The ‘power-based’ critique

In this framework, the liberal peace is critiqued on the basis that it reflects the hegemonic values and the political, economic and geo-strategic needs of Western states. This critique focuses on the role played by the interests of Western powers in shaping policy and the impact of the economic and structural inequalities of the world economy. It also pays attention to the naturalising of policy assumptions based upon this perspective. There are three main versions of this power-based perspective.

Firstly, there is a critical approach which tends to engage with a Left or neo-Marxist structural critique of liberal peace approaches. This framing suggests that Western intervention is inevitably reproducing hierarchies of power due to the structural constraints of neo-liberal market relations – opening up societies and economies through the demands for democratisation and the free market.Footnote ¹¹ This approach focuses on the problems of neo-liberal economic policies for the reconstruction of post-conflict societies and suggests that, in serving the interests of dominant Western powers and the international financial institutions, the policies of the liberal peace inevitably reproduce the conditions and possibilities for conflict.Footnote ¹²

This approach often draws upon Robert Cox's critical theory to suggest that the narrow problem-solving approach taken by Western policymakers is problematic as it takes for granted the interests of these actors and treats market-based economic solutions as merely technical ‘problem-solving’ approaches to address problems of post-conflict development.Footnote ¹³ These critical approaches to the liberal peace suggest that it is necessary to reflect on these assumptions to reveal the power interests that lie behind them and to question the presentation of these policies in policy neutral technical terms.Footnote ¹⁴ Michael Pugh, for example, has consistently highlighted how neo-liberal economic practices are naturalised as technical solutions to development and reconstruction, marginalising or preventing political discussions of economic alternatives better suited to post-conflict societies.Footnote ¹⁵

Secondly, there is a more Foucaultian structuralist approach, which critiques the ‘liberal peace’ not so much on the liberal basis of its interventionary policies per se as on the interests behind these policies: understood as perpetuating the needs and interests of liberal, neo-liberal or biopolitical capitalism in the West. Mark Duffield has pioneered this approach in his 2001 book, Global Governance and the New Wars.Footnote ¹⁶ Here the focus is less on the opening up of non-Western economies to the world market and more on the reshaping and transformation of these societies in order to prevent instability. In his 2001 work, Duffield argued that the project of ‘liberal peace reflects a radical development agenda of social transformation’ with the aim ‘to transform the dysfunctional and war-affected societies that it encounters on its borders into cooperative, representative and, especially, stable entities’.Footnote ¹⁷

This transformative liberal intervention has necessitated the radicalisation of both development and security discourses, giving the external institutions of global governance new mandates to: ‘shift the balance of power between groups and even to change attitudes and beliefs’.Footnote ¹⁸ In his later work, Duffield expands on this framework of the projection of liberal interests in stabilising ‘zones of conflict’ through the use of the Foucaultian conception of biopolitics, where intervention is understood as saving, developing, or securing the Other, at the same time legitimising and extending external regulatory control.Footnote ¹⁹ Duffield argues that in the interests of stabilising the neo-liberal economic order, the divisions between the ‘developed’ and the ‘undeveloped’ world are reproduced through policies of containment such as ‘sustainable’ or ‘community-based’ development.Footnote ²⁰

The third approach engages from the approach of critical theory and human security. Like the first approach, it highlights that ‘liberal peace’ policies should be seen as political and power-based, rather than as purely technical solutions.Footnote ²¹ However, the focus is less on the assumptions about market relations or securing the needs of global neo-liberal or biopolitical power and more on the assumptions made about the political and institutional framework and positivist and rationalist forms of Western knowledge. For writers, such as Alex Bellamy, a central concern is the problematic focus on the rebuilding of Westphalian state forms,Footnote ²² for Oliver Richmond, the focus is on the liberal assumptions of political community assumed in the approach of ‘liberal peace’, which tends to ignore vital local concerns of identity and culture.Footnote ²³

