Beyond the liberal peace: Latin American inspirations for post-liberal peacebuilding

Abstract

Critics of liberal peacebuilding have started to move beyond mere criticism and think about what hybrid or post-liberal peacebuilding might mean. This article aims at contributing to this debate by bringing contemporary experiences in that are usually not reflected in the peacebuilding literature. Since the turn of the century, political changes in a series of South American countries, including most notably in the case of Bolivia, have led scholars to identify trends towards post-liberal ways of organising and exercising political rule. The context in which these processes occur is, of course, very different from the so-called post-conflict societies usually studied by peacebuilding scholars. Yet, precisely because of these differences, conditions for a locally driven search for post-liberal democracy are much better in Latin America. In this sense, while the attempt to move beyond liberal peacebuilding does certainly not need yet another template to be implemented worldwide, these experiences might well serve as important inspirations in the ongoing search for locally grown, hybrid variants of a post-liberal peace.

Full text

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Beyond the Liberal Peace: Latin American inspirations for post-liberal peacebuilding
Jonas Wolff
Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), Germany
Contact: wolff@hsfk.de
This is the manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Peacebuilding, Vol. 3,
No. 3, pp. 279-296, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2015.1040606.
Please refer to the final version as published when citing.
Abstract
Critics of liberal peacebuilding have started to move beyond mere criticism and think about
what hybrid or post-liberal peacebuilding might mean. This article aims at contributing to this
debate by bringing contemporary experiences in that are usually not reflected in the
peacebuilding literature. Since the turn of the century, political changes in a series of South
American countries, including most notably in the case of Bolivia, have led scholars to
identify trends towards post-liberal ways of organizing and exercising political rule. The
context in which these processes occur is, of course, very different from the so-called post-
conflict societies usually studied by peacebuilding scholars. Yet, precisely because of these
differences, conditions for a locally driven search for post-liberal democracy are much better
in Latin America. In this sense, while the attempt to move beyond liberal peacebuilding does
certainly not need yet another template to be implemented worldwide, these experiences
might well serve as important inspirations in the ongoing search for locally grown, hybrid
variants of a post-liberal peace.
Keywords: Post-liberalism; liberal peace; democracy; Bolivia; post-liberal peacebuilding

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Introduction
The spread of international peacebuilding missions around the world has not only produced
sobering results. It has also led to a rich academic debate that, from different perspectives and
with different aims, criticizes the practices and premises of liberal peacebuilding.1 Scholars
working with a problem-solving approach, right from the start, translated their criticism into
proposals for improving peacebuilding. In contrast, those that have, on a more fundamental
level, challenged the project of liberal peacebuilding “on the basis of its assumptions,
epistemological and conceptual foundations”, were usually hesitant to engage with the
question of alternatives to the liberal peace.2 In recent years, however, these “critical” scholars
started to move beyond mere criticism and have set out to think about what a hybrid or post-
liberal peace might mean.3 This endeavor is not about proposing an alternative model but
about studying empirically the hybrid variants of peace that develop out of the encounter
between external and local efforts at building peace. Starting from the observation “that
liberal peace is already modified when it meets the local context”,4 the focus of analysis is on
local resistance to and “the ongoing renegotiation of the liberal peace via local agency”.5 The
“inevitable outcome” of these processes is, then, some form of “hybridity”, but it is an open
question – and depends on the specific circumstances – whether and which kind of peace will
eventually emerge.6
While the critical peacebuilding literature has started to embrace the notion of a “post-liberal
peace”, a series of scholars working on Latin American politics, in recent years, has become
interested in “post-neoliberal” and “post-liberal” trends in that region. On the one hand, the
so-called left turn, i.e. the election and reelection of a series of left-of-center governments
across the region, has been accompanied by attempts to turn away from neoliberal economic
1 For an overview, see Roger Mac Ginty, ed., Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding (Abingdon: Routledge,
2013); Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A critical agenda for
peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 763–83; Edward Newman, Roland Paris, and Oliver P.
Richmond, eds., New perspectives on liberal peacebuilding (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2009);
Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, ed., Rethinking the Liberal Peace. External models and local alternatives (London:
Routledge, 2011).
2 Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, ‘Introduction: Liberal peace in dispute’, in Tadjbakhsh, Rethinking the Liberal Peace,
2. Tadjbakhsh’s distinction between “problem-solving” and “critical” theories is, of course, taken from Robert W.
Cox. See also Michael Pugh, ‘The problem-solving and critical paradigms’, in Routledge Handbook of
Peacebuilding, ed. Roger Mac Ginty (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 11–24.
3 This, most notably, includes the contributions to Tadjbakhsh, Rethinking the Liberal Peace, as well as Roger
Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), and Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London: Routledge, 2011).
4 Tadjbakhsh, ‘Introduction’, 4.
5 Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace’, Millennium 38, no. 3 (2010): 670.
6 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 17.

