JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING
ISSN: 1750-2977 (Print) 1750-2985 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/risb20
The Limits of Liberal Peacebuilding? International
Engagement in the Sri Lankan Peace Process
Jonathan Goodhand & Oliver Walton
To cite this article: Jonathan Goodhand & Oliver Walton (2009) The Limits of Liberal
Peacebuilding? International Engagement in the Sri Lankan Peace Process, JOURNAL OF
INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING, 3:3, 303-323, DOI: 10.1080/17502970903086693
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17502970903086693
Published online: 20 Oct 2009.
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JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING
VOLUME 3
NUMBER 3
(NOVEMBER 2009)
The Limits of Liberal Peacebuilding?
International Engagement in the
Sri Lankan Peace Process
Jonathan Goodhand and Oliver Walton
This essay explores international engagement in the Sri Lankan peace process
between 2002 and 2008. The internationalization of peacebuilding in Sri Lanka is
analysed as part of a broader international shift towards a model of ‘liberal
peacebuilding’, which involves the simultaneous pursuit of conflict resolution,
liberal democracy and market sovereignty. The essay provides a detailed and
disaggregated analysis of the various exporters, importers and resisters of
liberal peacebuilding, with a particular focus on the contrasting ways in which
the United National Front (UNF) and the United People’s Freedom Alliance
(UPFA) regimes engaged with international actors. It is argued that an analysis of
the Sri Lankan case provides a corrective to some of the core assumptions
contained in much of the literature on liberal peacebuilding. Rather than
viewing liberal peacebuilding as simply an hegemonic enterprise foisted upon
countries emerging from conflict, the essay explores the ways in which
peacebuilding is mediated through, and translated and instrumentalized by,
multiple actors with competing interests / consequently liberal peacebuilding
frequently looks different when it ‘hits the ground’ and may, as in the Sri Lanka
case, lead to decidedly illiberal outcomes. The essay concludes by exploring the
theoretical and policy implications of a more nuanced understanding of liberal
peacebuilding. It is argued that rather than blaming the failure of the project on
deficiencies in its execution and the recalcitrance of the people involved, there
is a need to look at defects in the project itself and to explore alternatives to
the current model of liberal peacebuilding.
Keywords
policy
Sri Lanka; conflict; liberal peacebuilding; peace process; aid; donor
Introduction
This article focuses on the role played by international actors in the emergence
and subsequent breakdown of the Sri Lankan peace process between 2002 and
2008. The unprecedented internationalization of peacebuilding in Sri Lanka was a
reflection of shifts in both the global and local political economies. Key features
of this heavy internationalization included international facilitation of peace
talks, led by Norway and backed by three additional co-chairs (Japan, the US and
ISSN 1750-2977 print/1750-2985 online/09/030303-21
– 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17502970903086693
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India), the application of security guarantees and peace conditionalities, and the
establishment of an international monitoring mission to monitor the ceasefire
and funding for reconstruction in conflict-affected regions. The peace process is
understood here to be emblematic of a growing number of experiments in
‘liberal peacebuilding’, which have involved the simultaneous pursuit of conflict
resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty. An analysis of peacebuilding in Sri Lanka therefore has wider relevance, and as explored below, it
exposes the limitations of liberal peacebuilding as a normative and analytical
framework and as a guide for action.
The unravelling of the peace process and the eventual termination of the
ceasefire agreement in early 2008 has underlined the primacy of domestic
politics in determining the outcomes of peacebuilding interventions. The Sri
Lankan experience is arguably best characterized as a simulated peace process
where both parties saw engagement principally as a means to an end and where
the costs of disengagement were ultimately weighed against domestic political
benefits (Selby 2008). It also demonstrates several key shortcomings of
international actors’ peacebuilding strategies, most notably their tendency to
swing between extremes of engagement and disengagement and to attempt to
promote change by sending signals to conflict actors. More often than not, these
signals have been misinterpreted or instrumentalized and have produced
unpredictable political outcomes. This essay points to several broader lessons
regarding peacebuilding interventions, stressing in particular the need for
international actors to recognize the limits of their interventions, be more frank
about the potential trade-offs between their peacebuilding and other foreign or
domestic policy concerns and to utilize a closer analysis of domestic and regional
actors’ motivations to inform policy-making. Finally, and most fundamentally,
there is a need to recognize the deficiencies inherent in the model itself and
consequently to explore alternative versions of peacebuilding which are more
attuned to the way in which a legitimate peace is forged from below.
Liberal Peacebuilding and the International Dimensions of the
Sri Lankan Conflict
Although Sri Lanka is frequently characterized as an ‘introverted’ civil war, a
deeper analysis of the conflict reveals a set of causes deeply rooted in the
international and regional political economy (Moore 1985; Bastian 2006). These
external factors are too numerous to analyse here but they include: the impacts
of post-1977 liberalization on the Sri Lankan polity and economy; the enduring
role of India as the regional hegemon; the effects of international financial
institutions’ policies and donor-funded (conflict blind) projects on ethnic fault
lines; the influence of regional and international diasporic networks on conflict
dynamics; and the effects of global counter terrorism measures, specifically the
proscription of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by various actors
including India, the US, the UK, the EU and Canada. Arguably, the label ‘ethnic
INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE SRI LANKAN PEACE PROCESS
305
conflict’ has diverted attention away from the external dimensions of war and
peace in Sri Lanka (with some notable exceptions) (see Bose 2002; Bullion 1995;
Moore 1990). In fact, as Venugopal argues, what appears to be ‘internal’ is
actually the result of complex syntheses of successive waves of political,
economic and cultural engagements with the outside world (2003). In this essay
we eschew the label ‘ethnic conflict’ and prefer instead to conceptualize the war
as a crisis of the state / which in turn can be linked to how the polity has been
inserted into the global political economy (see Bastian 1999).
