Introduction
The liberal peace project is in disarray, if not in crisis. Many of its supporters correctly argue, usually via quantative methodologies, that the numbers of inter-state and civil wars have reduced in the last ten years or so, as have the number of deaths (perhaps with the exception of the heavily disputed figures of civilian deaths for the Iraq war). The numbers of durable negotiated settlements also appear to have increased.Footnote 1 This is significant but it also masks a widespread, local dissatisfaction with what the liberal peace actually represents for its subjects in post-violence environments. This is very evident in local and qualitative, social, economic, and political terms, as much contemporary, methodologically and theoretically sophisticated and locally grounded research now illustrates.Footnote 2 This contradicts the orthodox, institutional and elite level, state-based approaches often deployed, and reflects the events that have unfolded in situations as diverse as East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, or Cambodia.Footnote 3
In many post-violence environments local perceptions of the liberal peace project and its statebuilding focus indicate it to be ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive towards its subjects. Indeed, it may even have incited resistance, reflecting the common emergence of a local post-colonial narrative about liberal peacebuilding's endorsement of an international-local relationship, configured as managers and subjects. So far the liberal peace project has not been subject to a concerted ethical consideration over the last two decades.Footnote 4 Instead, its legitimacy tends to rest on past glories or on the praxis of already peaceful liberal polities.
This article argues that an ethical reading of the liberal peace exposes its significant flaws and opens up the need for a pluralist reflection on who peace is for, and what it means. This enables an exploration of the everyday nature of any sustainable peace – perhaps focused on a culturally appropriate form of individual or community life and care. This points either to the need for a form of liberal peace with a broader social contract, or more ambitiously, one that transcends liberal and neoliberal, Western biases. These might aim at producing an emancipatory, empathetic, everyday politics embodied in governance frameworks introduced in the name of peace in post-conflict situations. First, this article investigates the liberal peace and potential ethical issues therein. Then it examines interdisciplinary and IR literatures that offer an engagement with the everyday via critical research agendas for peace. Finally, it turns to a discussion of the parameters implied by an everyday form of peace, its possibly post-liberal and critical policymaking implications.
The ethics of the disciplinary liberal peace
The liberal peace framework rests upon conceptions of liberal-internationalist thought, on liberal-institutionalism, on the democratic peace hypothesis and free trade, on international law, and the balance between individual freedoms and regulation. These are embedded in liberal thinking and in the state, via a liberal social contract. It draws heavily on the Western philosophical and political debates that emerged from the writings of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Abbe St Pierre, Kant, Rousseau, Locke, Paine, Penn, Cobden, Mill, Bentham, and Grotius, among others, in the context of cycles of war, diplomacy, state-building, imperialism, and colonialism.Footnote 5 In academic and policy writings related to peacebuilding and statebuilding, it is normally taken to signify in Wilsonian termsFootnote 6 the processes, actors, and ‘technologies’ associated with humanitarian intervention. This is along with security sector reform (and DDR), with institution building, good governance, democratisation, rule of law programming, human rights, reconstruction, development, and free market reform.Footnote 7
There are four main strands of thought contained within the liberal peace framework from which these components are derived. These include the ‘victor's peace’, the ‘institutional peace’, the ‘constitutional peace’, and the ‘civil peace’.Footnote 8 These combine to form the liberal peace model, each contributing to a different area of governance. The liberal peace is differentiated from the liberal democratic peace in that it offers a broader focus, not just on domestic political institutions and their international implications, but on the character of peace in civil and societal, political, economic, and international spheres. This has been the model and loose ‘consensus’ that internationals have attempted to apply in UN peace operations – from Cambodia in the early 1990s to East Timor and Afghanistan more recently – and also via other international and regional organisations since the end of the Cold War, with limited outcomes.Footnote 9 In practice, the first three strands of the liberal peace framework dominate peacebuilding, with a focus on security, institutional and constitutional reform. These dictate the significance of security, as well as international regimes, organisations, and law, and democracy, the rule of law, human rights and the free market. Liberalism is understood to be aspirational and the liberal peace is always framed by the state and the market.
The civil peace is, however, a key part of this agenda as it supports the liberal peace's emancipatory claims and legitimacy, being derived from local agency as well as international liberal norms. The civil peace is derived from the phenomena of direct action, of citizen advocacy and mobilisation, and from the attainment or defence of basic human rights and values. Within the liberal peace context it indicates individual agency within an international organisation, agency, or NGO context or within the market, rather than community agency, which it itself is deemed to carry problematic cultural baggage. It also represents and underlines the old contractual dilemmas between the state and the citizen, of self-government, self-determination, and pluralism.
These intellectual strands offer different levels of engagement with the ‘everyday’ and with ‘care’.Footnote 10 They indicate conservative, orthodox, and emancipatory graduations of the liberal peace. The conservative graduation offers basic security while the emancipatory graduation offers social transformation. The conservative graduation of the liberal peace is associated with top down and heavily externalised approaches to peacebuilding. These have been widely accepted as a transitional necessity in most post-war environments. Illiberal transitions towards liberal institution building are key to this approachFootnote 11 (as have been seen in different phases in Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq). Conservative graduations of the liberal peace offer basic everyday security but little care.
The orthodox graduation of the liberal peace focuses on top-down institution building. Bottom up approaches engaging with civil society are relatively widespread, but international actors focus on the development of the liberal state, its institutions, and a neoliberal economy. This is rights-based and developed through conditionality. It tends to be justified by the argument that security, order, and institutions always come first. These are derived from the praxis of internationals not locals, for whom ownership of the liberal peace is eventually envisaged.Footnote 12 This model is exemplified by the UN family's practices of peacebuilding and governance reform, which started at the end of the Cold War and in particular culminated in the Kosovo mission and UN sovereignty for a time over East Timor. The orthodox graduation offers significantly more engagement with its subjects over a broader range of issues denoting potential for an everyday peace. Assuming security matters have been assuaged by this point, this establishes institutions that provide care, relating to governance and public services but within the confines dictated by neoliberal marketisation.
The next graduation represents a more critical form of the liberal peace. This emancipatory model is concerned with needs as well as rights (and a blurring of the line between these categories), and a much closer relationship of custodians with local ownership. This is a bottom up approach with a strong concern for social welfare and justice. It equates to the civil peace and generally is not state-led but shaped by NGOs, trade unions, advocacy and social movements. Here the everyday and care becomes major concerns of peacebuilding, though this treads a fine line between providing what external actors believe to be suitable versions of care according to their external understandings of the everyday, and what recipients may want. However, this comes closest to engaging with the notion of an everyday ethic of peace within the liberal peace framework.
