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Institutional Address: Department of Politics, University of Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.

Oliver.richmond@ manchester.ac.uk

Keywords: power, peace, peacebuilding, governmentality, international system, agency

The Paradox of Peace and Power:

Contamination or Enablement?

Oliver P. Richmond

Biography

Oliver Richmond is a Research Professor in IR, Peace and Conflict Studies in Department of

Politics, at the University of Manchester. He is also International Professor, College of

International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for

Peace Studies, University of Tromso, Norway. His recent publications include Peace

Formation and Political Order (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Failed Statebuilding

(Yale University Press, 2014). He is editor of the Palgrave book series, Rethinking Peace and

Conflict Studies, and co-editor of the Journal, Peacebuilding.

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Abstract

In debates about peace most discussions of power implicitly revolve around four types: (1)

the hegemonic exercise of direct power related to force, and (2) relatedly, the existence and

impact of structural power related to geopolitics or the global political economy; (3) the

exercise of international governmentality, soft or normative power, by IOs; (4) and local

agency, resistance, discursive or physical. Each of these types of power, while relational, may

be exercised from different sites of legitimate authority: the international, the state, and the

local, and their legitimacy is constructed via specific understandings of time and space. Each

type of power and its related site of authority has implications for making peace. This paper

examines in theoretical terms how types of power block, contaminate, or enable peace of

various sorts.

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“It is the powerful who are ignorant.” (Chambers, 1983: 84)

Introduction

It has long been known that power is ‘essentially contested’ (Gallie, 1955). There has

historically been much suspicion of power on the part of its subjects, even when exercised on

their behalf by an actor claiming to be benign, liberal, or representing a modernising, perhaps,

socially oriented, or utopian vanguard. Similarly, peace is also essentially contested, both

when it is made by the disputants to a conflict but especially when imposed by external

“power”. Discourses of peace and war, and the forms of power associated with them, are

produced by, and produce, socio-political relations, law, security and institutions, which go

on to shape the behaviour of subjects. Under conditions of perennial asymmetry, can power

make peace in a form better than a negative peace (Galtung, 1964)? Does power pacify rather

than make positive peace (Schmid, 1968)? Can power make an emancipatory peace

(Richmond, 2008) or does this require the (unlikely) elimination of power?

In order to answer these questions, and while acknowledging that power circulates

and is always relational (Foucault, 1980: 98), the various types of power and their related

legitimacy systems, dynamics, and capacities need to be explored. Power often claims to

‘make peace’, and yet such claims are rarely investigated. Historically, states that managed to

amass military and economic resources and sufficient international cohesion to harness

common direct, structural and governmental power, have been relatively successful in

meeting national interests over time. Through political, social and economic relations, power

produces desired results from a realist, liberal, and to some degree, constructivist and critical

perspective (Barnett and Duvall, 2005; Weber, 1947: 52; Dahl, 2007: 203; Booth, 2009).

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From a more radical perspective, contingency means that power is forced to become ever

more brutalising, while resistance grows, and networked agency circulates and co-opts

(Poster, 1989; Foucault, 2003: 6-7). Yet, one of the basic propositions of the liberal

international peace architecture, and the neoliberal system of global governance, is that power

may enable peace and development rather than contaminate them (Doyle, 1997). Since the

1990s, the assumption of the international community has been that power should be aligned

all levels, social to global, and indeed, universal claims made about the liberal peace rest on

this assumption.

Over time hegemonic power has partially determined politics, freedom and the subject

(Krasner, 2009). Questions of authority, legitimacy, and rights have always emerged, often

promoted by subaltern forms of critical agency (Richmond, 2011), and have been far more

destabilising of top-down power and have promoted reform more effectively than historical

‘state formation’ arguments suggest (Tilly, 1975; 1985). In liberal modernity the expectation

has been that power would restrain itself or act through relationships for the rights and needs

of societies around the world, and to form a stable and just peace, necessarily based on local

epistemologies, but supported by centralised forms of power, whether at the state or the

international levels. The subject would at least be ‘partially self-constituting’ able to exercise,

through a ‘technology of the self’, or self-formation, subaltern agency (Paras, 2006: 158, 64,

95). And yet, subaltern critiques of international norms, intervention, statebuilding or

peacebuilding are often concerned that the west, the state, and elites, use such processes to

disassociate themselves from historical injustice after the ‘year zero’ that a peace agreement

or military intervention represents. Pragmatism, normativity, international organisation, and

global governance, naturalises northern/ western hegemony, often at the same time as

exercising power to create or maintain peace (Yew, 2003).

This paper develops an understanding of the patterns of power, emerging from the

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scholarly literature surrounding IR, as they related to peace. The paradox of peace and power

spans new possibilities of emancipation, the potential of power to contribute to peace, and the

contamination of peace by power, interests, ideology, misplaced universalism and

particularism. Types of power may be used to block, contaminate, or enable peace of various

sorts. First, this article outlines the key sites of legitimacy from which power may be

exercised for peacemaking. Secondly, it sketches the types of power that are exercised in this

process. Thirdly, it examines what the relationship between peace and power implies for the

types of peace that may emerge. Finally, it then turns to a discussion of ‘ungovernmentality’.

Key Sites of Legitimacy

Peace and power are intricately related, often opposed, though they sometimes work in

parallel. An understanding of their relationship, as has been played out though recent

practices of intervention associated with liberal peacebuilding and neoliberal statebuilding, is

essential to understand the development of the international system itself as a historic order

through which peace, progress, and order have often developed hand in hand with power of

varying sorts.

Over the last three hundred years of peace praxis and advocacy, there have emerged

three key sites of political mobilisation where power gathers around (i) society, culture and

identity, (ii) around the state, its laws, constitution and military, and (iii) around the

international and its organisation (including peace talks and gatherings, institutions, financial

and legal frameworks). Around these sites different constituencies legitimate the exercise of

power of varying types (Waltz, 1959; Buzan, 1983). As power is exercised legitimately

around these three sites, representative institutions emerge to a greater or lesser degree, which

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often invoke norms over technical rationality (Avruch, 2012: 146).

