Liberal Interventions, Illiberal Outcomes? Probing the Link between the Liberal Peace and State Fragility

Since the early 1990s, countries coming out of civil wars are the theatre of peace building and post-conflict reconstruction missions. Unlike traditional peacekeeping missions, these are operations where foreign military troops are used by outsiders to “control political outcomes.” The objectives are often laudable, “to create stable, tolerant, more liberal and democratic regimes out of the wreckage of war-torn societies” (Zisk Marten, 2004: 5). But is this liberal intervention in peacebuilding the panacea it purports to be? The liberal peace agenda has already come under scrutiny. Analysts have questioned the appropriateness of its normative bias (Richmond and MacGinty 2007); they have also criticized it for stressing economic liberalization at the expense of institutionalization (Paris 2004). Some have even argued that it was imperialism in disguise (Jacoby 2007; Williams 2007). Many of the critiques, though they make important and valid points about the fragility of post-conflict states, fail to convincingly specify the causal mechanisms that link the liberal peace agenda to this fragility. In the absence of clarity on these issues, it is difficult to dismiss suggestions that the correlation could be spurious, as well as to weigh in on specific policy interventions with a better chance at improving outcomes. This paper scrutinizes the causal processes that link the liberal peace agenda and the fragility of post-conflict states. To do so, it adopts a small-N approach, identifies causal mechanisms that might account for the correlation between the two, and then explores two cases of liberal peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction missions selected on a “most-likely” basis. The paper will delve into the peace building and post-conflict reconstruction efforts in Bosnia and Lebanon. The research design examines in depth a single case in which a hypothesized causal relationship is believed “most likely” to be found; if it is present, the hypothesis is pronounced “plausible,” and if not, it is deemed “falsified.” This approach not only pays attention to causal linkages; it “helps account for variables that are difficult to measure; and it is sensitive to case-specific factors.” By so doing, the approach can probe and refine existing hypotheses while also generating additional ones to be tested in other cases (Ross 2004).

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