A Challenge to the Liberal Peace? European Union Peacebuilding faces China in Nepal

How does China’s rising presence in Nepal affect the European Union’s own peacebuilding efforts in the country? As a global peace and security actor, the EU has followed the liberal peacebuilding model that promotes peace by strengthening democratic institutions. China’s rise as a “pragmatic” peacebuilder is often called non-conducive to this approach, but how this dynamic plays out has rarely been studied with detailed case evidence. We narrow this gap using the case of Nepal. Drawing on interviews conducted between 2015 and 2020, we find that China’s rise has decreased the EU’s leverage in promoting peace in the areas of civil society, human rights, and constitution-building. But some setbacks in the peace process were unrelated to China. Instead, they were also linked to the EU’s own reform neglects and policy differences, and to local perceptions about peacebuilders, showing how external and internal challenges jointly affect the EU’s role as peacebuilder.

Interrogating the Liberal Peace in East Timor

<p>Peace operations from the 1990s have increasingly been driven by the assumption that conflict and social unrest can be ‘solved’ through the establishment and support of liberal structures. Known academically as liberal peace, this approach advocates the liberalisation of politics and economics, and the establishment of rule of law and international human rights norms, claiming such liberal structures offer the necessary foundation to lasting peace. This claim has become unquestioned logic for many of the international bodies and individual actors that participate in the peace industry and has led to a standardised approach to post-conflict situations. However, is this “peacebuilding consensus” justified? Does liberal peace foster sustainable peace? This thesis interrogates the concept and application of liberal peace to assess the extent to which liberal peacebuilding delivers on its claims and provides the foundations of sustainable peace. Due to the enormous size of such a project and the limitations of this thesis, I focus on one case study in my analysis of the liberal peace approach – East Timor. Relying on a single example of peacebuilding allows for a more in depth discussion of efforts, however, it is insufficient to draw broader conclusions about liberal peace. This body of research, therefore, is intended to contribute to existing academic work that evaluates liberal peace. Where this thesis deviates from existing research, however, is in the application of an immanent critique to assess liberal peacebuilding in East Timor...</p>

Interrogating the Liberal Peace in East Timor

<p>Peace operations from the 1990s have increasingly been driven by the assumption that conflict and social unrest can be ‘solved’ through the establishment and support of liberal structures. Known academically as liberal peace, this approach advocates the liberalisation of politics and economics, and the establishment of rule of law and international human rights norms, claiming such liberal structures offer the necessary foundation to lasting peace. This claim has become unquestioned logic for many of the international bodies and individual actors that participate in the peace industry and has led to a standardised approach to post-conflict situations. However, is this “peacebuilding consensus” justified? Does liberal peace foster sustainable peace? This thesis interrogates the concept and application of liberal peace to assess the extent to which liberal peacebuilding delivers on its claims and provides the foundations of sustainable peace. Due to the enormous size of such a project and the limitations of this thesis, I focus on one case study in my analysis of the liberal peace approach – East Timor. Relying on a single example of peacebuilding allows for a more in depth discussion of efforts, however, it is insufficient to draw broader conclusions about liberal peace. This body of research, therefore, is intended to contribute to existing academic work that evaluates liberal peace. Where this thesis deviates from existing research, however, is in the application of an immanent critique to assess liberal peacebuilding in East Timor...</p>

Towards Local Approaches and Inclusive Peacebuilding in South Sudan

The post-liberation peacebuilding in South Sudan, which largely drew from liberal peace theory, was employed between 2005 (after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and before the referendum, secession, and independence in 2011) and December 2013 (when it imploded into a civil conflict) and proved insufficient to sustain the fragile peace that briefly existed after the country’s secession from Sudan. After a protracted conflict lasting almost half a decade and the presence of multiple peace actors, the lack of a comprehensive and coordinated peacebuilding strategy proved detrimental. This failure is partly due to poor coordination between stakeholders and lack of local/domestic legitimacy, leading to insufficient peacebuilding and an aggravation of the 2013 conflict. Over the years, liberal peacebuilding strategies, which emphasize formal institution-building and statebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected environments, continue to produce mixed to poor results and fragile peace. This decline has resulted in the shifting of discourses and operations within peacebuilding, a paradigm shift that pays greater attention to localization and the local context in the conceptualization of peacebuilding objectives and strategies. This transformation promotes local ownership and inclusivity in peace processes and their dividends. The dialogue on inclusive peace has thus gained momentum, bearing a need to fully engage both states and societies in this process. The “local” in peacebuilding forms an important resource when solving root causes of conflicts, as in South Sudan, by improving awareness of the cultural and historical diversity in a given context.

