Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace

Abstract

Recent scholarly critiques of the so-called 'liberal peace' raise important political and ethical challenges to practices of post-war intervention in the global South. However, their conceptual and analytic approaches have tended to reproduce rather than challenge the intellectual Eurocentrism underpinning the liberal peace. Eurocentric features of the critiques include the methodological bypassing of target subjects in research, the analytic bypassing of subjects through frameworks of governmentality, the assumed ontological split between the 'liberal' and 'local' and a nostalgia for the liberal subject and liberal social contract as alternative bases for politics. These collectively produce a 'paradox of liberalism' which sees liberal peace as oppressive but also the only true source of emancipation. However, a re-politicisation of colonial difference offers an alternative 'decolonising' approach to critical analysis through repositioning the analytic gaze. Three alternative research strategies for critical analysis are briefly developed.

Where now for the critique of the liberal peace?

“…Sabaratnam (2013), for example, makes the well-worn point that the critique of the liberal peace relies on a distinction between the West and the non-West. For her, the West/non-West dichotomy masks an ontology steeped in Eurocentrism and 'reinstates Europe as the implicit subject of world history and historical sociology, and occludes the contemporaneous and necessary involvement of the wider world' (Sabaratnam, 2013: 261).…”

Fighting for Liberal Peace in Mali? The Limits of International Military Intervention

“…We move away from an analytical framework that takes for granted the 'reality' of the 'liberal peace', as such a framework seems to hide at least as much as it reveals (Sabaratnam 2013). Understood primarily as an ideology, the object of our analysis is not the 'liberal' content of the 'peace' that must be built, but how the 'liberal peace' ideology serves to support an understanding of social reality that structures effective relationships.…”

The limits to statebuilding for peace in Africa

“…It reproduces, rather than problematises, ideas of cultural difference. 58 In addition, a focus on localised alternatives may gloss over other important normative questions. In an analysis of one of the main rebel groups in eastern DRC, the RCD-ML, as well as the Bakassi Boys in Nigeria, Kate Meagher shows how local governance systems may not be legitimate or accountable to those who live under them.…”