The liberal peace framework and its graduations converge on a notion of peace-as-governance.Footnote 13 This is both biopolitical and governmentalising in the Foucaultian sense of these terms, reordering state and society via the alphabet soup of agencies, organisations, and institutions. The framework relies on the concepts of territorial statehood and sovereignty, and on dominant states in the international community. These assume that the epistemology, ontology, and methods associated with the liberal peace are on ethically firm ground. Its parameters suggest an end to violence and, through the liberal state formulation, an everyday form of peace, which engages with the local, its cultural dynamics, welfare needs, and environment. Thus, it leads to the social contract inherent in a liberal state. This has been extended into a claimed automatically ethical blueprint for its transferral to non-Western, non-liberal polities. Yet, it is also a disciplinary framework that often rests on coercion, a lack of consent, conditionality, and the prioritisation of elites over the interests of the many. As such criticisms emerged in the 1990s, the more recent ‘light footprint’ approach in Afghanistan was interpreted as a scaling back of the governmental claims of the liberal peace, but similar values remain in the internationals' approach even there.Footnote 14
The ethics of liberalism suggests the ‘good life’ in which individual privileges denote freedom to act politically, economically and socially, within a liberal governance framework which constitutionally guarantees human rights. Yet, the governmental and institutional imbalance in the very highly specialised context of post-conflict states undermines this ethic of freedom, and often stifles local voices and their concerns about peace.Footnote 15 Many of the subjects of recent statebuilding experiments regard the liberal peace as an ideology that degrades into violence because its universal aspirations are not mirrored on the ground.Footnote 16 This results in the re-securitisation of the post-conflict liberal state whereby politics is deemed to start from security and institutions, rather than from individual agency, social justice, community and everyday life. Thus, the politics of the liberal peace are perceived to represent the maintenance of existing normative and political hierarchies at the local, national, and global levels. This makes its subjects complicit in anti-democratic and anti-self-determination processes. They are tied to the state and to institutions that do not represent the local as either a civil society or as an everyday context.Footnote 17
This is particularly exaggerated in the liberal peace's most conservative, militarised forms – as praxis in Afghanistan or Iraq illustrates. It is also the case to some degree even in its orthodox, more institutionalised forms as in Kosovo, East Timor, or Bosnia.Footnote 18 In extreme cases it is now associated with ‘liberal war’.Footnote 19 Its post-Cold War moral capital, based upon its emancipatory claims, has been squandered as a result, and its basic goal of a liberal social contract undermined. Since 9/11 attention has been diverted into other areas and many, perhaps promising peace processes, have regressed. This has also diverted attention away from a search for alternatives, for hybrid forms of peace, and for empathetic strategies through which the liberal blueprint for peace that has loosely emerged might coexist with alternatives.Footnote 20 This is not to argue, as Barnett and Zuercher have already shown, that ‘cooptive peacebuilding’ (where international normative projection and conditionality and local elite requirements for survival produce an uneasy local compromise)Footnote 21 is without benefit, especially compared to the often violent alternatives, but this should not lead to complacency with respect to the critical development of the field and praxis.
Developing an ethical account of the liberal peace
Such a search, via critical research agendas for peaceFootnote 22 termed here eirenist, indicates the need for an ethical re-evaluation of the liberal peace.Footnote 23 ‘Eirenism’ was used by Erasmus as a call against religious chauvinism after the Reformation.Footnote 24 In a modern context it provides a lens through which one can evaluate the claims, apparent or hidden of a particular epistemology, concept, theory, method, or ideology. The failure to apply such a tool has led liberal peacebuilding approaches into a paradoxical situation. They have reinstated social and economic class systems, undermined democracy, and caused downward social mobility (as explained in the examples of East Timor and Afghanistan below). Yet, liberal peace's Renaissance and Enlightenment underpinnings make clear that the states-system of territorial sovereignty, the approximation of democracy, of human rights and free trade, also carries a humanist concern with social justice and wide-ranging pluralism (often to be guaranteed by an international organisation).Footnote 25 Ironically, this is where its failings are most obvious. Its focus has remained on security and institutions, rather than developing an engagement with the everyday life of citizens. It has sometimes been built on force rather than consent, and more often conditionality, and it has failed to recognise local cultural norms and traditions. It has created a ‘virtual peace’ in its many theatres.Footnote 26 This is not to say that narrow security issues have not been somewhat assuaged and that this has not been without benefit, of course.
Experience and data from a range of UN and UNDP thematic or country focused reports has shown liberal peacebuilding to have less impact on everyday life than is often claimed by its institutional proponents, the donor and development communities, and particularly the International Financial Institutions. One example among many can be found in the context of East Timor after the crisis of 2006. A UN report conceded that despite a lengthy and costly UN involvement there since 1999:
[…] poverty and its associated deprivations including high urban unemployment and the absence of any prospect of meaningful involvement and employment opportunities in the foreseeable future, especially for young people have also contributed to the crisis.Footnote 27
Yet there is little sense of a need to reflect on the underlying liberal peace paradigm that allowed a ‘peace’ to be built in East Timor which ignored these issues. In a more recent example, a report on Afghanistan by the UN Secretary General ignored any direct engagement with such issues in favour of traditional political and security concerns, with the exception of one telling reference:
The failure of development actors to ensure that quieter provinces in the north and west receive a tangible peace dividend has played into the latent north-south fault line within Afghanistan […]Footnote 28
This report's later sections on development, human rights, and humanitarian issues or human security, focus on orthodox issues relating to institution-building or ‘emergency’ issues.Footnote 29 In the conclusion to the report the full litany of liberal peacebuilding discourse is repeated in seeming ignorance of the lessons of East Timor, or indeed of Afghanistan itself. Accordingly, the transition in Afghanistan is under ‘[…] increasing strain owing to insurgency, weak governance and the narco-economy’. The government needs to ‘[…] restore confidence to the population in tangible ways’ but this is conceptualised as being derived from:
[…] stronger leadership from the Government, greater donor coherence – including improved coordination between the military and civilian international engagement in Afghanistan – and a strong commitment from neighbouring countries, [without which] many of the security, institution-building and development gains made since the Bonn Conference may yet stall or even be reversed.Footnote 30
This list of priorities, focusing on security, terrorism, narcotics, and then the orthodoxy of the liberal peace as a subsequent priority (governance, development, reconciliation, and human rights abuses in this order) effectively places a local peace dividend for communities and individuals as a distant and lesser priority, and disconnects its importance from the conduct of democratic politics and the legitimacy of the state.Footnote 31 This is because the liberal peace's primary goal in its intervention into the local or domestic is actually on an international order between sovereign states. This is to be achieved ideally through the construction of a liberal social contract to produce domestic and international order. In practice, what has been achieved in post-conflict environments are the shells of liberal states, reproducing international order, but achieving a virtual peace in a domestic context – at least in the short to medium term, as the examples above, and of Cambodia and Bosnia aptly illustrate.