Since the nineteenth century there has been a focus on state level constitutional,

international economic and international organisation designs and architecture, as well as

transnational civil society moments (Locke, 1980, 1983; Dunn, 1982). Identity was to be

related to the state. Mobilisation to advocate for reform and more progressive forms of

politics was often local, social, religious, and labour oriented, spilling over into transnational

networks. The resultant ‘liberal peace’ is subject to many tensions, not least between the

system of sovereignty, territoriality, nationalism, and particularism, and the attempt to

promote transnational norms. Rights and capitalism may be contradictory too under certain

circumstances.

Different types of power are exercised from these different sites of legitimate

authority, including the liberal-institutionalist international, the realist/liberal state, and the

local in all of its forms (liberal, non-secular, and including other forms of alterity). The

tensions between them- as they represent different constituencies and their identities, norms,

and preferences, and exercise different types of power- produces hybrid outcomes in terms of

law, institutions, and the state. Legitimacy and power may correspond, but it is likely that

they do not, especially as the in-group at the international, state, and local level varies widely.

The important question is what types of peace emerge from each site of legitimacy and its

exercise of power?

A Preliminary Typology of the Relationship Between Power and Peace

With these three sites from which power may be legitimately exercised in mind, most

discussions of power implicitly revolve around four types. They include:

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(1) the hegemonic exercise of direct power related to the use of force;

(2) relatedly, the existence and impact of structural power related to geopolitics or the

global political economy, as well as context;

(3) the exercise of international governmentality, soft or normative power, by IOs (or

perhaps ‘civilian power’) (Duchene, 1971);

(4) and local agency, resistance, discursive or physical (Barnett and Duvall, 2005).

Each of these types of power are exercised from different sites of legitimate authority: the

international, the state, and the local, and their legitimacy is constructed via specific

understandings of time and space. Each type of power and its related site of authority has

implications for making peace as illustrated in the following diagram.

Figure 1 Power and Sites of Legitimate Authority

Scale of Analysis/ Type of Power/ LegitimacySite of Authority

The Global Economy Direct &structural PowerLegitimate in IPE

The International System Governmental Power (occasionally direct power)Legitimate in UN system and Member States

The State Direct, Structural& Governmental PowerLegitimate with State elites and parts of society

Civil society Subaltern powerLegitimate at international and some social levels

The local scale/ local-local Subaltern agency offers a direct perspective of conflict issuesLegitimate at local scale though it may be particularistic(occasionally direct and governmental power may be exercised at this level).

The goal of much liberal internationalist and institutionalist thinking since WW1, as

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well as more recent constructivist contributions, post-Cold War, has been the alignment of

sites of legitimacy and the exercise of power this enables. Realists would argue and critical

theorists would argue that may well be skewed towards direct, structural or governmental

power, especially if the state or international community acts as, or is led by, a vanguard that

believes it has a mission to civilise, improve, or discipline their subject populations. Post-

structuralist perspectives, would view the local as a site of subaltern agency involving a

decentring process, and potentially a clash with state or international norms and interests

which would have to acknowledge the constant misalignment with power. This decentring

process, which emerges from subaltern power may not aim at establishing a new sovereign,

but may recognise the social aspects of power and their historical and contingent nature

(Barnett and Duvall, 2005: 46). Understanding critical agency, subaltern power, and the type

of peace it is used to produce (whether negative or positive), as well as its encounter with the

liberal peace architecture and its constituent, neoliberal state units, requires a new approach.

It implies a contestation of the liberal hegemon or state elites acting as an international

‘vanguard’- in authoritarian or trusteeship mode- of peace in a socio-political framework

where subjects also exercise power. It points to matters of identity, gender, inequality,

structural violence, which may be mitigated only partially through subaltern agency. The

subaltern site of legitimacy provides faint signals for the state and international to base their

engagement upon, to act for, and through which they may maintain their own legitimacy.

Nevertheless, reading and responding to any such signals and engaging in practices of

empowerment involves the possibility of the contamination of peace by power.

Governmental and structural understandings of power tend to be interpreted as

reducing agency to ‘bare life’ in everyday contexts, and resistance tends to be seen as hidden,

and marginal, even if consequential (Foucault, 1991; Agamben, 1998; Scott, 1985).

Resistance is often related to some emancipatory, material, or nationalist ideal (Balibar, 2002:

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144). Yet, this only moves some way to helping us understand why subjects the world over

are so ‘unruly’. Paradoxically, local, critical agency is normally seen to be ‘subaltern’ and at

the bottom of a hierarchical conception and distribution of political power, dominated by

direct and governmental forms.

Engaging with the concept of an emancipatory peace unsettles these hierarchies of

power and peace (of which the orthodoxy normally indicates the international is benevolent,

the state is self-interested, and the local is disruptive), especially when ethical questions are

raised. Legitimate authority relates to the exercise of various types of power to make peace in

material, political, temporal, and spatial terms. Ethically, points to what Massey calls ‘local-

internationalism’ (heterogeneous as opposed to a homogenous internationalism), and what

Escobar calls a ‘pluriversality’ as a response (Massey, 2007: 184, 200; Escobar, 2008: 11-12).

Balibar, similarly, calls for ‘equaliberty, while Foucault adds the dynamics of micro-

solidarities, self-formation, and heterotopias (Bhabha, 1994: 25; Balibar, 2002: 4, 35;

Foucault, 1997; Michel, 1984).

The following sections offer more detail on the above mentioned concepts of direct,

structural, governmental and subaltern power and their implications for peace.

Direct and Structural Power

A first type of power is direct and structural (see for example, Strange, 1988), and directed

from its holders onto their subjects in a unidirectional manner, brooking no opposition

(Strange, 1988). Direct power relates to the use of military force and other, perhaps economic

coercion. Structural power relates to geopolitical exercises of agency, or the power inherent

in geography or the global economy. Direct power involves direct control to make a victor’s

peace, or one implied by a Hobbesian view of the state of nature and the social contract

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(Barnett & Duvall, 2005: 49). Its progenitor controls and refines it and its subjects experience

its consequences. This may be carried out by great powers, states, alliances, elites, the

military, guerrillas, insurgents, or terrorists. It may be exercised through foreign policy,

alliances, even international organisations, and involve invasion, guerrilla warfare, or other

modes of violence.

