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The return of plural society:
statebuilding and social splintering
Jens Stilhoff Sörensen
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Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Drottning Kristinas
Väg 37, Box 27035, SE- 102 51, Stockholm, Sweden and School of
Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Published online: 31 Mar 2014.
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social splintering, Peacebuilding, DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2014.899135
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2. The return of plural society: statebuilding and social splintering
Jens Stilhoff So¨rensen*
Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Drottning Kristinas Va¨g 37, Box 27035, SE- 102 51,
Stockholm, Sweden and School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
(Received 21 September 2013; final version received 30 December 2013)
This article argues that liberal practices of peace- and statebuilding in post-conflict
societies contribute to cement ethnic divisions and exacerbate social and spatial
splintering. Drawing on historical experiences from colonial policy and from post-
colonial international development and statebuilding the article argues that a particular
problem lies in the conception and character of the state being promoted. Although
liberal peace- and statebuilding have come under accumulating critique over the past
decade, the practices and liberal interventionist agenda has consolidated and continued
to expand. It has come to increasingly express an authoritarianism and lack of
legitimacy and democracy that has recently given rise to a critique in terms of ‘post-
liberal’ governance. This article instead argues that the authoritarian and undemocratic
nature of governance is an extension of and fully in line with historical liberal practice
as well as the theory and ideology of neoliberalism.
Keywords: liberalism; biopolitics; statebuilding; plural society; colonial rule
Introduction
Is liberal peacebuilding dead? For some time now international peace- and statebuilding
has been under severe criticism. While the liberal interventionist agenda continues to
extend, as illustrated in the new normative UN framework ‘responsibility to protect’,
along with practices of intervention and state reconstruction (however arbitrary or
ambivalent), the theoretical debate has reached a point where the ‘liberal’ dimension is
deemed exhausted.1
Across numerous cases from Iraq and Afghanistan to Kosovo and Bosnia the
accumulating record of ‘statebuilding for peacebuilding’ indicates failure in promoting
inter-ethnic reconciliation, cooperation, social trust, trust in state institutions, and social
and economic development.2
Moreover, it has become increasingly implausible to
q 2014 Taylor & Francis
*Email: jens.sorensen@ui.se, or: jens.sorensen@globalstudies.gu.se
1
E.g. Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007);
Oliver Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London: Routledge, 2011); David Chandler, International
Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 2010).
2
Sumatra Bose, ‘The Bosnian State a Decade after Dayton’, in David Chandler, ed., Peacebuilding
without Politics: Ten Years of International Statebuilding in Bosnia (London: Routledge, 2006); M.
Cˇ ukur et al., Returning Home: An Evaluation of Sida’s Integrated Area Programmes in Bosnia and
Herzegovina (Sida Evaluation 05/18, Stockholm: Sida, 2005); David Chandler, ‘From Dayton to
Europe’, in Chandler, Peacebuilding without Politics; Roland Kostic´, Ambivalent Peace
(Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Report No. 78, Uppsala University, 2007); Roland
Paris, At War’s End (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jens Stilhoff So¨rensen, State
Collapse and Reconstruction in the Periphery (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009); Ahmed Rashid,
Descent into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (New York:
Penguin Books, 2009).
Peacebuilding, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2014.899135
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3. attribute these problems merely to the particular societies or conflicts in question and
increasingly clear that the problem lies with global liberal governance itself.
A neglected dimension in this context is the liberal conception of the state and the
nature and character of the state being promoted in these areas. What is the conception and
character of the state in contemporary statebuilding and what are its ramifications on
ethnicity and society? These are crucial questions with regard to contemporary peace- and
statebuilding.
Exploring them with a historical perspective provides us with contrasts and a wider
experience of actual alternative perspectives and practices. This accentuates and
elucidates both how we are bound up in historical and ideological context, and the
contingency and limits of contemporary practice. In providing us with an empirical long-
term record of liberal concepts and statebuilding, it can inform, scrutinise and critique
contemporary peace- and statebuilding. Indeed, the contrary tendency to neglect history as
a frame of reference is an ideological bias in itself.
This article draws on historical experiences from colonial policy and post-colonial
international statebuilding and argues that contemporary liberal conceptions of state are
particularly ill-fitted to promote inter-ethnic reconciliation, social trust and social-
economic development. Instead the character and nature of contemporary statebuilding for
peacebuilding in especially ethno-plural areas tends to contribute to social and spatial
fragmentation and introduce institutional forms and market relations under which the state
has no instruments to transcend or attract loyalty across sectarian divisions. The
persistence of these policies in the face of an accumulating record of failure indicates that
projects of state- and peacebuilding are insensitive to critiques on empirical ground and
that they should be understood in relation to quite other rationales than those officially
legitimising them. On the one hand, they are part of a global liberal security technology to
ensure Western neoliberal hegemony, which is less concerned with actual developmental
or socially cohesive effects in the intervened societies, and on the other, they are an
expression of a liberalism which has lost its integrative and progressive capacity and the
promises of social peace adjoined to it, and instead become divisive and destabilising.
Plural society and colonial rule
While liberalism is typically projected as a transformative force for peace and
emancipation (cf. ‘liberal peace’), through the social arrangements of democracy and
various rights and freedoms, its uprooting effect on society has been a major theme by its
critics. Thus, for example, the introduction of laissez-faire market relations in Europe
during the nineteenth century was, in the analysis of Karl Polanyi, directly responsible for
unleashing a series of disastrous social effects threatening the very fabric of society.3
This,
in turn, forced society to protect itself through counter-movements, which came in such
different forms as communism, fascism and the state-regulated ‘embedded’ liberalism of
the welfare state. Outside Europe the forced introduction of market relations in the
colonies has been analysed as directly responsible for a holocaust upon millions of people
in places like India, China and Brazil.4
3
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1944/1957).
