'Post-Liberal Peace' and the Crisis of International Authority

This paper seeks shed light on the way in which pragmatic approaches to peacebuilding have been undermining metropolitan policy elites’ capacity for instrumentalist political action and purposive social transformation. By focusing on Oliver Richmond’s recent work on “post-liberal” peacebuilding (Richmond 2011), the analysis will draw out how notions of ‘the everyday’, hybridity, and ‘the local’ are geared towards dissembling the existing stock of reductionist liberal-universal knowledge claims through which Western interveners used to cohere their policy frameworks towards the global periphery While this dynamic of analytical and normative self-deconstruction is heralded as an opportunity for radical change ‘from below’, it simultaneously corrodes Western policymakers’ authority as the “capacity to create and initiate” (Furedi 2013, 62). This is a neo-liberal relationship in which intervened states and societies are considered in need of outside empowering care, while their Western tutors are becoming increasingly disoriented, passive and status-quo minded. It would seem as if the kind of critique that pragmatic approaches to peacebuilding leverage against reductionist liberal-universal knowledge claims is ultimately targeting the foundational norms of liberal modernity. In that sense, they reflect a growing crisis of auctoritas. They seem to reject the “ideal of a foundational authority which someone develops (augments) and takes forward into the present” (Furedi 2013, 10). Or as Hannah Arendt pointed out, “what authority or those in authority constantly augment is the foundation” (Arendt 2006, emphasis added). In contrast, it appears as if contemporary practices of self-critique go in the opposite direction. They seem to aim at diminution. They vie to take apart the existing foundations of liberal modernity, rather than to augment them – or, alternatively, to replace them with a fresh set of new foundational norms. They are about “enabling people to destabilize even deeply institutionalized meanings”, rather than about (re-) building meaning (Autesserre 2014, 42).