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policies.7 On the other, with diverse experiences of participatory democracy at the local level
and, in the Andean region, the adoption of new constitutions that partially deviate from the
mainstream model of liberal democracy, contours of a possible post-liberal democracy have
begun to take shape.8 To the best of my knowledge, however, these developments have not yet
been taken up by peacebuilding scholars.9 This article therefore reviews contemporary Latin
American experiences with post-liberalism in order to identify insights for the discussion
about post-liberal peacebuilding. This said, I will not deal with those Central American post-
conflict countries that have experienced processes of liberal peacebuilding and are, therefore,
already reflected in the peacebuilding literature.10 Instead, I deliberately focus on South
American experiments with post-liberal politics that are not shaped by war-to-peace
transitions – and, hence, usually not included in debates about (post-) liberal peacebuilding. A
particular focus is on contemporary Bolivia because here the attempt to establish – by
peaceful and basically democratic means – a hybrid, post-liberal order is most advanced (even
if still ongoing, unsettled and contested).11
But why should peacebuilding scholars care about post-liberalism in South America? With
good reasons, existing research on emerging variants of post-liberal peace has focused on so-
called post-conflict countries and, in particular, on those with international peacebuilding
missions.12 Even if still in an incipient stage, these studies, however, demonstrate that the
search for viable, locally grown versions of a post-liberal peace is particularly difficult in
countries that have experienced civil war and/or international military intervention. Hence
there is still limited empirical evidence and rather abstract theoretical ideas about how post-
7 Cf. John Burdick, Philip Oxhorn, and Kenneth M. Roberts, eds., Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America?
Societies and Politics at the Crossroads (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Laura Macdonald and Arne
Ruckert, eds., Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Cristóbal Rovira
Kaltwasser, ‘Toward Post-Neoliberalism in Latin America?’, Latin American Research Review 46, no. 2 (2011):
225–34.
8 Cf. Benjamin Arditi, ‘Arguments About the Left Turns in Latin America. A Post-Liberal Politics?’, Latin
American Research Review 43, no. 3 (2008): 59–81; Arturo Escobar, ‘Latin America at a Crossroads. Alternative
modernizations, post-liberalism, or post-development?’, Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 1–65; Detlef Nolte
and Almut Schilling-Vacaflor, eds., New Constitutionalism in Latin America: Promises and Practices (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012); Jonas Wolff, ‘Towards Post-Liberal Democracy in Latin America? A Conceptual Framework
Applied to Bolivia’, Journal of Latin American Studies 45, no. 1 (2013): 31–59.
9 An exception is Wenche Hauge, ‘A Latin American Agenda for Peace’, International Peacekeeping 16, no. 5
(2009): 685–698. Richmond has noted, if only in passing, that the dynamics initiated by indigenous movements
in Latin America directly relate to his notion of a post-liberal peace. Cf. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 182.
10 See, for instance, Roddy Brett, ‘Peace stillborn? Guatemala’s liberal peace and the indigenous movement’,
Peacebuilding 1, no. 2 (2013): 222–38; Sabine Kurtenbach, ‘Why is Liberal Peace-building so Difficult? Some
Lessons from Central America’, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, no. 88 (2010): 95–
110; Jenny Pearce, ‘Peace-building in the periphery: Lessons from Central America’, Third World Quarterly 20,
no. 1 (1999): 51–68.
11 Nancy Postero, ‘The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia’, Latin American Research Review
45, special issue (2010): 59–78; Wolff, ‘Towards Post-Liberal Democracy’, 33.
12 Case studies include the “usual suspects” Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Kosovo and Timor Leste, but
also Afghanistan and the Solomon Islands. See, for instance, the contributions to Tadjbakhsh, Rethinking the
Liberal Peace.

