillars, p. 139. 61. Terence Wood, ‘Lessons learnt on the role for aid’, in Terence Wood and Stephen Howes (eds), Debating Ten Years of RAMSI. Reflections on the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, 9–11 (Canberra: Development Policy Centre, [no date] 2014), pp. 35–7, at p. 36.

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Index

Abrašević, 50, 51, 62 ActionAid, 84, 102, 228 Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP), 132, 133 agency critical, 10, 66, 79, 107, 118, 174 local, 4, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 23, 48, 56, 65, 66, 71, 73, 78, 79, 146, 161, 179, 180, 184 peace-formation, 18, 23 sub-altern, 108, 165 Ahtisaari peace plan, 78 Annan Plan, 87 annexation, 112, 114 Australia, 199 bio-power, 107 Blair, T., 83, 147 Buddhism, 163, 169, 170, 173 Khmer, 169 Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), 164, 166–8, 173 citizenship, 16 in Cyprus, 87, 91, 96–9 in Solomon Islands, 201 civil society, 1, 7, 11, 17 in Kosovo, 68, 69 in Northern Ireland, 28, 33, 35, 79 in Palestine, 113 in Sierra Leone, 156 clientelism, 55, 210

coexistence, 20, 23, 59 in Afghanistan, 136 in Kosovo, 71, 74–7 in Sierra Leone, 153 Colombia, 5 colonialism, 95, 119 Communities Consultative Council (CCC), 72 Community Policing Councils (CPC), 190 conditionality, 2, 73 conflict-calming behaviours, 17, 135 conflict-management, 7, 181 conflict-resolution, 9, 41, 115–17, 151, 189, 202, 206 Congo, DR, 5 co-operation, 15, 17, 51, 72–4, 93, 136, 147, 184, 190, 207 inter-ethnic, 20, 75, 78 Cyprus, 5, 6, 16, 83, 86–91, 93, 95–101 decentralisation in Cambodia, 165, 168 in Kosovo, 70, 71 in Solomon Islands, 210 democratisation, 1, 3 in Cambodia, 166 in Cyprus, 84 in Kosovo, 68 in Palestine, 108

240 Index democratisation (cont.) in Sierra Leone, 147 in Timor–Leste, 186 Denmark, 152 Department for International Development (DFID) in Sierra Leone, 143, 156 economic liberalisation, 3 in Bosnia, 49 in Sierra Leone, 145 elections in Afghanistan, 130–2 in Bosnia, 47, 52–4 in Cambodia, 164–6 in Cyprus, 87, 97 in East-Timor, 181–5, 187 in Kosovo, 68, 70 in Northern Ireland, 31, 32, 34, 43 in Palestine, 109, 111 ethnic divisions in Bosnia, 54, 57 in Kosovo, 69, 70, 79 in Timor–Leste, 183 European Union (EU), 2, 15, 16 in Bosnia, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63 in Cyprus, 88, 95 in Kosovo, 70, 71 in Northern Ireland, 35–8 in Palestine, 110, 111, 115 in Timor–Leste, 180 everyday peace, 10, 17, 68, 69, 79, 136 state formation, 16, 22, 23, 106, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119 Fatah, 106, 109, 110, 113, 117, 118 Foucault, M., 86, 118 funding, 14 in Afghanistan, 137, 138 in Cambodia, 167, 168, 172, 173 in Cyprus, 94 in Kosovo, 74, 79 in Northern Ireland, 35, 36, 37 in Palestine, 109, 111 in Sierra Leone, 143, 145, 152, 153, 155 Gaza Strip, 106, 109–11, 113 good governance, 3, 127, 128, 148, 200 Goodhand, J., 132, 136 grassroots initiatives, 16, 20

in Bosnia, 48 in Palestine, 106–8 Guatemala, 3, 5 Hamas, 106, 109–11, 113, 117, 118 Hoffman, L., 152 Human Development Index, 143 human rights, 1, 3, 8, 9 in Afghanistan, 126 in Bosnia, 59 in Cambodia, 169, 170 in Cyprus, 85, 95, 98 in Kosovo, 68, 75 in Northern Ireland, 30 in Palestine, 109 in Sierra Leone, 148, 150–3 in Solomon Islands, 204–6 in Timor–Leste, 188, 191 human security, 76, 96 hybridity in Afghanistan, 131 in Kosovo, 75, 78 in Sierra Leone, 146 in Solomon Islands, 200, 201 in Timor–Leste, 179, 180 Indonesia, 181, 186 inequality, 10, 73, 79, 107, 108, 118, 164, 174 International Financial Institutions (IFIs), 3, 11, 44 intifada, 114, 117, 118 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 30, 32, 33, 39, 40 justice, 1, 19, 21, 22, 23, 53, 57, 74, 76, 112, 118, 132, 146, 182, 184, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 200, 203–6, 209 distributive, 13 restorative, 203, 206 social, 50, 55, 107, 108 transitional, 71, 74 Karzai, H., 127, 141 Khmer Rouge, 160–5, 169, 171, 173, 175 Kosovo, 1, 3, 4, 16, 20, 21, 65–80 legitimacy, 1–4, 6, 10–15, 18–20, 22–4 in Afghanistan, 133 in Bosnia, 58–60, 62

