Who
wins the Neo-liberal Peace? The World
Bank, Information Asymmetries and the Economics of Peace in Sri Lanka – Part 2
Continued From Last Issue Click
Here for Part 1
…
Representing
Development: Information Asymmetries and power/Knowledge Hierarchies
International measures, indexes and observations of “success” or
“failure” of nation-states, economies, or people, have their own logic. They
establish authoritative descriptions, and construct truths about “national”
progress or regress. Indeed a number of theorists of development and
developmentalism (Escobar 1995,
Nandy 1983, Gupta 1998) have noted, that in the trajectory of “world
development”, peoples, nations, regions, and
the “third world” have come to see themselves as more or less developed/
underdeveloped, and more or less in need of development, or social capital, or
institutions, or better governance, or globalization etc. They have also
suggested that development processes might actually de-develop societies, and
have traced how development indicators may conceal increasing economic
inequalities and social and regional polarization.
In countries with skeptical
publics, information from international development and financial institutions
are sometimes given greater authority because of the presumption that they may
be more independent and accurate than government’s figures. In
turn, these authoritative indexes, measures, and narratives of developmental
progress or regress configure local perceptions of local conditions. Sometimes,
these constructions and their policy agendas elicit counter-reactions and
ethno-nationalist back lashes.[1]
In noting this dynamic of how a country may be measured, evaluated, and
restructured for World Development, my purpose is not to suggest that poor
people or armed conflicts do not exist. Rather it is to mark how poverty qua
poverty, or conflict qua conflict, are constituted as objects of and for
analysis and developmental-relief intervention
(read power/knowledge), and how such interventions are legitimated.
In the
late nineties as the war escalated in Sri Lanka local and global
political-economic processes and imperatives configured the dominant
representation and interpretation of the conflict-development nexus in Sri
Lanka, that growth with war was possible. The notion that war with growth was
possible is a corollary of the economic reductionism that characterizes the argument
that “violence is economically rational” and it is greed rather than grievance
that fuels conflicts (Collier et al., 2001). 1997-98 were years when the Bank
and IMF were increasingly critiqued on the crisis and escalating social
violence in the Asian Tiger economies. Internally, in the World Bank, Stiglitz
had criticized IMF policies and suggested that developmental macro-policy may
fuel and deepen the crisis and ensuing violence in South East Asia (Stiglitz:
1997, 1998, Wade:
2000). In this context, success stories even in conflict torn societies
were needed. In “Missed Opportunities”,
the World Bank’s Sri Lanka country report in 2000 suggested that Sri Lanka is a
relative success in terms of economic liberalization and structural
adjustments.
A story of operative fictions and mutual
entrapment between international financial institutions and a government
fighting a dirty war (given that national economic policy is increasingly
globally configured), amidst an increasingly dysfunctional democracy emerges in
the myth that “growth with war” was possible in Lanka. This entrapment in turn
sustained the war dynamic which developed self-sustaining momentum
(Rajasingham- Senakayake 2001). The myth was shattered after the LTTE attack on
Katunayake airport in July 2001, that impacted on sectors dependent on external
markets, particularly trade, tourism, and shipping and the growth figures
dipped from 5% into negative digits overnight.
This entrapment may continue with the peace dynamic too with the
government and Bank promoting an unsustainable neo-liberal peace.
The myth that growth with war was possible was also
enabled by the history of perception of the island as an “outlier” in the fifty-year-old
“world development” discourse. Sri Lanka had always followed the path of the
unexpected. At independence in 1948, armed conflict was not on the island’s
development agenda. The island’s social indicators that were the best in the
South Asian region despite very low per capita income, placed it in the
category of “outlier” in the development discourse for decades. Moreover, a
multilingual, multiethnic, multi-faith, and multicultural land, Ceylon as it
was called then, had been considered a “model democracy” until the
mid-eighties. In the years of the conflict, growth in the south despite a
debilitating armed conflict in the north east further buttressed Sri Lanka’s
standing as an “outlier” in the world development discourse, and enabled the perception
that it was land of “missed opportunities”. The “outlier” perception of Sri
Lanka masked the island’s de-development and deep regional divisions that fuel
the armed conflict in the island.
