ABSTRACT
For many commentators, the lack of success in international intervention since the early 1990s has been explained through the critical discourse of ‘liberal peace’, where it is assumed that ‘liberal’ western interests and assumptions have influenced policy-making, leading to counterproductive results. At the core of the critique is the assumption that the liberal peace approach has sought to reproduce and impose western models: the reconstruction of ‘Westphalian’ frameworks of state sovereignty; the liberal framework of individual rights and winner-takes-all elections; and neoliberal free market economic programmes. This chapter challenges this view of western policy-making and suggests that post-Cold War post-conflict intervention and statebuilding can be better understood as a critique of classical liberal assumptions about the autonomous subject – framed in terms of sovereignty, law, democracy and the market. The conflating of discursive forms with their former liberal content creates the danger that critiques of liberal peace can rewrite post-Cold War intervention in ways that exaggerate the liberal nature of the policy frameworks and act as apologia, excusing policy failure on the basis of the self-flattering view of western policy-elites: that non-western subjects were not ready for ‘western’ freedoms.