The ethical and policy metanarratives about liberal peace derive from the founding myths of Westphalia, its state-centric elitism, its focus on territorial boundaries and sovereignty, and its disciplinary nature. Walker has described this as a ‘moment of exclusion’.Footnote 32 The concept of peace has generally been subject to utopian or dystopian assumptions, and the notion of the liberal peace has emerged as an ‘auto-ambivalent’ compromise.Footnote 33 It has been imbued with a specific set of interests, partly through the decontextualisation of classical political theory to support inherency arguments about conflict, or confirm liberal norms of market-democracy, and propensity to reshape rather than engage with non-liberal others. This also validates territorial state sovereignty and a social contract skewed in favour of the state, free markets, and the eradication of the indigenous or locally more authentic (often through property rights),Footnote 34 among other tendencies.Footnote 35 This has been used to promote a culture of governmental and securitised institutionalism rather than a broad peace (often by rejecting Kant's peace federation or by confirming territorial sovereignty),Footnote 36rather than promoting an everyday peace.Footnote 37 It has supported the classical liberal view that liberal states and peoples are effectively superior in rights and status to others, and extended these arguments to allow for the justification of direct or subtle forms of colonialism, interventionism, and local depoliticisation to occur.Footnote 38 A civil and emancipatory peace might arise through liberalism, as Foucault argued, but more often it leads to violence of a structural or direct nature in non-liberal contexts.Footnote 39 In practice it also may have negative effects on self-determination and agency.Footnote 40
In this context an ethical evaluation of the liberal peace underlines its tendency to be flimsy, denying self-determination and self-government, and depoliticising. This is as opposed to the potential of peace being empathetic, emancipatory, and resting upon an ontological agreement and hybridity (meaning the development of an ontology that is not exclusive but is open to difference).Footnote 41 These latter qualities imply that the agents and recipients of the liberal peace are able to relate to each other on an everyday, human level, rather merely through problem-solving institutional frameworks that dictate or negate lived experience. They indicate the need for a deep negotiation of peace even by the agents of the liberal model, and for a willingness to see the Western liberal model itself modified by its engagement with its own ‘others’ – meaning conflict and post-conflict, especially non-Western, non-liberal, and ‘developmental’, polities.
What has emerged from the more critical literatures on peacebuilding is a suggestion that an ethical reading of peacebuilding requires a willingness to recognise local ownership, human rights, culture, social and grass roots resources for self-government as significant even in relation to the priorities of military or institutional capacities and international order. This infers an engagement with the everyday, to provide care, to empathise, and to enable emancipation.Footnote 42 These objectives are integral to the liberal peace in theory, but in practice asymmetries inherent its top-down nature, elite governance and complicity with local elites are more visible. The position that emerges from the above argument enables an investigation of modifications to the liberal peace without necessarily calling for its abandonment (though post-structural work indicates continuing dissatisfaction with the inherent biases of even a moderated liberal form of peacebuilding).
However, other serious issues arise with any attempt to retain, while modifying, the core of liberal peacebuilding. The neoliberal cooption of the liberal peace, its lack of social welfare frameworks and failure to mediate cultural difference, and tendency towards assimilation rather than local cultural engagement, means that it is often exceptionally abrasive when transplanted, as recent experience in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrates. In addition, there is a serious issue with its incapacity for environmentally sensitive engagement. It might be said that the conservative end of the liberal peace spectrum, as with liberal imperialism, has become an exercise in hubris for the internationals, Western states, donors, agencies and NGOs that propagate it, mainly because it lacks these sensitivities. Ethically, moving beyond these limitations would amount to an ontological commitment to care for others in their everyday contexts, based upon empathy, respect and the recognition of difference. This commitment to care has instead been displaced by a parsimonious orthodoxy that offers its participants the unproblematic right of interpreting and making policy for unknowable others, normally defined as states rather than people or communities. This is why the liberal peace is mainly focused on an international or regional peace, rather than an everyday form of peace.
From a liberal reformist perspective, what needs to be considered is how to identify the rights, resources, identity, welfare, cultural disposition, and ontological hybridity that would make liberal states, institutionalism, and governance viable in everyday liberal and non-liberal contexts. This requires an engagement with not just the currently fashionable and controversial issues of local ownership or local participation, but the far deeper ‘local-local’ (that is, not merely a veneer of internationally sponsored local actors and NGOs constituting a ‘civil’ as opposed to ‘uncivil’ society), which allows for genuine self-government, self-determination, democracy and human rights.
As Walker has argued, IR theory fails when it attempts to present a truth as anything other than a ‘historically specific spatial ontology’.Footnote 43 The paradox of thinking about peace in contemporary conflict is that governance and statebuilding require an instrumentalist need for theory and practice to offer progress from a war system to peace system in advance of its engagement with a specific conflict context. This means that great care must be taken to separate this intention with a historical or ideological blueprint approach to peace that is then transplanted into conflict zones.Footnote 44 This raises the broader question of how developing an account of peace can engage with the other without falling into an Orientalist and coercive syndrome, disregarding local context. Thus ‘peace’ as a concept offers a contradiction – it requires a method, ontology, and epistemology which is negotiated locally, but prompted externally by agents who must engage with the other, but cannot know one another a priori (at least in a short time and at the depth of detail required for such ambitious relationships). Indeed, it may well be that the Enlightenment derived discourse of liberal peace is not sophisticated enough for contemporary ethical requirements for a sustainable peace.