The power-based approaches in this third category clearly take on board the concerns over universalising Western liberal assumptions which will be dealt with in the following section, sketching the ‘ideas-based’ critiques. However, they are classed within the first category as the conception of Western ‘power’ still plays a vital role. Unlike the first two approaches, these more subjective or constructivist frameworks of critique suggest that frameworks of liberal peace, projected through Western power, can be successfully challenged by other more reflective, emancipatory, or ‘bottom-up’ approaches to liberal peace; suggesting that there is not necessarily a clash of interests between those intervening and those intervened upon.Footnote ²⁴ Some commentators from within this perspective would argue that elected Western politicians could pursue alternative polices by constructing their interests in a more enlightened way, for example, through pursuing more human security orientated policies, which could be conceived as in Western self-interest, in a globalised and interconnected world, or that non-state actors may be able to intervene in ways which engage more equally and empathetically with those on the ground.Footnote ²⁵

The ‘ideas-based’ critique

The ‘ideas-based’ critique of liberal peace presents itself as a critique of the grounding universalising assumptions of the liberal policy discourse itself, rather than merely as a critique of the forms of its implementation. These critics of liberal peace advocate less liberal frameworks of intervention, with less attention to the reconstruction of sovereign states, democracy and the free market. While upholding the values of democracy and the free market aspirationally, these critics argue against the liberal peace approach on the basis that it is unsuitable in the context of post-conflict states and situations of state failure.

This approach tends to focus on the problem of Western interventionist ‘ideas’ or ‘values’ rather than on interests or power relations. While their critique of the liberal peace thesis therefore may appear to be more radical, their intentions can also be understood as more conservative or policy orientated.Footnote ²⁶ Rather than problematising relations of power or the interests behind policymaking, there is a tendency to view the liberal peace approach as a projection of Western ideals in a context where they can be counterproductive. This critique has been developed by Jack Snyder, Fareed Zakharia, Stephen Krasner, Robert Keohane, and Roland Paris, amongst others, who argue that liberal peace assumptions have undermined the effectiveness of international statebuilding.Footnote ²⁷

One of the core liberal assumptions problematised in this approach is that of sovereign statehood. These critics argue that focusing on (re)constructing sovereign states is unlikely to solve the problems of post-conflict societies, merely to reproduce them. Krasner argues that sovereignty is problematic for many states because they lack the capacity for good governance and require an external regulatory framework in order to guarantee human rights and the rule of law.Footnote ²⁸ Robert Keohane forwards a similar perspective with differing levels of statehood applicable to different levels of governance capacity: ‘We somehow have to reconceptualise the state as a political unit that can maintain internal order while being able to engage in international cooperation, without claiming exclusive rights […] traditionally associated with sovereignty.’Footnote ²⁹

Pursuing a similar approach, Paris argues that the assumptions of the liberal peace – that democracy and the free market will ensure social progress and stability – neglects to consider the problematic nature of transition. Questioning the assumption that ‘liberalization fosters peace’, Paris advocates less emphasis on interventionist policies which promote democracy and the market, both of which can encourage competition and conflict without adequate institutional frameworks.Footnote ³⁰ Instead, Paris advocates a policy of ‘Institutionalization before Liberalization’ in order to establish the regulatory frameworks necessary to ensure that post-conflict societies can gradually (and safely) move towards liberal models of market democracy.Footnote ³¹

These critics of liberal peace do not argue that they are anti-liberal; merely that liberalism, as projected in liberal peace frameworks, has to take into account the non-liberal context in which intervention takes place. Fareed Zakharia, for example, argues that, while in the West, we have historically associated liberalism and democracy, in much of the non-Western world we have to make a choice between liberalism and democracy as, without the institutional framework of limited government, ‘elections provide a cover for authoritarianism’ and are ‘merely legitimized power grabs’; in this context, therefore, ‘what Africa needs more than urgently than democracy is good governance’.Footnote ³²

This critique of the liberal peace is that, rather than being based on the needs and interests of Western hegemonic powers and international financial institutions, the problem is one of projecting an idealised understanding of the West's own historical development; one which tends to naturalise the smooth working of the market and understand liberal political frameworks as an organic product of democratic processes such as free elections. For these critics, the founding assumptions of the liberal peace are the problem: attempts to universalise Western models in non-liberal contexts, will merely reproduce, and maybe even exacerbate, the problems of conflict and instability.