Arguably, the ‘tectonic plates’ underpinning the Sri Lanka conflict have barely
moved in the domestic sphere over recent years, and it is in the international
arena where the big shifts have occurred. The internationalization of the Sri
Lankan conflict reflects broader global trends. The post-cold war era has seen the
lowering of international inhibitions to intervene in other peoples’ wars. During
this period, the objectives of third-party interventions became more ambitious
and wide ranging (and often more militarized) involving the simultaneous pursuit
of conflict resolution, democratization and economic liberalization / sometimes
referred to as Wilsonian peacebuilding (Paris 2004) or ‘liberal peacebuilding’
(Duffield 2001; Richmond 2006). Lately, liberal peacebuilding has increasingly
become articulated within a discourse of counter terrorism.
The post-cold war internationalization of peacebuilding also reflects changed
notions of sovereignty. An expanded geopolitical space for Western governments
to intervene was linked to an erosion of the inviolability of national sovereignty.
Sovereignty increasingly became linked to, and conditional upon, upholding
certain norms, responsibilities and forms of behaviour. These new principles
were captured by the UN’s Agenda for Peace of 1992 (Boutros-Ghali 1995) and
more recently in the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty’s Responsibility to Protect (ICISS 2001). Insecurity / of peoples as
well as of states / is viewed as a global public bad, and where states cannot
protect their citizens, this must be rectified through intervention, leading in the
most egregious cases to forms of neo-trusteeship (Fearon and Laitin 2004).
Liberal peacebuilding has also involved new institutional arrangements, with
the emergence of complex networks and contracting arrangements, which
interlink state and non-state, and commercial and not-for-profit actors. This
has blurred the traditional boundaries separating departments of government /
for example, between development aid and foreign diplomacy / with the former
being seen as instrument for conflict management and thus increasingly overlapping with the mandate of the latter. It has also blurred the division between
the domestic and the international spheres; policies towards a given country are
shaped by a range of actors (treasury, trade/commerce, home office, defence,
development, diplomacy) each with different concerns (cost effectiveness,
homeland security, refugees/immigration, global poverty, international security,
trade relations). Although institutional boundaries have always been blurred and
resulting policies involve complex trade offs, the difference now is the explicit
connection between ‘our’ security and global security and the new assemblages
of governance interconnecting state/non-state, home/overseas. Hard security
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interventions overlap with regimes of ‘soft’ social reconstruction, development
and human security. Even ‘minor conflicts’ are seen as too dangerous to be left
alone, because they have the potential to spread and destabilize others in the
regional environment or further afield.
In some respects, Sri Lanka is atypical as an experiment in liberal peacebuilding. It is not a collapsed or failed state, and in spite of nearly twenty-five
years of civil war it has maintained reasonably democratic political institutions,
solid growth rates and good human development indicators. However, in terms of
the ‘supply side’ it conforms to most of the classic features of liberal peacebuilding, combining interventions which aim to simultaneously promote the goals
of conflict resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty (Pugh and
Cooper 2004). Reflecting broader trends there has been a blurring of the lines
between traditional diplomacy and the economic aspects of peacebuilding, with
aid being explicitly used as an incentive for peace (Sriskandarajah 2003). Also
introduced into the mix, increasingly but not only since 9/11, have been a range
of counter terrorism measures in the domestic and international spheres.
Liberal peacebuilding is underpinned by a number of core assumptions:
.
.
.
.
First, civil wars are internal problems with external solutions / in other words,
the roots of the conflict lie in a complex mix of indigenous factors, including
ethnic divisions, misgovernance and uneven development patterns. And the
deadlock can only be broken through external measures which shift incentives, preferences and institutional arrangements in favour of peace rather
than war.
Second, it is assumed that in liberal peacebuilding ‘all good things come
together’ / so that its various strands are mutually reinforcing and coherent with
a broader vision of peacebuilding. An emphasis is placed upon harmonization
and integrated missions so that international actors ‘talk with one voice’ in
order to pressurize recalcitrant domestic actors to make the right choices. The
desired end state / a polity and economy conforming to the core tenets of liberal
orthodoxy / is not open to question. The only choices left are technical ones
related to sequencing, prioritization and harmonization.
Third, actors who do not subscribe to the liberal peace model and actively
resist or subvert it are labelled as ‘spoilers’ (Newman and Richmond 2006).
The custodians of the peace process have the authority to use the term
‘spoiler’, but whether this label sticks depends on the legitimacy of the
peacebuilders and the process itself. Much depends on the complex interactions and bargaining processes between domestic and international actors and
their different sources of legitimacy. As explored below, if the peace process
itself becomes de-legitimized in the eyes of the population, then ‘spoiling’ is
itself seen as legitimate and desirable.
Fourth, liberal peacebuilding, with its emphasis on stability is essentially
conservative in character. The seemingly paradoxically connection between
liberalism and illiberal forms of rule has a long history. Uday Singh Mehta, for
example, shows how liberal doctrines were not only made compatible with
INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE SRI LANKAN PEACE PROCESS
307
illiberal colonial rule, but were used to justify it (Mehta 1999). Liberal
universalism and historical evolutionism perhaps represent points of continuity between nineteenth-century liberalism, twentieth-century modernization theory and contemporary liberal peacebuilding.1 In Sri Lanka, the
antecedents of the current experiment in peacebuilding can be found in
earlier attempts to import liberal institutions and ideologies, which provoked,
as they have today, an illiberal reaction in the form of defensive ethnonationalism (Spencer 2007).
The above points run the risk of overstating the homogeneity and hegemonic
power of liberal peacebuilding. Richmond (2006) and Heathershaw (2008), for
instance, have argued that the liberal peace involves several different versions or
discourses, underpinned by divergent methodologies and assumptions. Others
have highlighted how the application of these competing agendas has varied
tremendously from one context to another (Cooper 2007; Goodhand 2006; Mac
Ginty 2008). As the Sri Lankan case illustrates, writers on liberal peacebuilding
tend to underestimate the importance of domestic political processes and the
agency of individual actors who are either importers or resisters of liberal
policies. A more careful analysis reveals the complex negotiations that go on
between exporters and importers of liberal peacebuilding, how importers
instrumentalize the interventions of external actors, and the ways in which
they are ‘translated’ as they go through these multiple brokering arrangements.
Therefore liberal peacebuilding may look very different from how it was
originally framed, once it ‘hits the ground’.