Structural power, meaning deep super-structural and material conditions such as in

geopolitics, primary resources, or the global economy, either dictates direct power or is

overcome by it (a debate that has historic significance).They create a peace contaminated

with violence and external interests. They may also create a negative peace upon which a

more sophisticated version might later be built.

Direct and structural power are normally exercised through the state, and through its

hegemony or alliances, it produces order and institutions that protect its interests. Security

institutions and actors are vital to its operation. This Weberian perspective translates into a

dominant, realist concern with power, security and territory, has a vice-like grip over IR and

political science more generally. It represents the convergence, in European politics in the

Nineteenth Century, of a model of bureaucracy, intervention, and the control of populations

through the state where there were high concentrations of capital and thus the means of

coercion (Tilly, 1990: 63; Scott, 1985). This model was exported from the west to the

decolonising world during the course of the twentieth century (Tilly, 1990: 117). It requires

strong state structures that can integrate the material and identity dynamics the state

represents into a bureaucratic set of political institutions. They may produce viable state

governance and a subjugated population, favouring powerful elites (Weber, 2004). Much of

this discussion revolves around the way conflict and power shapes the state, and whether this

may eventually lead to a social contract or be shaped by the hegemonic power of elites. Thus,

power is exercised to produce a basic order in the interests of the hegemon, and this negative

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or victor’s peace may survive for as long as the hegemon is able to exercise direct power over

other states and populations and to control structural power. A victor’s peace- would

essentially be unstable, brutalising, and probably brief. Peace may look very much like war

from this perspective, and will certainly perpetuate inequality.

Direct power may also be exercised in order to overcome structural obstacles and

construct a broader and higher quality peace, perhaps through trusteeship type arrangements,

as in Timor, Bosnia, or Kosovo, beyond the hegemonic state or alliance and for the benefit of

all. Such altruism, which many see in the post-Cold War liberal peacebuilding consensus

(Peceny, 1997), has been rare in history, and depends on the very significant power of one

actor and its preferences. The fact that so much mistrust exists of direct power means that it

cannot achieve much against the will of so many subjects unwilling to accept its legitimacy.

Governmental Power

A second type of power is governmental (related to governmentality), which operates in a

more subtle manner, through discourses, knowledge, as well as institutions, and defines its

subjects by their inability to resist it (Foucault, 1991). Governmental power is the

rationalisation and centralisation of power relations through states and government (Foucault,

2002: 345). It reconciles the subject, often of emerging states or peoples, to the ‘current world

system’ (US Congress, 1966: 1545). Governmental power, often described in mainstream

theory as ‘soft power’ or ‘normative power’ (Nye, 2004; Manners, 2002; for the original

explanation of this argument see Diez, 2013) maintains international legitimacy limited to a

core group of actors and their ambitions to maintain ‘their’ international order (i.e. the

international community). Gramsci’s concept of hegemony extended from the domestic to the

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international perhaps captures this dynamic (Gramsci, 1992). It is also managerial rather than

political, avoiding politics because it runs the risk of raising issues of ideology and ethics

(Plattner, 2013). Governmental power rests on alliances, international organisations and

institutions’ capacity to direct, shape, and influence the behaviour of other actors according to

their will, interests, ideology, epistemology and preferred norms. It involves indirect control

and some consensus often focussed on a liberal peace, exercised through institutions at

international, state, and local scales.

Complicating any analysis of governmental power is the historical probability that the

imperialist system passed on its ‘civilising mission’ to the UN system in 1945, and that since,

modernisation theory, conditionality, liberalism, neoliberalism, and thin universalism has

perpetuated elements of previous hegemony whilst also extending the parameters of

emancipation. This contradictory version of power creates a peace resting on the enabling

aspects of the liberal peace, including rights, democracy, and capitalism, but also is

contaminated by historical injustice and hegemonic norms, inequality, as well as exclusive

forms of identity.

Governmental approaches were the result of an alliance of realist strategists and

liberal institution-builders under an international umbrella whereby international law held

states narrowly accountable. This system is nested in a liberal set of norms, neoliberal

understandings of markets, and realist strategic. It is a step forward from direct and structural

positions, but it still deploys the neo-colonial language of equating the international with

modernity, power, and norms, while the local is equated with more negative dynamics, like

tradition, custom, and informality, as well as conflict and corruption. Thus the peacebuilding

and statebuilding frameworks which have emerged from Cambodia to Afghanistan also

represent the development of a hybrid political order in which the domestic and the

international are blurred, and in which interests, power, intervention, structure, norms, and a

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level of idealism co-exist with a range of contextual and so far little understood agencies

(Clements et al., 2007). Governmental interventionism nudges, mirroring the ‘mediated state’

argument of Menkhaus (2007: 103). Krasner’s ‘shared sovereignty’, concepts of local

ownership and participation likewise began to emerge (Richmond, 2011).

Over the years of its existence, the UN has developed a range of (inter) governmental

strategies aimed at dealing with the adverse connection between power and peace- from its

resolution on programmes for ‘cultures of peace’, rights to peace, on the need for ‘new

economic orders’, economic, social and cultural rights, independence, self-determination,

development, and peacebuilding. They called for an international states-system framed in the

interests of positive peace rather than interests or power (UNGA, 1999, 1974, 1978, 1984,

1986, 1960, 1969, 1966). Such documents were signed by representatives of the much of the

planet’s population. Such strategies can also be seen in the interventionary progression from

the liberal values of Agenda for Peace to the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Doctrine, which also

happened to coincide with the intervention/ invasion/ statebuilding agendas of the 2000s

(Ghali, 1992; ICISS, 2001).