A ‘critical’ consensus?

This article seeks to argue that the radical intent of the critics of interventionist Western policies has been blunted by their articulation within the problematic of a ‘liberal peace’, enabling their critique to be assimilated into the policy discourse of how policy might be reformed and legitimated in the wake of the discrediting of the claims of Western policymaking after the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan. The two fairly distinct critical framings of the ‘liberal peace’ stem from very different methodological perspectives and political and policy intents. While the ‘ideas-based’ critics tend to seek to defend and legitimate regulatory external intervention, the ‘power-based’ critics tend to challenge and oppose these frameworks as the projection of Western power and interests. Nevertheless, in critiquing Western policy interventions, developed since the end of the Cold War, within the problematic of ‘liberal peace’ it seems that there is often much less distance between the radical approaches and the policy approaches than might be assumed on the basis of political intent and occasionally there is a surprisingly large area of confluence.

It seems that both sides of the divide, regarding the dynamics driving frameworks of liberal peace, start from the basis that the liberal peace (in its various framings) is actually an adequate description of the policy framework being devised and implemented in international intervention and external statebuilding approaches since the end of the Cold War. This would, of course, appear to make intuitive sense if we understood the post-Cold War period as one in which there was a new confidence in the power of liberal frameworks, with assumptions that the collapse of non-market alternatives meant the ‘End of History’ and the end of any political or ideological challenge to the ascendency of liberal perspectives and discursive judgements on the economic, political and social frameworks of states and societies. This article seeks to make the counterintuitive point that the rise of critiques of liberal peace is, in fact, indicative of a lack of confidence in classical liberal assumptions about human behaviour and the political and socio-economic institutions needed for human flourishing.

In the critiques of the liberal peace, this growing consensus on the problematic nature of liberalism appears to cross the political and policy spectrum. The fundamental and shared claim of the critics is that the lack of success of external interventions, designed not only to halt conflict but to help reconstruct the peace, is down to the liberalism of the interveners. If only they were not, in various ways, so liberal, then it is alleged external intervention or assistance may potentially be much less problematic. It can appear that the main academic and political matter of dispute is whether the liberal peace discourse is amenable to policy change. Here the divide seems to roughly approximate to the division highlighted above, in terms of the heuristic categories of ‘power-’ and ‘ideas-based’ liberal peace critics. The more radical, ‘power-based’, critics, with a more economically deterministic approach to the structural dynamics or the needs of ‘neo-liberalism’ are less likely to be optimistic of reform. On the ‘ideas-based’ side, those critics of liberal peace frameworks who tend to be more engaged in policy related work are more optimistic with regard to a shift away from the policy emphasis of liberal peace.

In a recent article, Endre Begby and Peter Burgess argue that the majority of the critics of the liberal peace seem to share two key assumptions about external intervention: firstly, that external Western intervention (of some kind) is necessary, and secondly, that the goal of this intervention should be the liberal one of human freedom and flourishing.Footnote ³³ They state that, in which case, the problem is not so much with the aspirations or goals of ‘liberal peace’ but with the practices of intervention itself. They have a valid point regarding the limited nature of much of this ‘critical’ discourse, but do not reflect adequately on the diminished content of the ‘liberalism’ of the policy interventions themselves nor the ‘liberal’ aspirations of those who advocate for the reform of practices of external intervention. It seems that the common ground in the broad and disparate critiques of the liberal peace, is not the critique of the external practices of intervention as much as the classical assumptions of liberalism itself.

