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Article Excerpt
This article develops the argument that peacebuilding brings into play microphysical and nonsovereign forms of power that circulate through opaque capillaries that link foreign peacebuilders and indigenous populations. It examines the governmentality of liberal peacebuilding and the practices of "unfreedom" it licenses; brings into focus the constellation of social control that is effected by the EU's efforts, in the context of its security and defense policy, to promote democratic policing in Bosnia; and shows how a normatively committed form of governmentality theory can be employed to limit the inevitable political pastorate in the international construction of liberal peace in posthostility societies. KEYWORDS: Bosnia, European Security and Defence Policy, Foucault, governmentality, peacebuilding, policing.
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International peacebuilding is in vogue. Many Western governments and their citizens sympathize with the idea and practice of aiding countries transiting from civil war to better themselves by strengthening fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, and other elements out of which a peaceful polity is assembled. This framing of peacebuilding as an uplifting and civilizing mission rests on an assumption that, since the end of the Cold War, has become so naturalized in Western political discourse and mainline academic treatises on security governance as to be nearly invisible.
The entrenchment of liberal peace in postconflict societies requires that the freedom of individuals is fostered and their political voice is strengthened. The developments since 9/11 have only reinforced this "truth." In this article, we provide a different reading of liberal peacebuilding by bringing into focus the relations of domination it produces and subjecting them to an immanent critique, using what Kevin Stenson calls a "normatively committed form of governmentality studies." (1)
The international construction of liberal peace in post-hostility societies licenses forms of micropower that, although they reach deep into domestic orders, remain largely unnoticed by the literature. They are masked either by the humanistic theme of the peacebuilding discourse or by the forceful interventions through which metropolitan actors impose their humanitarian empire on countries emerging from conflict. The mainline peacebuilding literature shares with practitioners a pronounced will to "improve" societies that violently differ from those of the West. (2) This ambition, and the inscription of natives in relations of domination it facilitates, are not interrogated, though the manner in which international peacebuilders implement what Michael Pugh calls the New York consensus is extensively scrutinized. (3)
As to more critical readings of contemporary peacebuilding, they, too, pay insufficient attention to the mechanisms in it through which the international comes to reside within transitional societies. Even those works that frame peacebuilding as disciplinary governance or that draw a parallel between it and colonialism--for instance, criticizing the highhanded use of illiberal power by the international administrators of liberal peace: censorship, the manipulation of elections, the removal of democratically elected officials, and so forth--fail to theorize and analyze the humble and mundane practices through which "unfreedom" operates in such international projects of improvement. (4)
To bring into focus the neglected elements of subtle coercion and subjectification in multilateral efforts to bring order based on political liberty to post-hostility countries, we use an empirical site that has so far not been given much attention by researchers: the efforts of the European Union, in the context of its new European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), to promote democratic policing abroad.
The case for focusing on ESDP police missions is compelling, both conceptually and empirically. In the 1990s, the international donor community, notably the United Nations, identified policing reforms in postviolence societies as a principal element in the construction of an order of liberal peace and began to act accordingly. (5) In line with the new international consensus, the European Union views its police missions as vehicles to advance security-sector reforms in support of peace in target countries through the dissemination of "best European policing practices." Moreover, police interventions are at the forefront of the operationalization of the civilian ESDP, both in terms of the quantity of the personnel made available by the member states and the number of deployed missions.
In the second half of 2005, the European Union has four concurrent missions engaged in (re)forming the indigenous police forces in Bosnia (the EUPM), Macedonia (the EUPOL Proxima), Congo (the EUPOL Kinshasa), and Iraq (the EUJUST Lex). Moreover, in July 2005, EU foreign ministers agreed in principle to launch an ESDP mission to provide support to the Palestinian police and build upon the work of the recently established EU Co-ordination Office for Palestinian policing. Although no date is mentioned, the mission could be launched as early as January 2006. In the same meeting, the EU also adopted a comprehensive supporting action to strengthen the African Union Mission in Sudan (Amis II), which includes a substantial civilian component in support of the local police. (6) In this article, we analyze the EUPM to develop our argument that peacebuilding brings into play microphysical and nonsovereign forms of power that circulate through opaque capillaries that link foreign peacebuiders and indigenous populations.
