Against the Illiberal Peace

How do UN stabilization operations in civil wars affect statehood? The article builds on existing literature on illiberal peacebuilding, by elaborating on the dissonances that have evolved between the rhetoric of freedom and equality at the base of the liberal international systems, and its backlashes and uniformities in dividing and weakening states under robust stabilization operations. Mounting challenges to the liberal international order have moved attention to a shift in conflict management, where an ‘illiberal’ peace is supposed to fundamentally diverge from Western, ‘liberal’ modalities. Here, I criticize the illiberal peace’s logic of difference by elaborating how liberal conflict management violates political pluralism in negotiated settlements. The article analyzes the interactions between struggles over sovereignty, international recognition, and stabilization operations conducted between the early 1990s and 2000s in Mali, Somalia, Libya and Sudan. By focusing on negotiations and peace agreements, I advance a theoretical framework and categorization of how conflict management strategies attempting to control and remake the state, influence power sharing and culminate into statehood transformations (secession, de-facto state, fragmentation, separatism). I examine how liberal peace conflict managements have historically compromised political plurality even in negotiated settlements and denied freedom to states.