decolonizing security and peace: mono-epistemology versus peace formation

9 Decolonizing security and peaceMono-epistemology versus peace formation

Oliver P. Richmond

IntroductionThe northern conception of security, peace and order, as an evolved form of ‘nature’ underpins western states’ foreign and donor policy. It guides their interventions through and outside of the UN system, and donor-state/NGO relations in general, especially with the global south. Conflict resolution, conflict management, conflict transformation, peacebuilding and statebuilding, are often thought to be akin to modernization, to bringing progress often through neo-trusteeship frameworks. From the latter perspective, they are based on a rationality aimed at educating disruptive ‘natives’ in the universal ways of post-Enlightenment peace-making, institution building, a priori shared norms, rights, and the good life. Peacebuilding and statebuilding demanded normative and institutional reform along such lines. All are often led by external expertise, and not infrequently, some exercise of power (governmentality, soft power, conditionality, etc.). This also implies a north-south hierarchy, across space, time, systems, norms and culture, resting on power relations embedded in uneven development and access to the industrial power modernization has provided the global north. The state and the international architecture of governance are normally seen as the central sites through which power is exercised in order modernize, develop, and produce, and this positionality has become a site of securitization. Conflict management, transformation, peacebuilding, and statebuilding in turn have been harnessed to respond to this type of securitization, reflecting a concern with maintaining an existing view of the liberal peace, stabilizing its peripheries and the existing global hierarchy, normative framework and distribution of material resources. This has two sides, where the liberal/neoliberal framework is seen to be progressive, or where it is perceived by subjects as oppressive and a reflection of historical and global injustice.

In terms of peace, this represents a rejection of the diversity within the contemporary international system, of states and societies, political and economic systems, as well as cultural, identity, and religious matters. Pragmatic concerns relating to scarce resources and entrenched hierarchies of their distribution are dominant. That this is often argued in the name of peace and security suggests the need for the ‘decolonization’ of both concepts, which would benefit from

Decolonizing security and peace 165

a cross-pollinated examination through both eirenist stances (a positive hybrid peace positionality) and securitization theory, and in particular, through critical work on the problems stemming from ontological claims about security. (Rumelili 2007; Buzan and Waever 2003) Ontological, physical security may be attained for the global north via the endorsement of the liberal peace and international architecture, but given the current crisis of the west, even this cannot be guaranteed. This oversight is partly due to the North’s methodological blind spot, its epistemological colonization of concepts like security and peace, and partly an exercise of its power (direct, structural and governmental forms of). This power is claimed to emanate from the global north/west’s normative superiority, more sophisticated political and economic architecture, developmentalism, the rejection of tradition and communalism over modernity and individualism. What is ontologically secure for the global north may therefore be disruptive for the global south (as Bilgin and İnce also discuss in this volume). Yet at the same time, southern partners in development, peacebuilding, and statebuilding often seek to draw on northern epistemologies for peace and the state.

This chapter examines the link between liberal peacebuilding/neoliberal statebuilding and a colonial epistemology through which in-group/out-group dynamics of peace and security are exacerbated rather than resolved by conceptual ‘mono-ontologies’, which actually represent specific epistemologies associated with power. It argues that pluralism is required if the broad rights and representative impetus of progressive politics reposition peace as emerging not solely from the international or the state, but from local dynamics of ‘peace formation’ (Richmond 2012b, 2013). It also examines if and how such a non-essentialized and non-instrumentalized ontological security might emerge through peace formation, meaning ontological pluralism (Rumelili Chapter 1): an assemblage of local, civil mobilization and agency for peace, coexistence, rights, needs, etc. This is a practical, transversal, and trans-scalar phenomenon that often recognizes the immutability of the dynamics emerging from the colonial history of contemporary mainstream views of security. What do peace and security look like in a contingent world to its subjects?

Liberal/neoliberal epistemologies of peaceLiberal peace frameworks effectively claim they represent ‘nature’ in its most advanced form and have recurrently rejected the ‘local’ as a contextual epistemological nexus for the reworking of security, order and peace. Instead, they insist on the need to prioritize international frameworks for order, designed in the context of the global North’s modernization process and the security threats it has faced. This has rested on a liberal peace blueprint, or in other words an epistemological framework that denotes security, and when challenged on identity or other grounds, may produce insecurity (see Rumelili Chapter 1). Liberal peace and neoliberal statebuilding represent the global North’s claims for ontological security for its norms, systems, laws, architecture, rationalities for politics and economics, and its historical interests. This has been taken up at among elite,

166 Oliver P. Richmond

bureaucratic, state, institutional, and business sectors around the world, as part of the first wave of decolonization after World War I and since the end of the Cold War. They have expected in return, security, modernization and development on an industrial scale, assistance with statebuilding, recognition, and the agency that provides for states to act in order to provide security and well-being. They have also expected leeway to pursue personal interests, hence the ‘authoritarian democracies’ that have emerged from Cambodia to Afghanistan.

This has been the character of the liberal peace framework, derived as it is from the victor’s peace imposed in 1945 and consolidated through the UN and Bretton Woods system. The European state-system was expanded during the subsequent period of decolonization according to the same model, as Tilly points out (Tilly 1990). Since the end of the Cold War, the liberal peace, and related attempts to build the neoliberal state (which is often failed by design because of its non-contextual, neoliberal character) have continued this project of the liberal peace and its inherent ontological assumptions. In parallel, both international and local actors view each other in similarly linear and fixed mono-ontological frames. Local actors often focus on fixed identities and boundaries from which conflict management would be derived, whereas international actors focus on the primitive and oriental political subject they perceive to be local actors. Both use these views in order to construct a discussion of conflict and peace inevitably based on access to direct or structural power. However, long-standing attempts at both have confronted alterity around the world, sparking off resistance and critical agency as a consequence (Richmond 2011a). Mono-ontological approaches to security reproduce similar, negative peace frameworks, in which neither self nor other have physical or existential security. Nevertheless, following Foucault’s understanding of how structural power sparks resistance, which becomes effective because power cannot be held eternally but instead circulates, they also inadvertently provoke more pluralist approaches for conflict to emerge (Foucault 1979, 1980, 1997, 2008; Picket 1996).

