From Liberal to Military Peace: a new way of making and (de)regulating war

Abstract

The international peacebuilding agenda is undergoing a series of transformations that have led the literature to question whether we are still within what has been called the Liberal Peace - a set of policies, understandings and approaches to conflict management whose main objective was to achieve peace through the reform of so-called conflict states, promoting liberal democracy, development and human rights. While this model has been in a state of flux and has had to adjust to each context, since around 2010 a loss of faith in the actual possibility of peace and political reform of states, and a tendency to seek military victories and to increase the provision of war resources to states in conflict, has taken hold. These two aspects have had other consequences, such as the loss of the multilateral context that had made Collective Security possible within the United Nations, a shift towards state protection and a condemnation of the civilian population, which is now seen as a threat.

The literature has provided three different readings to understand these changes. The first focuses on the objectives and normative foundations on which the Liberal Peace was based (Chandler, 2017; Bargués, 2020; Juncos, 2017; Moe, 2018). The second focuses on the actors who carry out peacebuilding (Krause, 2021; Xinyu, 2020). Along these lines, Lewis et al. (2018) argue that Liberal Peace is being replaced by Authoritarian Conflict Management, which, led by Russia and China, is characterised by a goal of controlling widespread violence rather than addressing the deep roots of conflict. And, third, it focuses on the means and operating principles of peacebuilding, including doctrinal shifts in peacekeeping, signalling an 'aggressive' and 'militarising' turn in the Liberal Peace (de Coning et al., 2017; Cunliffe, 2015, 2016; Karlsrud, 2017, 2019; Pugh, 2015; Tardy, 2011; Tull, 2018).

While this literature has been very sharp in identifying changes in peace interventions and conflict management, and the turn to the military, there has been no real analysis of the importance of changes in the organisation of war as a central element in the transformation of peacebuilding practices. Moreover, there has been a crossover literature where, despite the growing literature on global militarism, there has been insufficient analysis of how it affects the international peace agenda and, by default, the implications of these changes for global structures (Abrahamsen, 2018, 2019; Stavrianakis, 2018; Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013; Stavrianakis and Stern, 2018). As Stavrianakis and Selby (2013, p. 1) argue, the reasons why scholars dismiss militarism lie not in its lack of relevance, but in the tendency to focus on security as separate from questions of military organisation and war preparedness.

Therefore, whether the Liberal Peace model has come to an end, or whether it is possible to affirm, as Coleman and Williams (2021) do, that peace operations will continue, two correlated questions arise: To what extent do the objectives and practices that are characterising peace operations and conflict management differ from the so-called Liberal Peace in order to establish that this paradigm has ceased to exist? And what are the implications for the international peace agenda of the fact that military means and objectives seem to have taken precedence over political ones?

Based on the sociology of militarism, this article analyses the transformations of the Liberal Peace from the point of view of changes in the practices of legitimising and achieving war, arguing that we are moving from a paradigm of Liberal Peace to one of Military Peace. These two concepts attempt to capture the general characteristics of the cycles of the international peace agenda. This is done with three issues in mind. First, the Liberal Peace was itself already shaped by militarism. Second, the Liberal Peace already had at its core the objective of endowing the state with the preponderant role as the manager of political, social and economic order, under the control of the security forces. Third, there is no seamless and clean transition from one to the other, as, on the one hand, the liberalism of the Liberal Peace had already been questioned, and, on the other, a liberal ethos - or assistance on the basis of moral obligation - has permeated even the initiatives that have served to revise peacebuilding in order to address its challenges and pitfalls.

Military Peace is defined as a set of practices that are characterising the approach to conflict at the international level, including: a tendency to seek military victories and military preponderance of the state over the civilian population, with political reform objectives and the aspiration for peace taking second place; the search for alliances outside the traditional multilateral channels of the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), not reflecting an international agenda as such; and a perceived need for state protection from threats emanating from the population. This paradigm is no more or less militaristic than Liberal Peace. Militarism, as a discursive and material practice around the legitimisation, normalisation, organisation and exercise of military violence that influences both social relations and decision-making and serves as a source of power, has shaped the contemporary world order and blurred the line between peace and war (Manchanda and Rossdale, 2021; Mann, 1993; Shaw, 2013, para. 2; Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013). However, there is a greater trend towards a preponderance of weapons, military actors and the use of force as an instrument of hegemony and political power (Thee, 1984, p. 296). This trend has pushed the rhetoric of liberal state reform into the background, making war a de-monopolised and deregulated instrument, available and appropriate, outside the traditional monopoly of 'legitimacy' of the great powers in the UN Security Council, the EU and NATO.

The article offers a thematic analysis of the main documents on the UN peacebuilding agenda from 1992 to 2023 and includes some examples drawn from various observations and interviews with UN officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR). The implications are not only how we should view the Liberal Peace going forward, but the fact that new trends are being established that further normalise warfare without the likelihood of improving the impact of these interventions. To do so, first, the context in which these transformations have taken place is analysed; second, the identifying elements of the Military Peace are examined. In conclusion, it highlights the consequences that these transformations are having, principally the continuation and expansion of conflicts, the growing role of armed actors in their management, and a reconfiguration of the international order.