Governmental power means peace will be driven by normative understandings of

rights and democracy, developing along the lines suggested by Rousseau’s work on the social

contract. It is positioned within a liberal internationalist and liberal institutionalist framework

whereby the state is a carrier of international norms, rights, and associated bureaucratic,

developmental, and egalitarian reforms. The international and its norms are the site of

peacebuilding’s legitimacy, authority, and agency, and within its hybrid cosmopolitan,

imperial, and bureaucratic framework, the social contract between state and citizens is key. It

is an extension of the liberal internationalist and institutional dream, drawn from Kant and

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19th Century liberalism and Marxism.

Interventionary practices are required to maintain this system but as the system’s

interventionary capacity has been tested, the liberal peace has faded into the more

retrogressive pax neoliberal, underpinned by statebuilding.

Subaltern Agency

Subaltern agency represents a type of power that is often overlooked, following arguments

about critical agency, hidden resistance (Scott, 1985), co-optation, in discursive realms as

well as in practice. Where it relates to peace it is often connected to informal, public or

private practices of bottom-up peace formation (Richmond, 2014). It produces meaning,

identity, relationships, and maintains a framework of conduct, justice, rights, sustainability,

reconciliation, and for resource allocation (in its positive terms) (Doty, 1996: 4). It is an

attempted escape from the ‘panopticon’ through ‘transversal struggles’ in everyday life,

against the ‘privilege of knowledge’, which creates subjectivity (Foucault, 2002: 329). It does

so in the face of direct and governmental power, as well as structure and power (Giddens,

1979; Foucault, 1980b), while also having to content with localised struggles for power and

related forms of direct and structural violence.

Subaltern agency is networked, mobile, and relational, and is aimed at peace may well

provide a perspective of a more emancipatory form because everyday security, rights, needs,

and issues of discrimination and equality, motivate ‘local’ progressive politics. The problems

they face are more immediately apparent from this ‘bottom up’ positionality, even if

subaltern agency lacks the capacity to drive political decision making and distribute resources

at the state or international level. Of course, the subaltern may also be dominated by local

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direct, structural and governmental power aimed at maintaining historic systems of hierarchy,

discrimination, and stratification promoted by a local elite. Nevertheless, some subaltern

agency also inevitably develops to resist such processes from close quarters.

Subaltern agency has influenced the shape of statebuilding as in Kosovo, has inserted

identity and custom as in Timor Leste and many sub-Saharan cases, has lobbied for human

rights, transparency, and democracy through civil society in Cambodia, albeit with donor

support.

This requires an understanding of context, thus raising the age-old issue of structure

and agency, or more simply the way power is used for progressive reasons rather than self-

interest in the face of a range of material, social, and environmental constraints. It may also

raise issues of class in state and international hierarchies of power. Historically, such

subaltern agency has long been successful in nudging governmental and direct power to

introduce social, political, and economic reforms (eg the franchise, disarmament, slavery,

labour, women’s rights, etc), but it has also had to compromise with external influences, or

has depended upon international agency for support. Subaltern agency rarely exercises direct

or governmental power, though it may do within its small circle, for both reasons of

exclusion (ethno-nationalism, etc.) and conversely, for peace (though in direct power terms it

has often used guerrilla or insurgent tactics). As power circulates amongst all its subjects and

their networks rather than is simplistically unidirectional or top-down, producing hybrid

outcomes (Gayatri, 1988; Richmond, 2012), this means that subaltern power is unexpectedly

effective. It may contaminate governmental approaches with narrowly exclusive norms,

interests and identities, but it also may transmit signals through which direct and

governmental authority can act to prevent or unpack injustice, inequality, and overt violence,

through playing an enabling role for peace.

It has become axiomatic that matters of peace and war are no longer solely in the

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hands of officials, policymakers, the military, and politicians but are also engaged by civil

society, grassroots actors, and citizens. Historically speaking, local and increasingly

transnational networks involving social actors, labour movements, organisations interested in

questions of social justice, religion, or identity, as well as local development, support, and

sustainability have been formative of any broader society. Liberal notions of ‘civil society’

are by contrast often limited to a few NGOs, operating in a human rights, rule of law, or

democratisation framework, as has arisen from Cambodia to Afghanistan.

A multidimensional methodology and interdisciplinary approach, drawing on social

theory, philosophy, anthropology, geography, as well as IR and political science, uncovers

subaltern agency, which may be aimed at peace formation. This is an ethical site of

legitimacy and an encounter of different types of identity and agency. Thus, local knowledge

may be seen as a complex social, political, cultural, economic system design to maintain

peace and order in the face of many shifting structures of power and resources, not to

mention space (Appadurai, 1995: 178). Peace formation offers what Appadurai has described

as an ethnoscape, in this case of peace, which is partly aimed at claiming autonomy and

moving beyond external or colonial control (Appadurai, 1995: 183). Its concerns include

decolonisation, democratisation, racial and economic equality, workers’ rights, environmental

sustainability, gender equality, identity, religion, and indigeneity, as well as disarmament (see

Roberts and Garton Ash, 2009: 1). Subaltern agency offer a ‘rich web of connections’

(Roberts and Garton Ash, 2009: 13) that engage power, violence, structural violence, and

predatory institutions. This is not to re-inscribe the international, national or local with new

forms of colonialism or with local power dynamics posing as ‘local knowledge’ (Mohan,

2001: 153). Peace formation enables a perspective of local and networked positive

contributions to peace, drawing on a range of infrapolitical and infrastructural dynamics

beyond the rational-legal, and market driven logic of liberal institutionalism. It sees power,

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norms, law, and rights as working horizontally and from the bottom up as well as from the

top down. But such strategies are not to valourise or romanticise the local, to place it in the

context of western knowledge solely, or to claim that it is self-sufficient. They do not claim

that the west cannot help, and its multiple practices cannot transform, or that the state will

disappear or cease to be predatory (Mohan, 2001: 163). Subaltern agency offers signposts for

the construction of a locally legitimate peace in view of international norms and legitimacy.