The critique of liberalism as a set of assumptions and practices seems to be driving the approach to the study of post-Cold War interventions in ways which have tended to produce a fairly one-sided framework of analysis in which the concept of liberalism is ill-equipped to bear the analytical weight placed upon it and appears increasingly emptied of theoretical or empirical content. Liberalism appears to be used promiscuously to explain a broad range of often contradictory policy perspectives and practices across very differing circumstances and with very differing outcomes. In this sense, it appears that liberalism operates as a ‘field of adversity’Footnote ³⁴ through which a coherent narrative of post-Cold War intervention has been articulated both by critical and policy orientated theorists. The promiscuous use of liberalism to explain very different policy approaches is, of course, facilitated by the ambiguous nature of the concept itself.

It is this ambiguity which enables liberalism to be critiqued from opposing directions, sometimes by the same author at the same time. Good examples of this are Roland Paris and Timothy Sisk who criticise ‘liberal’ peacebuilding for being both too laissez-faire and too interventionist in its approach to the regulation and management of conflict. In the peacebuilding literature today, the experience of the early and mid-1990s and the ‘quick exit’ policies of the ‘first generation’ peacebuilding operations in Nambia, Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Liberia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Guatemala has been repackaged as evidence that Western interveners had too much faith in the liberal subject.Footnote ³⁵ Similarly, the ad hoc responses to the problems of the early 1990s in the development of ‘second generation’ peacebuilding with protectorate powers in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, has been criticised as liberal hubris, on the assumption that international overlords could bring democracy, development and security to others. It seems that, rather than adding clarity, the critique of the ‘liberalism’ of intervention tells us very little.

The mechanism through which these liberal framings have been facilitated and critiqued is that of the discursive centring of the non-liberal Other; on whose behalf the policy critics assert the need for different policy practices. In this way, the policy critics of past policy approaches evade a direct critique of liberal assumptions about equality, autonomy, and transformative capacity, instead, arguing that the non-liberal Other (in various ways) invalidates, challenges or resists (passively as well as actively) policy practices which may otherwise have been less problematic.

Rather than a critique of liberalism for its inability to overcome social, economic and cultural inequalities, both the policy, ‘ideas-based’, critique of the liberal peace and the more radical, ‘power-based’, critiques argue that social, economic and cultural inequalities and differences have to be central to policy practices and invalidate universalising liberal attempts to reconstruct and rebuild post-conflict societies. In this context – in which the dichotomy between a liberal policymaking sphere and a non-liberal sphere of policy intervention comes to the fore – there is an inevitable tendency towards a consensual framing of the problematic of statebuilding or peacebuilding intervention as a problem of the relationship between the liberal West and the non-liberal Other.

The rock on which the liberal peace expectations are held to crash is that of the non-liberal Other. The non-liberal Other increasingly becomes portrayed as the barrier to Western liberal aspirations of social peace and progress; either as it lacks the institutional, social, economic and cultural capacities that are alleged to be necessary to overcome the problems of liberal peace or as a subaltern or resisting subject, for whom liberal peacebuilding frameworks threaten their economic or social existence or fundamental values or identities. The ‘critique’ becomes apology in that this discursive focus upon the non-Western or non-liberal Other is often held to explain the lack of policy success and, through this, suggest that democracy or development are somehow not ‘appropriate’ aspirations or that expectations need to be substantially lowered or changed to account for difference.

International statebuilding and the critique of liberalism

It would appear that the assumptions held to be driving liberal peace approaches are very much in the eye of their critical beholders. The most obvious empirical difficulty is that international policy regarding intervention and statebuilding seems to have little transformative aspiration: far from assumptions of liberal universalism, it would appear that, with the failure of post-colonial development, especially from the 1970s onwards, international policymakers have developed historically low expectations about what can be achieved through external intervention and assistance. The lack of transformative belief is highlighted by one of the key concerns of the policy critics of the liberal peace – the focus on capacity-building state institutions and intervening to construct ‘civil’ societies. The focus on institutional solutions (at both the formal and informal levels) to the problems of conflict and transition is indicative of the narrowing down of aspirations from transforming society to merely regulating or managing it – often understood critically as the ‘securitising’ of policymaking. This is a long way from the promise of liberal transformation and the discourse of ‘liberating’ societies economically and politically.

