Notes on Crafting Liberal Peace? International Peace Promotion and the Contextual Politics of Peace in Sri Lanka

Authored by Kristian Stokke, published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, December 2009.
Focuses on the promotion of liberal peace in intrastate conflicts, particularly in the Global South, using Sri Lanka as a case study.

Intrastate conflicts in the Global South are often framed as global security threats.
This framing is used to justify the promotion of liberal peace through elite negotiations and the use of humanitarian and development aid.
The discourse emphasizes the synergies among liberal peace, liberal democracy, and neoliberal development.
It is assumed that liberal peace can be crafted through internationally facilitated elite negotiations, based on recent democratic transitions.
The article examines the tension between this technocratic approach and contextual political dynamics in conflict situations.

Sri Lanka's fifth peace process is analyzed as a product of international and domestic power relations and stakeholder strategies.
There was a convergence between the government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) around:
- Crafting peace through narrowly defined elite negotiations.
- Linking peace and development through humanitarian and development aid.
The use of development as a precursor to peace politicized the issue of interim development administration.
Political exclusion of elites and social exclusion of intermediate Sinhalese classes undermined the government's agenda for liberal peace.
Sri Lanka illustrates the tensions between internationalized, elitist peace crafting and contextual power relations.

The post-Cold War period is marked by new geographies of conflict and security.
Contemporary wars are primarily intrastate conflicts in the Global South.
Representations of these conflicts are contested:
- Some see them as rooted in social and economic grievances and limited democratic participation.
- Others argue they are motivated by insurgents' greed for resources and power, amounting to terrorism.
The former position suggests conflict resolution through political negotiations and comprehensive development.
The latter lends itself to armed interventions to combat terrorism and establish political stability.

Human geographic research on intrastate conflicts is uneven.
Development geographers have paid relatively little attention to armed conflicts.
Political geographers have examined northern geopolitical discourse on southern conflicts, with less attention to contextual dynamics.
There is a need for substantive integration of postcolonial studies and critical geopolitics in research on armed intrastate conflicts.
Critical geopolitics has investigated how post-Cold War conflicts are construed as global security threats.
There are few political geographic studies of nonviolent facilitation of conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

The article addresses the knowledge gap at the intersection of security and development.
It presents a contextualized case study of the interplay between international actors' practical geopolitics and domestic political dynamics in Sri Lanka's peace process.
The failure of the process is attributed to the disjuncture between elitist crafting of liberal peace and domestic dynamics of political representation and mobilization.
Sinhalese ethnonationalist politicization of liberal peace led to a militaristic