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liberal forms of peace could look like. At the same time, critics of liberal peacebuilding are
regularly confronted with the charge that there are just “no real alternatives to the liberal
peace”.13 Most prominently, Roland Paris has explicitly argued that “there is no realistic
alternative to some form of liberal peacebuilding strategy”.14 In this sense, bringing in
contemporary experiences with post-liberalism in South America serves two purposes. On a
general level, it clearly shows that there are actual alternatives to liberal mainstream
conceptions of political and economic order – even if post-liberal experiments in South
America are still limited and uncertain, diverse and contradictory. Second, and more
specifically, these experiences – and the Bolivian example in particular – offer tangible
insights into potential features and tensions of post-liberalism in the Global South.
To be sure, the conditions for the locally driven emergence of post-liberal politics are
certainly much better in contemporary South America than in post-conflict countries, and the
case of Bolivia is very particular even within this region. Still, it is precisely these relatively
benign conditions that have arguably enabled significant post-liberal experiments. In this
sense, while the attempt to move beyond liberal peacebuilding does certainly not need yet
another template to be transplanted worldwide, my much more modest argument is that
contemporary experiences in South America, and most notably in Bolivia, can serve as
important inspirations for the academic and political search for locally grown, hybrid variants
of a post-liberal peace. In this, I follow up on Wenche Hauge’s contention “that the Latin
American model provides alternatives to the hegemonic peacebuilding discourse”. 15 In
contrast to Hauge, who focuses on Latin American leaders’ discourses on peacebuilding and
international activities at the regional level, this article however takes a different approach: It
focuses on recent domestic political changes in selected South American countries.
In what follows, I, firstly, sketch the contemporary debate about “post-(neo-)liberalism” in
Latin America. The main section then reviews core elements of post-liberal trends in the
region and, particularly, in Bolivia with a view to analyzing how liberal and non-liberal
conceptions of political order coalesce in this specific context. In the third and final section, I
discuss how this analysis of post-liberal trends in Latin America/Bolivia might enrich the
debate about post-liberal peacebuilding.
13 Tadjbakhsh, ‘Introduction’, 4.
14 Roland Paris, ‘Saving liberal peacebuilding’, Review of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 340 (emphasis
in the original).
15 Hauge, ‘A Latin American Agenda for Peace’, 685.

