Hegemony and African Agency in Liberal Peace Interventions

Abstract

African regional actors have been notably active in the modern practice of liberal peace intervention. From Somalia to South Sudan to The Gambia, these non-Western actors prioritised creating a liberal form of order (where democracy, the rule of law and human rights are guaranteed) as a central methodological approach for reconstructing peace in (post-)conflict societies. This phenomenon presents a paradox since the liberal peace intervention is (often recognised as) a Western neo-imperialist undertaking. Informed by this puzzling empirical development, this thesis asks the central research question: why did African interveners activate their agency in liberal peace interventions? The 'neo-imperialist intentionality' explanation offered by the critical IR intervention literature for expounding why international interveners prioritise liberal peace intervention could not provide a satisfactory answer to why African interveners - as a group of non-Western actors - committed to the creation of liberal order in their peace interventions. As revealed in the mainstream intervention literature, the shortcoming of this framework centred on its primary and exclusive aim to explicate the interventionist actions, intentions and agency of Western interveners. This thesis ascribes the foundation of this weakness to how the extant critical IR scholarship on liberal intervention fails to accord any form of relevance to the non-Western agency in the methodological study of contemporary peace interventions. As a way of responding to this shortcoming, this thesis recasts African interveners as subjects whose agency in liberal peace intervention is worth exploring by focusing on their interventions in Somalia, South Sudan, and The Gambia. It draws and builds on the neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony to offer a more comprehensive lens for delving into the agency of African actors in the reproduction of the liberal normative order through peace interventions. The application of this explanatory approach led to the central finding of this thesis: that African interveners activated their agency in liberal peace intervention because they consented to common sense of the hegemonic Western liberal order as the only ideological paradigm suitable for inventing and sustaining peace. The neo-Gramscian analysis offered by this thesis recognises that African consent to the liberal order was the outcome of a specific, complex interaction. This thesis develops a neo-Gramscian explanatory framework to elucidate how a group of nonhegemonic actors may respond to common sense of hegemonic ordering. The framework makes a case that a set of non-dominant actors with ownership of a coherent alternative ideology, historical empowerment, and commitment to counterhegemony are more predisposed to resist the social forces of hegemony and its common sense. Within this purview, this thesis finds that because African actors were historically disempowered due to prolonged colonial subjugation and are neither presently laying claim to a coherent alternative ideology nor committing to counterhegemony, they could not resist the structural forces of the liberal order that recently pervaded the global society. The major implication of these findings is that notwithstanding the Western neo-imperial character of the liberal peace, the end is not in sight for its operationalisation in (in some parts of) the global South. Show more