Peace formation modifies power in order to iron out the inequalities that even

‘normative powers’ cannot see. It is indicative of plural solidarities, trans-scalarity, trans-

culturalism, and boomerang strategies whereby mono-cultures of power are exposed and

challenged, redistribution is necessary and democracy is deepened (Scholte, 2011). It has

become axiomatic that the capacity and legitimacy of a state or community rests on how

representative it is of all of the different needs and rights across society, as well as their

ability to engage in cooperation at the international level. Yet it is commonplace for state and

international elites to control their relationship with and exposure to civil society. John Locke

argued that civil society should be independent in order to combat arbitrary power of the

state; Montesquieu that social networks would balance central authorities; De Tocqueville

that democracy would socialise citizens through habit; and Habermas that public space was

required for marginal interests to be able to speak to ossified power structures. This shows

how subaltern power deflects structural power and makes governmentality accountable

through promoting law, connecting with local practices and institutions, networks and

associations. Of course, dealing with structural and governmental power requires a great deal

of subtlety and camouflage, and any such resistance can only be effective in the long term.

Legitimacy is thus partly historically constructed within and across societies, meaning

legitimate authority is perceived in different ways across contexts. One of the consequences

of the emergence of liberal peacebuilding and the harsher dynamics of statebuilding has been

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a reactive return of civil society.1 Agency therefore always rests, at least in the medium and

long term, on recognition, representation, legitimacy, consent, and an ability to mobilise, all

of which are differently configured, from the local to the global. Even the ‘powerless’ have

agency, and it may be exercised peacefully- even as theatre- in resistance to hegemony

(Havel, 1985) or merely for self-organisation, as in ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998), or

subsistence (Richmond and Mitchell, 2012). Where war and conflict has disrupted the state

and government, it is still possible to have governance (as the cases of Somalia and

Somaliland illustrate) (Menkhaus, 2004, 2007b) and a range of processes that are aimed at

developing or shaping peace according to a balance of social expectations.

It is important to note that while civil society and the local peace activities around it

are significant resources for peace, they cannot deal with direct and structural power. This can

be seen in Israel where Neve Shalom, a peace village launched in the 1970s, has long tried to

become a platform for peace activism and a mixed Jewish-Arab community. The Geneva

Accords indicated that there can be peace in Israel/ Palestine through a two state solution

(Annan, 2012: 287), and the peace movement was given significant support and stimulation

during the period from the Madrid Conference through to the Oslo process, illustrating how

necessary external enablement creates space for such peace formation processes (Annan,

2012: 108). Yet, as in Cyprus, where the parameters of any peace agreement have long been

laid out by inter-communal groups and accepted by many, what was supposed to be an ‘oasis’

for peace work also became a reflection of wider tensions in the region (Hermann, 2009: 86).

Local agency is often contaminated by conflict and interests, as well as historical ordering

practices. The related introduction of a limited ethical and methodological discourse to

constrain Northern experimentation- the notions of ‘do no harm’ and ‘conflict or context-

sensitivity’2- are too limited in addressing systemic issues which provoke extended conflicts.

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What Type of Peace Does Power Produce?

Direct power creates a victor’s peace. Structural power creates a negative peace.

Governmental power creates a peace somewhere between negative and positive often through

the projection of norms, standards, and conditionality, as the liberal peace framework has

long illustrated. For example, NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and Bosnia in 1995

represent examples of direct and structural power used to support the liberal peace (e.g.

governmentality). Governmental power (‘soft’ power or ‘normative’ power) has been widely

used in development, peacebuilding and statebuilding around a liberal and neoliberal nexus

across the world in the last twenty-five years.

Such a framework differs from others, such as Kenneth Boulding’s argument, in

which he divides power into destructive, productive, and integrative, in which hierarchy,

relationships, and legitimacy are pitted against each other (Boulding, 1989). Integrative

power is the key to creating peace in his view (Boulding, 1989: 174), but this appears to

represent a civilising mission on the part of those in a hierarchy or liberal vanguard, rather

than a construction of legitimate authority by all those who are subject to power. Nye regards

soft power as ‘…growing out of our values- democracy and human rights…” on which its

legitimacy lies (Nye, 2004). However, it rapidly loses legitimacy as this core group is

expanded or prized open by new entrants or marginalised participants with reformist or

revolutionary intent, without significant reform. Resistance, for reasons of both historical and

contemporary injustice, acted out in private and public political, social, and economic

spheres, has been a significant drag on structural and governmental engagements with peace

and their related exercises of power, raising the question of what type of peace does subaltern

agency envision?

Subaltern agency may provide faint signals or navigation points relating to the causal

20

and structural factors of conflict, as well as for a more emancipatory peace upon which power

may be able to act. Everyday security, rights, needs, and issues of discrimination and equality

may motivate ‘local’ politics, though they may provide a perspective of emancipation that

international or state perspectives find hard to hear or translate. However, subaltern agency

may also need to engage with the pluralist frameworks developed in international norms,

because the narrowness of the subaltern view may also reify exclusivity. Paradoxically, direct

or governmental power may appear to be most effective in producing a negative peace, but a

more emancipatory understanding may emerge from local politics where only marginal

agency exists in association with certain aspects of the international. Where direct, structural,

governmental and subaltern sites of legitimate authority cooperate as since the end of the

Cold War in general terms, it is often claimed that their alignment means that peace may be

both emancipatory and pragmatic. However, in practice, the problem of peace has been that

local, state, and international frameworks have been aligned through coercion rather than by

resolving differences.

The liberal internationalist and institutionalist, along with the liberal-democratic

dreams of peace have proven to be unable to achieve their goals without the involvement of

society, individuals and the community. The state cannot support the liberal peace while it is

connected so closely to territorial notions of security and sovereignty, or to neoliberalism.

The liberal peace system cannot inscribe its norms without a supportive state or support

(meaning legitimacy) from the broad population. Nor can it provide a peace dividend in a

neoliberal system of global governance.