4
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2002).
J.S. So¨rensen2
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4. The introduction of liberal economic relations and Western institutions was already by
more perceptive observers of colonial policy, such as J.S. Furnivall, considered to be the
main problem for the colonies.5
According to Furnivall this policy was directly
responsible for destroying the local social fabric effectively leading to social
disintegration. His concern was not just economic competition and eradication of
indigenous forms of production and subsistence, and hence not a romanticist critique, but
the impact on local society and its possibility to (politically) form a ‘social will’. Colonial
policy had produced the ‘plural society’ of the ‘tropics’ in which a medley of peoples, each
with its own religion, culture or language, met only on the market place, in buying and
selling, but lived separately and never combined.6
Furnivall’s empirical observation of
colonial practice and its effects in Burma and Indonesia directly echoes Karl Polanyi’s
analysis of Europe. A difference is that for Furnivall the effects were even more
destructive in the colonies and with regard to ‘plural society’ (i.e. ethno-plural), for in
Western society there was a common tradition to fall back upon. Moreover, laissez-faire
policy went even further in the colonies, which was the crucial problem in colonial policy.
When economic man ‘was cast out of Europe he found refugee in the tropics, and we see
him returning with seven devils worse than himself’, wrote Furnivall.7
The consequence:
‘Disintegration is the natural and inevitable effect of economic forces that are subject to no
restraint but that of the law.’8
Furnivall’s concept of the ‘plural society’ was a direct observation of liberal colonial
policy in Burma and Indonesia but with a similar pattern across ‘the tropics’ to colonies in
Africa. In Burma, where he had spent 20 years working in colonial administration, in
business and in education, and in Java, he observed how liberal colonial policy encouraged
migration and an emerging ethnic division of labour resulting in both social disintegration
and inter-ethnic animosity. According to Furnivall the plural society emerged as a result of
the promotion of market forces and it came to generate increasing intolerance towards
foreigners. There was an increasing clash ‘between capitalist interests, primarily
concerned with economic progress, and national interests aiming to promote social
welfare’.9
In both Burma and Java ‘the process of development under foreign rule has
resulted in a racially mixed community in which economic forces are abnormally active,
and in both a nationalist movement voices a reaction against foreign rule’.10
A problem
with plural society was that while easily malleable and governed by liberal colonial policy,
it created a society that had no integrating bonds to build upon for independence. It was a
forced union which, ‘is not voluntary but is imposed by the colonial power and by the force
of economic circumstances; and the union cannot be dissolved without the whole of
society relapsing into anarchy’.11
Liberal colonial policy was eventually replaced by what Furnivall called a ‘modern
colonial policy’ which took a new view of the role of the state, the relationship between
economic relations and welfare, and advocated state intervention in order to promote
5
John S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands
India (New York: ACLS History E-Book, 1948).
6
Ibid., 304 ff.
7
Ibid., 312.
8
Ibid., 546.
9
Ibid., 196.
10
Ibid., 264.
11
Ibid., 307.
Peacebuilding 3
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5. welfare.12
Modern colonial policy attempted to reconcile economic development with
‘native welfare’ and interests. In British colonial policy it found expression in Lord
Lugard’s ‘dual mandate’ and the idea of a colonial trusteeship in which the colonial power
had the right to extract natural resources from the colonies since the natives had no
knowledge or capacity to do so, but in return had a responsibility to reinvest in the colony
and promote development.13
Similar concerns were behind the earlier precursor of Dutch
‘ethical policy’ in Indonesia from 1901 onward, which emphasised improvement of
material conditions.
Post-colonial statebuilding: development and the modernist conception of the state
This view of the state’s role in development was growing in Europe with Keynesianism
during and after World War II and came to be reflected within international development
and the view of the decolonised ‘Third World State’. Decolonisation became the first wave
of internationally supported statebuilding.
Keynesianism came to dominate the discourse on the state throughout the early years
of independence. Revisiting it provides us with an illuminatingly stark contrast to
contemporary neoliberal practices of peace- and statebuilding. It developed the conception
that the state was the crucial agent in the economy in the Western welfare state, by
promoting national industry, welfare and securing full employment through counter-cyclic
economic policy, as well in the Third World, where the state would promote
industrialisation and modernisation. The state was protected internationally through
regulation of trade and finance, which were only gradually liberated.
International development thereby became state- and nationbuilding through modern-
isation. The general consensus of the state’s role in the economy was shared by modernisation
and dependency theorists alike and the theoretical and policy-prescriptive debate
instead focused on the role of exogenous versus endogenous causes of (under)development
and, as a consequence, the benefits of trade versus de-linking with the industrial north.
The modernist project, with the Keynesian welfare state in the West and ‘development’
in the South, was founded on the idea that the state would engineer economic and social
development, promote social integration and ensure labour supply to the industry by
promoting a healthy population. This implied a public infrastructure based on common and
broadly equal centralised services, which were considered integrative of society and crucial
in promoting circulation and hence economic and social progress.14
The foundation in the
‘liberal welfare state’ (‘Keynesian’ or ‘social’ state) was a social contract with mutual
duties and obligations, where the state protected and maintained a productive labour force
and simultaneously provided a safety-network to ameliorate for those worst off. The
worker was protected through unemployment schemes and an economic policy with
commitment to full employment, and the state oversaw the full chronology of life from
child care to pension. This order certainly had its exclusions and marginalised groups, on
the basis of gender, race, the mentally ill and so forth, but it nevertheless aspired to a
universalism where the population as a whole was the concern. Social rights were
connected to citizenship and the state was the ultimate insurance agency.
12
Ibid., 312–18.
13
F.J.D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: William Blackwood,
1922).
14
Cf. Stephen Graham and S. Marvin, Splintering Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2001).