The exercise of power – even in the name of liberal peacebuilding or neoliberal statebuilding – in the name of ontological security has led to counter-exercises of power, resting often on ‘hidden forms of resistance’ (Scott 1985, 1990, 2009). Though these may be seen as contrary to peace from a universalist perspective, it may also be the case that such critical agency seeks to maintain a pluralist notion of peace, in which alterity is mediated and ontology is diverse, bridged, and contingent. More pluralist ontologies of peace – a positive or emancipatory peace – would reflect a post-liberal, hybrid form. Such pluralism would have to contend with mono-ontological accusations of relativism, of course. This may sound fanciful, but it has already, and is continuing to, come into being: from the mediated state in the Great Horn of Africa to the local and contextualized peace infrastructures that have emerged in South Africa, Ghana, and Colombia among others, to the ‘peace formation’ efforts of ‘civil society’ actors from the Balkans to Cyprus (Odendaal 2010). Ontological security would be a basis for these developments, meaning the attempts of individuals, groups, and ultimately


the polity to gain security without undermining their own, or others, basic understandings, narratives and routines (Rumelili Chapter 1).

Ontological security and its implications for peaceOntological understandings of security and insecurity, physical and ideational suggest that peace may also be subject to a similar scrutiny (Rumelili Chapter 1). Negative and positive forms, liberal and post-liberal, every day, emancipatory, and hybrid forms can usefully be categorized in terms of their mono-epistemological universalism or their plurality for self and group. They can be evaluated for what they offer in terms of negative peace (physical, but possibly threatened) or positive peace (physical, stable, and unthreatened, across a broad range of areas, social, cultural, economic, political, environmental). An ontological peace may well represent a search for a settled and legitimate form in everyday settings. Many epistemologies of negative peace (neoliberalism, liberal peace, etc.) may claim to offer ontological security, but they general do this only for a specific in-group.

In the contemporary environment of IR, after the crisis of the liberal peace, in the middle of the crisis of neoliberalism, and at a point where western/northern power is being diluted, it has become crucial to examine how a non-essentialized and instrumentalized understanding of peace, order, and security be understood (Rumelili Chapter 1). This ‘decolonization of peace’ requires a critical interrogation of the liberal peace, the neoliberal state and the international architecture of peacebuilding as it has been constituted since the end of the Cold War.

The liberal peace is made up of security architecture, a set of international and national norms, laws, and institutions, domestic democracy, a global economy, and a developmental civil society. These are homogenous across actors, indicating shared norms, identity, institutions, law, social, and economic frameworks. This has been formed in historical terms through the struggle over power, representation and rights since the Middle Ages, principally in the west. The end of the colonial system in the mid-twentieth century both provided the impetus for the spread of this system and because of the dominant position of the US and Europe, allowed the west to establish its US-driven epistemological framework for security and peace as a universal system. Though it was internally contested by right and left over a negative or positive peace, this appeared to represent an ‘end of history’ – in other words the ontology of peace.

This system represents a modernist architecture for peace and security, resting on enforcement, law, international agreements, and institutional and market compliance (Doyle 1983; Doyle & Sambanis 2006; Call & Cousens 2008; Krasner 2004; Paris 2004; Snyder 2000; Cooper 2007).

It is a complex mix of power, interests, norms, institutions and actors, captured within a single ontological setting. From a security, institutional and market perspective this works through hard and soft power. It exercises structural power and governmentalism to reform its subjects– often from the global south or east– maintaining a specific international hierarchy. It now goes without saying that


this epistemic system is not an ontological framework, and is under great stress, meaning a reconceptualization of security, peace and order is now required. If theories of peace and security are to respond to such stresses, they need to challenge their own ontological basis in a world in which interests, norms, and actors are expanding, and which at the same time demands that all are represented. As challenges have mounted to the liberal peacebuilding and neoliberal statebuilding model, its universal claims in various areas have become more clearly contested. The securitization and desecuritization of each aspect of conflict and peace from the hegemonic view of the liberal-institutionalist occurs within the parameters set by the claim that non-liberal subjects need to ‘become liberal’ to experience peace and development (Richmond 2009a). This may be summarized in the following terms, each challenge partly pointing to how a specific universal claim about an aspect of the liberal peace, resting on an epistemology drawn from the global North’s experience of security, peace and the state, creates tension with its others:

1 Legality lies in the international and states-system, and not in local, customary, or historical practices. Authority is centralized and emanates from the more modern, industrialized, regulated, and institutional practices (political, economic, and social) of the global north and its claim to secular, individualistic, and institutional development. Yet local legitimacy and authority is crucial to the survival of most communities in practice.

2 Security is defined in terms of a territorial and national entity, containing a fixed population, requiring enforceable boundaries, as with Tilly’s depiction of the emergence of the modern European state (Tilly 1990). Defining the population, the boundaries, itself is an act of power, often leading to violence. Defining security as ‘human security’ on the other hand also threatens traditional sovereignty. Security is not defined in terms of the historical positionality of a specific society, thus threatening its identity.

3 Democracy is defined as an institutional and bureaucratic framework, creating competition over their control and crowding out substantive participation, which might have historically occurred in different formats in context (customary, tribal, community, consensual, etc.).

4 Law is defined via the modern liberal state ‘programming’ framework, yet the statebuilding process does not provide sufficient resources for its practice, so most law in many post-conflict environments involves customary, elder and tribal systems along with non-western understandings of community or citizenship, which are in tension with the neoliberal state.

5 Development is defined as occurring through donors or markets, when often communities see both as predatory, and undermining their traditional systems of welfare and subsistence, which also maintain a fragile political balance.

6 Human rights and gender equality are ‘mainstreamed’ with little regard for local practices (often referred to in the context of ‘dignity’) which also contribute to both. Internationals complain of ‘relativism’ when community actors point out that they have versions of both in their historical political systems and seek a pluralist or hybrid compromise.


As Rumelili has argued (Chapter 1) all of these different levels of, and strategies for, peacebuilding and statebuilding, rest on a similar attempt to construct ontological forms of security, perhaps mostly weighed in favour of the global north due to power relations, dependent upon a blueprint international state-level architecture as well as a homogenous form of citizenship. But they are actually knowledge systems accompanying power, and therefore represent at best conflict management and a negative peace. In actual fact these rest upon a liberal peace epistemology, inviting a response from subjects which are interested in developing ontological security in an everyday setting.

Each area contributes to the state and global peacebuilding architecture, implicitly buttressing its claim to universality. Ironically, as Rumelili also points out in Chapter 1, this has created insecurity at the ontological level of its subjects (who are not willing to ‘become liberal’ comprehensively). Some challenge that system, and others began to exercise local, critical agency in order to form a peace that would be contextually legitimate rather than merely situated in the nexus between UN, IFI, donor, and INGO preferences.