This does not mean that the elements of the liberal peace may not be broadly applicable, but that the assumption that they are should not be made a priori. The negotiation of a single and universal concept of peace may be a worthy goal but it also may be as much a chimera as Einstein's ‘unified theory’. A permanent modernity of the post-civil war environment that Hobbes was familiar with would not be an acceptable peace to many today. Neither would a hegemonic peace that was predetermined, equally permanent, and not reflective of the myriad of groups, interests, cultures, and dimensions of the local, or of international relations. Yet, the liberal peace has become an intervention in local discussions about peace, often replacing them entirely with the views of a transnational peacebuilding class and the institutions they are part of. This is indicative of a deeper contest over interpreting and governing the other.Footnote 45 The liberal peace is predicated upon the disciplinary enterprise of constructing rights for its epistemic communities of policymakers, analysts, academics, officials, and other personnel, to interpret and make policy on their behalf. Much of this move has been predicated upon the desire of this community to emancipate the other from war, violence, and unstable political, social and economic structures, to set an example, as well as to govern.Footnote 46 The orthodoxy has been to accept mainly rationalist approaches, and certainly not to question this privilege.Footnote 47 Opening up this question – as has already occurred in some disciplines such as anthropologyFootnote 48 – illustrates how ethical evaluations indicate and underline the problem of IR as a potentially ‘orientalist’ discipline, and its main methodological problems in dealing with others, difference, and the everyday. A growing of literature points to the problems of liberalism in this context.Footnote 49
If the liberal peace is to be salvaged it would have to offer a more pluralist debate on its own alternatives, a via media between itself and them, and would also have to offer a technology of governance that is broadly representative of all actors at multiple levels, public and private, gendered and aged, and of multiple identities. This would mean it would adopt a hybrid localised identity to counterbalance its global or governmental metanarrative of cosmopolitanism, with commensurate implications for its claimed boundaries, rules, rights, freedoms, and norms. This might mean it would accrue more everyday legitimacy, which might be then formalised in governmental, institutional or constitutional structures and legal frameworks, which would rest primarily upon a ‘new’ social contract. This legitimacy would rest upon its provision of social, cultural, economic and political resources sufficient to meet the demands made upon it by its local, everyday, constituencies and an international community of which they should be a stakeholder. It would also rest upon an international social contract, while not displacing indigenous legitimacy with preponderant institutions that are inflexible and actually obscure the local and the everyday. But such a framework should not then be set in stone, but instead must be seen as an evolving form, focusing on an everyday peace, and the necessary emancipatory and empathetic structures and institutions this may require.
The difficulty with this ethical repositioning of the liberal peace is that it no longer represents the ‘really-existing’ liberal peace in contemporary post-conflict environments, which have come to rest upon ‘biopolitics’, the ‘administration of life’, and ‘governmentality’.Footnote 50 This points to the problems inherent in universal frameworks for peace, engaging with others while avoiding orientalism, neocolonialism, or an over-reliance on predatory institutional frameworks at the expense of everyday life. Thus, liberal peacebuilding international security, elevates elites and institutions over societies and everyday life. This failure is often equated by its recipients with colonialism or hegemony, and identified as representative of dominant Western culture and ideology. A broader social justice is perceived to be absent.Footnote 51 It is unable to communicate across cultures, rests upon a legalistic framework, disassociates law from local norms, attempts to preserve the pre-existing Western liberal order, and claims a problematic universality.Footnote 52 As a result of it fails often to provide even ‘thin recognition’ let alone mutual consent. What is missing is dialogue and communication – indeed a discourse ethic of empathetic self-emancipation in an everyday context. The liberal concept of ‘toleration’ over difference, as the word implies, is too limited to produce pluralism or equitable hybridity, and liberalism's link with sovereignty and the state, as well as its homogenising tendencies provide other constraints. Issues such as welfare and culture are ignored as a result, meaning that the liberal peace is not an everyday peace.
Because of its ethical ambitions of enabling emancipation after achieving security and building institutions, the liberal peace is increasingly seen as caught up in a securitised and governmental praxis, being ideological, and deploying a meta-narrative which provokes resistance amongst what it portrays as powerless local subjects.Footnote 53 This post-colonial critique doubts the claims of the emancipatory graduation of liberal peace, but rather sees its use as legitimating its conservative and orthodox graduations. This challenges the liberal peace's implied claim that progress from a conservative version, based upon military and diplomatic processes (equated with a negative peace), to an orthodox liberal statebuilding process and then to an emancipatory version of the liberal peace (positive peace) will occur. The liberal social contract endeavours to accrue legitimacy for the regulatory institutions of governance required by offering mainly political rights to individuals as sufficient enticement for them to acquiesce to the liberal state project. This works on the assumption that the freedoms derived from political rights are more significant than need or material gain for individuals in post-conflict situations. The emancipatory graduation of liberal peace does offer the potential for reflection on the ethical implications of this but it is in this top-down, institutional format, that liberal peacebuilding fails to adequately consider the requirements for a social contract beyond political rights for grass-roots actors in their everyday context. As a result their consent is often lacking and the legitimacy of the liberal peacebuilding project is undermined. This eirenist reading points to a need to return the everyday to the praxis of emancipation.
First there must be a response to the moral hazards of liberal peacebuilding, which lies in its reflection of the ‘coldness’ (that is, its concern with elites and states rather than society, community, and everyday experience) of just war thinking, democratic and market oriented institutionalism, and justice oriented, mainly Western ontologies – from which arise its related epistemology and methodologies. These sacrifice the local and short term welfare and care of peoples according to institutionalised modes of political, social, and economic governance, some of which work in developing a social contract while others do not. This fails to develop engagement with everyday life, local culture, identity, and the emotional and psychological issues arising in post-conflict situations. In fact, in this enormous area of societal issues, the liberal peace offers little, because it is mainly aimed at the frameworks arising from remedying inter-state conflict, rather than the socio-political dynamics of any breakdown into conflict. This reflects the fact that liberal peacebuilding itself is an institutional framework derived from the logic of stabilising the Westphalian system and its positivist ontologies of security and strategy.
A post liberal peace
As the liberal peace is on uncertain ground what is needed is the addition of an eirenist and repositioning of this project. An eirenist perspective is not aimed at producing an ‘eirenology’, but at opening up a discussion of what form of peace is inferred by its peacebuilding praxis. The following section offers some thoughts on a post-liberal peace, which are perhaps a more suitable response to the sorts of critiques outlined above.
A more radical post-liberal peace lies ‘beyond Westphalia’Footnote 54 and in a new ‘moment of inclusion’ and its related ethical practices. This reflects and extends the historical expansion of the concept of peace that has occurred, from the medieval ‘Christian peace’, the Renaissance humanist and ‘non-infidel’ peace, to the utilitarian peace, the peace based on reason, and then later concerns with disarmament, international organisation, civil society, labour movements, and social transformation.Footnote 55 The interdisciplinary agenda dictated by an ethical critique of the liberal peace probably cannot develop while clinging to notions of a territorially bounded, sovereign and state-centric international space. The everyday, society, and community are distant to such discussions.
