International Statebuilding and the Future of Statehood
This article is published as part of Fridays With MUNPlanet, and its special series dedicated to world politics. The aim of this series is to bring you the analysis of global affairs by the established and upcoming scholars, decision-makers and policy analysts from various world regions. This week, Shahar Hameiri (Murdoch University) discusses ‘statebuilding interventionism’ and points to differentiating between peacebuilding and statebuilding in the context of the interventions in the 21st century and the current debates. The author argues that “rather than driven by a humanitarian impulse, or the desire to impose a liberal peace, the impetus for international statebuilding is that of risk management,” and writes that the states that intervene by means of international statebuilding “ironically extend the deeper crisis of the national scale they purportedly are aimed at ameliorating.”
Since the end of the Cold War, international peacebuilding interventions, whether involving the United Nations or not, have been focused on shaping and regulating the domestic governance of states.
This ‘statebuilding’ agenda is typically seen by peacebuilding scholars and practitioners to reflect the ‘lessons learned’ through earlier intervention efforts in the 1990s. According to Roland Paris, for example, early post-Cold War peacebuilding interventions had adopted a narrow conception of the liberal peace thesis and essentially sought to rapidly democratise target states, privatise their economies, and then quickly leave, assuming this would produce a peaceful outcome. The evident lack of success of many of those interventions, he argues, led to the adoption of longer term forms of intervention, seeking to construct better functioning states to attain both stabilisation and development.
Yet, this form of interventionism has had a patchy record too, especially reflected in the colossal failure of the US-led statebuilding projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. These failings are seen by many to have undermined the hitherto hegemonic ‘liberal peace thesis’ — the view that liberal societies and institutions are the best means of attaining and maintaining peace. Indeed, the subsequent adoption of more pragmatic forms of intervention, apparently more accommodating of recipients’ social, cultural and political structures, such as the US’s counterinsurgency doctrine, seems to substantiate the view that the liberal peace is in an ideological crisis.
For some, the ideological decline of the liberal peace suggests a weakening of the commitment to international intervention in general. This is either viewed as a negative development by those supportive of the idea of liberal peacebuilding, or as a positive development by those critical of it. This debate is misplaced, however, since the conflation of liberal peacebuilding with international statebuilding is a category mistake. Although statebuilding has undoubtedly been the main delivery device for peacebuilding since the early 2000s, the former’s origins are in deeper changes to the intervening states, which are not related to the peacebuilding agenda.
Specifically, statebuilding interventionism is an outcome of the emergence of regulatory forms of statehood, initially in the West, in two ways. First, statebuilding interventions are typically now diffuse, multilevel, multi-actor interventions, across many areas of governance and service-delivery. This is a manifestation of the prior disaggregation of governance in the intervening states, as well as in international organisations, such as the UN. Specialist agencies of states, international organisations and non-state organisations are thus increasingly networked and engaged in particular aspect of statebuilding — e.g. health, education, policing.
You can read the full article on MUNPlanet.
Cover image: UN Photo/JC McIlwaine
Police officers of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) play with children at the Temporary Learning Space of the Protection of Civilians (POC) site 2 in Juba.
