The End of Liberal Peacebuilding
Authors: Chandler David , Ledo Martínez Elena 
Published: February 2024

This article analyses the transformation in the conceptual understanding of liberal peacebuilding over the last few decades. It conceptualizes the fundamental shift in the understanding of international peacebuilding as one from the universalist liberal perspectives of the 1990s, through the institutionalist impasse of peacebuilding-as-statebuilding in the 2000s and the problems of the ‘local turn’, towards the dominance of the pragmatic perspective by the mid-2010s. These are heuristically framed in terms of the shift from peacebuilding interventions within the problematic of causation to those concerned with the pragmatic management of effects. In this shift, the means and mechanisms of international peacebuilding have been transformed, no longer focused on the universal application of Western causal knowledge through policy interventions but rather on the effects of specific and unique local and organic processes at work in societies themselves. The focus on effects recasts problems in increasingly organic ways, suggesting that artificial or hubristic attempts at socio-political intervention should be excluded or minimized. The conclusion is that the decline of modernist political framings and broader modernist understandings of causality have been central to the erasure of the particular space and goals of liberal peacebuilding, thereby transforming peacebuilding as an interventionary project.
This article summarises the transformation in the conceptual understanding of liberal international peacebuilding over the last few decades. It suggests that the conceptual shifts can be usefully interrogated through their imbrication within broader epistemological shifts highlighting the limits of causal knowledge claims. These are heuristically framed in terms of the shift from peacebuilding interventions within the problematic of linear or universal framings of causation to those concerned with the pragmatic management of effects. In this shift, the means and mechanisms of international peacebuilding have been transformed, no longer focused on the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches of generalising policy approaches but rather on the effects of specific and unique local and organic processes at work in societies themselves. The focus on effects takes the conceptualization of international peacebuilding out of the traditional terminological lexicon of politics and international relations theory and instead recasts problems in increasingly organic ways, suggesting that artificial or hubristic attempts at socio-political intervention should be excluded or minimized.
This fundamental shift in the understanding of liberal peacebuilding is grasped as one from the universalist liberal perspectives of the 1990s, through the institutionalist impasse of peacebuilding-as-statebuilding in the 2000s and the problems of the ‘local turn’, towards the dominance of the pragmatic perspective by the mid-2010s. In the pragmatic perspective, to all intents and purposes, peacebuilding no longer exists as a separate policy area. This shift reflects both the declining relevance of traditional disciplinary understandings of liberal modernist political categories and an increasing scepticism towards Western, liberal, or modernist forms of knowledge. Both of these are considered here. The conclusion is thus that the decline of both modernist political framings and broader modernist understandings of causality have been central to the erasure of the particular space and goals of liberal peacebuilding.
Over the last few decades, debates over international peacebuilding saw a shift from political concerns of sovereign rights under international law to concerns of knowledge claims of cause and effect, highlighted through the problematization of peacebuilding policy interventions’ unintended consequences. This can be illustrated through contrasting the difference between the confidence – today, critics would, of course, say ‘hubris’ – of 1990s’ understandings of the transformative possibilities held out by the promise of international peacebuilding with the much more pessimistic approaches prevalent today.
In the late 1990s, leading advocates understood international peacebuilding intervention as a clear exercise of Western power in terms of a ‘solutionist’ approach to problems that would otherwise have increasingly problematic knock-on effects in a global and interconnected world. Twenty-five years later, analysts are much more likely to highlight that the complexity of global interactions and processes, in fact, mitigate against ambitious schemas for intervention – aspiring to address problems at the level either of universalizable or generalizable solutions, exported from the West (‘top-down’ interventions), or through ambitious projects of social and political engineering (attempting to transform society through institutionalist approaches of peacebuilding-as-statebuilding).
When peacebuilding is condemned for being ‘liberal’ today, this is much more likely to be a pragmatist critique of the epistemological or cause-and-effect assumptions involved in external claims of peacebuilding effectiveness, rather than a statement concerning any understanding of the rights of sovereignty, self-government, or political equality. ‘Liberal’ thus equates to the modernist episteme rather than to political or philosophical questions of sovereignty and individual rights. Today, it is increasingly argued that causal relations cannot be grasped in the frameworks which constituted liberal international peacebuilding intervention in terms of either ‘top-down’ liberal universalism or ‘bottom-up’ institutional capacity-building understandings of the mechanisms of socio-political transformation. In a more complex world, the lines of debate and discussion have shifted away from a political critique of peacebuilding, grounded in political theory and claims of rights to self-government vis-à-vis external hegemony, to an epistemic critique of linear or reductionist assumptions of policy efficacy. Liberal peacebuilding has thus been discredited not on traditional ‘political’ grounds but on the ‘pragmatist’ basis of a growing awareness that any forms of external peacebuilding intervention or social engineering will have unintended side effects.
It is in the attempt to minimize these unintended consequences that the focus of policymakers has shifted to the pragmatic governance of effects (focusing on the fluid and specific context of engagements) rather than seeking to address ostensible universalist or structural cause-and-effect understandings of ‘root causes’. For example, rather than seeking to solve conflict or to end it (resulting in possibly problematic unintended consequences) international peacebuilding intervention is increasingly articulated as ‘managing’ conflict, developing societal strategies to cope better and thereby limit its effects. Focusing on managing effects rather than engaging with causative chains makes the forms and practices of peacebuilding intervention quite different.
The shift beyond conceptual discussions of rights and sovereignty and towards epistemic questions of knowledge is undertaken here through developing Giorgio Agamben’s heuristic framing of a shift from a concern with causation to that of effects, which he rightly understood to be a depoliticizing move. Debates about addressing causation involved socio-political analysis and policy choices, putting decision-making and the question of sovereign power and political accountability at the forefront. Causal relations assume power operates ‘from the top down’ with policy outcomes understood to be direct products of conscious choices, powers, and capacities. Agamben argued that whilst the governing of causes was the essence of politics, the pragmatic governance of effects reversed the political process. The governance of effects can therefore be seen as a pragmatic retreat from the commitments of the international peacebuilding approaches of the 1990s and 2000s, in terms of both resources and policy goals. However, the pragmatic shift from causation to effects involved a shifting conceptualization of peacebuilding itself; it is this conceptual connection that is the central concern of this article.
Peacebuilding policy intervention conceptualized as the governance of effects relocates the subject position of the peacebuilder in relation to both the problem under consideration, which is no longer amenable to external policy solutions, and the society or community being peacebuilt, which is no longer constructed as lacking knowledge or resources, but as being the key agency of peacebuilding transformation. Transformation comes not through external cause-and-effect policy interventions but through the facilitation or empowerment of local agential capacities. The regulation of effects thus shifts the focus away from the formal public, legal and political sphere to the more organic and generative sphere of everyday life. The management of effects involves on-going facilitative engagement in social processes and evades the question of government as political decision-making.