Unpacking the liberal peace: the dividing and merging of peacebuilding discourses

© 2008 SAGE Publications. Post-print version. 12 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released May 2009.This paper assesses the discursive environment of post-conflict intervention as a prism through which to view the international politics of the post-Cold War era. I argue that the ‘liberal peace’ is not a single discourse but a tri-partite international discursive environment that dynamically reproduces technical solutions which fail to address the core issues of conflict in a given place. The paper starts from the assumption that over the last twenty years we have seen a shift from an understanding of peace as a state of affairs in a given territory (as explored by Michael Banks in a 1987 paper) to peace as a process of post-conflict intervention; a move from peace to peacebuilding. This ‘liberal peace’ sets a standard by which ‘failed states’ and ‘bad civil societies’ are judged according to ethical, spatial and temporal markers. However, the apparent homogeneity of the model obscures the divisions and mergers which characterise the scholarship and practice of international peacebuilding. The boundaries of the peace debate remain; the political differences latent in Banks’ three concepts are retained in the evolving discourses of democratic peacebuilding, civil society and statebuilding. The paper shows how these three basic discourses are reproduced in international policy analyses and major academic works. Moreover, the discursive mediation of their differences is the dynamic by which the liberal peace is sustained, despite its detachment from the lived experiences of post-conflict environments. It is in this sense that we can comprehend international peacebuilding as a virtual phenomenon, maintained in the verbal and visual representations of international organisations, diplomats and academic policy-practitioners. In light of this disaggregation of the discursive environment, a better, more nuanced understand of the liberal peace can be attained; one that is able to grasp how critics and criticisms become incorporated into that which they seek to critique. The paper concludes with three propositions regarding the nature of world order in the era of the tripartite ‘liberal peace’. During this time coercion, military force and even warfare have become standard and legitimate features of peacefare. The discursive dynamics of international peacebuilding illustrate how peace has become ever more elusive in contemporary international politics

Peacebuilding as Practice: Discourses from Post-Conflict Tajikistan

Note that this is the postprint version, not the preprint.Peacebuilding is a contested concept which gains meaning as it is practised. While academic and policy-relevant elaboration of the concept is of interest to international experts, interpretations of peacebuilding in the Central Asian arena may depart immensely from those envisaged within the western-dominated ‘international community’. This article opens up the dimensions and contingent possibilities of ‘peacebuilding’ through an investigation of two alternative approaches found in the context of Tajikistan. It makes the critique that peacebuilding represents one contextually grounded basic discourse. In the case of Central Asia, and in particular post-conflict Tajikistan, at least two other basic discourses have been adopted by parties to the post-Soviet setting: elite mirostroitelstvo (Russian: peacebuilding) and popular tinji (Tajik: wellness/peacefulness). Based largely on fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan between 2003 and 2005, the argument here is that none of these three discourses is merely an artificial or cynical construct but that each has a certain symbolic and normative value. Consequently, a singular definition of Tajik ‘peacebuilding’ proves elusive as practices adapt to the relationships between multiple discourses and identities in context. The article concludes that ‘peacebuilding’ is a complex and intersubjective process of change entailing the legitimation of new relationships of power

Central Asian statehood in post-colonial perspective

Published version produced with permission of the publisher. The ebook is available to University of Exeter students and staff through MyiLibrary (or search the Library catalogue)

Measurement of viscous sound absorption at 50-150 kHz in a model turbid environment

The visco-thermal absorption of sound by suspended particulate matter can be reliably measured using a reverberation technique. This absorption may have an adverse effect on the performance of sonars operating at 50–300 kHz in coastal waters where suspensions are often present in significant concentrations. A series of experiments has been performed to study the viscous absorption by suspensions in the frequency range of 50–150 kHz. In the test volumes employed, the effect is small. It is therefore measured by taking the difference in reverberation times of a volume of water with and without particles. This greatly reduces the effect on the measurement of the other sources of absorption. Even so, it is necessary to design the experiment to characterize and minimize acoustic losses which occur at the surfaces of the container, the hydrophones, and their cables, and losses associated with bubbles and turbulence. These effects are discussed and results for particulate absorption for suspensions of spherical glass beads are presented and compared to theoretical predictions. Measured absorption agrees well with that predicted by theory for concentrations above 0.5 kg/m3 and up to 2.0 kg/m

Seeing like the international community: how peacebuilding failed (and survived) in Tajikistan

Post-print version. 18 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released April 2010.The international community claims transformative power over post-conflict spaces via the concept of peacebuilding. International actors discursively make space for themselves in settings such as the Central Asian state of Tajikistan which endured a civil war during the 1990s and has only seen an end to widespread political violence in recent years. With the work of James C. Scott, this paper challenges the notion that post-conflict spaces are merely the objects of international intervention. It reveals how, even in cases of apparent stability such as that of Tajikistan, international actors fail to achieve their ostensible goals for that place yet make space for themselves in that place. International peacebuilders may provide essential resources for the re-emergence of local forms of order yet these symbolic and material resources are inevitably re-interpreted and re-appropriated by local actors to serve purposes which may be the opposite of their aims. However, despite this ‘failure’ of peacebuilding it nevertheless survives as a discursive construction through highly subjective processes of monitoring and evaluation. So maintained, peacebuilding is a constitutive element of world order where the necessity of intervention for humanitarian, democratic and statebuilding ends goes unchallenged. This raises the question of what or where – in spatial terms – is the locus of international intervention: the local recipients of peacebuilding programmes (who are the ostensible targets) or ‘the International Community’ itself (whose space is re-inscribed as that of an imperfect but necessary regulator of world order)

Dictators without Borders

Central Asian dictators close down the space for domestic political opposition. But politics is still present, only it has moved offshore, out of the region

Quasi ALE finite element method for nonlinear water waves

This paper presents a newly developed quasi arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian finite element method (QALE-FEM) for simulating water waves based on fully nonlinear potential theory. The main difference of this method from the conventional finite element method developed by one of authors of this paper and others (see, e.g., [11] and [22]) is that the complex mesh is generated only once at the beginning and is moved at all other time steps in order to conform to the motion of the free surface and structures. This feature allows one to use an unstructured mesh with any degree of complexity without the need of regenerating it every time step, which is generally inevitable and very costly. Due to this feature, the QALE-FEM has high potential in enhancing computational efficiency when applied to problems associated with the complex interaction between large steep waves and structures since the use of an unstructured mesh in such a case is likely to be necessary. To achieve overall high efficiency, the numerical techniques involved in the QALE-FEM are developed, including the method to move interior nodes, technique to re-distribute the nodes on the free surface, scheme to calculate velocities and so on. The model is validated by water waves generated by a wavemaker in a tank and the interaction between water waves and periodic bars on the bed of tank. Satisfactory agreement is achieved with analytical solutions, experimental data and numerical results from other methods