Indeed, it is
arguable that the regional disparity between the conflict affected North-East
and the rest of the island constituted one of the biggest challenges of peace
building and development, even as the central barrier to human development in
Sri Lanka may be the information divide and information lacuna. The engineering
of information and the resulting ignorance generated at the highest levels of
policy and opinion making on the national impacts of the war was one of the
reasons that the war escalated to dire proportions, without giving rise to an
anti-war peace movement in the late nineties.
Conclusion: De-Development and the poverty of theory
in Post/Conflict Policy
Post/conflict
reconstruction, a growth sector in the world development industry led by the Bretton
Woods institutions is about information asymmetries, global-local hierarchies of knowledge and power and the
marketing of myths and models of development. Recognition by the development
policy community that Sri Lanka was a “complex emergency” and that violent
conflicts could undo years of development achievements, has not entailed
acknowledgement of the converse process: that the macro-policies and
practices of (uneven) development may also structure and fuel domestic
political-economic transformations and societal polarization leading to violent
conflicts. Possible linkages between development processes that exacerbated
social inequality and a number of social tensions (JVP and LTTE youth
uprisings), to contributed to over determine the north-south “ethnic” divide in
the island, and hence the need for mainstreaming conflict analysis into
development policy and planning are hardly acknowledged. There is a need to
link macro-policies of development to the local war economy in the conflict
zone, rather than treating them as separate.
It is arguable
that trans-historical “ethnic” readings of the violence in Sri Lanka and
neo-liberal myths that “growth with war” is possible in the dependent economies
of the global south have obscured issues of economic and social inequality that structured the 2 decades-long armed
conflict in the north and south of Sri Lanka. They also obscured how the war
had transformed the island’s society and political economy. But issues of political
representation and economic justice are inextricably linked: self-determination
will remain an unfulfilled promise without economic and social rights.
After the initial
de-politicization that the peace process necessitated, it would be necessary to
move on and deal seriously with political economic issues by linking civil and
political issues of demilitarisation and de-escalation with social justice
issues or economic and social rights. Post/conflict reconstruction must have a
holistic approach and move beyond a formalist legal approach to devolution and
power sharing among the armed actors and the State, and address issues such as
poverty, inequality and their relationship to macro-policies of economic
adjustment and conflict. Otherwise, the risk is that a peace agreement might
once again become a blue print for more war, or be merely a trade off between
armed groups, and politicians who peddle ethnic conflict or ethnic peace to
shore up their vote banks. Rather, the need is for substantive
democratic reform and transformation of political culture and economic ideology
and institutions (including the state’s coercive apparatus) that have generated
and fuelled multiple conflicts and much of the violence over twenty years.
The dominance of
the World Bank in the post-conflict reconstruction industry and the manner in
which a range of structural adjustments projects (including the recently
stymied labour bill) are being pushed through parliament as the peace process
takes centre stage in national politics may suggests otherwise. Structural adjustments
usually mean that things must get worse before they get better-- if ever.
Things getting worse usually mean another cycle of conflict that is very hard
to stop once started as Darby has noted. The timing of these interventions in
the long-term may lead to increased levels of unemployment, spiralling cost of
essential services and living and the unravelling of the peace process by
spoilers who exploit popular disaffection. Argentina where riots and social
unrest has occurred in the wake of massive neo-liberal reform sounds a warning
to us all.
My purpose here is not to decry all reform. Certainly reform in the
energy, education, public and social sectors and administrative and governance
structures is necessary. The point however is that the neo-liberal agenda may
not be the most appropriate type of reform. What seems to be forgotten in the
post/conflict and developmental emphasis on “good governance” (based on the
model and language of corporate governance despite Arthur Anderson Enron and
the expanding of corporate scandals) is that institutions are embedded in
social, cultural and political process. The formalist focus institutions and
constitutions often reduce democracy to actually existing free market democracy
and may result in a new cycle of war as
peace spoilers use the grievance of spiralling costs of living and real and
perceived increases in economic inequalities to upset the peace.
