The Strange Wars of Liberal Peace

Focusing on Somalia, this article demonstrates how the rise of population-centric counterinsurgency involves the increasing convergence between the politics of warfare and the politics of peacebuilding.

Instead of hierarchical and ‘direct’ military strategy, contemporary counterinsurgency advances military intelligence and tactics through aligning with, and drawing upon, peacebuilding policy trends advocating ‘bottom-up’ approaches and engagements with local ‘hybrid orders’. Through such alignment, contemporary counterinsurgency posits itself as an exercise of enabling social recovery, and providing support to self-securing communitiesagainst insurgencies.

Challenging such benign portrayals through an analysis of the implementation of human-centred approaches to overcoming ‘subversion’, the article instead demonstrates how the means and ends of peacebuilding and those of ‘everyday warfare’ are becoming increasingly blurred, thereby contributing to installing logics of warfare at the level of social relations.