J.S. So¨rensen4
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6. In this conception of the state, the object and reference of government is population,
and the promotion of life with reference to population. It is with Michel Foucault’s
terminology, a biopolitics, understood as a politics of ‘life’ (bios) at the aggregate level of
population.15
This contrasts to for example geopolitics, which is concerned with the geo,
of territory, borders and states. It is worth emphasising that the governmental reference in
terms of external security at this time remained geopolitical in the sense that the imagery
of security centred on the nation-state in economic, social and military terms. Outside and
beyond it, there was a fixed external security threat envisioned in the form of territorial
invasion and nuclear annihilation. Under this condition, with an external enemy and
threats of war connected to the borders of the state, war preparations required full national
mobilisation. International development, in turn, was a security technology to prevent
decolonised states from embarking on a communist trajectory and falling under Soviet
influence.
The neoliberal attack on modernism
The Keynesian consensus came under a forceful attack by neoliberalism in the 1980s.
While there is a variety in forms of neoliberalism, there is a shared set of core values.16
Crucial is that it was not just a market fundamentalist ideology concerning the economy
but an attack on the very foundations of modernism, the modernist conception of state and
its governmental rationality. Neoliberalism also established a different relation to
uncertainty. Where modernism and the Keynesian form of liberalism seek to plan and
protect in relation to uncertainty and risk, neoliberalism instead absolves protection in
favour of adaptation, adjustment and resilience, and embraces uncertainty as an ultimate
expression of freedom.17
Planning and protection is here an obstacle to freedom,
innovation and adaptation. These crucial changes in thinking about economy and security
are in turn constitutive of a changing biopolitics; one that is divisive rather than aggregate.
Biopolitics, in Foucault’s elaboration, concerned life at the aggregate level of
population. This was typical for the post-war modernist project where it reached its zenith
in the modern welfare state. But while biopolitics was aggregate it is necessary to break up
the biological continuum of life at some level and biopolitics therefore always has an
inherent logic of separation, selection and categorisation. Race is one criteria upon which
to do so, others are through distinctions between liberal and non-liberal or developed and
under-developed life. Although liberalism purports to be universal and has universal
claims, it views non-liberal forms of life as incomplete and potentially a threat. Such life
needs to be addressed, which liberalism traditionally has done in one of three ways:
(1) through reform or development; (2) by ‘preservation in situ’ (reservations or
self-sustenance); or (3) by extermination. The colonial experience contained all three
elements. International development, and aid policy, appears as the governmental response
15
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at Colle`ge de France 1977–78
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at
Colle`ge de France 1978–79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
16
For an overview see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road to Mont Pelerin (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
17
Pat O’Malley, Uncertainty Makes Us Free (Sydney University Law School, Legal Studies
Research Paper No. 09/99, 2009).
Peacebuilding 5
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7. for how to address non-liberal life after colonialism. In the imagery of modernisation it did
so with the (Third World) state as its referent, rather than its population, and was in this
sense aggregate. With international assistance, the aid-receiving state was assumed to
address the problems of development, mobilise its population and national resources,
address domestic imbalances, introduce new technology and know-how, and push towards
agricultural reform, industrialisation and modernisation. Its expected trajectory was to
become like the industrialised West. In this sense the Keynesian projection of international
development in the South was the ‘developmental state’ (although this term originally was
coined for Japan and Asian state-led development).
Neoliberalism, with its extension of market logic to basic infrastructure and state
services, entailed a new biopolitics that was divisive rather than aggregate. Melinda
Cooper has captured the distinction at biopolitical level and argues that neoliberalism
reworks the value of life as established in the welfare state and New Deal model of social
reproduction.18
Neoliberalism, she argues, does not merely want to capitalise the public
sphere and its institutions, but the life of the nation, social and biological reproduction as a
national reserve and foundational value of the welfare state.19
The realm of reproduction
itself becomes exposed to direct economic calculus:
Where Keynesian economics attempts to safeguard the productive economy against the
fluctuations of financial capital, neoliberalism installs speculation at the very core of
production. Neoliberalism, in other words, profoundly reconfigures the relationship between
debt and life, as institutionalized in the mid-twentieth-century welfare state.20
The result is a new kind of governmentality spreading to all spheres of political and
social life.
From society to community as correlate of government
The modernist project was challenged on other grounds as well. There were challenges
from the left which share premises with neoliberalism, or which neoliberalism has
demonstrated a tremendous capacity to absorb. Post-modernism, multi-culturalism,
feminism and sustainable development philosophy, all posed challenges to modernism and
universalism. As with neoliberalism, they all concern a new way of conceptualising the
plane of reference for government, its objects, subjects, targets and mechanisms.
As Nicholas Rose has argued, we see a ‘detotalization’ of society where the thought-space
of the social is fragmented:
in terms of ‘multiculturalism, and political controversies over the implications of ‘pluralism’ –
of ethnicity, of religion, of sexuality, of ability and disability – together with conflicts over the
competing and mutually exclusive ‘rights’ and ‘values’ of different communities. Subjects of
government are understood as individuals with ‘identities’ which not only identify them, but do
so through their allegiance to a particular set of community values, beliefs and commitments.21
Community now emerges as the ideal territory for the administration of individual and
collective, argues Rose, and individual conduct no longer appears ‘socially determined’
18
Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2008), 9.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 10.
21
Nicholas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 135.
J.S. So¨rensen6
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8. but shaped by values that arise from ties of community identification.22
Hence a kind of
replacement of ‘society’ with ‘community’, or rather ‘communities’, which is a social
breakdown quite compatible with neoliberalism and which implies a similar break with
aggregate biopolitics. A governmental plane of reference to ‘civil society’ or ‘community’
poses no obstacle to neoliberal thought for they can be exposed to market logic and ideas
of self-reliance. Hence there is no real ideological threat.
