The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace

Hybridity has emerged recently as a key response in International Relations and peace studies to the crisis of liberal peace. Attributing the failures of liberal peacebuilding to a lack of legitimacy deriving from uncompromising efforts to impose a rigid market democratic state model on diverse populations emerging from conflict, the hybrid peace approach locates the possibility of a ‘radical’, post-liberal, and emancipatory peace in the agency of the local and the everyday and ‘hybrid’ formations of international/liberal and local/non-liberal institutions, practices, and values. However, this article argues, hybrid peace, emerging as an attempt to resolve a problem of difference and alterity specific to the context in which the crisis of liberal peacebuilding manifests, is a problem-solving tool for the encompassment and folding into globalising liberal order of cultural, political, and social orders perceived as radically different and obstructionist to its expansion. Deployed at the very point this expansion is beset by resistance and crisis, hybrid peace reproduces the liberal peace's logics of inclusion and exclusion, and through a reconfiguration of the international interface with resistant ‘local’ orders, intensifies the governmental and biopolitical reach of liberal peace for their containment, transformation, and assimilation

Liberation struggle or terrorism? The politics of naming the LTTE

This article examines the politics of naming in one of the longest-running and most intractable conflicts in the world: that between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (ltte) and the Sri Lankan state. While the narratives presented by the ltte and the state in support of their respective positions are complex and range across a number of issues, this paper is primarily concerned with the politics of the ‘terrorist’ label as applied to the ltte. In particular, it examines how the characterisation of the conflict as a form of terrorism has affected its evolutionary course. While the Sri Lankan state has deployed the language of terrorism to further its strategic aims in both the domestic and international spheres, the label has not necessarily impeded the growth of the ltte's military capability but has, by denying the ltte international legitimacy, undermined the organisation's stated political project—Tamil self-determination. The article also outlines the contradictions between prevailing international attitudes to terrorism and the conduct of key international actors with regard to the protagonists in Sri Lanka and demonstrates how the sustained rhetoric of terrorism has become a serious impediment to reaching a permanent resolution of the conflict

Disciplining the Diaspora: Tamil Self-Determination and the Politics of Proscription

Anti-imperialism was the raw material from which a new, metaphorical geography of connection was forged. This chapter shows how the new anti-war anti-imperialism emerged out of a series of political traditions and locations. The more general contestation of anti-imperialism was evident from the first days of the anti-war struggle. The anti-war movements have been conceived in, advanced through and shaped by a series of strategic locations. To begin to speak of the material practices that stretch discourses is to raise questions about the concrete ways in which anti-imperialisms have been extended and converged in the anti-war movements. Many British Muslims have immediate understandings of imperialism, as migrants and descendents of migrants from former British colonies including Bangladesh and Pakistan. Welsh and Scottish nationalism both have histories of drawing together anti-imperialism and anti-militarism

The Tamil Proscriptions: Identities, Legitimacies and Situated Practices

Conventional analyses of terrorism proscription rely on conceptions of policy in terms of bureaucratic institutions and processes functioning according to means-end rationality, and law as an institutionalised body of rules expressive of sovereign power. By contrast, this article argues that the workings of Western terrorism proscription are inseparable from and deeply conditioned by situated interpretations of the contexts and dynamics within which West-led interventions for global stability—equated with liberal order—are pursued. Predicated on a seemingly self-evident division between “liberal” conduct, actors, and practices and illiberal ones which threaten the former, the production of good order requires the strengthening of the former, and the disciplining, transformation, or destruction of the latter. However, categorisations as “liberal” or “non-liberal” are not derived from “objective” criteria, but always mutually dependent on the situated interpretations by (self-recognised) liberals of the contexts within which they are intervening. Taking an interpretive approach that treats state action as situated practice, the article traces Western states’ security engagement with Sri Lanka before, during, and after the armed conflict (1983–2009) to show how changing calculations for liberal peace there governed evolving proscription practices in relation to the LTTE and the Tamil diaspora

Clash of governmentalities : Liberal peace, Tamil freedom and the 2001-2006 peace process in Sri Lanka.

This dissertation argues that the dynamics, trajectories and outcomes of the Norwegian-led intervention in Sri Lanka from 2001 to 2006 to end the protracted armed conflict in the island can be productively understood as a 'clash of governmentalities', as the result of the simultaneous pursuit of competing idealizations of how populations, territory and forms of political rule should be organized. The first part of the study explores the concept of governmentality and sets out what is meant by a 'clash of governmentalities', a notion that turns on the different exercises of sovereignty, discipline and governmental modes of power in the service of competing rationalities of rule. Governmentality, it is argued, provides a novel and insightful way of looking at the consequences of international interventions in sites of 'internal' conflict such as Sri Lanka. The second part of the study explores the Norwegian- led peace process in Sri Lanka to show how two governmental rationalities, here termed Liberal Peace and Tamil Freedom, clashed via a myriad of micro-practices and ultimately produced an impasse which led not to lasting peace, but renewed war. The thesis thus examines the consequences of Liberal Peace, a political rationality which posits economic interdependence, democracy and the rule of law as constituting the sustainable foundations for world peace, encountering other, 'local' governmental projects which are also trying, sometimes violently, to reorder places in the global South according to their own rationalities of rule. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of how the concept of a clash of governmentalities lends itself to further empirical and theoretical research

The Hybridity of Liberal Peace: States, Diasporas and Insecurity

Much contemporary analysis of world order rests on and reproduces a dualistic account of the international system, which is divided into liberal and non-liberal spaces, practices and subjectivities. Drawing on postcolonial thought, we challenge such dualisms in two ways. First, we argue that, as a specific form of governmental reason and practice produced at the intersection of the European and the non-European worlds, liberalism has always been hybrid, encompassing within its project both ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ spaces and practices. Second, through analysis of liberal engagement with diasporas, a specific set of subjects that occupy both these spaces, we show how contemporary practices of transnational security governance work to reproduce the hybridity of liberal peace. The article demonstrates the shifting conditions for local agency in relations and practices that transcend the simple dualism between liberal and non-liberal spaces, in the process showing how practices of transnational security governance also reproduce diasporas as hybrid subjects. The argument is illustrated with reference to the Tamil diaspora and the Sri Lankan state’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

A long view of liberal peace and its crisis

The ‘crisis’ of liberal peace has generated considerable debate in International Relations. However, analysis is inhibited by a shared set of spatial, cultural and temporal assumptions that rest on and reproduce a problematic separation between self-evident ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ worlds, and locates the crisis in presentist terms of the latter’s resistance to the former’s expansion. By contrast, this article argues that efforts to advance liberal rule have always been interwoven with processes of alternative order-making, and in this way are actively integral, not external, to the generation of the subjectivities, contestations, violence and rival social orders that are then apprehended as self-evident obstacles and threats to liberal peace and as characteristic of its periphery. Making visible these intimate relations of co-constitution elided by representations of liberal peace and its crisis requires a long view and an analytical frame that encompasses both liberalism and its others in the world. The argument is developed using a Foucauldian governmentality framework and illustrated with reference to Sri Lanka