There are significant implications for peace stemming from this logic. Any victor’s peace would offer epistemological security for any in-group within the society, state or system involved. But this would not apply to any out-groups. Perhaps more importantly, this indicates that peace operates in a similar mode to security at an ontological level. An alternative epistemology of peace would inevitably be present among any out-group, which would be said to be ontologically and physically insecure.

So a victor’s peace must either assimilate or marginalize difference through direct and structural power, probably using force, to maintain the optimum of epistemological security for its in-group. Similarly with the liberal peace architecture, this logic could be said to hold, except that it circumvents the problem of alterity by claiming that all out-groups would ‘become liberal’ by virtue of its universality. This represents governmentality, and has, of course, has been heavily contested theoretically and empirically. Both the victor’s peace and the liberal peace require the maintenance of a border or frontier between in-groups and out-groups, in order to preserve power relations as they are, the status quo, and normative as well as material superiority.

The question is whether ontological and physical security denotes such universalism in peace or whether multiple forms of peace may coexist, contextually framed, but incorporated into the liberal-international peacebuilding architecture. In order to deal with this issue, a post-colonial approach to subaltern knowledge and power about peace and security is required. Peace in these terms would rest on an everyday ontology in which local routines determine its framework, supported by the state and international engagement (Rumelili Chapter 1). Instead, peacebuilding ignores the local struggle for an ontological peace, favouring its own epistemic models.

From the perspective of peace- in local, state, and international terms, new questions are emerging. Though the liberal-international architecture of peace has long been established, and the liberal or neoliberal state is an essential part of


this, embedded as it is in liberal-international institutions, conceptions of peace and security have been driven by an understanding of the international system as it was around 1945 and 1990. This means they are dominated by northern perceptions, interests, norms, priorities and pre-occupations, to the extent that they have almost collapsed as meaningful intellectual and policy concepts – in an increasingly networked and interconnected world in which responsibilities, inequalities, rights, needs, law, institutions, as well as environmental, gender, age, and other aspects of global sustainability. This means, in the words of Mark Malloch Brown, former head of UNDP, that a ‘global revolution’ is needed (Brown 2011). This involves the decolonization and broadening of key concepts used to create and sustain order and peace, as well as a reframing of the key institutions, political architectures, and discursive frameworks, in order to reconstruct a more pluralist and less fragile local-to global society. A pluralist and contextual epistemology is required in order to provide legitimacy for states and for international peace architecture, whose legitimacy has waned in its capacity to represent diverse political communities beyond the western, formal, state architecture has been criticized. In other words, the epistemology of peace must be much closer to ontological security: the everyday practices of security.

In order to engage with such notions of peace and security, a new starting point is required. Whereas the modern movements of the twentieth century focused on international, regional, and state-level security, and produced a liberal, democratic, rights-oriented, neoliberal or welfare oriented domestic state as the aim (much contested by socialists, communists, dictators, and authoritarians around the world) the twenty-first century is increasing preoccupied by ‘local’ agencies, identities, institutions, and actors, as well as legitimacy, sustainability, representation and equality, in both peace and security matters. Because the mono-epistemology of peace and security only sought to do this for the west/north and endeavour to convert southerners to liberalism/neoliberalism, it was also forced to sanction pluralism. Accusations of relativism are often levelled at arguments that challenge universalism and its security requirement. However, relativism in peace terms might easily also be thought of as pluralism: accommodating difference and scarcity may be achieved through institutions, norms, and rights that recognize and represent different understandings of security and the peace it engenders. Thus, out-group/in-group and self-other dynamics of peace and security continue, but in reality boundaries are blurred, power is deconstructed and circulates. Bridges emerge between self and other, and hybridity is always imminent or present.

This phenomena might be explored through ‘peace formation’ (meaning an assemblage of historical, local, customary, social, political, economic, civil mobilization and agency for peace, often aimed at sustainability, coexistence, legitimate authority, rights, needs, etc.). It represents an expression of critical agency, resistance, and subaltern forms of power. This is a practical, local and global phenomenon which is referred to widely in a scattered literature across social science touching on matters of peace and security. It is often mentioned in private among the personnel of international institutions, or referred to formally


in a national context as ‘national ownership’ or ‘resilience’ (both very misleading terms) (Richmond 2012a).

In reality, peace formation rests on different ontological and epistemological understanding of security, order, institutions and rights, and that hybrid that emerges when local agency is exercised to bridge alterity, to that offered by conventional thinking in the global north. It sees the need for a universal position on peace’s architecture, but this is not associated with power, as the mainstream ontology of security currently is. It is instead built on a pluralist range of epistemologies. Its ontology might be said to include the accommodation of difference rather than its assimilation. Mono-epistemologies produce only negative forms of peace, as many of the historical lessons of practices of conflict management, conflict resolution, peacekeeping, mediation, and peacebuilding attest. Even despite the fact that peace formation, being based on subaltern agency, cannot counter the structural or governmental power that mono-epistemological positions are designed to harness, it continues around the world despite the obvious fragility and contingency it entails. The pluralist epistemology it draws on is, in other words, a great source of legitimacy and therefore sustains subaltern power. It has no particular aim of a homogenous consensus, other than accommodation, reconciliation, recognition and equality. The subaltern power it gathers is becoming increasingly significant in understanding peace and security, the formation of institutions, and the development of international peace architecture.

Ontology, epistemology, and peace formationPeace formation refers to localized, social, customary, religious, ritual, as well as historical, political, economic, and civil society derived practices of peace-making. It represents relationships and networked processes where indigenous or local agents of peace in a range of settings find ways of establishing peace processes and sustainable dynamics of peace. It operates in an everyday level and represents a search for ontological security through a mix of contextual, state, and international epistemic and material frameworks. In many cases women can be at the forefront, such as in Burundi, Somalia, and Liberia, among others (UNESCO 2003). Often the objective is to provide what are usually public services, such as health and education, in the everyday setting. Peace is made locally in this framework, perhaps individually in hidden and public spaces across a wide range of everyday life activities, but may be supported internationally. One might say it puts society, the village, community, and city at the centre of peace, rather than the state, security and markets.

Peace formation approaches interact with contemporary international approaches to peacebuilding and statebuilding. They may occur in the family, community, village, town, or within the state. They may be formal or informal, aim at shaping the state or merely mitigating and improving everyday life. Peace formation processes may be hidden from view to escape sanction from power because they are resistant. They may engage with mundane everyday issues; they may offer ritualistic and historical approaches to conflict. They may shape the


state, and they may also shape the international and its peacebuilding practices, directly or indirectly. Localized practices of peace formation are complex but increasingly visible expressions of critical agency aimed at ending violent cycles of state formation, and related power inequalities, often where more formal peace processes have entrenched them.