However, there is nothing natural about community. Like society it has to be
constructed. A new correlate of government has to be mapped, with distinctions and
borders, and with its interests and values identified. In this process society does not
disappear, but it is reworked through new categories that regenerate – or threaten – it.
Whereas this conceptualisation is exemplified in Western societies through new concerns
related to minority communities, gender-based policies, specific community programmes
and affirmative action, it entails a biopolitical separation that is mirrored in international
development and security policy. In the global periphery liberalism rediscovers multi-ethnic
post-conflict societies as tribal, communal and sectarian. These features are not merely
discovered and addressed but re-generated as a necessary correlate of government in the
new governmental rationality. Here, as David Campbell has argued, liberal governance and
ethnic national leaders have come to share a common ‘ethnic cartography’.23
Campbell’s
reference was to Bosnia-Herzegovina, but an extreme illustration of interventionist policy
would be the US counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq, especially from 2007 onward.
Following the complete breakdown of the Iraqi state under the US occupation from 2003,
Iraqi society was rapidly divided and mobilised along its ethnic-religious fault-lines.
Resistance blended with civil war and the ethno-plural City of Baghdad became an
increasingly ethnically divided city.24
The US counter-insurgency strategy popularly called
‘the Surge’ emphasised these divisions. Violence diminished only after a reduction of inter-
ethnic contact surfaces, through segregation, walled off neighbourhoods and pay-outs to
tribal leaders who mobilised their respective followers. The shared ‘ethnic cartography’
reflected biopolitical control measures that operated along ethnic-religious fault-lines.25
At
the core of the liberal development–security nexus sits the Janus face of illiberal practice.
Spatial splintering
While influences from both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ mutually contributed to deconstruct
society into various segments, physical infrastructure, various services and social space
are being fragmented through privatisation and internationalisation. This has profound
effects on social and urban space. The modernist project contained an ideology in which
infrastructure, such as water, power, roads, waste and communication networks, were
considered to bind cities, regions and nations together in geographical and political
wholes, to add cohesion to territory and society, and where services were to be delivered
on a broadly equal basis, a condition which required public ownership and control.26
Now, internationally, major infrastructure networks are opened up to private sector
participation in management and provision of services and public monopolies are being
22
Ibid., 136.
23
David Campbell, ‘Apartheid Cartography’, Political Geography 18 (1999): 395–435.
24
Derek Gregory, ‘The Biopolitics of Baghdad’, Human Geography 1, no. 1 (2008): 6–27.
25
Ibid.
26
Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism.
Peacebuilding 7
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9. replaced by profit-driven markets, which in turn has placed the infrastructure sector at the
centre in international flows of finance, capital and expertise, in the search for profitable
outlets.27
Globally, and especially in the South, the result is often increasing selectivity,
uneven distribution and development, and what Graham and Marvin call ‘splintering
urbanism’.28
The general hegemonic position of neoliberal governmental rationality, its breakdown of
the idea of ‘public service’ and the exposing of the latter to commercialisation and market
rationality, generates social splintering and tensions to the extent that it challenges
democratic legitimacy in the liberal core states. Colin Crouch argues that this has moved us
towards a ‘post-democratic’stage.29
However,theproblembecomesmore acuteinthe global
South, especially in weak or fragmented states. If the essential legitimising and integrative
functions of the state are removed, the problem becomes a direct security concern.
Security and the neoliberal institutional fix
Security has provided a key legitimising and rationalising principle for redesigning
institutions in a neoliberal fix during the post-cold war period, first in the second half of the
1990s, and then accentuated with the ‘war on terror’ after 2001. The World Bank first
reconsidered the role of state institutions in the wake of the social disasters following the
neoliberal ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ (SAP) pushed on Africa in the 1980s, but
it did so without challenging the neoliberal foundation of the policies. Instead, these
programmes were accentuated and modified to operate with institutional redesign and
fixing. The end of bi-polarism gave momentum to global neoliberalism in a double sense:
first, it stood victorious over the socialist alternative, which was now eliminated as a
development model and as new space was opened for capitalist expansion;30
second, the
‘unlocking’ of a binary geopolitics enabled a more radical interventionism in the South.
The break with bi-polarism enabled a vision of a new world order based on global liberal
governance and liberal interventionism, thus expressing a responsibility for the global
population. The concepts ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘human security’, as a
reorientation from state security, legitimised and conceptualised this new ambition. It was
now possible to challenge the principles of the old order on moral ground, as well as
practical, and states could be by-passed in favour of operating in societies directly, through
NGOs and promotion of ‘civil society’. The borders between national/international could
be abolished in international development and security thought. The explicit linking of
development to security that became increasingly articulated in policy discourse through
the 1990s was instrumental to this change.
The World Bank’s reorientation towards the character of the state and especially its
institutions was expressed in the ‘good governance’ agenda for developing countries and
in the ‘gradualist’ approach to post-communist transition in Eastern Europe. The Bank
articulated its new-found commitment to institutions in the 1997 World Development
Report (World Bank 1997) and then in subsequent reports, such as the 2002 WDR:
27
Ibid., 13–14.
28
Ibid.
29
Colin Crouch, Postdemocracy (London: Polity Press, 2004).
30
Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Neil Smith, The Endgame of
Globalization (London: Routledge, 2005).