Furthermore, the liberal peace model implies a level of homogeneity amongst
international actors which simply does not exist in practice. The peacebuilders
themselves are not disinterested parties and they intervene on the basis of a
range of interests which may often be conflicting, both internally2 and with each
other. The incentives and objectives of international actors should be subjected
to the same kind of rigorous political economy analysis to which warring parties
are subjected. For instance, Indian intervention in Sri Lanka in 1987 was
motivated to a great extent by domestic concerns and the need for the Congress
party to shore up flagging popularity and deflect public attention from various
scandals and failures through a foreign policy triumph (Bose 2002). Chandler has
argued more broadly that Western countries increasingly pursued ‘ethical’
foreign policies as a means of bolstering moral authority at home (2003). The
outcomes of these projects were not submitted to great public scrutiny and
failures could be blamed on domestic actors. This perspective implies that when
the rationale for intervention is clear, there are strong incentives for international actors to be associated. Conversely, when these interventions become
more complex and risky (as occurred in Sri Lanka after the election of Mahinda
Rajapakse) there are incentives to withdraw.
Liberal peacebuilding then is the manifestation of a structural shift that has
taken place in the post-cold war international environment and this in turn has
profoundly influenced conflict and peace dynamics in Sri Lanka. However, liberal
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peacebuilding is neither omnipotent, nor homogenous, and the analytical
challenge is to better disaggregate the domestic and international arenas and
the complex interface between them.3 In the following sections we will attempt
to do this by briefly examining two distinct phases in the peace process in Sri
Lanka / the UNF government after 2001 and the UPFA government after 2005 /
each involving contrasting responses and approaches to the internationalization
of peacebuilding.
International Role in the Peace Process
UNF Government: Towards a Cosmopolitan Peace?4
The election of the UNF government (led by Ranil Wickramasinghe) in 2001 and
the consequent ceasefire agreement of 22 February 2002 led to a significant role
for Western countries for the first time in the history of the conflict.5 As
mentioned above, there were considerable supply side factors influencing this
internationalization and Sri Lanka was viewed at the time, by many international
actors, as a success story that they wished to support and be associated with.
Also important was the existence of Norway as a willing mediator, whose role was
accepted by both sides.6 On the demand side, the incentives for an internationalization process were more mixed. For the UNF government, international
security guarantees, particularly from the US and India, helped provide a safety
net and thus reduce the government’s exposure in the event of a return to war.
Furthermore, international donors provided the financial backing for the
infrastructure of peace talks and the promise of significant funding in order to
generate a peace dividend (Sriskandarajah 2003).
Wickramasinghe’s strategy was shaped partly by the lessons drawn from the
previous round of peace talks in 1994/95, notably their failure to implement
confidence-building measures before entering the hard bargaining of the talks
themselves. Therefore an incremental, rather than a ‘big bang’ approach, was
adopted which entailed dealing with the humanitarian consequences of the war
before moving on to the core political issues regarding settlement. It was hoped
that this strategy would not only build confidence between the two sides, but
also in the long term that opening up the north and east to foreign investment
and development would increasingly make the armed struggle irrelevant. The socalled economization of peacebuilding reflected the government’s ideological
position as a party of the right, which came to power with the strong backing of
the business sector. For Wickramasinghe, the peace process represented a means
to an end, the ultimate goal being liberalization and structural reforms leading to
rapid economic development and the attainment of a 12 per cent growth rate, as
outlined in the government’s poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP), entitled
Regaining Sri Lanka (Bastian 2006). Sri Lanka’s future was believed to lie in
becoming an entrepot metropolis for the fast growing south India region. There
INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE SRI LANKAN PEACE PROCESS
309
was therefore at this time a strong convergence in the values and interests of
domestic and international elites.
For the LTTE, the internationalization process offered an opportunity to
regroup and refinance the organization after a period of intensive military
activity as well as providing the chance to cement the legitimacy of the LTTE as
an internationally-recognized political actor.
A number of problems can be identified in the Wickramasinghe strategy. First,
its heavy dependence on international actors undermined his domestic legitimacy, which helped to foster a nationalist backlash and, ultimately, led to the
breakdown of the process. The belief that international backing could enable
Wickramasinghe to ignore important domestic constituencies (including the
President, the army and nationalist groups) proved to be fatal. These dynamics
were intensified by the tsunami response, which inflamed nationalist sensitivities
to questions of sovereignty and ‘neo-colonial’ interference.7 Second, it was
simply not possible to circumvent the core political issues, as the conflictual
dynamics surrounding the Interim Self-Governing Authority (ISGA) and the PostTsunami Operational Management Structure (P-TOMS) negotiations demonstrated.8 A focus on normalization, without some kind of road map for the end
game, increased public fears about the outcome of talks, thus further weakening
popular support. Third, the bi-polar track one approach marginalized other
groups such as the Muslims and the nationalist groups including the Janatha
Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) which encouraged
spoiling behaviour.9 Fourth, it has been argued that heavy internationalization
perversely meant that domestic actors often spent more time addressing the
international players than they did each other. Fifth, Wickramasinghe, by
attempting to simultaneously negotiate peace and push through major structural
reforms, put too much strain on the southern polity. These reforms, which
included a freeze on public sector positions and the removal of fertilizer
subsidies, were implemented without consultation or compensatory measures
and were seen by many as an illegitimate dismantling of the welfare state. They
consequently undermined support for the regime in the south, and it has been
argued that the UNF regime lost the 2004 parliamentary elections, primarily on
the basis of economic failures rather than its performance in the peace process
(Bastian 2006; Kelegama 2006).