By focusing on hybrid forms of peace, and how they are influenced by local patterns of politics, peace formation may represent a more accurate depiction of the results of peace processes worldwide (Ginty 2008; Richmond 2011b). More generally, it represents a synthesis of conflict management, resolution, peacebuilding and transformation approaches, but it also transcends these mainly western/northern typologies. It highlights the domain of power and its distribution within societies that are pursuing peace autonomously, or with international support. In this regard, the identification of hybrid forms of peace implies that an emancipatory form might emerge reflecting the interests, identities, and needs of all actors, state and non-state alike, but most importantly resting on local legitimacy, which in turn then influences international norms (rather than vice-versa). In parallel to recognizing inequalities of power between internationals, state elites, and local peace formers, hybrid forms of peace represent a mixture of local and international agency and legitimacy. Peace formation dynamics are essential for the requisite mutual accommodation and social justice. They imply ontological security in the sense used by Rumelili (Chapter 1), but at the same time they contest the epistemologies of peace offered by internationals (liberal peace/neoliberal states).

Much is known about the workings of state-level peace processes as well as the architecture of liberal peacebuilding that has developed at the international level. Far less is known about the local dynamics, institutions, processes, and agencies involved in forming peace and the state locally. van Tongeren (2011) argues that there are at least 20 post-conflict countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, and Sierra Leone, where informal and formal, local peace committees and other institutional frameworks have autonomously developed (as in Sierra Leone), or have been assisted by external actors (as in Colombia or Nepal), operated informally (as in Columbia, Sierra Leone and many others) or have gradually been drawn into the formal state (as in Ghana, Timor-Leste, and the Solomon Islands).

The resulting hybrid forms of peace have emerged in unexpected places, such as Somalia, Cambodia (SIDA 2003) and Bosnia Herzegovina (Johnson 2010). Such cases may represent a slow and often arduous movement beyond the liberal peace towards what might be called a post-liberal peace (Richmond 2009b; 2011b), where international norms and institutions interact with different, contextual, and localized polities. They also pose an important question, which is whether local forms of legitimacy and norms of peace can equate or connect with international forms, not least when local practices (religious or customary) seem to clash with international human rights standards. This process exposes local-international power relations making plain that peace also demands their redress.


In summary, what is emerging is neither strictly a liberal nor a local form of peace, but a complex assemblage – of related but also separate associations, actors and networks – formed through political contestation involving a range of local and international actors (Latour 2007). It challenges traditional notions about the power of elites, internationals, the state, or social actors, as well as the normative frameworks that peace requires. It also challenges conventional wisdom about the need for public mobilization en masse in formal space, institutions, or formats. If a peace process is to be comprehensive then it needs to reach beyond such limitations. Underlying this are significant challenges for any mono-epistemology of peace and security. This blending of the formal and informal aspect of peace and governance is now perceived to be essential for a sustainable form of peace, and connects closely with the idea of ontological security.

Peace formation addresses the problem of what do peace and security look like in a contingent/social world to and for its people, and how do we uncover it, join it, and make power (i.e. concentrations of power at the IPE/state level) realize its powerlessness unless it supports the wide variety of peace formation dynamics. Peace in this sense is a ‘habitus’ related to the agencies, norms, culture, history, institutions, laws, and politics of its constituent subjects (Bourdieu 1977). At its periphery it also seeks to operate according to a pluralist epistemology in its encounter with others. Thus, there is an inherent contradiction with its security component which generally uses universalist ontological positions in order to make peripheral subjects comply with dominant interests and power.

Perhaps worse though, is the tension with international peace builders and state builders, who can neither ‘see’ peace formation because of the way security and peace are configured in their view of the international peace architecture, methodological limitations, remaining colonial views of southern subjects, neoliberal aspirations, and their adherence to progressive and modernization theories. They adhere to the latter even though these contradict claims to respect political autonomy, local institutions, and ownership, and diversity of identity.

Ontological security and peace formation in practiceIn Somalia, long considered in western circles as the most anarchic of places, local clan governance has emerged through local organizations where the state and international actors are absent. Internationals see Somalia as subject to most levels of insecurity, and in particular as a threat to the liberal peace ontology. In one of the longest running failed states in modern history, informal systems for security, governance, law, economic support and even representation have emerged through networks of civil, customary, and business actors in an ‘informal mosaic’ which is forming a new, localized, peace in each instance (Menkhaus 2006). Menkhaus (2006, p.87) has described this as a ‘radical localization’ of politics via ‘informal, overlapping polities loosely held by clan leaders and others’ also including elders, the business community, and clergy forming tense coalitions over power, resources, as well as judicial and law enforcement matters. Indeed, neither internationals nor the centralized state have provided peace, but local


peace formation actors have been more successful in their own way. Customary systems there have been instrumental in both war and peace, and equally vital to both. Indeed, Menkhaus goes as far as to argue that the international system itself is mirrored by the complex system of blood payments, customary law, negotiation, and force.

Such processes have also actively worked to undermine the revival of a centralized state, because the state itself is viewed as a potential threat to peace. In turn the vestiges of state still functioning often seek to marginalize the threat of local peace formers to its remaining power (Menkhaus 2006, p.76). Often, detailed, formal agreements are made and mediated between customary elders and district or state officials (as in Ethiopia) (Hagmann 2007, pp.6, 18). Where the state has been absent this peace formation role has been the only possibility (Hagmann 2007, p.9). It has provided some level of social and material security, a rule of law, a customary order, supported by elders, society, the business community, and even militias, as also in Puntland and most obviously in Somaliland. This has arisen through the Guurti (an upper parliamentary house), a legislative and cultural link between traditional, informal and modern, formal governance without which there would be no rule of law or social order. It bridges and negotiates in order to maintain peace (Richards 2012, p. 154–155). This has rested on hybrid forms of governance, incorporating aspects of the modern state with informal, local, historical processes in Somaliland. Menkhaus (2006, p.82) describes this as ‘without government, but not without governance’.

What this suggests is that physical insecurity is not necessary matched by existential security, even where a peace process or the institutions of state are coming into being. The northern assumption that the state is a vital vehicle for peace does not hold in this case either, suggesting significant epistemological disagreement. Local peace formation processes across the region, of course, small scale and little able to deal with direct violence, are actually ontologically secure in their understanding of how peace may be made, and with what outcome. They are also unanimous that a centralized state is a threat to both ontological security and their epistemic framework of peace. Neither has the liberal peace made a great impression, or has much in the way of a hybrid peace or state emerged as yet (despite very significant structural and governmental power lying in the hands of internationals and donors). Radically different ontologies of security for self and others exist in this case at local, state, and international levels. Homogenization, standardization, liberalization, westernization and other familiar motifs of peace and conflict resolution and their claims to produce ontological security through universalism have not impressed and been ignored.