These heirs of British liberal imperial and American liberal-capitalist ideology have

become practised at naturalising themselves via globalisation, the international community,

and have been widely accepted as such (Mazower, 2012). They may be wielded in the cause

of progressive but manageable and conservative reform of the state while maintaining the

21

international liberal order, following liberal understandings of progressivism and

emancipation. Though pragmatic from the perspective of avoiding major reform of the states-

system, such an approach has also been counterproductive. Peace has come to depend on

enforcement and conditionality (i.e. structural and governmental power), glossed over with a

sheen of top-down normative claims inconsistently applied around the world (to wit, the

juxtaposition Rwanda in 1994 with Kosovo in 1999), rather than on a broad local-to-global

(bottom up) legitimacy. Top down legitimacy, associated with liberal internationalism, liberal

institutionalism, Bretton Woods institutions, UN peacekeeping, peacebuilding, neoliberal

states, and donor-development, has found itself at something of an impasse, because of its

conflation with ‘intervention’ (particularly in Iraq, and Afghanistan and doctrinally through

R2P) and because of the problem of local agency, ownership, and consent.

In contrast to this international or state level perspective of legitimate authority, the

exercise of power, and the conditions for peace, a ‘local turn’ makes the question of power

far more visible. It raises the problem of inequality and injustice in material and historical

terms (c.f. Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009).

All types of power can be used for and against peace. Subaltern agency can provide

the signals of what are the conflict issues and how peace may be made in historical and

cultural terms, translated into modernisation and related social, economic, and political

institutions, but there can be no translation without contamination (Butler, 2000: 37). It may

in this way enable external strategies to overcome internal inequalities, exclusive identity

structures, and injustice. It may also point to conflict producing dynamics in the state,

regional order, global trade and governance. If it cannot deal alone with them it may provide

the signals upon which direct, structural and governmental power can act, enable or in the

worst case, intervene. The question is how to read the signals from a direct, structural or

governmental position and how to prevent the contamination of local agency with conflictual

22

interests, practices and norms, allowing a local peace process to design itself? The US and

EU, as well as the state, have  direct, structural, governmental, and subaltern power, but they

often follows specific national or common interests, meaning regional or global order rests on

the view of a small constituency. The UN and the state have governmental, rarely structural,

some subaltern power, via law and normative legitimacy, but when taken together their views

of peace and order tends to follow liberal lines. Local populations, civil society, the local-

local, resistance, agency, peace formation, reflect hybrid mixtures of these different views.

Some signals are more powerful than others. To maintain legitimacy subaltern signals

are often read, translated, and converted into governmental and structural, even direct,

power. In this way peace formation contributes to the search for a sustainable peace, even

despite its limited agency. 

Dimensions of Legitimate Authority

Any discussion of peace and power thus raises the problem of legitimacy. Legitimacy can be

seen in varying ways, from the legitimacy gathered at the international level for the liberal

peace system and for the neoliberal state as the epicentre of efficient modernity, epitomised in

the UN system and supported by international law, international human rights and

humanitarian law (see OECD, 2010: 6-9). This version of authority offers a view from IR.

Next there is the legitimacy of the legally recognised state with the right to rule (Weber calls

this normative legitimacy), via its control of the means of violence, its constitutional

framework and its conformity with international norms. This rational-legal version offers a

view from the state of effective authority and legitimacy. Next, there is the more grounded

legitimacy of the polity in its context, drawn from historical and socio-political sources, in

23

which any institutions are the result of negotiation of a wide range of interests, identities, and

objectives. Shared beliefs, needs and objectives are key, meaning reciprocity and relationality.

This level offers a view from the community and society, in other words and ethnographic

and sociological view, and is sometimes called empirical, traditional, customary, or local

legitimacy. There is also the well-known ‘charismatic’ legitimacy of elites and leaders, as

well as the legitimacy that arises from process or performance (Weber, 1958, 1994). These

forms of legitimacy exist independently, meaning international or state legitimacy does not

necessary mean acceptance by society.

Given the different types of power outlined above, authority rests on contested and

different forms of legitimacy too. No peace system can rely only one of these forms of

legitimacy, but there must be a balanced blend, which might be termed ‘hybrid legitimacy’

(for an elaboration of this concept in empirical terms see Boege, 2013: 3-5). Different forms

of legitimacy may co-exist and interact, and indeed be complementary and compensate for

each other’s’ limitations. Legitimacy, including local consent and consensus for systems of

representative authority, is essential to guarantee the stability of community, state, and

ultimately to the international. It may provoke tensions between an existing power structure,

or wealth allocation and redistribution, support for the community’s well-being, order, and

security (Boege, 2009: 10). Local, state, and international legitimacy are thus required for any

positive, emancipatory form of peace to emerge, and because legitimacy may be defined

differently at each level, this implies that any mediation of those differences will lead to the

gradual emergence of hybrid forms of peace and the state (Boege, 2009). State formation

assumes legitimacy arises from power, peacebuilding from liberal norms, statebuilding from

security and neoliberalism, whereas local voices would root it in socio-historical processes, as

well as by learning from external actors about norms, development and the state.

24

Governmental, structural and direct power controls how conflict is understood in

temporal terms. Most conflict settlements, peacebuilding, statebuilding, and development

approaches today are framed in a post-1992 (Agenda for Peace) context, reflecting the power,

interests, norms, state and international architecture preferred by the hegemonic power of the

west/ north. Most conflict actors choose different dates, however, through which to frame

their conflict and its issues, in terms of territory, power, legitimacy, identity and justice.

These represent exercises of legitimate authority and power from different levels and scales.

Different actors have different versions of these to each other, as with Israelis and

Palestinians, and to the 1992 liberal peace version. Intervention is a contest over the nature of

peace and its determination by different forms of legitimate authority. This means there is

often a mismatch between local, state, and international actors’ treatment of justice, injustice,

and legitimate authority. Similar patterns can be seen in spatial dynamics of power and

legitimate authority. The local turn, which has re-occurred over the last five decades (Mac

Ginty and Richmond, 2013), makes the power relations that cause and naturalise inequality

clear. These are identifiable through structure, through governmentality, through norms and

various forms of legitimacy, and through subaltern agency or resistance. Thus, an unequal

peace, however naturalised its terms may be (class, wealth, identity, gender, nationality) is

unlikely to be firm, and certainly is not sustainable in the longer term as any cursory

historical understanding of the fate of authoritarianism or empire will confirm.

