Reconfiguring Peacemaking for an era of multipolarity: Alignment under hegemony versus multipolar misalignment

Abstract

With the publication of Agenda for Peace in 1992 the UN system opened its peace interventions up to critiques that eventually allowed for a tentative incorporation of ethnographic, feminist, and rights-based approaches into the Liberal International Order (LIO). Yet, subsequent efforts to reform the much broader International Peace Architecture (IPA) have been limited. Legitimate political claims from outside Western understandings of peacemaking were soon marginalised, despite the growing prominence of non-Western discourses. One important idea did emerge from the liberal international order though: the understanding that the coercive capacities of the state had to be restrained by an alliance between international actors and civil society in order to allow sustainable peace to flourish. In an emerging multipolar order, this ‘liberal alignment’ has broken down and been replaced with misalignment.

This paper outlines and critically compares two patterns of international order and related peacemaking epistemology and tools: the aligned pattern under liberal hegemony, which came into being after 1990, and the misaligned, multipolar pattern of the 21st century. In the aligned order, a nonviolent stalemate dynamic of peacemaking has emerged, while the misaligned order typically generates an oppressive and unstable victor’s peace. While both patterns ultimately freeze rather than resolve conflicts, there are significant differences between them.

The creation of stalemates by peace processes since the 1990s demonstrates that the alignment was not ambitious enough to produce a sustainable peace. It also suggests that peace processes of the post-Cold War era were entangled with counter-peace processes in the form of parasitic dynamics that helped strengthen and connect spoilers across different scales, while exploiting structural blockages to peace and unintended consequences of the liberal peace. Eventually, counter-peace processes in the emerging multipolar order have paralysed the liberal alignment along with the international peace architecture. Yet, instead of offering new peacemaking approaches to replace the liberal alignment, the multipolar order reverts back to foregrounding the use of force and the determination of political orders through power relations. Decolonial peacemaking approaches, by contrast, have neither been scaled up by the rising powers, nor do they appear to be compatible with Russia’s and China’s illiberal conflict management strategies. As a consequence of the paralysis of the international peace architecture, the multipolar order is more prone to conflict as the outbreak of new wars (from Syria to Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia), the collapse of fragile or stalemated peace processes (e.g. in Ukraine, Sudan, Israel/Palestine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Myanmar), the widening of insurgencies (across the Sahel region) and the increasing stranglehold of gang violence (throughout the Caribbean and Latin America) show. In practice, the peacemaking approaches of rising powers such as China and Russia leave feminist, ethnographic, postcolonial, environmental, and post-liberal critiques unanswered (even if they appear to discursively support some of these critiques). The role of the UN has been reduced to a regional player (i.e. within the West or representative of the West’s interests), while other regional security complexes do not have comparable internal nor external peacemaking tools. Without such tools for order maintenance and conflict resolution, some regions might descend into a range of complex hybrid wars like the Middle East or remain mired in cycles of violence, oppression and rebellion.

Hence, this paper highlights the importance of the ‘liberal alignment’. Recognising that contemporary wars often resulted from the rise of non-state networks in opposition to illegitimate state structures, the ‘liberal alignment’ aims to create an alliance between civil society and the international peace architecture to curtail and reform the powers of the state. In this alliance, civil society monitors state power, articulates societal demands on the state, and tracks minority rights, while international actors deploy incentives and sanctions to pressure the state into reforming its coercive apparatus. This created a progressive - and ultimately precarious - anomaly. Peace processes carved out a larger role for civil society than its constitutional remit and power relations would have dictated. Yet, liberal peacemaking tools only temporarily decentred the role of the state without levelling power hierarchies. Subsequently, civil society became overburdened in the implementation of peace agreements. Curtailing state power and shoring up civil society’s checks and balances required constant pressure on conflict-affected states. This was difficult to sustain. Moreover, backed by US hegemony, the liberal international order lost credibility as it became entangled with the hegemon’s hypocrisy, drive towards neoliberalism and the American War on Terrorism. After 9/11 and 2011 respectively, the international peace architecture shifted from the liberal alignment to stabilisation policies and counterterrorism. This policy shift unshackled the state and left civil society exposed. Without constraints on state power though, the international order of the 21st century has reverted back to earlier balance of power mechanisms, enabling authoritarianism, (ethno-)nationalism and oppressive forms of a victor’s peace.

Instead of a pluriverse of emancipatory alternatives to the liberal alignment, rising powers within the emerging multipolar order have supported authoritarian capitalism and military rule as alternatives to the liberal alignment. Decolonial approaches that offer greater equality, expanded rights and distributive justice have emerged in a few places in the global south, but appear fragile in the face of rising authoritarianism. Instead of supporting such approaches, rising powers such as Russia and China have created a revisionist international network of authoritarian states, which is hardly postcolonial, decolonial, or emancipatory. By eroding the ‘liberal alignment’, paralysing the international peace architecture but only offering pacification as an alternative peacemaking strategy, illiberal rising powers have severed the link between international politics and critical scholarship. Worse still, the social, state, and international order nexus is now permanently misaligned.

Methodologically, the paper presents a critical inductive analysis of contemporary peacemaking, comparing the alignment of the liberal international order with the misalignment in the emerging multipolar order. It first elaborates how advanced scholarship (on feminism, environmentalism, global justice, development, postcolonial thinking and anthropology) and civil society demands (for expanded rights, recognition, justice, legitimacy, and sustainability) put pressure on the international peace architecture to move beyond the paradigm of conflict management and to expand its interventionary toolbox. Yet, this paper highlights the limitations of the academic critiques. Moreover, it analyses why the international peace architecture ultimately failed to fundamentally transform its policies and tools. By elaborating the ‘liberal alignment’, this research explains why attempts to curtail state power became prominent in the early post-Cold War period, why this alignment could have provided a platform for progress towards an emancipatory peace, but also how the alignment broke down. After investigating the mechanisms that led to the collapse of the ‘liberal alignment’, the paper investigates the emerging ‘misalignment’ of peacemaking in a transitional international order. It identifies two strands of the misaligned order: An international strand and a decolonial strand, which appear incompatible. Finally, the paper evaluates what this means for a critical re-envisioning of peacemaking practices and peace theory.