This is not to foreground a search for a new meta-narrative of peace. Plant warns that most critical and ‘revolutionary’ thinking displays a concern with new meta-narratives based upon a ‘[…] nostalgia for truth, meaning, immediacy, and liberation’.Footnote 56 These are often depoliticising, as with the contemporary praxis of the liberal peace. Instead, this approach highlights the importance of local voices and narratives (not just local elites), and enables self-government, self-determination, empathy, care, and an understanding of cultural dynamics, contained within the everyday. In these senses, developing a more sophisticated understanding of peace connected to the liberal universal project, or with multiple and hybrid forms of peace, can be connected to an excavation of the model self and the states of exception that might impact upon it, rather than merely a focus on the state as its organising principle.Footnote 57 This is not to say that the regulation of boundaries, the construction of viable states, and the modern state system's location of the self is not significant, but to offer another, significant location of forms of peace. Of course, it should be acknowledged that the everyday and the local are ‘fuzzy’ concepts, requiring more research in order to open up their more critical understandings of peace.
There are a range of dynamics stemming from this attempt to respond to the ethical issues that the praxis of the contemporary liberal peace has given rise to, and to begin imagining the modifications that this may involve. More radically, it raises the question of where alternatives to the liberal peace agenda may be derived from, and what they may entail. In this respect, areas such as gender can be read as requiring a radical restructuring of representation across political, social, professional, and economic spheres, and within the public-private/agency-structure and care debates. Similarly, environmental debates generally point to the non sustainability of many political, economic, and social practices that lead to the consumption of non-renewable resources, irreversible environmental harm, and reflect an unequal demography of consumption. Focusing on marginalised actors such as children raises the question of their agency within the broader adult dominated structures of IR, and whether and how they can be represented. The problem of poverty has of course long been linked to a tendency for violence, relative-deprivation, and frustration- aggression. It also refreshes the debates about whether relative economic equality is a component of peace, whether welfare should be centrally organised, or whether it should be left to markets and individual capacity to remedy. Behind all of this is the lurking question of whether liberal paradigms are able to engage with, and represent equitably non-liberal others – those for which it infers a lesser status.
The incorporation and study of inter-subjective issues has necessitated methodologies that facilitate research on how individuals, societies, and communities operate within this context. For example, the adoption of discourse analysis and ethnography allows for greater, and more culturally appropriate, access to everyday life, and to facilitate a clearer understanding of how institutions and their creation or development affect the individual, communities, and society. Yet, ethnographic methodologies in IR are generally taken to have achieved little more than providing an overview of civil society actors, or how war, conflict, and violence effects individuals and groups, and often research is heavily oriented towards official statistics and reports which themselves tend to be compiled via mainstream statistical approaches (often based on very limited local data).Footnote 58 Where ethnography is applied it is often marginal, though the sort of ‘institutional ethnography’ that Escobar has called for is now slightly more common.Footnote 59 Such research may open up a clearer understanding of what motivates individuals and social groups to enter into conflict, criminality, and grey/black markets, or to develop a more harmonious existence with their neighbours. Does this mean the end of liberal institutional governance? This is a provocative question which indicates a need for peacebuilding actors and developed world academies can gain a clearer understanding of the everyday and its dynamics. This requires that local academies and policymakers beyond the already liberal international community are enabled to develop theoretical approaches to understanding their own predicaments and situations, without these being tainted by Western, liberal, and developed world orthodoxies and interests. In other words, to gain an understanding of the ‘indigenous’ and everyday factors for the overall project of building peace, liberal or otherwise, a via media needs to be developed between emergent local knowledge and the orthodoxy of international prescriptions and assumptions about peace.
Using the notion of the everyday might enable a response to the constraints of the liberal peace, but also represents an alternative site of knowledge for peacebuilding. One contribution can be found in the work of de Certeau. He argues that the practices of everyday life are distinctive, repetitive, and unconscious. He focuses on productive and consumptive activities, rather than culture or resistance – two other interpretations of everyday life. For de Certeau, the everyday is about how individuals navigate their way around and try to create space for their own activities while taking into consideration institutions of power.Footnote 60 People are able to adapt and take ownership over structures and institutions so that they begin to reflect their own everyday lives rather than structural attempts at assimilation. This re-appropriation through the everyday then becomes a site of politics and represents a move from subjects to active citizens, from de-politicisation to self-government and self-determination. He outlines strategic and tactical forms of behaviour vis-à-vis the everyday. Institutions operate in a strategic manner to which people adopt tactical responses. A strategy offers a relatively inflexible dominant order which is physically manifest and controls significant material resources. It is thus embedded in a dominant order. However, because the goal of a strategy is maintain itself, this creates the need for individuals to find ways of ‘domesticating’ them, while it causes the strategic actor to need individuals to become predictable, homogenous, and malleable. De Certeau also points out that strategy and tactic (i.e. institution and individual) only have very indirect contact with each other. Effectively, they become distant and engaged in assimilation or resistance. This binary represents politics in this subsequently fragmented terrain. For him, tactics representing the everyday are hindered by hegemonic institutions but are unencumbered by their material weight. Thus, the everyday tactic is more flexible and able to adapt more quickly than centralised strategies and methodologies. They are more personal and invisible to eyes that are attuned to orthodoxies of state and power. The tactical in the everyday is a diffuse form of politics, not institutionalised but able to shape, resist, and choose institutions and strategies.Footnote 61
A post-liberal agenda entails a praxis that would enable political, social, and economic organisations and institutions to represent and respect the communities they are effectively in a contractual relationship. At the same time this would seek to enable the tactical flexibility de Certeau outlines. As a consequence, international forms of peacebuilding would be more likely to be participatory, empathetic, locally owned, and self-sustaining, socially, politically, economically, and environmentally speaking. They provide a via media between different identities, and interests. They would also be adaptable to changing circumstances and needs. As far as possible, these interlocking and interrelated versions of peace would also provide justice and equity, and avoid violence both direct and structural. This would either counter-balance or supplant the liberal peace's obsession with hard security, territorial sovereignty and statehood, and institution-building over the everyday. This might, in liberal terms, lead to a modification of current global statebuilding agendas and a refocusing on needs at the civil level, rather than mainly on rights. More likely it would entail an everyday tactic of engagement between liberal states and non-liberal alternatives, or locally imagined polities that provided for political, economic, and social requirements in their immediate context – whereby the strategy approximates the tactic, the institution responds to the characteristics of the local via an ethic of care. It is difficult, from a liberal and critical position, to image this being achieved without some conception of democracy, law, human rights, and development or welfare support. A deeper contextualisation of peace may allow for a hybridised localised and internationalised praxes of peacebuilding to emerge that are more locally sustainable, resilient, and legitimate than what has been the result of the recently evolved liberal peacebuilding/statebuilding praxis. There are already indications of these opportunities in the evolving systems of peace – some of which are modifications to, or alternatives to, the liberal peace. This is not to supplant the already existing research agendas dealing with everyday issues such as neo-patrimonialism, rent seeking, spoilers, criminality, militias, or corruption, but to provide a balance to the general tendency to make essential the mainly contractual or institutionalised rights based responses to these, which then spill over into the core everyday life in its ‘civil’ rather than ‘uncivil’ senses.
