A long view of liberal peace and its crisis
| Author | David Rampton,Suthaharan Nadarajah |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116649029 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116649029
European Journal of
International Relations
2017, Vol. 23(2) 441 –465
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066116649029
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A long view of liberal
peace and its crisis
David Rampton
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Suthaharan Nadarajah
SOAS, University of London, UK
Abstract
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 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.
Keywords
Governmentality, international order, liberalism, liberal peace, nationalism, Sri Lanka
Introduction
The ‘crisis’ of liberal peace is the subject of considerable debate in International Relations
(IR) amid the doubts that have overtaken post-Cold War confidence that a pacific world
Corresponding author:
Suthaharan Nadarajah, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London,
WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: sn22@soas.ac.uk
649029EJT0010.1177/1354066116649029European Journal of International RelationsRampton and Nadarajah
research-article2016
Article
442 European Journal of International Relations 23(2)
order based on liberal democracy, market economics and the rule of law could be gener-
ated by West-led engagement in the world’s conflict spaces and institutional innovation
in global governance. Scholars are divided over the viability and future form of liberal
order, the sources and extent of its crisis, and the efficacy of liberal peacebuilding as a
modality of interventionist global order-making. Nonetheless, there is a shared and
taken-for-granted understanding of where the frontier and limits of liberal peace are
located: in the disorderly global South, characterised by authoritarianism, civil war, iden-
tity conflict, underdevelopment, rights abuses and ‘ungoverned’ spaces. Relatedly, the
crisis of liberal peace, in its various treatments, is understood as non-liberal and illiberal
resistance to the assisted or imposed emergence of liberal rule.
As such, despite their many disagreements, proponents and critics of liberal peace
share a common spatial and temporal framing that rests on, and reproduces, a problem-
atic separation between ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ worlds. First, the international system
is implicitly or explicitly divided into two distinct parts: a stable liberal core of market-
democratic states; and a volatile non-liberal/illiberal periphery comprising both ‘rising’
powers and weak, authoritarian or partially liberalised states. This divide is fundamental
to, for example, studies of democratic peace and the global ‘diffusion’ of liberalism,
democracy and capitalism. Second, international engagements for liberal peace in the
periphery are treated in presentist fashion as ‘first encounters’ between liberalism and its
non-liberal others. Contemporary peacebuilding, developmental, democratisation and
other interventions are routinely studied as interactions between pre-formed and distinct
‘international’ (liberal) and ‘domestic’ or ‘local’ (non-liberal) actors, practices and con-
texts (cf., e.g., Williams, 2013), and often as characteristic of a distinct post-Cold War
context.1 This is not because scholars do not recognise that colonialism, Cold War inter-
ventions (military and otherwise) and the historic consolidation of global capitalism have
had a profoundly transformative impact in the South, or do not see the commonalities
between current and earlier international attempts at liberal transformation and moderni-
sation (e.g. Duffield, 2001; Jahn, 2007a, 2007b). Rather, as this article shows, the onto-
logical and epistemological premises of liberal peace as a universalising rationality of
pacific order and of its critical treatments as a project of US/Western hegemony, capital-
ist imperialism or ‘global governmentality’ preclude taking seriously the productive con-
sequences of the long history of mutually constitutive relations between ‘liberal’ and
‘non-liberal’ worlds (e.g. Barkawi and Laffey, 2001; Jahn, 2013). In great part, the afore-
mentioned divisions rest on a more fundamental assumed distinction: that between liber-
alism and other social orders, such as nationalisms.2 However, as postcolonial scholars
have emphasised (e.g. Goswami, 2004; Scott, 1999), failure to take the long view and an
analytical frame encompassing liberalism and its others distorts our understanding of
both, as well as the intimate relations between them, throughout what G. John Ikenberry
(2009) teleologically terms ‘two centuries of liberal ascendency’.
This article argues that the obstacles and threats that a globally expansive liberal order
apprehends in its periphery as representative of its limits, and now its crisis, cannot be
understood without reference to the productive consequences over the longue durée of
attempts to advance liberal rule in non-liberal spaces. Liberal interventions since the 19th
century may not always have resulted in liberal rule, but they have been deeply conse-
quential nonetheless, enabling, strengthening, disrupting and otherwise transforming
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