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.
This essay explores international engagement in the Sri Lankan peace process between 2002 and 2008. It 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.
Key findings:
- The limits of international action need to be recognized and evolving strategies cannot be based on inflated assessments of outsiders’ capacities to engineer peace. 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 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. 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 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (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 alternative path to peace from the kind laid out by liberal peace builders, 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.
Recommendations:
- Peace builders 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.