Such patterns of subaltern agency with respect to peace-making are common, though they often differ in their approach to building a state and a liberal peace or rejecting them. Even if such processes are not made public or formal they often continue informally or as NGOs that do not want to become part of the state infrastructure though they are crucial to the debate on peace locally and at the national level (this is the case with the National Peace Council in Sri Lanka) (Perera 2012). In South Africa a peace architecture emerged at grassroots level


as the apartheid system was being dismantled and a liberal state was being built. Many others have since followed, including Ghana, Kenya, South Sudan, Togo, and Timor-Leste, often assisted by UNDP support and community forums, women’s groups, track II processes, and mediators.

Some of these, including the Kenyan peace architecture have been partly led by women’s groups’ responses to the violence, as in Wajir district (Menkhaus 2008, p.27). Here, a small women’s group started a peace process in the mid-1990s in response to local, ethnic violence, utilizing a number of tools, including customary approaches, which eventually produced a model for partnership between civil society and government around the country (p.26). The search for ontological security has opened up a new, contextual epistemological framework for forming peace. It started with clan elders and produced a partnership with formal government actors. A Wajir Peace and Development committee was formed in 1995, representing a broad swathe of society rather than merely officials and elites. This process was eventually merged into a ‘district development committee’ which brought local civil society, NGOs, and government together. This model soon proliferated across the country, after which donors began to support the process. A number of different models emerged for the local peace committees: some were democratically run and led, while others were run by the district commissioner. In 2001 the government responded by forming the National Steering Committee on Peacebuilding and Conflict Management. After the post-election violence in 2007, an Open Forum was created and a Citizen’s Agenda for Peace was developed by individuals who gathered from all sectors of society in the weeks immediately after the conflict broke out. It drew on this earlier experience. A National Policy on Peacebuilding and Conflict Management emerged in 2009, and peace committees in all districts were set up according to the National Accord and Reconciliation Act of 2008. This process drew in a number of ministries and levels of government and the media, and also was connected to the high-level peace process. But crucially, it was driven and legitimated in civil society and at the grassroots, including many local institutions and norms.

In Colombia since the 1990s there have been similar phenomena, which have been supported by the EU and by UNDP. Local institutions, social movements and networks, and other initiatives have been supported, numbering perhaps as many as 400 since 2003 alone. Coalitions have formed across a variety of groups, movements, and networks. These have formed around issues of development, human and women’s rights, and restitution, producing visions of and practice paths to peace, which can be clearly seen as reaching for ontological security. The everyday setting as well as the role of the state and the international is often referred to, in a sense demanding their alignment with ontological security. They represent a high level of local ownership, closely related to local and everyday understandings of conflict issues and how to deal with them. These span local regions caught up in conflict but have not until recently had much impact on formal state institutions. The president has a peace advisor, and a number of other advisors, there is a National Peace Council dating from 1998 led by the president, but they are focused on negative peace approaches, even though a broad range


of civil society actors are included. As a consequence such state-level initiatives have not developed the legitimacy that local initiatives have. Local initiatives have instead drawn on recent international principles such as local ownership, citizen participation, partnership, and accountability in order to develop local infrastructures for peace. This has allowed a much broader cross-section of actors to converge on a peace agenda than the state has made possible so far.

In Afghanistan, there are long-standing traditions of conflict resolution by tribal elders, village councils, the jirga dialogues, and the Peace Shuras or Councils, at local, district and national level. While there is a general aspiration to create a viable state, the emergence of ‘quick impact projects’ underlined that it would be required to be community based rather than externally driven. Internationals have tried to strengthen the state, work with the existing elites and look for alternatives. Mirroring the way the quick impact projects brought together the state and the community, this may be emerging in the form of the peace councils, connected to a more formal understanding of peace and stabilization. This is emerging through the Community Development Councils and the National Solidarity Programme run by a government ministry, which though far from successful, have become part of the international expectation about the nature of the state that will emerge. These are driven mainly by localized understandings of peace formation in an Afghan context though there is also clear tension between the local, provincial, state, and international dynamics at work. There are 22,000 such councils in existence which distribute financial resources, provide local governance, and address poverty and unemployment, and well as undertaking conflict resolution roles, often involving forming a network of local actors working on a range of issues from gender to education, political empowerment and accountability. What is also important to note is that moderate Taliban approaches are themselves not opposed to democracy, engaging with the international community, and opening up liberal education systems, or inclusive public services. Yet, as in Somalia, the internationals’ assumptions of a centralized neoliberal state which shapes the agency and rights of citizens has actually been strongly resisted on epistemological grounds, whether religious, ideological or cultural, and an ontological security framework has begun to emerge. This is part of an uneasy merger between international expectations for the state and local alterity that may be emerging.

After the Lomé Peace Accord in Sierra Leone, one of the most important local movements that has emerged is called ‘Fambul Tok’ (Family Talk). It developed in response to what it saw as the contextual weaknesses of international actors. It used traditional ‘bonfire ceremonies’ in order to promote reconciliation in communities, especially where the formal judicial process had been ineffective. Its director, John Caulker argues that internationals see local actors and processes as damaged and compromised, and so disregard its potential, one which his organization was designed to engage with. His organization’s approach provides some interesting contrasts to those of peacebuilders or statebuilders: meetings are held in local, home, contexts; peace is not used to push ideological or political agendas; local traditions are respected; and the whole community can participate on their own terms; projects are designed in situ and not a priori, nor according to


external interests. Fambul Tok argues that it ‘fills a void created by the inability of the government and international partners to embrace community reconciliation.’ This perhaps reflects a search for ontological security in the context of local, state, and international frameworks for peace, but aimed at rescuing or improving peace formation at the grassroots level.

With the exception of Somalia and Afghanistan, most of these cases suggest that the state is vital for security and peace, meaning it is the yardstick by which both are measured. One would therefore assume a better quality peace would emerge where there was a much closer match to northern assumptions about security, the state, and peace, underpinned by an agreed universalism. Nevertheless, even where it is accepted that the state is essential to peace and security, problems still arise. The search for ontological security may expose clashes in the way different communities understand their everyday settings and power relations, even if there is a general agreement with the liberal peace framework, i.e. the epistemological framework for peace.