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The debate about post-(neo-)liberalism in Latin America
As far as the template of liberal peacebuilding is concerned, there is broad consensus that it
aims at establishing a lasting peace by promoting “liberalization” in both the political and the
economic realm, i.e. “democratization” and “marketization”, as Roland Paris put it.16 This
agenda, however, was not limited to countries emerging from civil war. In fact, Latin America
is the region in the Global South were, during the 1980s and 1990s, both liberal democracy
and neoliberal “structural adjustment” were implemented most comprehensively. While the
overall results of this double transformation in Latin America are heavily contested,17 the
“recipe” proved relatively successful in terms of enabling a liberal peace at the intra-state
level18 – in contrast to the experiences of liberal peacebuilding missions.19
Since the late 1990s, however, the combination of democracy and neoliberalism has met with
increasing resistance from within a series of Latin American countries. Mass protests and
social movements primarily attacked economic and social policies that responded to the
demands by “the market” and international creditors and investors rather than by the poor
majorities of the population. But, from the beginning, this political struggle was also “over
possible alternative blueprints for democracy”.20 Particularly the indigenous movements and
their call for redefining the nation-state, citizenship and democracy have been identified as a
“postliberal challenge”.21 At the same time, also an “experimentation with post-liberal formats
of political participation”22 emerged, important examples being the spread of participatory
budgeting, the creation of autonomous municipalities and the recognition of customary
(indigenous) law. In a few South American countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela,
these bottom-up challenges have culminated in profound transformations of the existing
political regimes via constituent assemblies.23
16 Roland Paris, At War’s End. Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 5. On the introduction of democracy as a standard practice of international peacebuilding missions since
1990, see Anna K. Jarstad and Timothy D. Sisk, eds., From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); on neoliberal economic transformation as the counterpart to
democratization, see Michael Pugh, ‘Curing strangeness in the political economy of peacebuilding. Traces of
liberalism and resistance’, in Tadjbakhsh, Rethinking the Liberal Peace, 147–63.
17 Cf. Kurt Weyland, ‘Neoliberalism and Democracy in Latin America: A Mixed Record’, Latin American
Politics and Society 46, no. 1 (2004): 135–57.
18 Cf. Jonas Wolff, ‘De-Idealizing the Democratic Civil Peace: On the Political Economy of Democratic
Stabilisation and Pacification in Argentina and Ecuador’, Democratization 16, no. 5 (2009): 998–1026.
19 Tadjbakhsh, ‘Introduction’, 1. See also Paris, At War ’s End; Pugh, ‘Curing strangeness’.
20 Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, ‘Introduction: The Cultural and the Political in Latin
American Social Movements’, in Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures. Re-Visioning Latin American Social
Movements, ed. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998): 1.
21 Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America. The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the
Postliberal Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2005): 30.
22 Arditi, ‘Arguments About the Left Turns in Latin America’, 67.
23 Cf. Maxwell A. Cameron and Kenneth E. Sharpe, ‘Andean Left Turns: Constituent Power and Constitution
Making’, in Latin America’s Left Turns: Politics, Policies, and Trajectories of Change, ed. Maxwell A. Cameron
and Eric Hershberg (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2010), 61–78; Escobar, ‘Latin America’.

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What does it mean to characterize these processes of change as “post-liberal”? As Benjamin
Arditi has argued, these instances of an emerging post-liberal politics in Latin America do
“not suggest the end of liberal politics and its replacement with something else, yet it is clear
that the post of post-liberal designates something outside liberalism or at least something that
takes place at the edges of liberalism”.24 Post-liberal democracy, in this sense, is about
questioning the substantial liberal “qualifiers” usually implied by the marker “liberal
democracy” without breaking with basic standards of representative democracy in the Dahlian
sense.25 Correspondingly, the new constitutions in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela maintain
all the well-known institutions of representative democracy and the usual series of political
and civil rights but add or strengthen mechanisms of direct democracy and societal
participation, expand the notion of human rights in areas of economic, social and cultural
rights and include collective indigenous rights.26 Studies on the “post-neoliberal” policies
implemented by the diverse left-to-center governments in South America reach a similar
conclusion: Contemporary attempts to strengthen the economic role of the state and expand
social policies, to deepen the domestic market and implement some kind of redistributive
policies differ from country to country, but in general do not break with the entire neoliberal
model.27 For instance, while the Morales government in Bolivia has abandoned privatization
by enacting the “nationalization” of the gas sector it has stuck to a quite conservative stance in
terms of fiscal responsibility and macroeconomic stability (see below).
This idea of Latin American post-(neo-)liberalism as something partially replacing, partially
modifying and partially maintaining liberal principles constitutes a first general similarity to
the notion of post-liberal peacebuilding as introduced by Oliver Richmond. Post-liberal forms
of peace, there, are conceptualized as the “local-liberal hybrids” that emerge when the liberal
peace is modified by its contact with, and appropriation by, local actors.28 Without breaking
with liberal principles as such, these are combined and partially replaced by “ways of
knowing relating to peace” that deviate from Liberalism’s “Enlightenment, rational, and
individualistic biases”.29 An analysis of the elements of post-liberal democracy in
contemporary Latin America gives us an idea about what this might mean.
24 Arditi, ‘Arguments About the Left Turns in Latin America’, 73.
25 Philippe C. Schmitter, ‘A Sketch of What A “Post-Liberal” Democracy Might Look Like’ (February 27, 2006)
http://www.talaljuk-ki.hu/index.php/article/articleprint/502/-1/21 (accessed March 5, 2009).
26 Cf. Fidel Pérez Flores, Clayton Mendonça Cunha Filho, and André Luiz Coelho, ‘Mecanismos de democracia
participativa: o que há comum nas constituições da Bolívia, Equador e Venezuela?’, Observador On-Line 4, no.
7 (2009), http://observatorio.iuperj.br/pdfs/56_observador_topico_Observador_v_4_n_07.pdf (accessed
September 17, 2009); Jonas Wolff, ‘New Constitutions and the Transformation of Democracy in Ecuador and
Bolivia’, in Nolte and Schilling-Vacaflor, New Constitutionalism in Latin America, 183–202.
27 Cf. Rovira Kaltwasser, ‘Toward Post-Neoliberalism in Latin America?’, 231–3.
28 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 18. Cf. Tadjbakhsh, ‘Introduction’, 4.
29 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 190.