The hybrid outlined above necessitates the development of a system that protects difference and allows for exchange and cooperation in a way in which all its participants believe is beneficial for their needs, to define themselves and cooperate with others.Footnote 62 This is a difficult a problem as it involves mediating relations between differently bounded and comprised units subscribing to different forms of peace. It signifies that it is unlikely that a universal form of peace will persuade everyone.
This also connects to the more common research agenda on a just peace.Footnote 63 Such research generally argues that justice through peace is preferable to justice through war and the most marginalised provide guidance to the powerful in understanding what peace means. A just peace is normally taken to require respect for free speech and human rights, and that individuals have primacy over states in terms of their rights, freedoms, and participation. It acknowledges that recognition is a central part of peace, as are the way in which categorisations are made to include or exclude others.Footnote 64 Of course, recognition implies reconciliation, but the latter cannot occur before the former.Footnote 65 The language of Western liberal institutionalism, or of sovereignty, alone are a doubtful basis for a just peace, because these offer obstacles to the recognition of certain others, favour liberals, and continue the process of marginalisation. Reconciliation cannot stem from this (hence the inability of states to recognise even their own native peoples). Again this points to a need to engage with the everyday. Allan also adds a requirement for a global concern with care to the concept of the just peace.Footnote 66 This care ethic supersedes a positive peace in liberal terms, drawing on the eponymous feminist concept.Footnote 67 This, he argues, can be seen in the liberal discourses relating to the needs for recognition, a culture of non-violence and respect for life, solidarity, economic justice, tolerance and equality, and common empathy between human beings.Footnote 68 Tolerance and solidarity coalesce within care, according to Allan, in that difference and uniqueness are accepted, and sympathy for the difficulties of others and a willingness to assist are present.Footnote 69 This also connects with pre-existing debates on human security, particularly its emancipatory aspects.Footnote 70 This reflects the agenda in recent international documents such as the Responsibility to Protect.Footnote 71 The question is who will provide this care and who will define its reach, terms, and definition? International institutions, policymakers, states, NGOs, agencies and scholars are currently part of an embryonic version of this process, though with differing approaches. Focusing on what this means in everyday life might prevent this from becoming another ‘hegemonic’ agenda.
The notion of care has a number of facets, invoking both a moral association and solidarity. The Hegelian notion of a struggle for recognition is certainly significant, in that it leads to equality, and mutual understanding and respect.Footnote 72 As Dallmayr argues, it is possible to draw out an intellectual connection between the Stoic notion of ‘self-care’ in relation to freedom.Footnote 73 As Foucault argued in his last works, freedom can be taken to be the ontological condition of humanity in everyday terms relating to self-care and care for others. He argued that this was an Enlightenment replacement for the cultivation of the soul (lost in modernity) and is analogous in particular with self-government.Footnote 74 Indeed, Szakolczai has argued that Foucault's entire project was to show how, from Socrates onwards, European thinking has been aimed at ‘[…] wak[ing] others up from the slumber in which they conduct their everyday existence […].’ This is aimed at the transformation of the self, echoing Walker's comments about a post-liberal peace's connection with the excavation of the modern self.Footnote 75 This reproduces self-government rather than regulation (though, more problematically it might also be equated with neoliberal approaches to economic self-help). This may be taken as a critique of political liberalism and of its grand interventionary strategies on behalf of others, or less radically it may be taken as an attempt to replace the liberal technology of regulatory governance (bio power) which results in restriction and cold institutionalism, with a more emancipatory version of liberalism. Either way, these goals are connected through the everyday and require empathy.
Both would require radical methodological change. They indicate, as Bauman has argued, that ‘[…] the moral is what resists codification, formalisation, socialisation, and universalisation’.Footnote 76 Translated into peace, this has far reaching ethical consequences. The ethics of peace are therefore not found in exporting institutional governance as technology, or ‘branding’ exercises (for democracy, neoliberalism, human rights, and rule of law). They reside instead in the empathy and care of human relations, in ‘unscripted conversations’Footnote 77 about self-government and are reflected in the informal relations of individuals and communities in the official framework of the polity and its own relations with other polities. This fluidity resists formal institutions and boundaries unless mutual care and empathy provides their everyday ethic. Thus, rather than merely being a contest over rights and rules, an ethical version of peace would be heavily influenced by specific contexts in balance with responsive international institutions and norms.Footnote 78 This would, of course, need a constant process of negotiation, and would have to include a broad range in voices from the local to the global. This would perhaps involve global elites, officials, and states taking responsibility for the reframing of their interests and activity by the poor, powerless, and marginalised and their everyday concerns.Footnote 79
What the everyday, a just peace, and the care of the self exposes in the context of the juxtaposed liberal peace project is its general tendency to harvest power and resources for politicians, officials, experts, and institutions. This forms a liberal discourse that removes individual and societal agency at the expense of empathy and care, and therefore of a sustainable peace. This is a side effect rather than the goal of liberal governance in the specialised circumstances of its export to post-conflict environments, but the net effect is the displacing of community, culture, identity, and welfare in favour of external discourses of expert knowledge. These are tinged by their own ideology, culture, and interests. The everyday, empathy, and care therefore unsettle liberal institutions rather than merely confirming them, but add additional dimensions and sensitivities and the ontological dimension that they imply. It is important to remember that Foucault saw care in the context of self-governance as a way of escaping, or moderating, the hegemonic tendencies of liberal social and political governance. Power and resistance are entangled within liberal polities but empathy and an aspiration towards self-government, especially within a ‘deep civil society’ (the local-local) derived from a more empathetic engagement, offers a conceptual way forward without delving into a new grand narrative of ethics, and with an eye on the everyday as a contested site of identities, care, empathy, as well as interests.
