Normative Values and Economic Deficits in Postconflict Transformation
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200706200303 |
| Author | Michael Pugh |
| Date | 01 September 2007 |
| Published date | 01 September 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Michael Pugh
Normative values
and economic
deficits in
postconflict
transformation
| International Journal | Summer 2007 | 479 |
When he [Ashdown] came to Bosnia, he published a manifesto called
“For jobs and justice.” But there are no jobs and there is no justice. The
only thing he is interested in is being able to write a report at the end
of his term boasting of all his “reforms.”1
It is remarkable how little attention is paid to the economic contexts in
which peacekeepers, police, and other external agencies operate in wartorn
Michael Pugh is a professor in the department of peace studies, University of
Bradford. He publishes widely on peacekeeping and peacebuilding issues from a crit-
ical theory perspective. Some sections of the article are based on a revision of ideas
expanded in “Post-war economies and the New York dissensus,”
Conflict, Security
and Development
6, no. 3 (2006): 269-89.
1Dragan Jerini, editor of the Banja Luka newspaper
Independent
, cited by John
Laughland, “Bosnia today,”
Mail on Sunday
,22 May 2005.
2 For a critical analysis see Christopher Cramer,
Civil War is not a Stupid Thing:
Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries
(London: Hurst, 2006), 124–37.
3 On liberal peace and the securitization of development see Oliver P. Richmond,
The
Transformation of Peace
(London: Palgrave, 2006) and Mark Duffield,
Global
Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security
(London:
Zed Books: 2001).
4 See www.bradford.ac.uk.
societies. Yet it is arguable—without subscribing to reductive explanations
based on economic rationalism characteristic of neoclassical economic ide-
ology—that predation and the exploitation of resources play a significant
role in civil wars as integral to untidy and violent processes in capital accu-
mulation and development.2Postconflict economies are also generally char-
acterized by widespread and deep poverty, disrupted markets and produc-
tion, high levels of unemployment, and varied patterns of “criminality.”
Wartorn populations turn to a variety of means to survive when opportuni-
ties and incentives arise, and this may include growing poppy or selling
black-market cigarettes. Social cohesion and intercommunal tensions may
be aggravated by the deprivations and inequalities seemingly inescapable in
emergence from conflict. In Kosovo, for example, an estimated unemploy-
ment level of 70 percent among school leavers and up to 24 years old was
estimated for 2003, and in Timor Leste soldiers went on the rampage in
May 2006 when they lost their jobs or suffered a pay cut. We know these
issues are significant, but how can they be tackled?
This article stems from the transformation of war economies project at
the University of Bradford, UK, which examined the role of external as well
as domestic actors in the political economies of wartorn societies.3Post-
industrial powers in the international system, we concur, have hegemonic
preoccupations with international order that require the installation of a
“liberal peace.”4The argument springs from an epistemology of political
economy that is grounded in the structures of regulatory and disciplinary
capitalism and the agencies and writers of liberal economics (such as
Jeffrey Sachs, one time adviser to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan). The
contention here reflects a resistance to the certainties of disciplinary liber-
alism, its mobilization of an ideology of probity against unruliness, and its
efforts at problem-solving for peace—the notion that social life across the
globe can be engineered into obedience to certain norms, through thera-
peutic governance, televisual representations of “reality,” and surveillance
of everyday life.
| 480 | International Journal | Summer 2007 |
| Michael Pugh |
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