This period exposed the difficulties associated with moving from a ceasefire
towards a settlement. As Uyangoda argues, in the absence of ‘settlement
stability’ a political solution was never viable (2003). In spite of the Oslo
Declaration of 2002, in which both sides agreed to explore a federal solution,
fundamental divisions remained between the two sides about the means and ends
of the peace process. Essentially, the government prioritized the economic over
political transformation, whilst the LTTE felt that the reverse would better
further their interests (Uyangoda, 2009). The LTTE withdrew from direct peace
talks in June 2003, with their spokesman, Anton Balasingham, stating that
they needed to break free of the ‘peace trap’. By this he meant that the LTTE
felt increasingly hemmed in by an internationally-driven peace process which
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favoured the state over the non-state. The LTTE, the government and significant
sections of Sri Lankan society remained fearful of the implications of a political
settlement. This hesitancy arguably helped to reinvigorate southern nationalism
and enabled it to re-enter the political mainstream. These so-called ‘spoilers’
were hard to engage, but perhaps the potential for international actors to
influence them was reduced by the problematic binary division between those
who are ‘for’ or ‘against’ peace. A closer analysis of the ‘spoilers’ reveals a
division between those who spoil in order to shape the process and those who
attempt to destroy the process itself.10
External engagement during this period has been critiqued on several grounds.
International support (particularly from the US) became too closely associated
with the UNF regime and the bi-polar negotiation model excluded other key
actors (including the President) (Lunstead 2007). International actors can also be
criticized for failing to consistently stress human rights issues and to insist on
serious commitments from both the LTTE and the Government to introduce
democratic reforms. The prioritization of the management of the peace process,
and an ‘even-handed’ approach, arguably meant turning a blind eye to the
growing violence and abuses that were being committed under the guise of
‘peace’ (Keenan 2007). This problem was accentuated by Norway’s double role as
both facilitator of the peace process and member of the Sri Lanka Monitoring
Mission (SLMM) responsible for monitoring abuses and ceasefire violations.
Finally, the commitment of $4.5 billion of development aid, made at a donor
conference in Tokyo in 2003, which was conditional on ‘good performance’ in
relation to the peace process and human rights, was based upon an inflated
assessment of the leverage of aid. The declaration ultimately ‘put the
development cart before the political horse’, raising the political stakes before
there was a mechanism in place for deciding how the stakes would be divided up
(Sriskandarajah 2003). Arguably, donors were too bullish, whilst diplomats were
too timid, in terms of their failure to address key political issues as they emerged
(Goodhand and Klem 2005). This lack of coherence, or strategic complementarity, became more evident as the peace process started to fall apart. In fact, just
as peace talks acted as a lightening rod for a range of broader societal conflicts in
the domestic sphere, the break down of talks exposed a range of inter and intragroup tensions in the international sphere. When there was an international
‘tailwind’ behind talks there was a level of coherence between the external
players. But international divisions were exposed as soon as the talks started to
unravel11 and, as explored below, these divisions were subsequently exploited by
the new government.
UPFA Government:12 Reasserting Domestic Ownership of ‘Peace’?
The defeat of Ranil Wickramasinghe to Mahinda Rajapakse in the 2005
Presidential elections immediately reduced the influence of those international
actors who had backed Wickramasinghe’s peace strategy. By 2005, both the UPFA
INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE SRI LANKAN PEACE PROCESS
311
government of Mahinda Rajapakse and the LTTE had come to the conclusion that
an excessively internationalized peace process that had prevailed between 2002
and 2004 was not in their interests. Both sides wanted to extricate themselves
from the so-called ‘peace trap’. The LTTE was frustrated at its lack of room for
manoeuvre and what it perceived as its growing marginalization to the process
since 2004. The defensive mood was compounded by the organization’s own
internal problems. The breakaway of the group’s Eastern commander, Karuna
Amman, in March 2004 considerably strengthened the position of government
forces in the east and made it less likely that the LTTE would return to the
negotiation table.
President Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), has traditionally been a
party of the left, whose support base largely came from the rural peasantry and
whose legitimacy was connected to a narrative of state welfarism. This and its
dependence on a fragile alliance with the JVP meant that the UPFA government’s
approach was bound to be very different to that of the previous regime’s. As
Uyangoda (2008) notes, the UPFA government has shifted the terms of the debate
about the nature of a political solution to the conflict in Sri Lanka. The three key
components of the government’s political framework are: first, there can be no
political solution without a military victory; second, the LTTE are the main
obstacle to peace, in which case they must be defeated rather than negotiated
with; third, a political solution can be found within the framework of a demerged north and east, thus reversing a political consensus about the unit for
regional autonomy that goes back to the Indo-Lanka accord of 1987.13
Rajapakse’s strategy has been to mobilize and maintain a broad coalition both
in parliament and more broadly amongst societal groups in the south. This
attempt to take the south with him was bolstered by stepping up the pursuit of
the war in the north and east and building pragmatic alliances with non-LTTE
militant groups. The new government also presented an alternative development
vision drawn out in the Mahinda Chintanaya Election Manifesto of 2005; in many
respects, the mirror image of Regaining Sri Lanka. It questioned the existing
framework of the peace process and external interference, whilst stressing
autarkic economic development and the unitary nature of the Sri Lankan state.
Rajapakse’s inward-looking political strategy permitted a more expansive
military strategy which, by early 2009, had wrested back control of the vast
majority of LTTE-controlled territory including the LTTE’s former ‘administrative
capital’, Kilinochichi, and the key coastal stronghold of Mullativu. At the same
time, discourses of reconstruction and development have been invoked as a
means of co-opting donors and legitimizing the government’s military and
political pacification of the east (Rampton 2007).
Rather than focussing on international sources of legitimacy, like Wickramasinghe, Rajapakse drew much more explicitly on domestic sources. Consequently,
his strategy has been to dilute the international role and at times, in an attempt
to outflank the JVP and reassert domestic legitimacy, to disavow international
involvement as a threat to Sri Lanka’s sovereignty. This distancing from the
liberal peacebuilding approach of Western powers has to some extent been
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counterbalanced by a strategy of regionalization, which involved strengthening
links with India and encouraging a growing role for other non-Western donors
such as China, Pakistan, South Korea and Iran.14 Although loans and grants from
Western countries fell between 2006 and 2007, total loan commitments actually
increased slightly (from $1.0 billion to $1.2 billion), with China picking up most of
the shortfall. China committed approximately $1 billion to fund a new port in
Hambantota, while Iran has provided Sri Lanka with $1.5 billion in soft loans to
develop an oil refinery and to buy Iranian oil.