One common criticism of arguments concerned with prioritising the local and the everyday is that such inclusivity and openness in peacebuilding environments may be relatively inefficient compared to the sort of progress that can be made via more limited and reductionist prioritisations of needs and issues (such as those encouraged by the orthodoxy of liberal peacebuilding). Slow progress or constant political in-fighting is taken to undermine progress towards a centralised unity, as can be seen in the context of the tribal networks and the deliberations of the loya jirga in AfghanistanFootnote 80 or in Iraq where tribal leaders have also had some involvement after early criticism that government, whether by the coalition or by ‘local’ actors, was extremely limited in its representation of the range of Iraqi groupings.Footnote 81 Stalemate rather than progress is the result according to this view of the dangers of the local, undermining reform and institution building, and the development of liberal governmentalism. The examples of Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, show that both a deferment to the local and a retention of powers amongst the internationals can be very problematic.Footnote 82 In these cases local tensions retarded or blocked reform, or co-opted the state project for ethno nationalist agendas. International direction of peacebuilding did little better, however: either empty institutions were built which were not then taken up at the local level, or resources were deployed in ways that often depoliticised the local (as Chandler has shown in the context of Bosnia),Footnote 83 or had little impact on the local. In all of these cases attempts have been made to involve the local, while simultaneously depoliticising it by failing to deal with everyday issues. Local actors in these cases have, while acknowledging the benefits of peacebuilding and statebuilding in some areas, tended also to see this as undermining the legitimacy of their peace process, as depoliticising, undermining their right of self-determination and human rights, as portraying a lack of respect for their cultural norms, or as examples of either hegemonic or ideological Western conditionalities. These indicate serious dilemmas which the post-liberal peace might avoid in its concern for the everyday. The evidence points to the need to better understand the local and its contextual everyday before internationals begin directing reform, institution building, or providing services, which may not meet local everyday needs. Blaming the local – whether directed at elites or at ‘civil society’ – for lack of a progress towards a liberal peace is to miss the point of local politics, and the contours of everyday life.
A research agenda is needed which engages with an understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between the liberal and the local, and of the interface between the two in terms of everyday life for local communities and actors, as well as for more abstract institutional frameworks. This ‘liberal-local interface’, and the nature of peace that it suggests requires extensive and ongoing consultation and research in order to develop these ideas. Then, they are ready to be negotiated, accepted, rejected, and constructed when and where it becomes necessary. When internationals engage in conflict zones, they might ask of disputants at the many different levels of the polity what type of peace could be envisaged; what and how care might be provided, and what is needed to understand, engage and support everyday life? Security, institutional building, democratisation, the rule of law, human rights, marketisation and development, might be constructed from these informed perspectives. This would have to occur in the explicit context of responses to the root causes of the conflict (even within an indeterminate world, as Plant points out),Footnote 84 meaning that peacebuilding occurs at two starting points. Rather than mainly stopping overt violence from threatening regional stability, it would concurrently establish an understanding of a local and everyday peace. This would require a conversation between disputants and internationals, avoiding any exclusionary practices, to undercover a consensual discourse ethic and praxis by which a post-liberal peace might be achieved. This appropriateness would be negotiated from the perspective of the internationals, custodians, and other interventionary actors, and most importantly, local actors, and not to necessarily to pre-existing models, agendas or scripts.
Rather than producing bare lifeFootnote 85 critical research agendas for peaceFootnote 86 offer an eirenist reading of the connected areas required for the consideration of the possibilities inherent in post-liberal forms of peace, as in the liberal-local hybrid and its interface suggested above. These aim to reflect and become embedded within everyday life and the societies it affects. This may seem naïve to many working within a more orthodox tradition, but to others who are working around these traditions, resistance to these ambitions seems naïve – destined to repeat the traumas of realist or liberal ‘history’. As Jabri has shown, this version of peace engenders a capacity to resist violence and to struggle for a just social order that goes far beyond the endeavours of a liberal ‘international civil service’. It represents the everyday issues and solidarity of individuals, communities and social movements. For Jabri, it is this solidarity that produces a more sophisticated form of peace.Footnote 87 Indeed, this indicates that individuals and communities have primacy over states in terms of their rights, freedoms, and participation.Footnote 88 Thus, recognition is a central part of the way in which categorisations are made to include or exclude othersFootnote 89 (think of the way non-state groups such as the Turkish Cypriots, the Kurds, the Palestinians, and many others have often been excluded from peace processes on such grounds). Recognition implies empathy, care, and thus, reconciliation, but the latter cannot occur before the former, and little can be achieved without a contextual understanding of the everyday.Footnote 90 The limitations of liberal and neoliberal versions of peace mean that the state is empowered to interrupt this ethic of care, solidarity, and empathy at its borders, and tends to focus on risks rather than opportunities. In building an empathetic, emancipatory peace, utilising an eirenist lens, considering the everyday provides some guidance around the pitfalls and biases reflected in the liberal peace and its borders.Footnote 91 This would surpass the current focus on the state, territoriality, and on institutions, and reconnect with the local – a hybrid and post-liberal peace.
Conclusion
Clearly, developing a critical analysis of the liberal peace raises some important questions, the initial one being why liberal peacebuilding has been so fragile in post-conflict settings? Indeed, does liberal peacebuilding create situations that economists often refer to as ‘moral hazard’, through which peace builders unwillingly or unknowingly take on a colonial role, or reward practices that are not conducive to a broader peace as outlined above? Does liberal peacebuilding avoid practices that may provide care for fear of possible long term issues such as dependency that are projected but unproven, because of their own inability to understand the social and cultural dynamics of an often non-Western post-conflict polity? These weaknesses are reflected in the dominant methodology of narrow versions of social science, which have become the main vehicles for work on politics, economics, law, and development in such contexts. In the context of transitional polities, the liberal peace has released the state of exception into the everyday, whereby the citizens of that polity are effectively excluded from emancipation. This depoliticisation is an unintended consequence of the political and normative closure that the liberal peace creates. A post-liberal peace would respond to this weakness by engaging with the dynamics of the everyday – whether strategy or tactic, institution or person, and instead revitalise a far more democratic and legitimate politics than has so far occurred in post-violence zones, where politics has become the unbalanced art of reducing peace to security, institutions and markets.