In fact, it is the consensus of opinion on the dangers of democracy, which has informed the focus on human rights and good governance. For the policy and radical critics of liberal peace, liberal rights frameworks are often considered problematic in terms of the dangers of exclusion and extremism. Today's ‘illiberal’ peace approaches do not argue for the export of democracy – the freeing up of the political sphere on the basis of support for popular autonomy. The language of illiberal institutionalist approaches is that of democratisation: the problematisation of the liberal subject, held to be incapable of moral, rational choices at the ballot box, unless tutored by international experts concerned to promote civil society and pluralist values. In these frameworks, the holding of elections serves as an examination of the population and the behaviour of electoral candidates, rather than as a process for the judgement or construction of policy (which it is assumed needs external or international frameworks for its production).

The focus on institutionalism does not stem from a critique of liberal peace programmes; institutionalist approaches developed from the 1970s onwards and were rapidly mainstreamed with the end of the Cold War.Footnote ³⁶ From 1989 onwards, Western governments and donors have stressed that policy interventions cannot just rely on promoting the freedoms of the market and democracy, but need to put institutional reform and ‘good governance’ at the core.Footnote ³⁷ Even in relation to Central and Eastern Europe it was regularly stressed that the people and elected representatives were not ready for freedom and that it would take a number of generations before it could be said that democracy was ‘consolidated’.Footnote ³⁸ The transitology literature was based on the critique of liberal assumptions – this was why a transitional period was necessary. Transition implied that markets and democracy could not work without external institutional intervention to prevent instability. While markets needed to be carefully managed through government policymaking it was held that civil society was necessary to ensure that the population learnt civic values to make democracy viable.Footnote ³⁹

It was through the engagement with ‘transition’ and the problematic negotiation of EU enlargement that the discursive framework of liberal institutionalism – where human rights, the ‘rule of law’, civil society, and anti-corruption are privileged over democracy – was programmatically cohered. It was also through the discussion of ‘transition’ that the concept of sovereign autonomy was increasingly problematised, initially in relation to the protections for minority rights and then increasingly expanded to cover other areas of domestic policymaking.Footnote ⁴⁰ It would appear that the key concepts and values of the ‘liberal peace’ held to have been promoted with vigour with the ‘victory of liberalism’ at the end of the Cold War were never as dominant a framing as their radical and policy critics have claimed.Footnote ⁴¹

Rather than attempting to transform non-Western societies into the liberal self-image of the West, it would appear that external interveners have had much more status quo aspirations, concerned with regulatory stability and regional and domestic security, rather than transformation. Rather than imposing or ‘exporting’ alleged liberal Western models, international policy making has revolved around the promotion of regulatory and administrative measures which suggest the problems are not the lack of markets or democracy but rather the culture of society or the mechanisms of governance. Rather than promoting democracy and liberal freedoms, the discussion has been how to keep the lid on or to manage the ‘complexity’ of non-Western societies, usually perceived in terms of fixed ethnic and regional divisions. The solution to the complexity of the non-liberal state and society has been the internationalisation of the mechanisms of governance, removing substantive autonomy rather than promoting it.

While it is true that the reconstruction or rebuilding of states is at the centre of external projects of intervention, it would be wrong to see the project of statebuilding as one which aimed at the construction of a liberal international order.Footnote ⁴² This is not just because external statebuilding would be understood as a contradiction in liberal terms but, more importantly, because the states being constructed in these projects of post-conflict and failed state intervention are not liberal states in the sense of having self-determination and political autonomy. The state at the centre of statebuilding is not the ‘Westphalian state’ of classical International Relations (IR) theorising. Under the internationalised regulatory mechanisms of intervention and statebuilding the state is increasingly reduced to an administrative level, in which sovereignty no longer marks a clear boundary line between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’.Footnote ⁴³ Whether we consider European Union (EU) statebuilding, explicitly based on a sharing of sovereignty, or consider other statebuilding interventions, such as those by the international financial institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, it is clear that the state is central as a mechanism for external coordination and regulation rather than as a self-standing actor in so-called ‘Westphalian’ terms.Footnote ⁴⁴

Too liberal?