Finally, the question remains: will humanitarian and post/conflict aid
effectively subsidize SAPs and county’s adjustment to Global Capital (ism)? As
the various MPs tour Switzerland, Canada etc for constitutional models they may
as well read Stiglitz and visit third world Latin American countries in
conflict and post/conflict situations that have a far closer profile and learn
from economic debate and debacles in that region not to mention Africa. What
informed critical debate in those countries may suggest is that After
almost two decades of armed violence in Sri Lanka building a sustainable peace
would entail political and economic reform aimed at achieving substantive
rather than ritual or procedural democracy and the need for re-distributive
justice. By substantive democracy is meant here, economic and social as well as
civil and political aspects of democratic practice.
A striking example of the failure to connect the issues of social
justice with political reform is evident in how the property rights of
displaced people are being addressed as if the pattern of violence and
displacement in the agrarian peasant communities had no relationship to prior
competition over land between peasants of the various ethnic communities, and
issues of land settlement and redistribution. Redistribution has been a
fundamental aspect of peace processes in Guatemala and El Salvador and other
parts of the world. In Zimbabwe the failure to address the issue of land in the
first instance arguable has fuelled the recent land disputes form which Mugabe
has made political capital. The post/conflict settlement in Sri Lanka if it is
to be sustainable in short must take into account issues of poverty and
property rather than seeking to extend the interests of international
corporations. In short, the peace process will have to balance the right of
return of the (individual) property of the displaced with the new (collective)
allotment of territory that the war has affected and notions of individual
rights with notions of collective or social property.
Finally it seems a propos to quote, Amatya Sen, another Nobel Prize
winning economist’s response to a question by a Pakistani Journalist at the
Lahore based Dawn:
Journalist: “Conditions
imposed by international financial institutions sometimes prevent recipient
countries, even democracies, from acting in the interests of their own people.
How can this problem be solved?”
Sen: “I think that is a
correct diagnosis, though things used to be even worse than they are today. In
the past, conditions imposed by the IMF and the World Bank proved quite
counterproductive instead of serving the interests of the poor. They often saw
expenditure on such things as education and nutritional supplementation through
cheapening of food as bureaucratic, governmental expenditure that hinders a
country's efforts towards economic development. This is, of course, a mistake.
But the understanding has improved in the case of the Bank under the leadership
of James Wolfensohn. However, some of the Bank's practices may not be entirely
in accordance with his guidelines and of course, there is need for the IMF to
seize these issues more fully”.
Sen sounds optimistic that
the Bank can learn from the past. We
will have to wait and see and monitor what’s being said on the peace process in
the streets of Colombo and in the post/conflict zones of the north east.
Already there are signs that some people are becoming nostalgic for the war
economy, when the cost of living was less burdensome that it was today as the
neoliberal peace looms on the horizon. In the meantime, it may be relevant to
do a conflict analysis of the post/conflict reconstruction package by analyzing
links between the macro-policies of “development” including SAPs and cycles of
violence. Sri Lanka simply cannot afford another cycle of conflict between its
diverse ethnic and religious communities that co-existed in relative peace for
centuries before the World Development industry led by the Bretton Woods
institutions and the international military industrial complex came along.
References
Collier, Paul
Greed and
Grievance in Civil Wars.
http:/www.worldbank.org
Darby, John
2002 The Effects of Violence in Peace Processes.
Washington DC. United States Institute for Peace
Fine, Ben
2001 Social Capital Versus Social Theory. London.
Routledge
Mayer, M, Rajasingham-Senanayake, Thangaraja. Eds.
2003 Building Local Capacities for Peace: New Delhi.
Macmillan.
Silva, Tudor
2003 in Mayer et al. Eds
Stiglitz, Joseph
2002 Globalization and Its Discontents New York.
Norton and Co.
Wade, Robert
2000 Showdown at the World Bank. New Left Review
Wood, Elizabeth
2000 Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent
Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador. Cambridge University Press.
--
Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake is an anthropologist and Senior Fellow at
the Social Scientist’s Association and ICES and a Fulbright New Century
scholar, 2003 at New York University’s International Center for Advanced
Studies.
[1]
Michael Foucault’s work on the dynamics of
discourse and power to construct and represent an authorized social reality,
and Nandy’s work on how global discourses come to structure local realities and
subjectivities has given us the tools to unveil some of the mechanisms by which
certain orders of knowledge are produced as permissible modes of being and
thinking, while others are disqualified, also in the historically singular
experience, if not teleology of “world development”.