Peacebuilding vs. Conflict Resolution

On October 24, 2012 Vivienne Jabri presented the 24th Annual Lynch Lecture to a large, enthusiastic audience in the auditorium of Founder’s Hall on George Mason’s Arlington campus. Dr. Jabri is Professor of International Politics and Coordinator of the Centre for the Study of Political Community at King’s College in London, and is a long-time friend of S-CAR. Those expecting her to deliver an important and controversial lecture were not disappointed.

The speaker began her talk, entitled “Human Rights, Sovereign Rights, and Conflict Resolution,” by taking the audience on a journey through the intellectual landscapes created by Immanuel Kant, Jurgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault, with a fourth stop, the political thought of Hannah Arendt, concluding the trip. A key point in the lecture was the separation of peacebuilding, defined as “the government of other people’s populations,” from conflict resolution and diplomacy.

Kant, described as “the first Critical Theorist,” put the autonomous, self-legislating human being at the center of his system. By constructing a “cosmopolitan imaginary” in which these suffering individuals are the bearers of rights, Kant becomes the first theorist of human rights. But he argues against making the cosmopolitan regime a positive legal order, and so defends the sovereign state against the idea of empire.
Habermas gives cosmopolitanism positive force by announcing that human rights trump sovereign rights, and that sovereignty must be pacified to create the conditions necessary for Kant’s “perpetual peace.”        Modern international civil servants like Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan agree. An “international civil service at large” comes into existence, and law-enforcing institutions like the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court partially realize the juridical dream. But this immediately creates a problem: peacebuilding threatens to replace both conflict resolution and diplomacy. Since “the law is constituted in a sovereign speaking” and rests not only on consent but also on violence, the new system seeks to legitimate violent interventions by some states (a reconstituted “sovereign”) in the affairs of others.

By asking “Where is sovereign power?” and describing how it is exercised, Foucault lays bare the underlying dynamics of the new peacebuilding regime. Sovereign power always demands an audience, which now consists of those subject to military intervention in the name of humanity. Its late-modern form is disciplinary and biopolitical, meaning that it is a regime of pacification of populations exercised through surveillance and continuous intervention – the very opposite of Kant’s “perpetual peace.” Although the new sovereign has values and interests of its own, its wars are always fought in the name of humanity at large. This implies a norm from which “abnormals” are excluded, and generates a tendency toward the sort of massive, even genocidal, violence represented by colonial wars and the Holocaust.

Dr. Jabri “internationalizes” Foucault. According to her, peacebuilding discourses are essentially Foucauldian, constituting the liberal subject, and presuming to shape the development of “less developed” societies. The problem is dramatically illustrated by recent Western interventions in places like Libya and Syria, in which peacebuilding – the attempt to “shape the directionality” of other societies in ways congenial to the intervening powers – tends to replace both conflict resolution and diplomacy. (This is precisely why Kant withheld his approval of juridical cosmopolitanism.) Because government (Foucault’s “governmentality”) now involves the disciplinary control of populations, “the borders of populations are racialized,” and the juridical human rights regime comes to resemble the old colonial regimes that it purports to replace.

Despite this grim reality, Professor Jabri insists, there is reason for hope. The San Egidio Statement reflected the views of those opposed both to violent revolution and to allegedly humanitarian military intervention. They valued the post-colonial status of states like Syria, and advocated a “cosmopolitanism of recognition and solidarity” in place of an authoritarian juridical regime. The figure who bests expresses such values, according to her, is Arendt, who, distinguishing government from politics, defines politics as “the insertion of self into the public arena, thereby constituting that arena.” Politics means active, participatory deliberation, not just governmentality (i.e., rule-making, administration, and intervention). Declaring herself a “small-r realist in the Arendtian sense,” Dr. Jabri concludes by calling for a renewal of conflict resolution and diplomacy in order to affirm a post-colonial regime that recognizes differences and the need for genuine political activity.

Following her lecture, Professor Jabri made herself available for extensive questioning by the audience. She also spoke at several S-CAR forums and graduate classes, discussing topics ranging from reflective practice to narrative methodology and Critical Theory, and stimulating thoughtful discussion wherever she appeared. There was general agreement that her visit raised very important ideas for our consideration and greatly enriched the community as a whole.