ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, more missions were launched3 and ‘postconflict peacebuilding developed into something of a growth industry’ (Paris 2004: 3). The common denominator of all these missions deployed between 1989 and 1997 was that in general they had limited-period mandates and they were primarily focusing on organising a post-conflict election with little attention being paid to longer-term goals such as constructing or strengthening the institutional structures necessary for democratic governance and market-oriented reforms (Paris and Sisk 2009: 4-7). As a result, the lack of mechanisms to promote power-sharing arrangements before the elections and the inability of institutions to uphold election results led to renewed violence in places such as Angola, Cambodia and Liberia. The guiding standard behind all the missions deployed in the 1990s was singular: that a lasting peace could be created and established only by promoting ‘liberalisation’4 in the countries that had recently experienced civil war (Paris 2004: 5). The ethics of liberal democracy were thus made explicit in peacebuilding from the beginning (Heathershaw 2008: 601). Boutros-Ghali, in his Agenda
for Peace, had argued that ‘there is an obvious connection between democratic practices – such as the rule of law and transparency in decision-making – and the achievement of true peace and security in any new and stable political order’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992: 34). To this end, the liberal peace thesis, especially after the end of the Cold War, has enjoyed ‘a nearly unrivalled ideological hegemony’ (Hameiri 2011: 5). The antecedents of the liberal peace could be traced in the work of Kant and his Perpetual Peace. Kant came to set specific conditions by which peace could be attained between states. These included the adoption of democracy as a basis of government and the promotion of international trade, which would form the basis of international co-operation and consequently the ending of war (Kant 1795). The Kantian arguments have formed what is now called the ‘democratic peace thesis’, which legitimises the argument of the promotion of democratisation as a tool of building the liberal peace. To that end, ‘the defence and construction of the liberal peace . . . became a legitimate and legitimizing objective in this context’ (Richmond 2007: 27). This argument gave rise to what Paris (2004: 6) calls ‘Wilsonianism’, meaning that the use of democratisation and marketisation would be the best tools for fostering domestic peace. Thus, peacebuilders in the 1990s were trying to turn war-torn states into liberal democracies without questioning the success of this strategy or the mechanisms and methods for conducting this project (ibid.). It seems that the so-called liberal market democracy had gained triumph over other types of democratic or non-democratic governance. As Sachs puts it:
By the mid-1990s almost the entire world had adopted the fundamental elements of a market economy, including private ownership at the core of the economy, a currency convertible for international trade . . . and market-based transactions for the bulk of the productive sectors of the economy.
