The Ethics of Liberal Peacebuilding

Abstract

This chapter explores the normative underpinnings of the scholarly debate on liberal peacebuilding and situates them within international ethics. The debate is relevant for the ethics of global governance more broadly by addressing a theoretical gray zone between the ethics of international intervention and state sovereignty. The chapter argues that instead of rejecting the liberal internationalist objectives of peacebuilding, the critics tend to deny the coherence of liberal peacebuilding with these objectives. This is exemplified by relating the critique to the prevalent positions of John Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Simon Caney in international ethics. The critique challenges descriptive presuppositions of these positions by drawing on critical, poststructural, and postcolonial perspectives.

Promoting Peace or Pushing Norms? Normative Agency and Mediators as Norm Entrepreneurs

“…Peacebuilding missions go beyond negotiating and mediating political settlements to end violence-they actively promote democratization and marketization (Paris 2004) in the process of rebuilding post-conflict societies. Because of the shortcomings of peacebuilding practice (Lidén 2006) and the ethics of using humanitarian intervention in tandem with regime change, and transposing liberal democracies in given locales (Call 2012), the literature on peacebuilding thus shifted to debates on liberal peace. The liberal peace theory contends that societies that espouse liberal components such as democracy promotion, rule of law, good governance, market economies and human rights are more stable than those that do not (Doyle 2005).…”

“…The misadventures of emerging norms in international security around the turn of the millennium such as the Responsibility to Protect (Welsh 2013) and the creation of the International Criminal Court led norms scholars to question not only which norms matter, but "whose norms matter?" (Lidén 2006;Acharya 2011Acharya , 2013. This critique placed the "moral cosmopolitan" emphasis of early norm diffusion literature into the fore, rendering the simplistic narrative of "good" global norms promoted by Western norm entrepreneurs fixing or displacing "bad" local norms found in the "Global South" (Acharya 2013; Palmiano Federer 2019) increasingly untenable.…”