Index  241 in Cambodia, 168, 169 in Kosovo, 65, 73 in Northern Ireland, 30, 31, 33 in Palestine, 108, 109, 111, 114, 118 in Sierra Leone, 149, 150 in Solomon Islands, 198, 208, 209, 212 in Timor–Leste, 179, 181, 186, 188–91, 193 nationalism, 13 in Bosnia, 55 in Cambodia, 169 in Cyprus, 88, 95 in Northern Ireland, 30, 39 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 11, 19 in Afghanistan, 137, 141 in Bosnia, 49, 55 in Kosovo, 68, 73, 75, 78 in Northern Ireland, 36 in Palestine, 91, 92, 103 in Sierra Leone, 147–51 in Solomon Islands, 203 Oslo accords, 111, 115 Oslo process, 105, 108 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 110, 111 peace hybrid peace, 1, 2, 5–10, 12–14, 21, 23, 146, 186, 198, 209 infrastructure(s) for peace, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80 liberal peace, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11–13, 15, 18, 20, 21: in Afghanistan, 126, 134; in Bosnia, 47, 60; in Cambodia, 164; in Cyprus, 84–6, 90, 92; in Kosovo, 65–9, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79; in Palestine, 107, 108, 119; in Sierra Leone, 145–8, 151, 152, 155, 156; in Solomon Islands, 199, 210; in Timor–Leste, 186, 191 peace-formation, 2, 4–7, 9, 10–24: in Afghanistan, 135–8; in Bosnia, 60; in Cambodia, 161, 165, 169, 173; in Cyprus, 85, 86; in Kosovo, 65–7, 69, 71–9; in Northern Ireland, 27, 43, 44; in Palestine, 105, 106; in Sierra Leone, 146; in

Solomon Islands, 198, 201, 203, 208, 209, 210; in Timor–Leste, 180, 181, 184, 187 peacekeeping, 12 in Cambodia, 161, 164 in Cyprus, 85, 93 in Sierra Leone, 143, 155 in Timor–Leste, 181 plenum, 51, 55, 56 poverty, 58, 158 privatisation, 55, 58 resistance, 2, 6, 8–13, 22 in Bosnia, 47, 49–51, 56 in Cambodia, 161, 163, 175 in Cyprus, 85, 86, 100 in Kosovo, 65, 66, 68, 69–71, 73, 78, 79 in Palestine, 105, 107, 108, 111–19 in Sierra Leone, 149–51 in Solomon Islands, 204 rule of law, 1, 3, 8, 22 in Afghanistan, 126, 132, 138 in Kosovo, 68 in Sierra Leone, 145, 148, 153, 182, 184, 187, 188, 200 security, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 18, 24, 25 in Afghanistan, 132, 134, 137 in Bosnia, 52, 57, 71, 74, 76, 77 in Cambodia, 163 in Cyprus, 84, 85, 91–3, 96, 97 in Northern Ireland, 27, 36, 38, 41, 43 in Palestine, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 119 in Sierra Leone, 144–6, 156 in Solomon Islands, 197, 199, 205, 206 in Timor–Leste, 179, 181–3, 189–91 self-determination, 21 in Kosovo, 69, 70 in Palestine, 105, 107 Sjoberg, L., 98 social contract, 8, 14, 22, 79, 107, 188 social movement(s), 1, 47, 49, 69, 137 Sontag, S., 50 state-building, 8 in Afghanistan, 126, 128–32, 134, 137 in Bosnia, 47 in Cambodia, 164

242 Index state-building (cont.) in Kosovo, 66, 77 in Palestine, 107 in Sierra Leone, 147 in Solomon Islands, 197, 198, 200, 209, 210 state-formation, 13, 16, 22, 106–10, 112, 118, 138 sumud, 115 Taylor, C., 147 Todorova, M., 57 unemployment, 52, 198 United Nations, 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 18, 69, 73, 74, 83–5, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 105, 113, 117, 126, 132,

143, 161, 164, 180, 183, 184, 186, 187, 191, 199, 203 United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), 67, 68, 70, 71, 77 United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET), 181, 182 United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), 182, 189 Vetëvendosje, 69, 70, 76, 77 victimisation, 94, 114 World Bank, 2, 11, 58, 115, 145, 147 xenophobia, 98