There is little evidence here of the assertions of the critics of the liberal peace, that external interveners imagine that they have the power to reshape state institutions and societies in accordance with Western norms.Footnote ⁴⁵ The limited results would appear to demonstrate that the process of internationalising the governance of non-Western states, through the process of ‘state institution-building’ has increasingly resulted in states which have little in connection with their societies, and where the formal political process is increasingly marginalised. Empirically, the radical critics of liberal peace may be correct to argue that external policies of intervention – which operate at the formal level of exporting human rights frameworks, the rule of law and mechanisms of ‘good governance’ – marginalise the people of these societies. This, however, is not the same as arguing that this is because the frameworks of intervention are too liberal.

It is quite possible to argue that external mechanisms of international engagement ignore the economic and social context of these societies and are satisfied with non-Western states paying lip-service to external donor and institutional requirements without asserting that these external actors are attempting to transform these states into Westphalian liberal democracies. At the empirical level it is unproblematic to argue that the result of these external programmes of intervention might be seen as ‘façade democracy’ or as ‘reproducing state failure’Footnote ⁴⁶ or to highlight that Western policy aspirations have little purchase on very different realities and often therefore result in ‘hybrid polities’ where the state formally accords to Western norms but informally still operates on the basis of traditional hierarchies and exclusions.Footnote ⁴⁷

Where this critical discourse becomes problematic is in the confidence with which its proponents assert that the reasons for these policy failings can be located in the liberalism of the interveners or the illiberalism of the subjects of intervention. Roland Paris, for example, argues that ‘there is no logical requirement for international agencies to resurrect failed states as states, rather than [as] some other type of polity’, and argues that this is the ‘latest chapter in the globalisation of the Westphalian state’, where this state form is being propped up despite its failings.Footnote ⁴⁸ Paris argues that just as the non-liberal Other cannot deal with the liberal state form, they are similarly ill-suited to handle electoral democracy, warning particularly against the holding of elections in post-conflict situations. It is asserted that holding elections when societies are still divided or segmented will be counterproductive, often giving enhanced legitimacy to warring parties and bolstering the legitimacy of the forces successful in conflict. Often the solutions advocated by the policy critics are along similar lines with regard to both sovereignty and democracy: the need for greater international engagement in the state institutions, under the guise of guaranteeing that no voices are ‘excluded’ and the need to constrict the autonomy of elected authorities. Under the rubric of the critique of the liberal peace, these critics of the liberal peace often advocate the reform of policy interventions away from the focus on liberal rights frameworks and electoral democracy.

Dominik Zaum, for example, through a series of case studies, argues that the aspirations of the technocratic approach of international statebuilding fails to appreciate that the liberal discourse of self-government undermines the authority of external interveners and enables local elites to assert pressure and influence.Footnote ⁴⁹ These liberal normative commitments mean that international interventions are limited both in time and scope and therefore find it difficult to resist compromising their initial goals through giving greater authority to local actors.Footnote ⁵⁰ Other authors have a similar perspective, explaining the failures of international intervention as a product of external actors assuming that liberal models can merely be exported, rather than understanding the contradictions involved in bringing liberalism to non-liberal societies. Michael Barnett and Christopher Zürcher, for example, have sought to analyse why liberal interventions tend to be no more than surface, on the basis that elites at both national and subnational levels can ‘capture’ and ‘compromise’ peacebuilding leading to the reproduction of state-society relations and patrimonial politics.Footnote ⁵¹

