This report examines BRICS engagement with interventionary forms of development, peacebuilding, statebuilding, and their related institutions and practices. The BRICS can be both “status-quo” and “critical” peacebuilding and statebuilding actors. On the one hand, they all engage with the liberal peace paradigm and its often-neoliberal agenda that allows them to protect sovereignty and non-intervention, pursue trade interests, and advance their own interests (like a seat on the UN Security Council, regional stability or maintaining their often-ambiguous status of being both aid donors and recipients).
On the other hand, their involvement has challenged peacebuilding’s and development’s Euro-Atlantic character through the unfolding of their own donor and peace agendas. This report highlights the instances in which traditional and emerging actors’ agendas converge and diverge – and the motivations behind these agendas.
Key Findings:
- BRICS member states have operated both within and outside the spectrum of the liberal peace. When conformity with the liberal peace paradigm has occurred (e.g. China in Sudan and Liberia, and Brazil in Haiti), this occurred in select circumstances when there were considerable “soft power” gains for the BRICS member in question.
- Brazil and India have focused on in-kind payments for food, as well as on education, agriculture and healthcare assistance, perhaps consistent with a focus on the everyday, “human-centred” approach consistent with more recent and critical thinking about peacebuilding. In some cases the international community and its norms are simply being ignored (particularly in the case of Russia).
- Support for the liberal peace framework is strongest from the India, Brazil, and South Africa grouping, which has a clear concern for political variations at the local level, although its members have different approaches to poverty, inequality and discrimination. Other emerging donors such as Qatar, South Korea and Turkey could be added to this grouping. China and Russia’s approaches tend to be more bilateral and profit driven: they are not concerned with discrimination.
- The BRICS are all particularly concerned about any dilution of sovereignty, thus reinforcing the political bias of the UN system towards the state, non-intervention, official forms of politics, status and hierarchy.
- The BRICS appear to want to be part of the peacebuilding architecture to a greater or lesser degree. They see it as an avenue to contribute where they see regional security and political advantage to be at stake. Yet they do not want to be called upon to make mandatory donations to any part of the peacekeeping, peacebuilding, statebuilding or donor system, partly because they still receive donor resources themselves. Some of them are afraid of losing their status as recipients and exchanging it for being donors, with all the attendant expectations.
- The BRICS and new donors work through the existing international peacebuilding architecture as well as seeking to change it. No clear alternative model, ideology, or model of the state or peace is offered by the BRICS and/or other emerging powers.
Recommendations:
Until the differences between traditional donors and new actors are resolved, and the latter engage on a more significant scale, it looks as if any alternative to the liberal peace will be fragmented and indeterminate.