J.S. So¨rensen8
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10. Building Institutions for Markets and the 2004 report Building Market Institutions in
South-Eastern Europe.31
A common theme in these is the continued persistent
commitment to market liberalism. Graham Harrison argues that the reforms that followed
the good governance agenda in the World Bank’s success-cases, Uganda, Tanzania and
Mozambique, were stimulated by the failure to implement the SAP, and where the new
focus on institutions are a remedy to enable, implement and ‘lock-in’ neoliberal reform
packages.32
The failure of so-called ‘first generation reforms’, in which the state was
rolled back, has been followed by ‘second generation reforms’, which focus on the state’s
capacity to receive and implement aid programmes, civil service reform and so on, but
with strong involvement by the international agencies in shaping the reforms. This
external involvement is a central feature of what Harrison calls ‘governance states’.
The same pattern is repeated across international protectorates and statebuilding
missions, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo or Iraq. Given that the concern here is post-
conflict reconstruction one might expect a much stronger focus on the integrative
functions of the state, and investment in institutions and services that could be utilised in
economic recovery and to attract cross-ethnic popular legitimacy and potentially
reconciliation. The state’s possibility to provide welfare goods and services, employment
and equitable taxes was seen as crucial for providing legitimacy to the state institutions in
classical development theory.33
Today, the governing conception of statebuilding and
peacebuilding is instead built around neoliberal reforms and market economy, with
continuous and recurring instability as a result. A single case in point is the efforts to
privatise socially owned enterprise in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, which has been
made a priority along with a process of continuous identity politics in existing institutions.
This has contributed to the preservation and reproduction of client dependency and ethnic
polarisation as well as shadow economic activity rather than ameliorating the formal.34
Great emphasis has been placed on the ‘individual entrepreneur’ through small- and
medium-range enterprises, as well as through micro-loans, which appear to sustain,
reproduce and often increase poverty.35
Another instructive case is Iraq, where the institutional dismantling of the state during
the first months of occupation provided a direct infusion to the military resistance and
further opened up for ethnic mobilisation and competition.36
Here, the first two orders by
31
World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (Oxford University
Press, 1997); World Bank, World Development Report: Building Institutions for Markets
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002); World Bank, Building Market Institutions in South-Eastern
Europe (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004).
32
Graham Harrison, The World Bank and Africa: The Construction of Governance States (London:
Routledge, 2004).
33
Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (London: Gerald Duckwalz,
1957).
34
Timothy Donais, The Political Economy of Peacebuilding in Post-Dayton Bosnia (London:
Routledge, 2005); Kostic´, Ambivalent Peace; So¨rensen, State Collapse.
35
Milford Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism
(London: Zed Books, 2010); Milford Bateman, ed., Confronting Microfinance: Undermining
Sustainable Development (Boulder: Kumarian Press, 2011).
36
Cf. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin
Books, 2006); Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
Zaki Chehab, Inside the Resistance: The Iraqi Insurgency and the Future of the Middle East (New
York: Nation Books, 2005); Gregory, ‘The Biopolitics of Baghdad’.
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11. Paul Bremer, who then headed the ‘Coalition Provisional Authority’ (CPA) have been
considered crucial for the build-up of the armed resistance that grew considerably during
summer 2003.37
The first order (CPA Order No. 1), on 16 May 2003, concerned the de-
Ba’athification of Iraq, which meant that all senior party members, as well as all of the three
highest ranks within state institutions, from the Ministries to the hospitals and universities,
would be dismissed from office and prohibited from future employment or service. This
resulted in some 30,000–50,000 officials and party members being driven underground.
The second order (CPA Order No. 2) of 23 May, concerned the dissolution of the army,
police and security services, dismissing some 385,000 army employees and 285,000
employees under the Ministry of Interior (including the police and security service). All
officers of higher rank also lost their pension. In one stroke half a million men, with special
training and access to arms, were made unemployed. The resulting widespread protests
were countered by US soldiers opening fire on non-armed demonstrators. Bremer
proceeded by signalling that there would be no Iraqi government ‘any time soon’ and by
instituting a fast-track process for transforming Iraq to a market economy, which included
the closing of state-owned factories, hence adding to unemployment an additional tens of
thousands of Iraqis. In a few months tens of thousands of Iraqis had been excluded from
political and economic life and the country’s unifying institutions (the army, police and
state institutions) had been dissolved.38
Instructive as the Iraqi case is, it comes with its
particular geopolitical context and the debate over its oil wealth as a motive for
intervention.39
A widespread view in the Arab world seems to be that the USA actively
seeks to break up and divide the country, and the Arab world in general, by installing ‘fitna’
in the region, an Arabic word for ‘upheaval and fragmentation within Islam’.40
While Iraq
after the formal US withdrawal in 2011 is deeply and systematically divided along
sectarian lines, official US policy maintains support for a unified federal Iraq.
Across these cases ‘market-economy’ has been written into the constitutions after
detailed guidance by international agents, and subsequently this issue is exempted from
the future democratic process. The reconstruction programmes have emphasised and
executed rapid privatisation in all cases, seeking foreign investment and take-over if
possible, which has often resulted in considerable local opposition and legal disputes, as
for example over socially owned enterprise in Kosovo, or as with the Iraqi Oil Law, widely
disputed for example by the trade unions and which to date has not been ratified by the
parliament.41
Accompanying the institutional reshaping is an orientation to and a conception of
‘civil society’ with an Anglo-American and neoliberal meta-narrative or bias.42
37
Following Ricks, Fiasco.
38
Ricks, Fiasco, 163–5; Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 155 ff.; see also David Harvey, The New
Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
39
E.g. Harvey, The New Imperialism; Noam Chomsky, Failed States (New York: Penguin Books,
2006); Jonathan Cook, Israel and the Clash of Civilizations (London: Pluto Press, 2008); Greg
Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq (London: Vintage Books, 2011).
40
Seymour Hersch, ‘The Redirection’, The New Yorker, March 5, 2007; cf. Cook, Israel and the
Clash of Civilizations.
41
Alan Cafruny and Timothy Lehmann, ‘Over the Horizon’, New Left Review 73 (2012): 5–16;
Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire; on Kosovo see So¨rensen, State Collapse, ch. 8.