Some of the policy critics argue not merely that these Western models are perverted by the power of the non-liberal Other but that the attempt to export Western models to non-liberal societies is inevitably going to fail to bridge the gulf between liberal and non-liberal state-society forms. Noah Feldman, for example, suggests that these non-Western states and societies are so alien to Western liberal interveners that ‘the high failure rate strongly supports the basic intuition that we do not know what we are doing’.Footnote ⁵² Feldman suggests that we need to continue to provide external assistance but should reject the idea that ‘our comparative advantages of wealth and power [give] us any special ability to identify the institutional structures that will succeed in promoting democracy’.Footnote ⁵³ Michael Ignatieff similarly argues that ‘we do not actually know how to make states work in non-liberal societies that are poor, divided on religious or ethnic lines or lacked a substantial state tradition in the first place’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The work of Roland Paris and Timothy Sisk, supports this view, suggesting that, in dealing with the non-liberal Other, the issues are so complex and dilemma-laden that pragmatic ‘muddling through’ is the only solution.Footnote ⁵⁵

Discursively, the alleged ‘voice’ of the non-liberal Other has also been central to the shifting discourse of development. While some commentators suggest that little substantive has changed in the shift from the modernising frameworks of the liberal ‘Washington Consensus’ to the post-liberal, post-conditionality, ‘New York Consensus’ focus on pro-poor policy making, sustainable development and poverty reduction strategy papers,Footnote ⁵⁶ there is little doubt that the aspirations for social and economic transformation have been scaled back.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is quite clear that broad frameworks of development intervention have much lower horizons than during the Cold War period;Footnote ⁵⁸ for example, the replacement of Cold War desires for modernisation with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs focus not on social and economic transformation but on the situation of the poorest in society with the aspiration that, by 2015, people will be able to live on $1 a day.Footnote ⁵⁹ The view that there is a universalising transformative liberal agenda is a peculiar way to understand the focus on sustainable development, small and medium enterprises and the shift away from large development projects.Footnote ⁶⁰ With regard to the critique of universal liberal aspirations for progress, it is often difficult to tell the policy perspectives apart from the viewpoints of some of the more radical critics of the liberal peace. There is a danger that liberalism is criticised not for its inability to universalise economic growth and overcome the problems of combined and uneven development, but for the aspirations of development itself. For example, Michael Pugh asserts that rather than the ‘economic rationalism of (capitalistic) entrepreneurship’, other, ‘non-liberal’, values need to be taken into account. Following the work of those critical of liberal development models, such as Amartya Sen,Footnote ⁶¹ he argues that in non-liberal societies:

It would seem that at the core of the policy and radical critiques of the liberal peace is a critique of liberal aspirations rather than a critique of international interventionist policies and practices. The critique reflects the ease with which liberalism has become a ‘field of adversity’, through which both policy reform and critical claims for theoretical advance can both be made. The construction of a liberal ‘field of adversity’ seems to have little relation to policy realities. This is reflected in the fact that, while there is a consensus on the view that Western policies are problematic in that they are too liberal, there is much less attention to how the problems of the post-colonial world might be alternatively addressed. Here, as discussed below, the discursive critique of the liberal peace unfortunately has very little to offer in ways that go beyond present policy perspectives.

Beyond the critique of the liberal peace?