The Rajapakse government has explicitly pursued a two-pronged strategy to
the conflict: on the one hand taking on the LTTE militarily and, on the other,
pursuing a version of ‘peace’ amenable to international actors via the stuttering
peace negotiations of 2006, the Ceasefire Agreement and a series of consensusbuilding mechanisms such as the SLFP/UNP Memorandum of Understanding
(MOU), the International Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP) and the All-Party
Representative Committee (APRC) which were designed largely to deflect
international opposition to the conflict.15 While these mechanisms provided
the government with time and space to pursue its military strategy by fending off
international criticism; coalition partners, primarily the JVP, exerted increasing
pressure on the government to water down the recommendations of the APRC
and to abrogate the ceasefire. Although terminating the CFA involved political
costs to the government at the international level, the price was outweighed by
the potential domestic political costs of an election prompted by the withdrawal
of the JVP’s parliamentary support.
The LTTE’s strategy, since 2004, appears to be one of upping the ante, and by
promoting a military backlash, after the election of President Rajapakse, they
perhaps hoped to weaken the support base of the current regime and tip
international support once more in their favour (Uyangoda 2007). Again, this
highlights the need for international actors to think carefully about how
internationalization is instrumentalized by domestic actors to pursue political
goals.
The role of international actors in this changed environment has become more
complex. With nationalist voices in the ascendancy, a more critical stance
towards external ‘interference’ emerged, which was manifested in media
attacks and public demonstrations against international actors, particularly
Norway. Several donors responded to the concerns about the government’s
military strategy, human rights abuses and displacement by disengaging:
Germany stopped new commitments of development aid (until the peace process
advances) and the UK suspended around $3million of debt relief. The US’s
Millennium Challenge Account’s commitment of $110 million to Sri Lanka was put
on hold in December 2007 ‘pending an improvement in the security situation’.16
In many respects, the current environment has seen a return to the behaviour of
the 1990s, in the sense that international actors are increasingly risk averse,
‘peace’ is viewed as a taboo subject and donors work ‘around’ conflict (see
Goodhand 2001).
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313
International engagement in 2006 and 2007 continued somewhat unevenly
with international actors mobilized intermittently by spikes in violence, such as
the Mavil Aru crisis in July 2006, or the evictions of Tamils from Colombo in June,
2007.17 Some, more sustained, efforts were made by international actors to
address the human rights situation with the US, for example, calling for a UN
human rights monitoring mission for the first time in October 2007 and the EU
members on the UN human rights council attempting to pass a resolution on
human rights in Sri Lanka. The government, however, was able to ward off these
engagements with tokenistic gestures to the international community, for
example by inviting the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour,
to Sri Lanka (HRW 2008).
International engagement entered a new phase after the termination of the
CFA by the government in January 2008, but the Sri Lankan government has been
able to maintain its strategy of deflecting and offsetting concerted international
pressure (CPA 2006, p. 11). Given their loss of international legitimacy, the LTTE,
on the other hand, continued to have little to lose (CPA 2006, p. 10). There were
some signs that international actors were willing to exert greater pressure on the
Sri Lankan government in this new context. In January 2008, Japan stated that
aid to Sri Lanka was under ‘continuous review’ although no existing aid
commitments were cut. Since the start of 2008, EU threats to withdraw trade
concessions to Sri Lanka under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP)
scheme grew more forthright but a final decision on Sri Lanka’s status was
delayed in December 2008, providing Sri Lanka with concessions until late 2009.
Although these threats have clearly worried the government (as evidenced by its
vigorous campaigning on human rights in Europe), they have also been used by
President Rajapakse as a means of articulating his own domestic agenda of
defending Sri Lankan state sovereignty, autarchic economic development, and a
strengthened relationship with Asian, rather than Western, powers. As the
Government edged nearer towards a military defeat of the LTTE in 2009, it
became increasingly confident about dismissing calls for intervention from
Western powers. In this context, the focus has increasingly shifted back towards
India, which has come under pressure from political parties in Tamil Nadu to take
action to protect Tamils in the Wanni.
International actors have been divided by the terrorism agenda, which has led
many to take a tougher approach towards the LTTE. The proscription of the LTTE
by the Canadians on 10 April 2006 and the EU on 18 May, coupled with increased
efforts to curb LTTE front organization fund raising, reduced their capacity to
engage and damaged the potential for the strategic complementarity of the
ceasefire period where the European countries played the ‘good cop’ to the US
and India’s ‘bad cop’ (see Lunstead 2007). The discourse of terrorism has also
been useful for the Sri Lankan government because it allows a discrete separation
of its military aims (which are described as a campaign to eliminate terrorist
threats) and its longer-term political objectives (to resolve ethnic-based
grievances and existing structures of governance).
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In addition to their material effects, external interventions play an important
symbolic role. The extent to which they can have a positive effect in
peacebuilding terms depends in large measure on how different actors read
and interpret the meanings and ‘signals’ behind interventions. In Sri Lanka, the
growing impasse between international and domestic players is partly related to
how the signalling effects of aid have been interpreted differently by various
domestic constituencies. For example, whilst the US felt it was sending a clear
message that their military support to the government came with strings
attached / notably an imperative to show restraint / others interpreted it as a
green light to pursue the war. Furthermore, whilst internationals felt that that
their hard line on the LTTE was part of a quid pro quo / i.e. the government
would, in return, put forward political proposals for power sharing / others
viewed it as symptomatic of a swing back towards a state-centred approach.
The Dilemmas of Liberal Peacebuilding
Conflictual War to Peace Transitions
Just because international actors failed to ‘bring peace’ does not necessarily
mean that international intervention was ill-conceived or a failure. As with other
cases of liberal peacebuilding, the metrics of success are contested and their
measurement is difficult because of the problems of data, counterfactuals,
attribution and variance in time frames.
The Sri Lankan experience provides some general lessons on the nature of warto-peace transitions which are always conflictual and often violent. Peace
processes are moments of change when the new rules of the game and one’s
position in the game are decided; in this sense they always involve ‘positional
conflicts’, as different groups attempt to either get a seat at the table or disrupt
the table. External interventions in these so-called ‘charismatic moments’ of
politics (Grenier 1996) are ineluctably political and cannot be reduced to
generalisable technical exercises.