42
Cf. Margareth Somers, ‘What’s Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere?
Toward a Historical Sociology of Concept Formation’, Sociological Theory 13 (1995): 113–44;
Margareth Somers, ‘Narrating and Naturalizing Civil Society and Citizenship Theory: The Place of
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12. This involves a division of society into ‘spheres’ and a conception of civil society as
absolutely autonomous from the state. This perspective builds on classical political
economy, in which the economy, and civil society, is understood as consisting of ‘natural’
processes into which it would not only be wrong by the government to intervene, but
indeed against nature.43
The Anglo-American conception can be contrasted to a neo-
Hegelian conception of state and civil society, in which their inter-relation is emphasised
and the state is seen as the necessary mediator against the various particular interests
generated in civil society. This perspective is expressed in the Nordic model of civil
society.44
Development agencies follow a neoliberal conception, with civil society defined
as essentially autonomous to the state consisting primarily of NGOs that can be supported
as means to promote liberal values, democratisation and reconciliation.45
Neoliberal rationality has demonstrated tremendous capacity to shape, condition, adapt
to and permeate what was first presented and advocated as novel or ‘alternative’
approaches to development-security over the past decades, such as ‘human security’ and
‘sustainable development philosophy’. The latter, sustainable development, emerged from
quite separate ideological and philosophical strands in the 1970s as an anti-modernist non-
material development alternative rooted in romanticism.46
It seemed to offer a new kind of
critique of economic-centred development, one which was not anchored in concerns with
social injustice and inequality, but in the economy’s relation to the environment and its
capacity for preserving the biosphere.47
However, in this critical capacity it became part of
the neoliberal attack on state-led modernisation strategies. The critique launched from
sustainable development over the grand-scale state-engineered development, industrial-
isation and modernisation, with its ecological and social alienation had a direct parallel in
the neoliberal concern with the state’s intrusion on the market. It became particularly
popular with NGOs and could in this manner be construed as a ‘civil society’ alternative,
again contributing to the corrosive effects neoliberalism exercised upon state-oriented
development. This does not mean that sustainable development is a mere neoliberal proxy.
As Julian Reid argues, the relationship is more complex and while sustainable development
deploys ecological reason in advocating the need to secure the biosphere, neoliberalism
presents the economy as the very means to that security.48
Thus, in neoliberalism economic
reason is conceived of as a servant to ecological reason and thereby it can project its own
rationalities as both addressing and being the solution to the very same issue.
Footnote 42 continued
Political Culture and the Public Sphere’, Sociological Theory 13 (1995): 229–74; So¨rensen, State
Collapse; Lars Tra¨ga˚rdh, ‘Associative Democracy in the Swedish Welfare State’, in Civil Society in
the Age of Monitory Democracy, ed. Lars Tra¨ga˚rdh et al. (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013).
43
See Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics.
44
Lars Tra¨ga˚rdh, ‘Associative Democracy’.
45
So¨rensen, State Collapse, ch. 9; and ‘Aid Policy, Civil Society and Ethnic Polarisation’, in
Challenging the Aid Paradigm: Western Currents and Asian Alternatives, ed. Jens Stilhoff So¨rensen
(London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
46
Vanessa Pupavac, ‘From Materialism to Non-Materialism in International Development’, in
So¨rensen, Challenging the Aid Paradigm; Vanessa Pupavac, ‘The Consumerism–Development–
Security Nexus’, Security Dialogue 41, no. 6 (2010): 691–713; Mark Duffield, Development,
Security and Unending War (London: Polity Press, 2007).
47
Julian Reid, ‘The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject of Resilience’, Development
Dialogue 58 (2012): 67–79.
48
Ibid.
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13. The growing popularity of sustainable development among Western NGOs in the
1980s was met with neoliberal restructuring of the aid industry which increasingly
subcontracted NGOs in development work in the 1990s. Sustainable development is now
fostering the neoliberal ideal of integrating poor people on the market, where they can
become entrepreneurs. The mainstreaming of sustainable development philosophy is well
illustrated by Amartya Sen’s highly influential ‘capabilities’ approach, which is organised
around the individual micro-entrepreneur and the realisation of the individual’s ‘capacity’
within existing political, economic and social relations.49
Today, sustainable development
is one of five selected priority areas of the UN and also articulates the ‘human security’
agenda, since its advent in the 1990s. Human security has thereby never come to include
any economic dimension aiming at providing employment or welfare security, but furthers
the self-reliance and sustainability tradition by focusing on basic needs, such as health,
water, nutrition, for the extremely poor and on obstacles for self-reliance.50
In this manner
it replaces earlier broader ambitions of modernisation and material development. In place
of the modernist universal ‘developmental state’ it envisions a minimal ‘human security
state’ that provides basic functions while institutionally adapting itself to the forces of the
market. In effect the discourse on human security is deeply ideological and it enables
international agents to securitise an issue faster and more arbitrarily and thereby legitimise
intervention and a certain shaping of states.
The human security state
The difference between contemporary security imagination and that of the modernist
project is particularly expressed in a changing relation between state and population.
Security and economy are now borderless and interconnected in new ways.
In contemporary views on security the borders between national/international are
abolished and states are no longer seen as autonomous units but as integrated in a network
of a global security terrain that protects the circuits and functioning of the global
circulation necessary to sustain liberal life. Threats to the liberal order and global economy
are de-territorialised, biopoliticised and continuous. This is expressed for example in the
concept of failed or fragile states. While this invokes that the state is a security concern it
is so, not by way of its foreign policy orientation, as with the term rogue state, but because
of a lacking capacity to control its population. Controlling and identifying threats within
population is a major concern within Western states as well, with ‘homeland security’,
increasing surveillance, biometric readings and control now operating not just on airports
and borders but within the cities across public and private space.51
The profiling,
identification of target groups, restriction in mobility and integrity, illustrates a new
segregative biopolitics of security that is more personal, domestic and borderless. Security
is now at home and everywhere. War has been brought back into society.
