Challenges to Peacebuilding in a Changing World

Title: Local origins, liberal trajectories?: Analyzing the entanglements of peacebuilding interventions to the illiberal local order in Myanmar, Nepal, and the Philippines

The proposed research aims to interrogate the entanglements of liberal peacebuilding efforts to the illiberal local order in conflict-affected societies, in hopes of addressing the rising authoritarianism and illiberalism that has hampered peacebuilding interventions all over the world. Specifically, I ask the initial question: How do embedded political/social structures at the local level shape international peacebuilding interventions, and vice versa? My research hopes to tackle head-on dilemmas inherent to post-conflict peacebuilding efforts in societies mired with local state capture, warlord politics, and elite bargaining; and aims to develop a useful framework to understand the effects of big men/women politics and kinship-based alliances to international peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions in conflict-affected communities. The resulting framework can potentially offer alternative pathways for post-conflict statebuilding and unsettle criticisms and contestations of the practice of liberal peacebuilding in societies with limited statehood in Asia (Myanmar, Nepal, and the Philippines).

There is no debate that the liberal peace template privileges state characteristics that conform to Westphalian states-- strong institutions, meritorious bureaucracy, and equal representation, rendering locally derived state-society arrangements as insignificant. Peripheral arrangements such as kin-based alliances and personalistic politics are rooted in history and state formation processes in Asia, yet little is known about their entanglements to the current political order and broader peacebuilding landscape in both literature and practice. Proponents and scholars of peacebuilding often fail to acknowledge the existing pre- and post-war structures, let alone recognize their long-term legacies and the backdrop from which they successfully operate. Even with the aid of critical peacebuilding and local turn literature, to this day, both scholarship and practice have grappled to understand where peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions fell short in fostering peace in fragile societies all over the world.

Through qualitative methods, I will analyze the entanglements of international peacebuilding interventions to the embedded political and social order in Myanmar, Nepal, and the Philippines. Primary data will be collected through archival, historical, and ethnographic research, employing semi-structured interviews and participant observation among local communities: their respective local government units, indigenous institutions, traditional justice systems, and grassroots organizations, among others. An extended field involvement as a volunteer at one or two of International Alert's offices in Asia is also envisioned.
The analysis will proceed in three stages. The first part of the analysis is to characterize the social and political institutions in societies with 'limited statehood', zooming into locally-derived orders based on kinship, alliances, "big men" and insurgent politics, spanning from historical to modern times. I will then juxtapose these institutions and their practices to international peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions by International Alert in the three contexts since 1988 in the Philippines, 2001 in Nepal, and 2012 in Myanmar. Through the lens of comparative historical sociology, these entanglements will then be analyzed vis-a-vis the "underlying structures-- economic, institutional, social, and geopolitical (Hedman and Sidel, 2005, p. 6)" orders. I hypothesize that the local and international orders influence peacebuilding outcomes more than previously assumed in practice and literature. This influence comes and goes in different directions, creating collisions, and contestation but also negotiations and accommodat