In negotiating these turbulent political waters, both domestic and international actors tended to swing dramatically from one approach to another, and by
doing so they arguably over-compensated for shortcomings in earlier phases of
the peace process. In the domestic arena, Wickramasinghe’s strategy of an
incremental, process-based and largely exclusive approach, gave way to
Rajapakse’s strategy, based on military engagement, hard bargaining, building
a southern consensus and returning, in some respects, to the ‘big bang’ approach
characteristic of the 1994/95 peace process. In the international arena there
have been similar pendulum swings, from the veritable ‘peace rush’ of 2002/03,
with a maximalist approach to peacebuilding, back to a more defensive and risk
averse strategy since 2005. International actors have been criticized for this
‘traffic light’ behaviour,18 rather than steering a more consistent and long term
course of action.
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315
It would be wrong to conclude that international players have had no influence
on conflict and peace dynamics in Sri Lanka. The international regime influences
the environment within which domestic actors operate. Although international
actors failed to bring about a peaceful resolution to the Sri Lankan conflict, they
played an important part in creating the pre-conditions for negotiations and have
the potential to create an enabling or disenabling environment for peace. This
case demonstrates the importance of distinguishing between the conditions that
led to the ceasefire and the interventions required to move towards a settlement.
It also stresses the need for different supportive strategies from donors for
ceasefire, settlement and peace consolidation.
Struggles for Legitimacy
The Sri Lankan experience illustrates the way in which peace processes present
opportunities for conflict actors to pursue a range of political agendas. Domestic
actors manipulate and instrumentalise interventions by third-parties for their
own ends. The various parties’ engagement in the peace process accrued
different benefits at different times. The UNF government and business elites
were important transmission agents for the liberal peace, but they lacked the
political base and consequent legitimacy required to push through major
structural changes. While the UNF regime principally saw the heavily internationalized peace process as a means of shoring up a strategy of rapid economic
development, the UPFA government increasingly used the peace process as a
means of deflecting international criticism and facilitating the war, which in turn
could be seen as a part of a broader strategy of regime consolidation (CPA 2006).
The peace process initially provided the LTTE with an opportunity to regroup and
refinance but, as the shadow of war escalated, also provided them with a means
of managing the risks associated with a return to war or the implications of a
renewed peace process. These shifting agendas of domestic actors undermine
the assumption of liberal peacebuilders that peace is pursued because it
represents an absolute good.
As already mentioned, the idea that liberal peacebuilding is foisted upon
domestic actors is overly simplistic. There are always importers of liberal
peacebuilding in the political sphere (such as Ranil Wickramasinghe) and within
sections of civil society in Sri Lanka. The peace process has highlighted an
associated problem of over-internationalization. Being too closely associated
with international actors can be damaging for all kinds of domestic political
actors. These lessons also apply to NGOs. Since 2005, NGOs working on peace and
conflict issues have increasingly been attacked for their close ties to international actors and labelled ‘peace vendors’ (Walton 2008). Perversely, liberal
peacebuilding may have illiberal effects by inadvertently bolstering the positions
of hardliners. As mentioned above, there is a long history in Sri Lanka of liberal
reforms inducing defensive reactions from nationalists.
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The peace process then is best seen an intensified political environment
providing a range of opportunities for different actors to generate legitimacy in
different ways. First, the process provides the parties to the agreement with
opportunities to bolster their own legitimacy and to use it as a means of pursuing
their own agendas. Second, it furnishes international actors with a means of
shaping political and economic outcomes by conferring legitimacy on some
actors, whilst attempting to delegitimize others by excluding them from
negotiations or labelling them ‘spoilers’. Third, the failure of the process to
generate popular legitimacy provides space for critical domestic actors such as
the SLFP and the JVP to mobilize in opposition to it.
Finally, the illiberal consequences of liberal peacebuilding may further
undermine the long term prospects for peace. A history of failed peace processes
in Sri Lanka has added new layers of complexity and new forms of grievances to
an extremely resilient conflict system. A political settlement that might have
resolved the conflict a decade ago would no longer be sufficient today. For very
different reasons, neither regime has been able or willing to address the
underlying need for state reform. The manner in which each regime sought to
end the war, paradoxically limited their ability to find a long term solution. The
UNF government was caught in a liberal ‘peace trap’ because it had a limited
support base and legitimacy, depended on external actors and advocated
structural reforms which accentuated, rather than addressed, the underlying
sources of conflict. On the other hand the UNPFA government is now caught in an
illiberal ‘war trap’ because its legitimacy is tied to the successful pursuit of the
war and a nationalist support base, both of which limit its willingness and ability
to ‘win the peace’ by forging a new grand bargain or political settlement.
The contrasting approaches of the Wickramasinghe and Rajapakse regimes
highlight how interventions, ostensibly aimed at addressing the ‘root causes’ of
conflict, often miss their target since different actors will often subscribe to
different versions of what those root causes are. These divisions not only help to
drive conflict, they also play a crucial role in how domestic actors engage with
internationals. As Woodward has argued: ‘Crucial to the way a conflict ends are
the parties’ campaigns to win external support (including intervention) for their
side by shaping outsiders’ perceptions of the causes of war’ (2007, p. 155).
Development, Peacebuilding and Security
The Wickramasinghe and Rajapakse manifestos, Regaining Sri Lanka and Mahinda
Chintanaya respectively, contained contrasting development visions and different
understandings of the link between development and the peace process. For the
former, development was explicitly linked to the peace process: firstly, as an
instrument to create disincentives for war by generating a peace dividend;
secondly, it was hoped that peace would kick start economic take-off, leading to
structural reforms and development through export-led growth. Rajapakse’s
regime, in contrast, sought to de-link development issues from the peace
INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE SRI LANKAN PEACE PROCESS
317
process / international donors were discouraged from straying into the political
realm, and international aid belonged strictly in the economic and technical
spheres. Furthermore, unlike Ranil’s idea of development through liberalization,
Mahinda has stressed a more populist vision of development within a national,
state-led framework.19
The post-ceasefire period has demonstrated the limitations of development
aid: even though some attempts were made to address structural causes of the
conflict, the peace process did not shift the ‘tectonic plates’ underpinning the
conflict. The experience of this period suggests that development aid is best
suited to addressing these medium- to long-term issues related to state reform,
governance, poverty and uneven development patterns, rather than as a tool for
incentivizing a change in conflict actors’ short-term strategies.20
Therefore, it is not possible to ‘buy peace’ in Sri Lanka, whilst leaving the core
political questions unresolved. The so-called economization of peacebuilding is
based upon a fundamental misreading of the incentives driving conflict in Sri
Lanka and the idea that a dose of liberalization can somehow act as a conflict
prophylactic is similarly misconceived. There is ample evidence to point to the
conflict-producing potential of rapid liberalization in Sri Lanka and elsewhere
and to suggest the need for greater caution on the part of donors who advocate
sweeping reforms (as the IMF and others did in 2002) (Gunasinghe 2004; Moore
1990; Bastian 2005, 2006).