49
Pupavac, ‘The Consumerism–Development–Security Nexus’; see also Sen A, Development as
Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
50
For an expanded critique of human security discourse see also David Roberts, Global Governance
and Biopolitics: Regulating Human Security (London: Zed Books, 2009); Giorgio Shani et al.,
Protecting Human Security in a Post 9/11 World: Critical and Global Insights (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
51
Graham Stephen, Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2010); see also
Daniel Salove, Nothing to Hide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
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14. In this framework the objective in contemporary international statebuilding is not an
autonomous and developmental state, an idea that would conflict with the framework,
but to secure the space for liberal order. While the referent is population, this must be
re-territorialised within a security state. Here, development has abandoned its previous
concern with material growth within states, with modernisation and aspiration to a more
equal world, and moved to manage socially disruptive effects occurring at the level of
populations. While states are expected to undertake market reform and institutionally
adapt to neoliberalism, populations need to be contained and protected through poverty
reduction on the most marginalised groups and, more generally, measures to promote
self-reliance, which is now offered as an alternative to liberal development. In this sense
development is, as Mark Duffield has argued, a security technology aiming to both
secure the global liberal order, and its continuous extension, from potential disruptions in
terms of refugees, illiberal networks, local conflict or political extremism and terrorism,
and to secure the surplus population that is excluded, and generated, in the process of
creating market forces on a global scale.52
Here, statebuilding has a double role: first, it
provides a geographic fixing of space for global capitalism by shaping states in line with
market liberal relations. This process is an extension of what Neil Smith has termed a
geoeconomic vision and strategy of breaking up and fixing space for an American-led
global capitalism that followed World War I by creating nation-states in Europe upon the
territories of the defeated Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, and then World War II by
breaking up the global colonial trading system and creating nation-states in Africa and
Asia.53
Second, these states are institutionally equipped with the population management
technologies of sustainable development and self-help, which secure and help the surplus
population to adjust from the social effects of the market forces.54
Contemporary
statebuilding thereby aims to promote what we may call a ‘human security state’. This is
a direct extension of the biopolitical shift in development that was signalled with the
concept ‘human security’ in the early 1990s. Operating in the name of security it has a
parallel in an increasing security and surveillance state in the West. Human security is a
neoliberal concept that privileges self-reliance, adaptability and resilience, over a welfare
state and over risk socialisation or protection.55
The ‘human security state’ is a state that
no longer provides comprehensive welfare or social insurance, just basic ‘critical’
infrastructure upon which population is now contingent. It is the institutional
manifestation of liberalism’s retreat from all its previous (post-war) ambitions related
to development and a re-institutionalisation of Furnivall’s plural society; a society
governed primarily through foreign influence, reproducing a heterogeneity of community
interests, meeting only on the competition at the market place and adjoined only under
the law.
While it is tempting to denote the undemocratic character of this imposed form of
governance and shaping of society as ‘post-liberal’,56
it is instructive to highlight its
correspondence with textbook neoliberal visions, especially those of Friedrich Hayek.
52
Cf. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War.
53
Smith, American Empire; Smith, The Endgame of Globalization.
54
Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War; Pupavac, ‘The Consumerism–
Development–Security Nexus’.
55
See also Shani et al., Protecting Human Security.
56
E.g. David Chandler, International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance (London:
Routledge, 2010); Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace.
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15. Hayek’s idea of a ‘catallaxy’, elaborated in Law, Legislation and Liberty is a social and
economic order in which the principles of the free and self-regulating market are
constitutionally enshrined and rendered outside the realm of politics.57
In Hayek’s ideal
society of a ‘catallaxy’, there is no common purpose, end or goals. It is, in his own words, a
society ‘which has nothing to do with, and is in fact irreconcilable with “solidarity”’ and
where ‘the only ties which hold the whole of a Great Society together are purely
“economic”’.58
In Hayek’s vision this is best achieved in a plural (i.e. multi-cultural) and
federal order where social solidarity is weaker than in national contexts, for in the latter
‘the people’ tend to utilise the democratic process for various interventions on the market,
and to create social security programmes.59
The enemy to this order is all forms of social
engineering and, according to Hayek, the greatest threats are therefore precisely the
ideologies that can produce social solidarity, especially socialism and nationalism.60
Hayek’s vision of a social order consisting of a plurality or peoples adjoined only by the
free market is, in essence, precisely the condition Furnivall warned about as propelling
social collapse and havoc in the colonies.
The imposition of a free market, diminished instruments for the state in an ethno-plural
order and circumscription of democratic intervention are thereby core ingredients not only
in practice, but in the very vision of neoliberal state- and peacebuilding, and in order to
denote it ‘post-liberal’ one must argue that neoliberalism itself constitutes the departure
from liberalism. The latter is certainly a viable proposition. Neoliberalism, I would argue,
destroys the foundation of political liberalism and of democracy. The idea of instituting a
market order in which no democratic process must interfere is itself in conflict with
democracy, but also with the idea of a politics, because the latter is precisely about the
denotation, organisation, allocation and use of public utilities. Barring economic and
social relations from politics is to introduce a post-political and post-democratic order with
which political liberalism has little in common. Politics requires real alternatives and
options of choice otherwise it collapses into mere public management. Politics
presupposes transcendence, or an idea of a possible future that can be different from the
present. Neoliberalism instead introduces a stasis of continuous uncertainty and adaptation
in a (spontaneous) market order. Effectively it seeks to absolve all political vision. Julian
Reid has added another argument.61
In replacing the security concern that has always been
central to liberalism, and as especially played out in the biopolitics of the Keynesian
welfare state, with ‘uncertainty’ and ‘resilience’, neoliberalism now presupposes and
engenders a subject that no longer seeks to protect itself in relation to the unexpected, but
that is open to and embraces uncertainty by adapting fully to changed circumstances. This,
Reid argues, is a subject rendered outside the realm of politics, a post-political subject,
and in this sense neoliberalism destroys the foundation (i.e. subject) upon which politics
is built.