How Africa and China may shape UN peacekeeping beyond the liberal international order

UN peacekeeping became a flagship activity of the liberal international order (LIO) in the post-Cold War era, characterized by globalization, liberal norms and western leadership. Western states' diminished support for LIO UN peacekeeping has left it increasingly open to challenge, but significant changes are only likely if a strong group of states coalesces around an alternative model of UN peacekeeping. This article highlights African actors and China as well positioned to play pivotal roles in such a coalition. African states, who host the preponderance of UN missions and furnish almost half of the UN's uniformed peacekeepers, support globalized UN peacekeeping, show relatively weak support for the most liberal peacebuilding principles and assert the need for African-led solutions to continental crises. China's influence reflects its P5 status, financial and personnel contributions to UN peacekeeping and engagement with regional actors, notably in Africa. Aspiring to global leadership and a ‘new world order’, China endorses globalized UN peacekeeping but proposes a non-liberal (and non-western led) notion of ‘developmental peace’ to guide it. The complementarities between African and Chinese priorities raise the possibility of a profound challenge to LIO peacekeeping. Rather than heralding deglobalization, however, this challenge illustrates that post-LIO international institutions may instead be characterized by deliberalization and dewesternization.

Peacebuilding with “Chinese Characteristics”? Insights from China's Engagement in Myanmar's Peace Process

The unpreceded rise of China, amid the decline of the Western-led liberal world order, has brought questions about how China will engage with the various manifestations of that world order, including human rights, trade, and global peace and security regimes. Through the empirical example of Chinese engagement in Myanmar, this article offers an inductive analysis of China's engagement in the field of “peacebuilding”: a prominent manifestation of the liberal world order in post-conflict states. In doing so, the article first argues that China speaks a distinct vernacular of peace, which is characterized by five core features: a focus on stability, prioritisation of development, conditional adherence to state-centricity, prioritization of regional actors in the making of peace, and an aversion to templates and policies for engaging in peace processes. Secondly, the article also highlights that in deploying these features, Chinese engagement in conflict management in Myanmar not only generates tensions between the various features, but is also seen to overlook local needs, bolster elite control of the state, discount the political context of peace processes, and indeed fluctuate in accordance with Chinese strategic and economic interests: all issues that resonate with the dominant critique of liberal peacebuilding projects. In proffering these arguments, the article cautions that as the Chinese approach to peacebuilding matures and strengthens, the ironing out of these contradictions is likely to be challenging.

Norm Contestation and Normative Transformation in Global Peacebuilding Order(s): The Cases of China, Japan, and Russia

Focusing on the disconnect between mainstream “liberal” peacebuilding and the discourses and practices of “new” and “alternative” peacebuilding actors, this article develops a nonbinary approach that goes beyond norm localization to capture the ways in which major powers influence the nature, content, and direction of normative change. Within the context of their bilateral and multilateral contributions to the “global peacebuilding order,” what forms and types of interventions are conceived by these actors as peacebuilding? How, in turn, has the substantive content of their peacebuilding practices (re)shaped norms and narratives in international peacebuilding efforts? Based on extensive empirical research of the peacebuilding policies and activities of China, Japan, and Russia, this article analyzes the way in which these “top-top” dynamics between norms embedded in the liberal narrative and major powers with competing visions can influence peacebuilding as practiced and pursued in host states. In doing so, it brings together research on global norms and peacebuilding studies and offers a simple yet analytically powerful tool to better understand the evolution of global peacebuilding order(s) and the role of rising powers in (re)shaping global governance.

Peace after Revolutions

This chapter investigates how liberal peacebuilding has responded to and intervened in the revolutionary processes that unfolded in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. In particular, it focuses on the tensions between the liberal peace’s orthodox and emancipatory strands by asking: Which role has liberal peacebuilding been playing in the postuprising period? Does it help or hinder revolutionary agency in the Arab region? By trying to understand different types of continuous revolutionary agency (here called “everyday state formation”), the chapter aims to close a gap in peace and conflict studies’ local turn. It argues that the disjunctures between revolutionary agency and liberal peacebuilding interventions run so deep in some areas that the latter risk appearing as counterrevolutionary practices.