Tensions, Trade-offs and Limitations
The case also highlights the tensions and trade offs involved in liberal peacebuilding and suggests that a greater awareness of these can contribute to better
policies in the future. The ‘all good things come together’ approach should be
replaced by one that pays greater attention to the prioritization and sequencing
of interventions. Ultimately, international actors need to decide whether
domestic peace is their overriding priority and can coexist alongside other policy
goals, including trade, economic liberalization, terrorism and refugee flows.
Elevating peace may mean de-prioritizing other policy goals, particularly those
which have only a limited base of support in Sri Lankan society, such as economic
liberalization or civil service reforms. Pursuing goals inconsistently can undermine the credibility of international actors in the eyes of conflict actors.
Sri Lanka is unlikely to become an overriding concern for international actors.
Its middle income status is increasingly setting it outside the aid strategies of
many donors. A lack of key strategic interests for many international actors
increases the government’s room for manoeuvre, as does the growing role of
international actors who do not necessarily subscribe to the liberal peace agenda
such as China, Iran and Russia.
This support from regional players has been critical in sustaining Rajapakse’s
ambitious military strategy which rejected the assumption that a negotiated
solution to the conflict is the only effective solution. The sources of credit and
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military aid have permitted sustained increases in defence spending and made up
for cut-backs in aid from several multi-lateral and western bilateral donors, for
whom supporting development alongside a military solution to conflict was
unpalatable. For the time being at least, Rajapakse’s uncompromising strategy
for dealing with the LTTE has sustained high levels of popular support among the
Sinhalese majority.
This convergence of interests between nationalist domestic actors and a group
of regional actors challenges the view that liberal peacebuilding acts as a
monopoly, crowding out space for alternative versions of peace (Mac Ginty 2007,
p. 458). In the Sri Lankan context, where there is a strong state which is not
dependent upon donor funding and where state legitimacy is linked to state
welfare provisions as well as an absence of significant Western strategic
interests, the liberal view is a minority position which is easily crowded out by
‘non-Western’ alternatives. In retrospect, the pursuit of liberal peacebuilding
during the UNF period was only pursued for a brief period of time when there was
a temporary convergence of political interests between external actors and
domestic elites.
Conclusions: The Liberal Peacebuilding Paradox?
The limits of international action need to be recognized and evolving strategies
cannot be based on inflated assessments of outsiders’ capacities to engineer
peace. It seems that, within the current peacebuilding paradigm, effective
international engagement is only possible when a government shares a belief in
the strategies of liberal peace policies / but ownership needs to extend beyond
the government in power. When the regime in power feels they do not have any
‘ownership’ over (indeed feels antipathetic to) such policies, the scope for
meaningful reform is extremely limited. In this context, a simulated peace
process is likely to emerge, where conflict actors use the process as a means of
accruing residual benefits and masking war-like strategies (Selby 2008). International actors are left treading a fine line where the pitfalls of being too critical
or too close to the regime are equally hazardous. While outspoken international
actors can suffer from a loss of access and therefore influence, those actors who
get too close to the regime can also lose out in the long term, as was
demonstrated after 1994 and 2002. Furthermore, criticism of a regime hostile
to external engagement can easily be instrumentalized to bolster illiberal or
belligerent agendas.
Although the Rajapakse regime appears to have successfully defeated the
LTTE on the battlefield, this victory has come at a great cost both in terms of
human lives lost and in the broader damage inflicted on democratic governance
in Sri Lanka. Some international actors have begun to look at ways in which the
end to military conflict can provide opportunities to reconstruct the north and
east and to forge a new, more inclusive political settlement which incorporates
moderate Tamil voices. While Rajakapakse’s approach can be seen as offering an
INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE SRI LANKAN PEACE PROCESS
319
alternative path to peace from the kind laid out by liberal peacebuilders, its goal
is at best a much more limited version of peace concerned with defeating the
LTTE and at worst little more than an attempt to consolidate the power base of
the Rajapakse regime.
This essay has suggested that peacebuilders could navigate some of the
contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the liberal peacebuilding project by
paying greater attention to the way in which legitimacy is constructed on the
ground and by adopting a more flexible, nuanced and long-term approach based
on a closer reading of the political incentives of local actors and the ways in
which they may be influenced by (neo)liberal interventions. These arguments
resonate to some extent with the critical literature on liberal peacebuilding that
advocates alternative models of engagement. This literature has highlighted the
need for greater focus on the potential for consent to be built through the
provision of social welfare and engagement with ‘progressive’ elements in civil
society (Richmond 2008) or via the legitimation of state institutions (Barnett
2006) and has emphasized the extent to which a perceived lack of legitimacy of
external intervention is likely to be exploited and instrumentalised by local
actors (Williams 2007).