For example, from the early 1990s, conflict resolution workshops run in Cyprus by mainly American or European scholars provided an important platform for social reconciliation to develop. Internationals have long argued that Cyprus does not have an active civil society on either side of the green line, and what there is may be nationalist or very marginalized. Existing networks or organizations, such religious organizations or trade unions (which have a long history of cross community engagement) tend not to focus on peace issues. Most ‘civil society’ in Cyprus has historically been connected to religious organizations or more recently, nationalist political parties (Confidential Diplomatic Source 2011; Loizides Chapter 4). The inter-communal movement has tried to move beyond such parameters, meaning that they were quickly marginalized by nationalist actors. Many in the inter-communal movement quickly came to perceive international attempts to promote the inter-communal movement as both an opportunity to be supported, but also patronizing and indicating a lack of international awareness and sensitivity about the conflict.

In these processes, both sides exercised their peace formation agency in the context of the state and its reconfiguration. It might be said that othering only really made sense in the context of the state. In this context, both sides felt insecurity and yet in their social relations, through inter-communal meetings and at the social-cultural level, ontological security was rapidly established. At the political level, this would rapidly dissipate, however. Greek Cypriots felt that the Anglo-American group of academics wanted them to forget the role of the Turkish army and their own dispossession. Turkish Cypriots were suspicious that their independence and autonomy was not being respected. Opposition among government and politicians was great, on both left and right, perceiving the workshops as a threat to their nationalist positions or their control of the state (meaning both the Republic of Cyprus and its political parties and Church led civil society, and the even more top-down Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus) and the blood invested in supporting them. So, while peace formation illustrated potential for accommodation, the fact of the state (s) as an assumed parameter of


security and peace, constantly has worked to undermine their efforts. One way around this has been to shift much of the inter-communal movements’ symbolic presence to a neutral space in the green line. The opening of the House of Cooperation was a major victory for the inter-communal movement, especially as its location (Ledra Palace) was a site of historic importance for both communities. Indeed, it is now an unwritten rule that everyone cooperates with the House of Cooperation, from both sides and all political persuasions (Confidential Source 2011). This is one sign of the agency and legitimacy of such processes, especially when embedded in a supportive international framework, which has often, but not always been the case.

In a sophisticated way participants have renegotiated locally exclusive forms of identity as well as prescriptions from external donors. They have also taken the opportunity to work for broader social and political reform (Hadjipavlou 2010). They have drawn on hidden historical practices of pluralism (Constantinou 2007) and a range of local and international networks in order to form a hybrid peace process which is perhaps more worthy of the name ‘peace process’ than the high-level talks have been. It has formed a complex assemblage that bridges a range of ethno-national and international divisions and borders. It has often opposed political elites, and has questioned the nature of the state they were negotiating for. The House of Cooperation represents a renegotiation of the two states on the island away from their current ethno-nationalist frameworks towards an ontological unit for peace and security.

In both Kosovo and Bosnia Herzegovina, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the evolution of peace operations into liberal or more accurately, neoliberal, statebuilding was on public show. Similar dynamics also existed, though in Kosovo there was a consensus on the need for a state, especially among Kosovo Albanians. Internationals were by this point somewhat frustrated with their local counterparts’ tendencies to obstruct or ‘go slow’ on institutional reforms designed to bring the liberal state into being, particularly where these demanded, social, cultural, economic, reform or identity changes (Parish 2010). In other words powerful local interests were manipulating the role the internationals could play. The result in Bosnia was deadlock over the reform of the state, while in Kosovo the result was the bringing into being of a contested state, as opposed to peace, and one that might suffer a further round of partition if nationalist Serbs in Mitrovica and other places had their way. In Bosnia, local peace agencies began to emerge in order to maintain localized forms of cooperation, identity, and opportunities, whereas in Kosovo, the uniting of a pre-existing shadow state with the international’s peace project led to the formation of a new state, at least in formal terms.

The achievement of statehood as a priority taking precedence over peace became the order of the day early on in the peacebuilding process in Kosovo. This was partly based on the long-standing experience Kosovans had in running a shadow state and public services under Serb rule since the early 1990s. In Bosnia, local non-cooperation at the elite political level with the OHR, despite its Bonn Powers, made developing the liberal peace very difficult in a highly fragmented


state, and in response, a number of civil society organizations in the ground, involved in human rights and transitional justice matters, cultural projects, emerged in an attempt to speed up progress. The role of the internationals in both cases was to illustrate how both physical and ontological security – and so peace – would be achieved by creating liberal states with their requisite standards. Not many were convinced. The reality has been the states formed are themselves still sources of conflict and insecurity, and there has been much contestation of their very essence: from their right to exist, their boundaries, institutions, legal norms, and identity. In Kosovo in particular, the contrast between the security the state provides its in-group and out-groups is marked. Peace (negative) and insecurity are being provided simultaneously.

In the peace formation community, a number of local political and administrative figures have also begun to take peacebuilding into their own hands in order to provide an ontological framework of security. These processes have taken a long time to emerge (or to become visible to external eyes) (Parish 2010). In BiH, a number of town mayors have undertaken inter-community initiatives, expressing frustration with the slow pace of political reform at the state level, and international approaches. Many citizens see both their own political structures and elites and international approaches to Bosnia as requiring them to rely on their own capacity and resilience while unfairly marginalizing them from the benefits of modernity (Richmond & Kappler 2011).

While such movements have remained disaggregated and fragmented in Bosnia, partly because there is little elite agreement on the nature of the post-Dayton state, in Kosovo, in a context where a new state was the broad aim of the main ethnic group, one might say that a national mobilization took place in which every person who wanted to see a state declared would use his or her position, whether in national politics or bureaucracy, or while working for the range of internationals present, to lobby and advocate for a state. This process of co-option of the UN and international mission into a simultaneous statebuilding and peace formation process through the sum of many small pressures has been very successful, even if it has not addressed the root causes of the conflict (visoka 2012). At the same time it aspires to the liberal peace with a Kosovan flavour (Montanaro 2009, p. 21).

A similar pattern can be seen clearly in Timor-Leste. Emblematic of how the internationals saw their role there, the constitution was written in Portuguese, which the vast majority of the population did not speak, rather than in Tetun (which was in their defence, then an unwritten language). Internationals assumed that there was no-pre-existing system. If it was not written it did not exist (Trindade 2012). Culture and tradition was seen to be powerful, but as alterity was the force which held society and the state back. Ironically, the resistance networks that have maintained a viable Timorese sense of polity and a liberation struggle throughout Indonesian occupation were completely ignored. Yet, the internationals were welcomed into Timor-Leste because the population wanted to modernize, even though they also realized it would mean more disruption. However, given local history, they were incredibly sensitive to any potentially


renewed settler-colonist style relationship, and of the need to address the legacy of colonialism and occupation.

