Peaceful accidents in the shadow of hegemony: the unintended outcomes of international peace interventions in Asia-Pacific (Cambodia, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste).
Panel J4 at conference DSA2019: Opening up Development.
This roundtable draws on 4 cases to explore the thesis that international peace efforts have little influence but big impacts. In short, they tend to 1) fail, but 2) have profound, rupturing effects on the political landscape, which 3) may contribute to unforeseen peaceful outcomes in the long run.
Long Abstract:
International intervention in contemporary wars has been accused of imposing Western hegemony, securing Western interests and propelling the paradigm of liberal peace. This critique has spawned renewed interest in "vernacular" and "local" approaches to peace, and the forms of interaction, contestation and hybridity that emerge when international efforts "hit the ground". This roundtable takes issue with the common tendency to overestimate the hegemonic power, the significance and the foresight of international peace interventions (and then conclude this supposed hegemony yields a litany of failure). At the same time, it takes cognisance of the fact that such interventions often have enormous, often rupturing, impacts with sometimes quite enduring legacies. To navigate this apparent contradiction (while also seeking a middle ground between blind optimism and depressing cynicism), this roundtable explores an argument consisting of three components: 1) international peace efforts are rarely able to successfully engineer the outcomes they set out to achieve; 2) at the same time, they often have dramatic and enduring effects on the political landscape in which they intervene; and 3) in unintended and unforeseen ways, these effects may in fact contribute to peaceful outcomes in the long run. With this session, we will juxtapose our research on the long-term legacies of diverse international peace interventions (by regional hegemons, soft power mediators and large UN missions) in four countries: Cambodia (Howe), Solomon Islands (Hobbis), Sri Lanka (Klem) and Timor Leste (Smith). The roundtable comprises short inputs and comparative panel discussion followed by plenary Q&A.
Cambodia and East Timor are widely viewed as successful examples of UN intervention. This presentation examines areas where they failed, including negative long-term impacts on post-UN governance, while still acknowledging the significant contributions to building a narrowly-defined liberal peace.
Paper long abstract:
The Southeast Asian region is one where the Westphalian state rights of political sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the principle of non-intervention are jealously defended. Indeed, such concepts are embodied in regional organisations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in which non-interference is the cornerstone of the "ASEAN Way". It is also a region, however, where two of the most comprehensive examples of UN "interference" can be found. Cambodia and East Timor are widely viewed as successful examples of UN intervention, peacekeeping, and state-building. They are also promoted as such by the organization itself. There are concerns, however, that the UN administrations overstepped their mandates, focused too greatly upon short-term stability and efficiency in their governance prioritisation, and ignored local voices and interests. This potentially undermined legitimacy, human security considerations, and the enduring governance legacy after withdrawal of UN forces and support. This presentation examines the long-term consequences of UN interventions in Cambodia and East Timor through the competing lenses of liberal and socially-constructed peacebuilding in order to assess the extent to which they can truly be judged successes or failures.
The paper discusses an international organisation's efforts at grassroots government reforms, intended to improve peace. The intervention unintentionally created new sites of contestation and resistance in a fragile political environment, with both positive and negative effects on peacebuilding.
Paper long abstract:
Recent peacebuilding literature critiques the role of external peace building processes, and advocates instead for more space for grassroots mechanisms. It is argued that such mechanisms provide more ownership and agency to 'local' actors thereby producing a more resilient peace. But what happens when international actors try to influence peacebuilding efforts to be more 'local', by directly intervening in grassroots politics and governance?
This paper discusses a case study of how an international organisation funded a local government reform agenda, with the intention of building better "bottom-up" governance in post-war rural Timor Leste. By funding and training village leaders, and encouraging grassroots resistance to a top-down government, multiple tensions were unleashed: who was the 'local', what was a valid 'local' agenda, and for whom? This new local governance reform programme meant villages became a renewed site of contestation and resistance in an already fragile and fraught political environment, where a central government simultaneously attempted to establish political order.
The paper discusses how local peacebuilding programmes in post-war contexts - like Timor-Leste's - are not necessarily productive of more sustainable peacebuilding, but may instead generate more disruption. The paper argues that these disruptive effects of 'local peacebuilding' can have both positive and negative impacts on the quality of governance, democracy and political development in post-war states. This case of a local-level governance and societal intervention in Timor-Leste contains lessons and implications for the theory and practice of "locally" driven peacebuilding elsewhere.
This presentation examines the enduring, often unintended, outcomes of an Australia-led intervention in Solomon Islands. It focuses on three challenges in the peace process: gendered violence and inequalities, political (de-)centralization, and the (re-)establishment of trust in the police force.
Paper long abstract:
The Australia-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI, 2003-2017) was in many ways modelled after the UN intervention in Timor-Leste. Many of the participating peacebuilders having served in both locations and researchers regularly note the general comparability of the two interventions and closely related peacebuilding efforts such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. My presentation takes this comparability as a starting point for discussing the shared but also the diverging experiences with, and legacies of, foreign peacebuilding on the ground. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural and urban Solomon Islands (2014-2015; 2018), particular emphasis will be placed on the enduring and, often unintended, outcomes of the RAMSI intervention. I will focus on three core short- and long-term challenges faced by the peace process: gendered violence and inequalities, political (de-)centralization, and the (re-)establishment of public trust in the police force. Current debates about each of these enduring challenges reveal not only unforeseen consequences of peacebuilders' often well-intentioned efforts but also how the intervention force has, in several cases, been merely supplementary or peripheral to the peace process.
Revisiting the formidable work on the Sri Lankan civil war, my input will discuss the long-term legacies of Indian (i.e. the provincial councils) and Norwegian (i.e. ruptures that contributed to LTTE defeat) peace efforts in Sri Lanka.
Paper long abstract:
As is the case with much of the writing on peace processes, scholarship of Indian and Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka suffers from historical short-sightedness. It is preoccupied with process design details and the question of immediate success and failure. A longer-term perspective sheds a different light.
Scholarship on India's attempt in the 1980s to enforce its 'solution' to the Tamil separatist conflict in Sri Lanka offers meticulous accounts of the dramatic turning points, the blunders and deceptions. An analysis of longer-term legacies suggests that India fundamentally changed the nature of the conflict and left Sri Lanka with an enduring institutional legacy: the Provincial Councils. While these are a sabotaged layer of government, they are foundational to any bargaining process about shared sovereignty in pursuit of a more comprehensive solution to the conflict.
With the Norwegian peace effort in the 2000s there is a similar tendency to over-emphasize the significance of process design and the rush to a judgment of failure. The biggest impact of Norway's effort was arguably not shaped by what they tried to do, but by inadvertent effects. Their effort caused severe rupture in both the Sinhala and the Tamil polity, resulting in a split LTTE and a fiercely nationalist government. This, in turn, helped precipitate the military defeat of insurgency in 2009. Arguably, and somewhat cynically, Norway's biggest contribution to peace was the political rupture that contributed to rebel defeat.
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