Whilst it is too early to draw conclusions from current developments in the Sri
Lankan political arena and on the battlefield in the Wanni, this case does
illustrate both the problems inherent in liberal peacebuilding, and the pitfalls
associated with alternative endogenous versions of peacebuilding that may
emerge in reaction to the former. Although these rival models may have
relevance in certain contexts where the state is weak and stability is the
overriding priority, their application appears more problematic in contexts such
as Sri Lanka whose post-independence history has seen the state grow
increasingly exclusionist in character and where repeated failures to resolve
conflict have entrenched mistrust and divisions between the parties to the
conflict. In this environment, efforts to build a peace based on state legitimacy,
bolstered through a discourse of Sinhala nationalism, have resulted in extreme
violence and have enduring negative consequences for minority groups. Therefore, the paradox in Sri Lanka has been that whilst liberal peacebuilding has been
exclusionary and destabilizing, alternatives have often had similarly negative
consequences. Although a welfare-led approach has potential to cement a social
contract, building the legitimacy of the state and creating stability, these
strategies can also be used to cement illiberal models of governance that
augment exclusion and defer a just political settlement to conflict. At the
current moment in Sri Lankan politics, this just settlement cannot be built
around the alliances constructed by the Rajapakse regime to wage war. A more
broad-based and progressive set of alliances will be required to forge a new grand
bargain for peace. The likelihood of this coalition emerging could be enhanced
through sensitive international engagement, but it will certainly be decreased if
once again liberal peacebuilders seize the ‘post conflict’ moment as an
opportunity for radical reforms.
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Notes
1 See Rudolph (2005) for an excellent critique of the ‘Lockean impulse’ which she
argues the US is particularly prone to. This involves the impulse to impose the Lockean
liberal consensus everywhere.
2 For example, diplomats and development actors from the same government may
have different and sometimes competing sets of incentives in relation to any one country.
There may be disbursement pressures on the development agency whilst the diplomats
want aid to be withheld as a bargaining lever.
3 The ascendancy of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ as the dominant model of western
intervention has been increasingly questioned with Cooper (2007) declaring a ‘crisis of
the liberal peace’. He highlights a growing consensus amongst analysts that interventions
should pursue more consensual and accountable approaches.
4 The UNF coalition was formed in 2001 and included the main opposition United
National Party (UNP), a number of key dissidents from President Kumaratunga’s People’s
Alliance government as well as members of the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress and the Ceylon
Workers’ Congress.
5 India intervened in the 1980s, sending a Peacekeeping Force (known as the IPKF) to
Sri Lanka in 1987.
6 Historical links with Sri Lanka, the perceived absence of geostrategic interests, its
experiences of peace mediation elsewhere and the personal commitment of individuals
like Erik Solheim, Minister for International Development (Martin 2006) were all important
factors behind Norway taking on the role of mediator.
7 This was largely a result of problems surrounding the Post-Tsunami Operational
Management Structure (P-TOMS) mechanism for distributing tsunami aid between
government and LTTE-controlled areas (Goodhand and Klem 2005). The heavy international NGO presence in the aftermath of the tsunami provided further opportunities for
nationalists to assert discourses of neo-colonial intervention, drawing in particular on
stories about the uneven distribution of tsunami resources, NGO malpractice and the
cultural impropriety of NGOs.
8 ISGA was a set of political proposals for power-sharing in the north and east,
presented by the LTTE in 2003, which drew heavy criticism from both the then opposition
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) led by President Kumaratunga and the nationalist Janatha
Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). The P-TOMS mechanism was designed to facilitate the transfer
of international aid to LTTE-controlled areas in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. The
mechanism was agreed by the LTTE and the government but subsequently blocked by the
Supreme Court in July 2005.
9 The JVP are a youth-based Sinhala nationalist group which initiated two armed
uprisings against the government in 1971 and between 1987 and 1989. The JHU are a
nationalist political party led by Buddhist monks founded in 2004.
10 For example, arguably the JVP fall into the latter category whilst Muslim groups or
human rights organizations who were critical of the peace process, wished to influence
rather than destroy it.
11 One example of this is the failure of donors to follow through on their proclaimed
conditionalities. After a united position in Tokyo, donors then proceeded to disburse
money irrespective of the peace process and human rights abuses (Frerks and Klem 2006).
12 The UPFA alliance was formed in 2004 ahead of parliamentary elections and involved
collaboration between the SLFP and the JVP as well as several other smaller parties.
13 The Indo-Lanka Accord was signed by the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the
Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayawardene in 1987. The Sri Lankan government agreed to
several Tamil demands including the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the
INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE SRI LANKAN PEACE PROCESS
321
devolution of power to the regions and official status for the Tamil language. The IPKF was
tasked with enforcing the Accord.
14 This trend is not new. Sri Lanka first developed strong trade and diplomatic links with
Communist countries such as China and Russia in the 1950s (Bastian 2007).
15 The SLFP and the UNP signed a Memorandum of Understanding in October 2006 to
cooperate on issues relating to the resolution of the conflict. The International
Independent Group of International Experts (IIGEP) was established in February 2007 by
the President of Sri Lanka to oversee the government’s Commission of Inquiry into human
rights abuses. The group withdrew from Sri Lanka in April 2008 on the basis that the
government had not sufficiently taken on board their recommendations. The All-Party
Representative Committee (APRC) was appointed by President Rajapakse in June 2006
with the aim of generating a consensus in the South on devolving power to the regions.
16 Several important European donors such as Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands
are in the process of winding down commitments to Sri Lanka in line with broader policy
changes.
17 The Mavil Aru crisis arose when the LTTE closed a sluice gate in Trincomallee
Province, prompting a military offensive from the Government forces. In June 2007,
approximately 400 non-resident Tamils were forcibly removed from Colombo by Sri Lankan
police on ‘security grounds’. The evicted people were allowed to return after spending
two days in detention centres in the Northern town of Vavuniya.
18 Which is at least in part the result of how they have built close relationships with the
‘like minded’ (i.e. those who subscribe to liberal peacebuilding), without appreciating
their often tenuous political and social base and the considerable scepticism towards
aspects of the liberal peace in many parts of Sri Lankan society.
19 This strategy is evident in the government’s Nagenahira Navodaya or ‘Eastern
Resurgence’ programme which aims to develop and democratize the east in the aftermath
of the region’s ‘liberation’ in 2007. As Nadarajah and Rampton (2008) have argued,
couching this project in the terms of ‘development’ is not only depoliticizing, it also
serves to co-opt foreign donors into a state-driven agenda.
20 The growing role of China has limited the scope for the use of economic tools and has
further eroded any residual belief in the efficacy of economic carrots and sticks from
‘middle powers’.
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