25

Figure 2 Typology of Power and Peace

Direct/Structural Governmentality Subaltern

Victor’s Peace Liberal Peace/ Institutions/ Civil Peace/ Human RightsInternational Law

Liberal Imperialism Neoliberal state/ IFIs/ Resilience/ Self Intervention Development HelpStructural Adjustment Enablement/ Empowerment Everyday/

Capacity Building Emancipatory Peace

Enablement or Contamination?

Mainly enables hegemon Enables a broader consensus Often contaminated by external power.and contaminates others group, contaminates others May enable local exclusion but also(very narrow interest set) (as it is still fairly euro-centric) sends faint signals for external power

to act for emancipation(lacks direct or governmental power, except internally)

There are additional complications to this picture, as above.3 Just as governmental sites of

authority may try to exercise direct power, subaltern sites of authority may also exercise

direct/ structural and governmental power over lower stratifications, and micropolitics

indicates how fluid such categories are (Solomon & Steele, 2016). In general, however, these

categories represent key sites of authority in which different types of power may be used to

make peace or war, represent interests and identity. They overlap and interact, sometimes

clashing, coercing, co-opting, or resisting.

The legitimacy of the exercise of power from each site of legitimacy is limited to

groups that gather support consensually around its core. At the international level power is

exercised by a hegemon over the rest, but legitimacy is arrived from a core group gathered

around the hegemon. It may well be that this group is very limited in size but has access to

direct or governmental power. At the state level, elites exercise power drawn from their

constituencies within the state. Internally, this may be legitimate, but externally, it may not.

At the subaltern level, consensus is gathered from internal groupings, or in some cases from

26

transnational networks, meaning that legitimacy rarely has more than subaltern agency to

draw upon but micropolitics rarely reflects the formal political unit of the state or the

international. An outline of this framework is provided below.

27

Figure 3 Related Sites of Legitimate Authority and their Practices

Direct/Structural Governmentality Subaltern

Activities:

Invasion/ Intervention Peacebuilding/ Development Peace Formation/ Geopolitics Resistance/ Peace Infrastructures

Peacekeeping/ Mediation/ Negotiation Conflict Resolution/ Transformation

Actors

Superpowers Great Powers Rebels/ Insurgents, etcUN, WB, IMF Donors, INGOs LNGOs, customary actors, churches,

local organisations, etc

International Frameworks

States-system/ Balance of Power UN system/ international community Local institutions, transnational &Geopolitics Transnational networks Transversal networks

Identity

Formal, diplomatic, official, state-centric International civil service, official, donor Local official, customary, informal

Aims

Domination/ Balance of Power Hegemony/ reform, Autonomy, self-determination, identity,progressive modernisation equality.

Peace FrameworkVictor’s Peace Liberal/Neoliberal Peace Post-liberal/ positive hybrid peace

Power and Ungovernmentality

These concepts of power each suggest different motives for, and types of peace. These types

of power can be mapped onto different intervention activities, with implications for their

28

outcomes, in terms of negative, positive, hybrid, and emancipatory forms of peace. Invasion,

intervention, humanitarian or otherwise, peace-enforcement, and peacekeeping tend to

operate in the grey areas between direct, structural and governmental power (hence “Chapter

VI and half, in between Chapters VI and VII of the UN Charter). Peacebuilding, integrated

missions, and statebuilding shift into governmental power. Civil society engagements, local-

local activities, and peace formation operate in the realms of subaltern power. The latter has

some effect against governmentality, as many post-cold War peace operations have seen,

from Timor-Leste to Kosovo, but little direct effect against external direct or structural power

(though the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan suggest otherwise). Direct and structural power

produce a realist or victor’s negative peace, governmental power produces a liberal peace,

whereas subaltern power may produce a negative or positive hybrid peace. It is well known

that denying the possibility of power to dominate has a significant impact on legitimacy, itself

a spur for resistance (See for example Burton, 1979).

Maintaining hierarchy in the international system (or community) has moved from

direct and structural to governmental power since WW2, to the attempted alignment of all of

these forms of power and their claims of legitimacy post-Cold War. However, this alignment

has encountered the ‘ungovernability’ of social agency, which may demand that progressive

and emancipatory notions of peace includes the reform of local power structures, responses to

structural violence, autonomy, equality in rights and needs, identity, and global historical and

distributive justice. Radical this may seem, its legitimacy appears very significant in

contemporary politics.

Types of power are closely related and interwoven. ‘Resistant subjectivities’ and

‘subjugated knowledges’ are after all partly constituted by power which shapes institutions

and accesses everyday life. Thus, a subaltern exercise of power (or its intensification) is not

unlikely in the interests of escape, or the extension of governmental (eg state, or state welfare,

29

or international peacebuilding) or historical systems (e.g identity, cultural, religious, or

political) in areas deemed necessary for locally legitimate forms of emancipation. This may

be mainly in the sense of exercising guarded individual autonomy, or it may mean larger

forms of civil or social mobilisation for political reasons, but added up across an entire

population it becomes significant. As power learns to become more subtle and invasive, so

does resistance. Governmentality developed as Foucault’s critique of how structural power in

social democracy and socialist states was dressed up in such a way that subjects became

compliant if not complicit (Foucault, 1991). It was fed by Foucault’s early conviction that

resistance was effectively futile against such power, and his concern that the welfare state

sought to mould subjects rather than to emancipate them. What subjects have displayed

instead in the broader project of statebuilding as a replacement for state formation, is their

ungovernmentality: that is their resistance, desire for autonomy, identity, agency, and for

significant subaltern groups, concerns about justice in the context of peace and development.

It displays a distrust of centralised authority, of neoliberalism, and the tendency of power to

establish forms of trusteeship in the rhetorical name of peace.

