Illiberal peace? Authoritarian modes of conflict management

DOI10.1177/0010836718765902
Published date01 December 2018
Date01 December 2018
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718765902
Cooperation and Conflict
2018, Vol. 53(4) 486 –506
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0010836718765902
journals.sagepub.com/home/cac
Illiberal peace? Authoritarian
modes of conflict management
David Lewis , John Heathershaw
and Nick Megoran
Abstract
In a contested international order, ideas of liberal peacebuilding are being supplanted by state-
centric, authoritarian responses to internal armed conflicts. In this article we suggest that existing
research has not yet sufficiently recognised this important shift in conflict management practice.
Scholarship in peace and conflict studies has avoided hard cases of ‘illiberal peace’, or categorises
them simply as military victories. Drawing on accounts of state responses to conflicts in Russia,
Sri Lanka, China, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Turkey, we develop an alternative conceptual framework
to understand authoritarian conflict management as a form of wartime and post-conflict order in
its own right. Although violence is central to these orders, we argue that they are also dependent
on a much wider range of authoritarian policy responses, which we categorise in three major
domains: firstly, discourse (state propaganda, information control and knowledge production);
secondly, spatial politics (both military and civilian modes of controlling and shaping spaces);
and thirdly, political economy (the hierarchical distribution of resources to produce particular
political outcomes). In conclusion, we propose a research agenda that moves on from discussions
of liberal peace to examine hard cases of contemporary conflict and conflict management.
Keywords
Authoritarianism, civil war, conflict management, liberal peace, peacebuilding
Introduction
Attempts to develop a global consensus on how to respond to civil wars and
inter-communal violence have failed. Ideas of liberal peacebuilding are increasingly
contested in the international system. The United Nations (UN) Security Council has
become deadlocked over questions of sovereignty, regime change and intervention. In
place of negotiations and peacebuilding, governments have increasingly resorted to
authoritarian practices and state coercion to suppress armed rebellions (Baglione, 2008;
Corresponding author:
David Lewis, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4QJ, UK.
Email: d.lewis@exeter.ac.uk
765902CAC0010.1177/0010836718765902Cooperation and ConflictLewis et al.
research-article2018
Article
Lewis et al. 487
Goodhand, 2010; Lewis, 2010; Piccolino, 2015; Russell, 2014; Smith, 2014).
Internationally negotiated settlements, which became a common mode of civil war ter-
mination in the 1990s, began to decline in frequency in the 2000s. By the 2010s norms
of peace and conflict were increasingly contested, and some argued that the historical
norm of wars being resolved primarily through military victories was being restored
(Kovacs and Svensson, 2013). In cases such as Chechnya and Sri Lanka, military victo-
ries successfully ended long periods of armed conflict, posing a major political chal-
lenge to proponents of liberal peacebuilding. This shift towards authoritarian
mechanisms of conflict management reflects significant changes in the liberal interna-
tional order, including the increasing influence of authoritarian powers, such as Russia
and China, on global governance (Gat, 2007; Mead, 2014). These trends in state
responses to internal conflict are one aspect of a much wider process of contestation of
liberal norms and practices in the international system (Acharya, 2011; Cooley, 2015;
Wolff and Zimmermann, 2016).
In this article we suggest that existing research has not yet sufficiently recognised this
important shift in conflict management practices. Scholarship in peace and conflict stud-
ies tends to avoid hard cases of ‘illiberal peace’, or examines them through simplistic
conceptual frameworks. A limited understanding of the nature of these authoritarian
responses not only leaves an important lacuna in academic research on contemporary
conflict, it also inhibits the development of adequate policy responses. Drawing on
accounts of state responses to conflicts in Russia, Sri Lanka, China, Ethiopia, Rwanda and
Turkey, we develop an alternative conceptual framework to understand what we term
authoritarian conflict management (ACM) as a form of wartime and post-conflict order in
its own right. While ACM does not comprise a coherent normative and policy framework,
we argue that there are certain shared theoretical premises and common practices across
these cases. Conceptualising these similarities within a robust theoretical framework ena-
bles us to lay the groundwork for a more sophisticated typology of modes of civil war
cessation and conflict management. This article is therefore primarily an initial exercise in
theoretical ground clearance and conceptual framing for an emerging academic and policy
debate. It forms part of a much wider research agenda being undertaken by the authors.
The article proceeds as follows. The first part surveys the limitations of the liberal
peace debate, in which neither proponents of the liberal peace nor its numerous critics
are able to offer convincing explanatory frameworks to assess existing practices of con-
temporary conflict management. The second section outlines an alternative conceptual
framework of ACM that analyses practices in three major categories: discourse (state
propaganda, information control and knowledge production); spatial politics (both mili-
tary and civilian modes of producing and controlling new spaces); and political economy
(the hierarchical distribution of resources to produce particular political outcomes). In
conclusion, we propose a research agenda that moves on from discussions of liberal
peace to examine hard cases of contemporary conflict and conflict management.
Liberal and illiberal peace
This ‘illiberal turn’ in conflict management is best understood in the context of a theoreti-
cal and political crisis in the ‘liberal peace’, the set of discourses and practices that

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT