Revolutions and the liberal peace: Peacebuilding as counterrevolutionary practice?
| Author | Sandra Pogodda |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836720921881 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720921881
Cooperation and Conflict
2020, Vol. 55(3) 347 –364
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836720921881
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Revolutions and the liberal
peace: Peacebuilding
as counterrevolutionary
practice?
Sandra Pogodda
Abstract
This article explores the relationship between contemporary revolutionary agency, domestic
reforms and liberal peacebuilding in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings. In particular, it focuses
on the tensions between the liberal peace’s orthodox and emancipatory strands by asking:
Does liberal peacebuilding support or hinder revolutionary emancipation in the Arab region?
The article aims to close a gap in PCS scholarship by delivering insights into contemporary
revolutionary processes (here called ‘everyday state formation’). After elaborating the
disjunctures between revolutionary agency and liberal peacebuilding interventions in the spheres
of statebuilding, development and democratisation, many peacebuilding interventions appear as
counterrevolutionary practices.
Keywords
Arab Uprisings, counterrevolution, liberal peace, peacebuilding, revolution, state formation,
statebuilding, development, democratisation
Introduction
Historically, revolutions have presented a complex set of political dilemmas for neigh-
bouring countries as well as international powers. Given revolutions’ transnational
impact and universal ideologies (Halliday, 1999: 94–132), status quo powers have
often had an interest in containing, sanctioning or militarily defeating revolutions.
Yet, as emancipatory projects, revolutionary processes are traditionally hostile grounds
for intervention. In pursuit of the overarching goal of freedom, revolutionary move-
ments are wary not to replace the toppled regime with subordination to external con-
trol. From France to Haiti, Cuba to Iran, revolutionary movements therefore used their
capacity to mobilise the masses in order to defend their revolution against external
Corresponding author:
Sandra Pogodda, Politics Department, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL Manchester, UK.
Email: sandra.pogodda@manchester.ac.uk
921881CAC0010.1177/0010836720921881Cooperation and ConflictPogodda
research-article2020
Article
348 Cooperation and Conflict 55(3)
counterrevolutionary forces. Consequently, coercive forms of counterrevolutionary
intervention have remained notoriously unsuccessful in stemming the ‘irresistible
flow’ of revolutions in the 20th century (Arendt, 1990 [1963]: 265; Halliday, 1999:
224–226).
In 1989, however, a western-idealist perspective started to portray contemporary rev-
olutions in a different light – not as a challenge to western interests but as their vindica-
tion (Hobson, 2010). Seeing the revolutions in Eastern Europe as the ultimate victory of
market-based democracy, western intervention aimed to support rather than counter the
revolutionary process. Many revolutionaries of 1989, however, consider this support a
form of colonialism, which suffocated the emancipatory impulses of the anti-communist
uprisings (Della Porta, 2016: 173 – 202). Given the enduring political consequences of
widespread frustration over the transformation processes of the 1990s in Eastern Europe
(Krastev and Holmes, 2019; Hockenos, 2019), this article critically examines the notion
of ‘supportive’ interventions in contemporary revolutionary contexts.
In the 21st century, revolutionary struggles as well as their international and domestic
contexts tend to diverge from historically established patterns. In contrast to the takeover
of state power by armed revolutionary movements and vanguard parties or the negotiated
power transfer of the ‘refolutions’ of 1989, contemporary revolutionaries in the Arab
region tend to be organised in loose horizontal networks and show more modest ambi-
tions: overcoming oppressive power structures at home, rather than taking power; and
reshaping the state without owning it. The absence of an intellectual environment that
provided revolutionary liberation ideologies, combined with the unexpectedly rapid top-
pling of their dictators, left Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan and Yemeni revolutionaries with-
out any preconceived plans for political and economic transformation (Bayat, 2017:
158–173). Hence, the Arab Uprisings have been variously criticised for their lack of
ideology, failure to generate strong revolutionary organisations, inherent fragmentation
and eventual ineffectiveness (e.g. Abdelrahman, 2015; Bayat, 2017).
Without taking power, Arab revolutionaries cannot disrupt the field of intervention
that has engulfed their countries. From Tunisia to Egypt, Libya to Syria, revolutionary
networks have been marginalised, while domestic governments and their foreign coun-
terparts negotiate the forms, extent and costs of international intervention that their coun-
tries have to bear. Regional actors (especially Saudi Arabia and Iran) intervened to crush
the uprisings, which threatened to disrupt their alliances or to incite revolutions at home.
International organisations such as the International Financial Institutions (IFI), UN and
EU, by contrast, have responded to the Arab Uprisings with liberal peacebuilding inter-
ventions. Similar to the revolutions of 1989, western governments might have inter-
preted the uprisings as attempts to import western governance models. In the absence of
an alternative ideology, could the window for rapid transformation (Skocpol, 2015
[1979]) created by the revolutionary moments of 2011 be used for the rapid liberalisation
inherent in the liberal peace (Paris, 2004)? While a desire for transformation is indeed
shared between liberal peacebuilders, neoliberal statebuilders and Arab revolutionaries,
this article aims to explore how different – in parts, even incompatible – those notions of
transformation are.
Since international conflict management, peacebuilding, statebuilding and develop-
ment were designed with different problems and contexts in mind (e.g. post-civil war,
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