Though many Timorese accepted a developmental view of their situation, in which they were regarded as backward, there was also a recognition that local actors would work in their own way even if internationals tried to stop them. Ironically, the internationals effectively handed power to a tiny Portuguese-speaking elite, which also represented contra the lengthy Timorese liberation struggle, a connection with the former colonial power. Thus, the state had a limited reach yet custom provides the context for everyday life (along with the Catholic Church).

International actors followed their liberal peacebuilding blueprint but have developed a close understanding of the social, political, economic, and cultural terrain of Timor-Leste, though there were present several NGOs who were much more aware of the local situation.1 Internationals assumed that local resistance, well organized in terms of violent and non-violent action in the past, would not emerge and instead citizens would take up their roles as opportunities provided by the new state framework became available. They ignored the fact this network was crucial to local legitimacy (Unofficial source 2012a). Indicative of the epistemological gap between international and local actors, the collapse that occurred in 2006 was a surprise to the international community despite the growing political tension on the ground, the failure to deal with chronic poverty and unemployment, or to develop public services such as health or education. Many local voices, and some international – such as Sergio vieira de Mello, the Representative of the UN Secretary General in Timor for a time – had long been making such points. This seemed too narrow many Timorese, who had a more sophisticated idea of peace in mind and who were expecting more from their long self-determination struggle. Calls for ‘Timorization’ were soon heard. These were effectively epistemological challenges to both the state and the form of peace internationals were offering.

After the collapse of 2006, an interesting dynamic occurred after the international community returned. This time they were less focused on running Timor like a ‘UN kingdom’ as Jarat Chopra, also once of the UN operation in Timor, argued, and more on understanding of local knowledge, expertise, and processes (Trindade 2008). This has provided space for hybridization of the liberal peace model and Timorese imaginings of their own distinctive political, social, cultural orders (Ruak 2012), as well as the modification of the market system by a turn to social welfarism. Remarkably, Timor has begun to stabilize far more significantly than before. An act of translation began expressive of the search for local ontological security (Unofficial source 2012b). In the light of both the liberation struggle and in the Timorese customary context a peace resting on social justice in a local context is widely expected (Boavida 2013).

In some quarters, there is now a concerted discussion about what sort of state would fit better with the Timorese context, culture, various networks including resistance and Church networks (McGregor et al. 2012), and political history (Trindade 2008, p.160). Some are of the view that diplomatic, clandestine,


and resistance frameworks of the pre-1999 period need to be focused on state formation which in turn needs to be wrested from the elite and based on a more diversified social and economic basis. The historic Timorese networks are slowly reoccupying the state. The question being asked is, what is the state for and how might it reflect both the liberation struggle, its networks, mitigate internal tensions, development and order best? This has to be rethought, as Trindade argues by ‘[f]irst the traditional system, then the Church, and then the government.’ It must be blessed by the elders, made sacred, and become part of Timorese culture (Trindade 2008, p.166). The ‘lulic’ system is being recovered via an encounter with liberal peacebuilding and neoliberal statebuilding, and it has been argued that it has its own system for security, law, checks and balances, representation, equality, and sustainable development. According to Trindade, probably the island’s leading expert and translator of this system, this makes sense to Timorese people in terms of their society, context, environment and their historical liberation struggle, and so offers local legitimacy for a new and developing state (Trindade 2012). This is the discursive framework that arises from the complex array of internal voices interested in producing a peace order as defined locally, and in conjunction with their understanding of the liberal-international order and the neoliberal state. This does not mean a rejection of external knowledge about peace and development and their systems, but instead a hybridization of both local processes and international blueprints. Indeed in local terms, democracy and human rights, as well as even gender equality, are not new western imports, but have long been accepted (Trindade 2012, p.167). According to this logic, the liberation struggle from the 1970s did not end with the formation of the new liberal or neoliberal state, but will continue until needs, rights, and identity (historical, religious, and modern) have reached a balance. The winning of international legitimacy was merely a waymark on the path to establishing local legitimacy, in which ontological security would be matched by peace and the state.

ConclusionFrom this perspective, peace formation indicates a significant decolonization of the international, mono-epistemological, logic about peace and security. Instead of emanating from the international (read northern power) it is embedded even in post-conflict ontologies, (see also Bilgin and İnce) which themselves are framed in everyday terms and reach out both for support and for epistemic refinement. Instead of the latter being found in northern models and cemented in the state, thus requiring the erasure of the ‘local’, its alterity, traditions, and autonomy, in actual fact the state remains a site of ontological insecurity. At a societal level an ontological peace in which difference, pluralism, and hybrid frameworks for self-other relations is suggested, and might even have long existed in some quarters. Subaltern agency often tries to promote this in various creative ways where the state and the international are either opposed or are obstacles to its objective of an ontologically diverse peace, partly because though they may prefer liberalism and pluralism, these tend to be read through specific ontological perspective.


Table 9.1 illustrates the ambivalence of mainstream approaches to peace and security (victor’s and liberal peace), the binaries they produce and the methods they use. Their positions on peace are ambivalent even though they claim universality. Peace formation on the other hand embraces difference and so that very ambivalence about security and insecurity because it is only through the recognition of alterity that peace’s subjects may build an inclusive, and therefore hybrid, peace.

Note 1 See for example La’oHamutuk, http://www.laohamutuk.org/

BibliographyBourdieu, P. 1977, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Brown, M. M. 2011, The Unfinished Revolution, London: Allen Lane.Buzan, B. & Wæver, O. 2003, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Call, C. T. & Cousens, E. M. 2008, ‘Ending Wars and Building Peace: International

Responses to War-Torn Societies’, International Studies Perspectives, vol.9, no. pp. 1–21.

Confidential Diplomatic Source (2011), Personal Interview, EU Commission, Nicosia, Cyprus, 10 November.

Confidential Source (2011), Personal Interview, Home for Cooperation, Nicosia/ Lefkosha, 5 November.

Cooper, N. 2007, ‘Review Article: On the Crisis of the Liberal Peace’, Conflict, Security and Development, vol.7, no.4.

Constantinou, C. 2007, ‘Aporias of Identity: Bicommunalism, Hybridity and the “Cyprus Problem”’, Cooperation and Conflict, vol.42, no.3, pp.247–270.

