Critical Theory Versus Peacebuilding

For your consideration: a couple of interesting cards we’ve found that support an anti-imperialism-based affirmative.

First, the problem-solving approach of current peace building efforts takes the world as they find it. The neg’s appeal to pragmatism inhibits a larger reconstructive agenda that challenges current notions of common sense and prioritizes the listening to the dispossessed.

BELLAMY, Pf of Peace & Conflict Studies @ Queensland and WILLIAMS, Pf of Security Studies @ Birmingham, 2004 (Alex J. and Paul, International Peacekeeping, Spring, Vol.11, No.1, Spring)

Problem solving theory takes the world as it finds it and aims to make the relationships and institutions found therein work smoothly by dealing with particular sources of trouble. As we discuss in greater detail in the concluding essay, such theories are far from socially or politically redundant but must be seen as limited in their perspective and as identifying and dealing with problems in a particular manner. In this collection, several contributors argue that the theory and practice of peace operations and conflict resolution have been shaped by a problem-solving epistemology. This has resulted in managerialist solutions based upon the prevailing definitions of common sense that privilege particular types of knowledge and experiences as relevant, and draw spatial and temporal limits around the remit of peace operations. Although such approaches may mitigate particular violent conflicts they do not challenge or seriously reflect upon the global structures that contribute to human suffering and, sometimes, violent conflict in the first place. Moreover, problem-solving approaches define certain forms of action as relevant, identify particular lines of causality and render certain practices legitimate at the expense of others.

Critical theory on the other hand aims to reflect upon the characteristics and structures of the prevailing world order and asks how that order came about. Critical knowledge calls into question existing institutions and social power relations by enquiring into their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing. In relation to peace operations, a critical approach seeks to investigate who benefits from certain types of practices, what linkages exist between local actors and global structures, and why certain voices and experiences are marginalized in policy debates.24

But critical theory is not solely concerned with developing critiques of past and present thought and action. It is also fundamentally concerned with proposing reconstructive agendas based on possibilities immanent within the current global order. The first step in any reconstructive agenda, however, is to challenge prevailing conceptions of common sense and listen to what Edward Said called ‘the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless’.25 Reflecting upon the epistemological assumptions behind current peace operations is thus a necessary part of thinking anew.

Second, condition CPs are a form of the neoliberalist urge to engineer. We need to accept the defeat of peacebuilding.

PUGH, Director of the Plymouth International Studies Centre, 2000
(Michael C., Regeneration of War-Torn Societies)

Clearly, however, a conceptual emphasis on process may neglect outcomes. Events may inexplicably overturn peacebuilding, or reveal the transformation as cosmetic. Indeed, processes of democratisation, for example, can contribute to the outbreak of violent conflict.1 And, as Wayne Nafziger and others suggest, the resources brought to bear on regeneration can restore the kind of neo-liberal development policies that perhaps contributed to the conflict in the first place.2 The difficulty is that judging outcomes is bound to be elusive, since 'success' can be neither absolute nor readily measured. Benchmarks, such as 'fulfilling a mandate', are subject to interpretation and the quality of success is more often a matter of propaganda than substance. From a historical perspective, it is even doubtful whether one can determine a meaningful timescale to judge outcomes, as suggested by the question: 'was the Bolshevik Revolution a success?'. The more meaningful difficulty may be in recognising flaws in peacebuilding and adjusting policies accordingly – including, perhaps, accepting defeat. In practice, actors are inclined, quite reasonably, to test indicators on an incremental and comparative basis: 'have incidents of political violence declined since last week/year?', 'how many people accept what we are doing?' and so forth. Another problem, then, is for participants to gain some idea of the strategic picture and to avoid getting hooked into short-term, sectoral projects divorced from, and perhaps counteracting, other peacebuilding efforts. Interaction at the grassroots cannot replace top-down initiatives since, as Peirce and Stubbs argue in chapter 9, international agencies can more readily exert strategic influence at national and international levels. However, issues of benchmarking, impact assessment and disparate projects are not the only, or even major, dilemmas to be recognised.

The conceptual baggage of peacebuilding has included the assumption that external actors wield the power and moral authority to bring about the peaceful change that communities have so signally failed to do. Indeed, for local actors, the resort to violence was certainly regarded as an essential process to secure a change in their destiny. If international diplomacy had failed to prevent the onset of conflict, then, so the presumption follows, external actors should at least make concerted efforts to pick up the pieces and regenerate societies in ways that will inhibit relapses into violence. These hubristic assumptions are not sufficient, however, to endow external actors with superior techniques for dealing with peaceful change. Nor does the evident destruction and dislocation they confront represent a tabula rasa on which external scribes can write a peaceful future. External involvement in peacebuilding seems to figure, however, as an 'urge to engineer', whether at international or community levels. It is based on technical fixes in the form of disarmament, law and order programmes, 'hard' reconstruction projects, refugee returns and elections. Such an approach is less concerned to interact with local norms and hegemonic relationships at the grassroots, than to produce inventories of measurable outputs or, at a strategic level, to make way for integration of war-torn societies in the world economy. It promotes a pattern of development that is determined by dominant democratic and neo-liberal, capitalist ideology.3

A veritable industry involving international institutions, regional organisations and NGOs for integrating lives and livelihoods in societies emerging from civil war into relative peace has evolved. This is not necessarily a manifestation of direct control. On the contrary, state policy-makers that accept the responsibilities of intervention are reluctant to get trapped in recurrent cycles of violence and foreign commitment of the kind that bedevilled Somalia and Angola. Nor has the institutionalisation of peacebuilding been other than sporadic. It grew reactively from the enterprises and debates that marked an evolution of aid intervention and peacekeeping in the 1990s.

Humanitarian aid and military peacekeeping were not enough. They did not address the root causes of conflict or secure social development beyond emergencies.