The most well-known argument about peace and power suggests that direct/structural

power (i.e. force or hard power) as well as governmentality (soft power, normative power, IFI

conditionality, the role of the EU and its ‘normative power’) (Manners, 2002), exercise

agency in order to control their subjects against their will or with their co-opted consent.

However, if we are to take related arguments about resistance, social mobilisation,

democratic accountability, and the circulation of power seriously, they have to contend with

ungovernmentality. ‘Unruly’ subjects insist upon exercising autonomous, subaltern, often

critical agency driven by their own understanding of legitimacy and legitimate authority

structures.

30

Power, peace and ungovernmentality are closely related. Soft power is

governmentality, which is based upon an epistemology that prioritises the naturalisation of

northern power and its self-legitimisation. Conversely, ungovernmentality is a sign of a

legitimacy deficit, is critical of local, elite governance, the state, or the international. It works

to undermine direct and governmental power, and to bring about a response to injustice and

inequality (Avruch, 2012: 144; See also Curle, 1986). It may also, and indeed is more likely,

to mobilise in order to protect the right to determine local structures of governance in full

view of context and history, as well as the international. In other words, subaltern agency

may coax other forms of power into more productive forms (Boulding, 1989). Subaltern

agency often contests and reformulates what it means to be progressive, and how this may be

defined by the state or by the international community. Relationality, networks, connections,

and transversality- in other words critical forms of agency- circulate around the forms of

power I have outlined, as Foucault famously argued (1979). These are not discrete sites of

power, but represent nodes in a network of complex relations.

The following diagrams outline the differences between the tradition and critical

conceptions of power. Traditional conceptions indicate how the states-system excises direct,

structural and governmental power to which the subaltern has little response but futile

resistance. However, critical conceptions show how subaltern agency exercises a range of

counter-agencies through micropolitics that are able to challenge the states-system (to a

degree), including its own direct and structural forms of power.

31

Figure 4 Types of Power

Traditional Conception Outcome

state / IOs Structural / direct Compliance/ Governmentality Acceptance

subaltern everyday life Resistance//resistance Hybridity

Critical Conception

State / IOs subaltern

Power = victor’s Power follows subaltern signalsor governmental peace Peace may be locally legitimate butwith low contextual legitimacy internationally controversial(Intervention) (Enablement)

Hybrid/ Post-Liberal Peace

insurgencydirect power

structural power structural power

ungovernmentalitygovernmentality

32

From the perspective of subaltern agency, and certainly where it is exercised in critical form,

resistance and hybridity are legitimate representations of autonomy, self-determination, and

the desire for liberation. From the international perspective this resembles ungovernmentality

because compliance and acceptance are the goal.

Conclusion

Understanding the tensions between the claims different sites of legitimacy make about an

emancipatory peace, and the different types of power they exercise in pursuit of their goals

not only helps understand power relations, but also the risks of aligning the different sites of

legitimacy and power to produce peace (Foucault, 2002: 339). It also illustrates the different

claims that each site of legitimacy makes about emancipatory peace. Through this

conceptualisation we may begin to understand the potential for rethinking an emancipatory

and positive form of hybrid peace, moving from a ruler- subject relationship to a citizenship

framework in which law and institutions represent an epistemic framework for peace and

order that is worked out amongst its own subjects (Bartelson, 2001: 71). Direct, structural,

and governmental power have long been applied in ways that provides limited justice or

negates justice while simultaneously claiming that peace is being made (Rouhana, 2004).

Unpacking the paradoxes this presents for legitimate authority and power may assist in

developing a new peace system for the 21stCentury, as opposed to the peace system of the 19th

and 20th Centuries which was designed by state or international elites, after victory and

imposed on subjects through a vanguardist fiat.

Direct and governmental power may read the faint signals of subaltern agency and

enable them. But, as the literature on empowerment has already shown (Groom and Webb,

1987), this process will tend to be contaminated by external preferences and a tendency

33

towards pacification while favouring the inequalities produced by direct power. This means

that governmental power is, true to the liberal peace, a balancing of the enablement of the

subject (liberation) with the preferences of power (a type of oligarchical regulation), resulting

in governmentality. This conundrum cannot be transcended unless the site of legitimacy upon

which direct power or governmentality are exercised is expanded to represent subaltern

constituencies.

If all types of power from the main sites of power and legitimate authority

(international, state, and local) are aligned in a specific peace project, peace from the

subaltern perspective will be contaminated by direct, structural or governmental power.

Given that subaltern agency is fainter than direct, structural or governmental power, this

should lead in determining the nature of peace and how emancipation is understood,

otherwise any emergent hybrid peace will merely reflect direct, structural, and government

power leading to ungovernmentality. Direct and governmental power would have to be

pluralist in supporting peace in security, normative, institutional, and material terms as

defined by the subaltern, embedded in the state and mediated with international and state

interests. This would mean a broad (but thin) universal peace architecture at the international

level, a variety of hybrid state forms, and a wide diversity of peace systems at the local level,

representing different models for the construction of legitimate authority. This radical form of

emancipation would rest on a positive forms of hybrid peace rather than global and state

forms of direct or governmental power and their assimilative and trusteeship-oriented

tendencies.

Nevertheless, the evolution of forms of power is always incomplete. Hints of a fifth

type of power can also now be discerned, which might in preliminary terms be called

‘atmospheric power’. An alliance of new technologies and innovations for gathering data,

communications, logistics and coordination, transport, and military operations, with global

34

capital and existing centres of hegemonic power, threatens to add further disruption to the

established dynamics of power and legitimate authority. This increasingly de-territorialised

type of power might see a further drift away from an ethico-political discussion for the basis

of peace as well as a shift away from states, international organisations, and law as the

mainstays of global order.

Notes

1 Confidential Sources (2012) Personal Interviews. Washington: World Bank. 2 February.2This has occurred amongst a wide range of 'traditional donors' in the last ten years or so.3 Thanks to Sandra Pogodda for this insight.

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