It would appear that the ostensibly more radical critics, those who draw out the problematic nature of power relations – the ‘power-based’ critiques above – in fact, have very little to offer as a critical alternative to the current policies of intervention and statebuilding, other than a scaling back of the possibilities of social change. The leading critics of the liberal peace, like Mark Duffield, Michael Pugh and Oliver Richmond – working through critical theoretical frameworks which problematise power relations and highlight the importance of difference – suggest that the difference between the liberal West and the non-liberal Other cannot be bridged through Western policymaking. For Pugh, as we have seen above, taking critical theory to its logical conclusion, capitalist rationality is itself to be condemned for its universalising and destabilising impulses. Similarly, for Duffield, it seems that the problem of hegemonic relations of power and knowledge cannot be overcome, making any projection of the ideals of development or democracy potentially oppressive.Footnote ⁶³ Oliver Richmond, has systematised this perspective, highlighting the problems of the disciplinary forms of knowledge of ‘liberal peace’ approaches and suggesting that while it may be possible to go beyond them through the use of post-positivist and ethnographic approaches – enabling external interveners to have a greater access to the knowledge of ‘everyday life’ in non-liberal societies being intervened in – any attempt to know, rather than merely to express ‘empathy’, is open to hegemonic abuse.Footnote ⁶⁴

It would appear that, without a political agent of emancipatory social change, the radical ‘power-based’ critics of liberal peace who draw upon the perspectives of critical theory, cannot go beyond the bind which they have set themselves, of overcoming hegemonic frameworks of knowledge and power. In fact, it could be argued that these critical approaches, lacking the basis of a political subject to give content to critical theorising, ultimately take an uncritical approach to power. Power is assumed rather than theorised, making the limits to power appear merely as external to it. It is assumed that there is an attempt to transform the world in liberal terms and that the failure to do so can therefore be used to argue that liberal forms of knowledge are inadequate ones. The critique is not essentially of power or of intervention but of the limited knowledge of liberal interveners. The alternative is not that of emancipatory social transformation but of the speculative and passive search for different, non-liberal, forms of knowledge or of knowing. This comes across clearly in the conclusions reached by Duffield, Richmond and others, and highlights the lack of a critical alternative embedded in these approaches.

The more ostensibly conservative critics of the liberal peace, drawn largely to the policymaking sphere, have much clearer political aims in their critique of the liberal peace. This is manifest in their focus on institutional reform, understood as a way of reconciling non-liberal states and societies both to the market and to democratic forms. This, like the transitology discourse before it, is a radical critique of classical liberal assumptions. In their advocacy of these frameworks, discursively framed as a critique of the ‘liberal peace’, they have a clear point of reference. Although, as highlighted above, this point of reference is a fictional one: a constructed narrative of post-Cold War intervention, which enables them to ground the scaling-back of policy expectations against a framework of allegedly unrealistic liberal aspirations.

This critique of liberalism is not a critique of interventionist policymaking but rather a defence of current practices on the basis that they have not been properly applied or understood. Institutionalist approaches, which have informed the interventionist frameworks of international institutions and donors since the early 1990s, are explicit in their denunciation of the basic assumptions of classical liberalism. This critique of liberalism is however an indirect one, inevitably so, as the institutionalist critique developed at the height of the Cold War.Footnote ⁶⁵ This is why, while the classical concepts of the liberal rights framework remain – ‘sovereignty’, ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, ‘civil society’ – they have been given a new content, transforming the universal discourse of the autonomous liberal rights-holder from that of the subject of rights to the object of regulation.Footnote ⁶⁶ This new content has unfortunately been of little interest to the more radical ‘power-based’ critics of the ‘liberal peace’. But, in understanding the content of institutionalist approaches, it is possible to tie together the superficial nature of external engagement with the fact that it has a non-liberal content rather than one which is too liberal.

The institutionalist discourse of intervention and regulation is not one of liberal universalism and transformation but one of restricted possibilities, where democracy and development are hollowed out and, rather than embodying the possibilities of the autonomous human subject, become mechanisms of control and ordering. Institutionalisation reduces law to an administrative code, politics to technocratic decision-making, democratic and civil rights to those of the supplicant rather than the citizen, replaces the citizenry with civil society, and the promise of capitalist modernity with pro-poor poverty reduction.Footnote ⁶⁷ To conceptualise this inversion of basic liberal assumptions and ontologies as ‘liberalism’ would be to make the word meaningless at the same time as claiming to stake everything on the assumed meaning and stakes involved in the critique of the ‘liberal’ peace.Footnote ⁶⁸