57
Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 vols (London and New York: Routledge,
1982/1993).
58
Ibid., vol. 2, 111–12.
59
See also Friedrich Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948), esp. ch. 12, and Perry Anderson’s critique of the EU in The New Old World (London:
Verso, 2007), and subsequent debate in New Left Review 73 (2012).
60
Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, 111.
61
Reid, ‘The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject of Resilience’. See also his forthcoming
work with Brad Evans, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (forthcoming 2014).
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16. Neoliberal ‘human security’ statebuilding can therefore be viewed as a process of
securitisation without security, one that is ‘post-liberal’, ‘post-democratic’ and ‘post-
political’.
The return of plural society
In the absence of a greater vision, contemporary statebuilding, as an expression of
interventionist global liberal governance, has abandoned socially organised development
to the forces of the market, while using the full institutional infrastructure as instruments to
manage security; in essence ‘development’ has become totally securitised. But, while
international statebuilding is an instrument of global security governance, the actual trend
it reproduces is neither development nor security, but rather its opposite: social splintering
and accelerating uneven development and inequality. Following classical development
theory this would be a fully expected outcome. Early development theory held the latter to
be a general feature and established empirical trend of market liberalism.62
The atomising
effect on society, of breaking the social fabric and enhancing divisions, was observed by J.
S. Furnivall in the colonies and by Karl Polanyi in Europe.63
Today, spatial segregation is
a typical feature of neoliberal urban planning, with certain areas upgraded in urban
development projects, while others fall into disarray. The architectural expression of this
trend is the increasing gap between a privileged and protected private space and a decaying
unsafe public space in cities worldwide.64
It stands in contrast to urban planning under the
Keynesian ‘modernist’ vision, where focus lay on a general infrastructural development,
upgrading and connecting whole cities. In underdeveloped, or in post-conflict ethno-plural
societies this trend becomes particularly dangerous since it plays into existing divisions
and identity ties that have already been mobilised in conflict, and since it reaffirms the
dependency on clientelist networks, while leaving the state without instruments to attract
cross-sectarian loyalty or to promote social integration. The Hayekian neoliberal idea of a
catallaxy, or society without solidarity, is a particularly ill-fitted ideology for post-conflict
reconstruction in ethno-plural societies.
Ethnic reconciliation has been effective where it has been possible to provide an idea
of the state that can be shared by all ethnic groups. A good example is socialist Yugoslavia
after World War II. Here, in spite of vicious inter-ethnic violence, the partisan communists
were able to provide an idea of the state based on equality among nations, and a project of
development and modernisation linked to the promises in socialist ideology and the visible
success of the Soviet Union. It was perhaps the only available ideology at the time for
creating a unified Yugoslavia.
There are examples when a liberal formula, and economic liberalism, has provided the
legitimising principle for post-conflict reconstruction and statebuilding. In his lectures at
the Colle`ge de France 1978–79 on the birth of biopolitics, Michel Foucault argued that the
Nazi project during World War II had destroyed the key foundations of the idea of a united
post-war German state, and that the Ludwig Erhard plan of 1948 offered a solution where
the economy, and economic growth, was the foundation of sovereignty and thereby idea of
the state.65
However, the reconstruction of Germany took place within the framework of a
62
E.g. Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory.
63
Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice; Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
64
Cf. David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review 53, Sep–Oct (2008): 23–40.
65
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ch. 8 and passim.
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17. complete reorganisation of the global political economy in which Germany had a crucial
role; it took place in a society that was already highly industrialised before the war, and
integrated into the global economy; it took place under a Keynesian paradigm, where
market liberalism was circumscribed and where the German case emphasised a ‘social
state’ along the market and, moreover, it took place in a relatively ethnically homogenous
society. It thereby serves poorly as historical reference for contemporary reconstruction
and statebuilding projects. The conception that the free market can provide legitimacy for
the state is much less tenable in an ethnically divided post-conflict society located at the
periphery of the global economy. Especially so with a global economy that contrasts so
markedly to the Keynesian order in which Germany was reconstructed, with its regulated
trade and restrictions on international finance. Instead, today’s deregulated international
finance and free-trade fundamentalism makes the analogy with liberal colonial policy the
more relevant reference. Furnivall’s warning for the post-colony is back to haunt
contemporary statebuilding: ‘reintegration must be based on some principle transcending
the sphere of economics’ (p. 546).
The inability to process the accumulating evidence to this effect and learn from its
dismal track record demonstrates a tragic ‘zombie-state’ of contemporary neoliberal
statebuilding for peacebuilding, and by extension of global neoliberal governance. Lost
beyond critique and empirical learning it operates from a neoliberal ideological stasis, by
reproducing these practices as security technologies for Western neoliberal hegemony.
It expresses a new form of liberalism which has lost all progressive and emancipatory
potential. Obsessed with security, it is unable to provide it or conceive it in any but the
most militarised form. It provides no socially integrative instruments for the state and no
vision of development, but dumps its subjects into the centrifugal vortex of identity
politics in the ‘plural society’.
Notes on contributor
Jens Stilhoff So¨rensen is Senior Lecturer in Peace and Development Studies and International
Relations at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, and Research Fellow in the
Swedish Institute of International Affairs.
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