Doyle, M. 1983, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol.12, no. 3, pp. 205–235.

Table 9.1 Types of peace and states of securityIngroup/self Outgroup/other Instrument/power

victor’s peace Physical, ontological insecurity

Insecure/marginalized

Direct or structural power/ptate

Liberal peace Physical security, universalism

Insecure/governmentalized

Governmentality/internationals

Peace formation Insecure/ secure?* Insecure/secure?* Subaltern agency/local peace organizations

*Peace formation requires a collapsing of the distinctions between security and insecurity – which themselves are sites of competition unresolved by the modern state – until both in- groups and out-groups autonomously produce a hybrid outcome.


Doyle, M. & Sambanis, N. 2006, Making War and Building Peace, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Foucault, M. 1979, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: vintage Books.

Foucault, M. 1980, Power/Knowledge, New York: Pantheon.Foucault, M. 1997, ‘What is Critique’, in The Politics of Truth, Cambridge, MA; MIT

Press.Foucault, M. 2008, The Birth of Politics, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Palgrave.Ginty, R. M. 2008, ‘Indigenous Peace-Making versus the Liberal Peace’, Cooperation and

Conflict, vol.43, no.2, pp.139–163.Hadjipavlou, M. 2010, Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict,

London: I. B. Tauris.Hagmann, T. 2007, ‘Bringing the Sultan Back In: Elders As Peacemakers in Ethiopia’s

Somali Region’ in State Recognition and the Democratisation of Sub-Saharan Africa, eds L. Buur & H. M. Kyed, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp.31–51.

Johnson, P. 2010, ‘Local vs. National Peacebuilding: The Richness of Somali Peacemaking’. Available from: www.prio.no/peaceethics/PeacE-Discussions

Krasner, S. D. 2004, ‘Sharing Sovereignty. New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States’, International Security, vol.29, no.2, pp.85–120.

Latour, B. 2007, Reassembling the Social, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Mcgregor, A., Skeaff, L. & Bevan M. 2012, ‘Overcoming Secularism? Catholic

Development Geographies in Timor-Leste’, Third World Quarterly, vol.33, no.6, pp.1129–1146.

Menkhaus, K. 2006, ‘Governance without Government in Somalia’, International Security, vol.31, no.3, Winter 2006, pp.74–106.

Menkhaus, K. 2008, ‘The Rise of the Mediated State in Northern Kenya’, Africa Focus, vol.21, no.2, pp.23–38.

Montanaro, L. 2009, ‘The Kosovo Statebuilding Conundrum: Addressing Fragility in a Contested State’, FRIDE Working Paper, no. 91.

Odendaal, A. 2010, ‘An Architecture for Building Peace at the Local Level’, UNDP Discussion Paper.

Paris, R. 2004, At War’s End, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Parish, M. 2010, ‘Paradigms of State-Building: Comparing Bosnia and Kosovo’, Journal

of Eurasian Law, vol.3, no.3.Perera, J., Executive Director, Personal Interview, National Peace Council, Colombo Sri

Lanka, 20 April 2012.Picket, B. L. 1996, ‘Foucault and the Politics of Resistance’, Polity, vol.28, no.4, pp.445–

466.Richards, R. 2012, ‘The Road Less Travelled: Self-led Statebuilding and International

“Non-intervention” in the Creation of Somaliland’, in Statebuilding and State-formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention, ed. B. Bliesemann de Guevara, London: Routledge, pp.149–164.

Richmond, O. P. 2009a, ‘Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism: The Everyday, Empathy, and Post-Liberal Peacebuilding’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, vol.3, no.3, pp.324–344.

Richmond, O. P. 2009b ‘Eirenism and a Post-Liberal Peace’, Review of International Studies, vol.35, no.3, pp.557–580.

Richmond, O. P. 2011a, ‘Critical Agency, Resistance, and a Post-Colonial Civil Society’, Cooperation and Conflict, vol.46, no.4, pp.419–440.


Richmond, O. P. 2011b, A Post-Liberal Peace, London: Routledge.Richmond, O. P. 2012a, ‘Beyond Local Ownership and Participation in the Architecture of

International Peacebuilding’, Ethnopolitics, vol.11, no.4, pp.354–375.Richmond, O. P. 2012b, ‘Missing Links: Peace Infrastructures and Peace Formation’,

Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series, no.10.Richmond, O. P. 2013, Failed Statebuilding and Peace Formation, New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press.Richmond, O. P. & Kappler, S. 2011, ‘Peacebuilding in Bosnia: Resistance or

Emancipation?’, Security Dialogue, vol.42, no.3, pp.261–278.Ruak, T. M. (2012) Address on The Commemoration of the 13th Anniversary of the

Referendum for ‘the Self-Determination of the People of Timor-Leste’, Dili, 30 August.Rumelili, B. 2007, Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast

Asia, London: Palgrave.Scott, J. C. 1985, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press.Scott, J. C. 1990, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press.Scott, J. C. 2009, The Art of Not Being Governed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.SIDA 2003, ‘Civil Society and Democracy in Cambodia. Changing Roles and Trends’,

The Fifth Report of the Sida Advisory Team on Democratic Governance, www.pnyx.se/docs/CambodiaI.pdf

Snyder, J. 2000, From Voting to Violence, London: W.W. Norton.Tongeren, P. v. 2011 ‘Overview on Infrastructures for Peace’. Available from: www.

parliamentariansforconflictprevention.netTilly C. 1990, Coercion, Capital, and European States, Oxford: Blackwell.Trindade, J. 2008 ‘Reconciling Conflict Paradigms: An East Timorese vision of the Ideal

State’, in D. Mearns, Democratic Governance in Timor-Leste: Reconciling the Local and the National, Darwin, NT: Charles Darwin University.

Trindade, J. 2012, Advisor to the President, personal interview.UNESCO 2003, Women and Peace in Africa, New York: UNESCO.Unofficial Source 2012a, Personal Interview, Political Affairs, UNMIT, Dili, Timor-Leste,

29 August.Unofficial Source 2012b, Personal Interview, ‘Mahein’ (Guardian) Organisation, Dili,

Timor-Leste, 27 August.van Tongeren, P. 2011, ‘Overview on Infrastructures for Peace’. Online. Available from:

www.parliamentariansforconflictprevention.net.visoka, G. 2012, ‘The “Kafkaesque Accountability” of International Governance in

Kosovo’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, vol.6, no.2, pp.189–212.

decolonizing security and peace: mono-epistemology versus peace formation

Documents