The Foucaultian notion of a care of the self represents an ongoing ethical critique built into a post-liberal peace at local and international levels, rather than a fixed and institutional ethic in itself. This enables an engagement with everyday issues, empathy and care, and so enables emancipation. This transcends Rawlsian liberal approaches, or Habermasian critical approaches, by focusing on self-government in which the citizen comes to the fore in the process of peacebuilding. This confirms the well known cliché that the local, and its ownership, is essential for sustainability: it can generate new insights on peace. Effectively, what is this implies is a ‘local ethic of peace’, resting on the legitimacy of a wide array of interconnected local and non-local liberal and non-liberal, practices, and the mediation of any tensions that obviously exist between them. This requires a privileging of non-liberal voices as well as the far more common recognition that order and peace requires a general, often elite level principle or agreement. From this insight there emerges a recognition of the ongoing development of local-liberal hybrid forms of peace, which have significant implications for peacebuilding and statebuilding.
With this in mind critical policies for a post-liberal peace might engage with the following:
1. A detailed understanding (rather than cooption or ‘tolerance’ of) of local culture, traditions, and ontology; and acceptance of peacebuilding as an empathetic, emancipatory process, focused on everyday care, human security, and a social contract between society and the polity, which acts as a provider of care rather then merely security:
2. In addition a peacebuilding contract between internationals and local actors which reflects the social contract within the polity;
3. Thinking about peace beyond the liberal state mechanism (rather than using peace to propagate liberal states);
4. Local-local ownership of a local, regional and global process of peacemaking, or of an agreement;
5. Local decision making processes to determine the basic political, economic, and social processes and norms to be institutionalised;
6. International support for these processes, guidance on technical aspects of governance and institution building without introducing hegemony, inequality, conditionality, or dependency;
7. An economic framework, focusing on welfare and empowerment of the most marginalised, should be determined locally. Internationals may assist in free market reform and marketisation/privatisation not on the basis of external expert knowledge but on local consensus, but they should also introduce a socioeconomic safety net immediately to bind citizens and labour to a peaceful polity (rather than to war making, a grey/black economy, or transnational criminal activities). Otherwise, neoliberalism clearly undermines any social contract and leads to a counterproductive class system;
8. Any peacebuilding process must cumulatively engage with everyday life, care and empathy, as well as institutions;
9. One to eight should result in a process whereby an ‘indigenous peace’ is installed that includes a version of human rights, rule of law, a representative political process that reflects the local groupings and their ability to create consensus, as well as broader international expectations for peace (but not alien ‘national’ interests);
10. Overall, these points imply the development of a liberal-local hybrid and a commensurate interface in each context.
To some extent, these points reflect the potential of the liberal peace, but they also emphasise the need to construct local consensus before blue-print thinking or policies are developed or applied. This causes one of the key paradoxes of peacebuilding: the institutions needed for it pre-exist most peace processes, and therefore they carry their own blueprint of norms and assumptions about what constitutes peace processes (even if peace builders may try to avoid this). It may be difficult to achieve the points above with existing peacebuilding actors, but of course it is also implausible that they should be created anew for each case. What this means is that peacebuilding actors themselves must also be subject to a set of requirements to prevent them from treating every case as the same, and to actualise or at least simulate a social contract between internationals and local populations of post-conflict areas. The above agenda requires the following from peacebuilding actors:
1. That care, empathy, welfare, and a consideration of everyday life, are the basis of a social contract required between societies, emerging post-conflict polities, and internationals.
2. Peacebuilding actors must not work from blueprints but should develop strategies based upon multilevel consultation in each case. They should develop relations with local partners which reach as far as possible across local society, enabling grass roots representation. They should endeavour to see themselves as mediatory agents whereby their role is to mediate the global norm or institution with the local norm (academics and peacebuilding policy makers should avoid overstating the applicability of blue-print type models, but instead engage more with local knowledge in an empathetic manner).
3. Peacebuilding actors also operate on the basis of the norms and systems they are trying to instil, such as democracy, equality, social justice, etc. Theorists and policymakers cannot ever be beyond methodological ethics, and must acknowledge peacebuilding's reflexive qualities.
4. Theorists and peacebuilding actors need to move from an institutional peace-as-governance agenda to an alternative or at least additional everyday agenda. Putting communities first entails a rethink of the priorities of peace. In terms of peacebuilding this would place human needs, particularly economic and security needs before free market reform, and in parallel to democracy, second generation human rights, and a rule of law that protects the citizen and not just wealth. This would probably require the creation of social welfare oriented peacebuilding institutions, funded by donors and other international actors in whose interests a self-sustaining peace ultimately is.
5. Finally, peacebuilding should not be used as a covert mechanism to export ideologies of peace, but instead should seek open and free communication between post-conflict individuals and peace builders about the nature of peace in each context.
Post-conflict communities and individuals for the most part want to lead meaningful and prosperous lives, but many do not aspire to Western developed forms of liberalism.Footnote 92 Instead, what are crucial are their own needs, identity, representation, and agency; where these are absent they expect external assistance or may become involved in the dynamics of resistance. In the longer term, the notion that powerful states or even international organisations can independently create order, or even peace, without an intimate contract with the peoples who are part of that order and peace has proven to be a blind alley.
The resurgence of the everyday as a concern for peacebuilding and IR more generally entails several avenues for investigation. This might echo the voices of Iraqi and Afghani scholars who recently called for peace and statebuilding processes that engage more with their local experiences, that are open to tradition and religion, that focus on communities and collectivism, that meet everyday needs, resonate with democratic practices and mixed economies, that engage with the extra needs inherent in very slow transitions out of violence, and prioritise jobs, welfare, education, and social justice as well as security.Footnote 93 The consideration of such issues requires the opening up what Duffield and others have referred to as ‘unscripted conversations’Footnote 94 untainted by, and aware of, hierarchy, hegemony, and problem-solving. This is crucial if empathy is to be carried through communication, policy, and institutions, via critical policies for peacebuilding towards and everyday peace. Pugh, Turner, and Cooper have argued that this requires ‘permanent critique’Footnote 95 and a broader wariness of grand narratives, even in the guise of responses to crises.Footnote 96 At a broader level an eirenism needs to be placed at the heart of the various disciplines and sub disciplines used to develop peace after war. This would not be a new hegemonic ‘ism’ or a grand metanarrative, but instead would be a mechanism or lens through which it can be locally asked whether and how an action, conversation, or policy contributes to a mutual form of peace.
