The Grand Challenges in the Quest for Peace and Democracy

Abstract

Peace and democracy are intertwined concepts. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1796, proposed that, if ‘the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to be declared, it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise’. Kant therefore suggested that a ‘republican constitution’ offers the potential to achieve ‘a perpetual peace’ (translation by Nisbet, 1991, 100). In more recent decades, the notion that ‘democratic or liberal states never or very rarely go to war with each other’ (Gat, 2006, 73) has been further developed and debated. Nevertheless, peace studies and democracy studies have tended to take different directions. Academic research on the attainment of peaceful societies and democracy remains underdeveloped. Furthermore, the consequences and implications of achieving peace and democracy, and the wide variety of actors involved, lack conceptualization. The interactions between these processes and actors with the wide range of political regimes developed across the globe remain on the agenda of scholars and policymakers. This essay outlines a number of the key challenges facing peace and democracy studies as we enter the new decade of the 2020s. It aspires to advance our understanding of crucial empirical and theoretical questions and to establish a better dialogue between the fields of peace studies and democracy studies. We see the need to address the following, among many, key challenges in the field of peace studies over the coming years: The crisis of liberal peacebuilding: what comes next? The tenets of the ‘liberal peace’ dominated peacebuilding academia and practice in the 1990s, guiding peace process designs aimed at achieving multi-party democratic systems characterized by ‘the rule of law, human rights, free and globalized markets and neo-liberal development’ (Richmond, 2006, 292). However, the liberal peacebuilding project and its ‘linear cause-effect problem-solving model’ are now widely deemed to be in ‘profound crisis’ (Randazzo and Torrent, 2020, 3; De Coning, 2018, 302; Paffenholz, 2021) and the peace agreements struck in the heyday of liberal peacebuilding in the early 1990s have rarely produced lasting peace (Jarstad et al., 2015). Similarly, the democratization efforts of the 1990s proved a disappointment, frequently culminating in the consolidation of non-democratic regimes and autocracies, democratic backsliding and a rise in populism. Academics have long recognized the more turbulent reality of peacemaking and peacebuilding (e.g. Paffenholz, 2021; Jarstad et al., 2019, 2; De Coning, 2018, 301; Bell and Pospisil, 2017, 583, 577; Rocha Menocal, 2017, 561, 567; Lederach, 2005, 118) while policymakers and donors, too, have embraced a more pragmatic, flexible and context-driven approach–at least in theory–termed the ‘sustaining peace agenda’ (e.g. UN, 2015a; UN, 2015b; EU, 2016; World Bank and UN, 2018). However, practitioners appear reluctant to abandon the linear, liberal peacebuilding model (Mahmoud et al., 2018; Autesserre, 2019; Ross, 2020; Paffenholz, 2021). While researchers have proposed ‘local peacebuilding’ as an alternative (Lederach, 2005; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013), this approach has also been criticized for essentializing and romanticizing the ‘local’ and neglecting power dynamics (Heathershaw, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015). There is a clear need for new peacebuilding paradigms that encourage and facilitate international and local peacebuilders to embrace a transformation in their practice. Interrogating the ‘inclusion project’. The notion that both peacemaking and peacebuilding must be inclusive can now be considered to be a predominant international norm (De Waal et al., 2017, 165; Turner, 2020). Numerous UN resolutions, frameworks and reports advocate the centrality of inclusion, from UNSCR Resolution 1325 (2000) to Resolution 2535 (2020). However, existing comparative research into the effects of inclusive peacemaking has faced criticism for its failure to establish a causal link between inclusion and sustainable peace (Pospisil, 2019, 99–100; De Waal et al., 2017, 180) and it has also been claimed that the notion of ‘inclusion enables peacebuilding policy to uphold the appearance of agency’ (Pospisil, 2019, 92) while merely make superficial changes to practice (Paffenholz et al., 2016; Paffenholz, 2021). This can be compared with the manner in which autocracies may include ‘human rights’ clauses in their constitutions in a bid to imitate democracies.1 More worrying, however, is a failure to distinguish between process and outcomes. It is not yet clear whether, and if so how, inclusive peacemaking and peacebuilding set communities on pathways toward more inclusive societies. As Rocha Menocal (2017, 560) has asked: ‘where do more inclusive institutions come from in the first place? How and why do they emerge and evolve over time, and how can they be nurtured?’ Castillejo (2014, 3) has also pointed out that, ‘in many cases, excluded groups’ participation in the peace process has not translated into significantly improved outcomes’. There is a clear need to interrogate whether the current inclusion modalities (Paffenholz, 2014) can truly pave the way toward more inclusive societies and, if not, what forms of peacemaking, peacebuilding and democracy promotion can do so. Re-defining peace and finding new methods. Johan Galtung famously distinguished between negative peace, ‘the absence of violence,’ and positive peace, ‘the integration of human society’ (Galtung, 1964, 2). Notably, the integration of society, and accountability to this society, are key elements in the foundation of democracy. However, as Söderström et al. (2020, 1) have...