The critical thrust of our empirical-analytical engagement with EU policing notwithstanding, we do not militate against this form of peacebuilding, as such. Given the often repressive and divisive role played by police forces in war-torn countries, projects to assist in the reform of law enforcement in countries emerging from violence have a place in a progressive international politics. However, there is a need to ask of such aid if its form and content are justifiable in normative terms. Police assistance, just like peacebuilding more generally, is a field of governance in which the play of freedom and domination can be configured differently. This creates an opening for reformatory discourses. Thus, we not only bring into focus the power in ESDP police aid, but also provide recommendations as to how current and future missions can be rendered less nonegalitarian. (7) Our advocacy, far from being idealistic, is informed by our reading of the rationality inscribed in EU peacebuilding.
The article proceeds as follows. First, we describe the conventional, functionalist understanding of police aid, and we point out its shortcomings. We argue that like other forms of development aid, police aid inscribes the recipients in structures of discipline and normalization. Drawing on Michel Foucault, we conceive of these structures as hybrid forms of rule in which practices of "unfreedom" are enacted in the name of liberty. Next we contextualize the EUPM before exploring a series of subjugating practices, most of them inconspicuous in nature, through which the mission pursues its projects of improvement, and we document the constellation of asymmetric social control that is effected by them.
From a critique of the governmentality of policing reforms in Bosnia, we move, in the conclusion, to suggest ways as to how the EUPM and its sister missions in the restless European Elsewhere can reconfigure their programs along more egalitarian lines. We end by drawing out the significance of our analytical and prescriptive engagement with EU policing for critical perspectives on peace-building more generally.
International Police Aid
International assistance for rule-of-law reforms has become a cottage industry since the end of the Cold War. The rewriting of laws, reforming of prisons, retraining of police forces, and other measures aimed at upgrading the justice system in countries transiting from internal conflict are widely seen as vital for peacebuilding. Moreover, as Thomas Carothers points out, rule-of-law reforms are attractive to the international donor community because of their apparent nonideological, technocratic character. (8)
While economic globalization generates a new politics of contestation symbolized by such events as "the Battle of Seattle," the globalization of the rule of law is hardly controversial. Who would disagree with, for instance, the statement by one of the foreign-aid bodies of the US government, the Transition to Democratic Policing program of the Department of Justice, that in order "to thrive, an emerging democratic government must [have] an effective democratic police agency"? (9)
While a number of arguments are advanced by practitioners and scholars in support of the link between international aid in support of police reforms and the transition to peace and democracy, two interrelated explanations stand out. First, only a democratic, human-rights-oriented police is capable of securing the lives and property of citizens, independent of their ethnic, economic, or social profile, as well as the public spaces that are so important to the exercise of political and civil rights. If the justice system cannot or will not ensure citizens' equal standing before the law in respect of individual and communal protection, then peace and democratic society cannot flourish. Moreover, pervasive insecurity in the form of crime and social violence is detrimental to the strengthening of civic values and an obstacle to postconflict rehabilitation.
Second, it is the police, together with the military, that wields the state's monopoly of violence. In a democracy, this formidable repressive potential is held in check by making the police accountable to the public in order to ensure it does not become a state within the state, abusing its coercive means and discretionary powers to harass, intimidate, extort, torture, or kill. Systematic police brutality and other forms of everyday police harassment impede peacebuilding efforts and undermine the ideal of the protective democratic state by curtailing the civil liberties of citizens, corroding their trust in public institutions, and contributing to an order of endemic insecurity.
In short, the dominant perspective in the literature is that the provision of collective and individual security is a foundation on which progress in the political (and economic) transition of disrupted societies rests. By molding "apolitical police forces that are composed of different political contingents and ethnic groups, and who will protect citizens, uphold the rule of law and help maintain order with a minimum of force," foreign aid in support of police reforms makes a crucial contribution to peacebuilding. (10)
Having been identified as an important aspect of rule-of-law reforms, police aid is analyzed as nonideological political-development assistance inscribed in a commitment to universal human rights and validating the causal link between the consolidation of democratic institutions and the entrenchment of peace.
In such a functionalist interpretation, the kinds of domination enacted by policing and police aid are concealed. Democratic policing is not simply about the apolitical protection and vindication of universal human rights and the provision of individual-level security. It is also inevitably about putting in...
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