ABSTRACT
Since the end of the Cold War, numerous internal armed conflicts have been brought to a close, and following most, if not all, of these resolutions, the international community, as well as the affected state and society, have engaged in what is now generally called peacebuilding.1 Many recent scholars have even begun to identify a liberal peacebuilding consensus, for good and ill, that specifies a key set of activities as central to post-conflict pacification.2
These are often heavily contested in methodological terms, but the broad goal of building a liberal state with all of its expected regimes and institutions is not. This is despite the fact that the types of governance which peacebuilding activities construct in post-conflict zones reflect almost exclusively the developed world’s social, political, and economic experiences. In particular, some analysts have singled out the emphasis on the reconstruction of governance, and in particular its creation as liberal democratic governance, as problematic.3 This emphasis, even imposition, of a liberal model on a post-conflict state, it has been argued, is often a poor fit, unwelcome, and may even result in the renewal of conflict. It is argued that the competition inherent in liberalized political and economic structures can deepen existing divisions or even create new ones. For this reason, some scholars have suggested that a strategy of ‘institutio-
nalization before liberalization’ might be advisable: embedding and reforming structures of law and governance so as to manage the inevitable social conflict that attends liberalization.4 However, there remains a danger that such emphasis upon institutionalization entails the same imposition of international preferences that the previous emphasis on liberalization did; furthermore it is likely to favour official structures and elites over civil society. Finally, there appears to be an implicit assumption that institutional reform is in some sense neutral, and thus able to contain political contestation, rather than being a political activity in itself.5 Key among the tools of institutional reform has been the use of ‘rule of law’ programming, including reform of laws, constitutions, judiciaries, the use of transitional justice mechanisms, and engagement with the ‘informal’ or ‘traditional’ justice sector. Many of these
interventions are undoubtedly positive; however, there is a risk that emphasis upon the rule of law as a tool to manage conflict may simply relocate social conflict to these domains, away from the more explicitly political sector.