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Elements of post-liberalism in South America
In this section, I briefly summarize six important features that characterize the ongoing search
for post-liberal politics and post-neoliberal economic policies in South America: the
redefinition of the nation-state; the (territorial) reorganization of the state; the redefinition of
the rule of law; the broadening of democratic participation; the broadening of the human
rights agenda; and the transformation of the economy and the state-economy relationship. As
will be seen, all these six elements directly relate to crucial problems discussed in the
peacebuilding literature.
Throughout the section, my main point of reference will be Bolivia, a country in which the
different changes have been particularly pronounced. Bolivia’s ongoing transformation
process is very much associated with the name of Evo Morales, a union leader, coca grower
and head of the political Movement toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS), who
in 2006 became the country’s first indigenous president. Since taking office, Morales has led a
process of profound political change that included, as a core element, the restructuring of the
political system via a constituent assembly. Yet, the adoption of the draft constitution by a
two-thirds majority of the assembly’s present members, in the absence of the most important
opposition groups, was heavily disputed and led to nine months of fierce political struggle. In
the end, however, the governing MAS and parts of the opposition agreed on a detailed
revision of the constitutional draft which was approved by a two-thirds majority in
Congress.30 In January 2009, the new Constitution was approved in a referendum by more
than 60 percent of the population, paving the way for Morales’s reelection in late 2009 (and,
most recently, again in 2014).
30 Cf. Carlos Romero, Carlos Böhrt, and Raúl Peñaranda, Del conflicto al diálogo. Memorias del acuerdo
constitucional (Quito, fBDM and FES-ILDIS, 2009).

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Redefining the nation-state
A core question for international peace- and statebuilding concerns the related task of nation-
building.31 For obvious reasons, post-conflict societies are generally characterized by a lack of
a common national identity. An innovative response that has emerged from Latin America,
and particularly from the indigenous movements in the Andean countries of Bolivia and
Ecuador, is the notion of a “plurinational state”. While the term seems to suggest an open
break with the unitary conception of the nation-state, the concept as used and constitutionally
recognized in Bolivia (and also in Ecuador) is rather a hybrid: It combines an overarching
national identity with an acknowledgment of particular indigenous identities. In this sense, the
new Bolivian constitution refers to the “Bolivian people” or the “Bolivian nation” (Article 3)
and, at the same time, to indigenous “nations and peoples” (Article 2); the “the unity and
integrity of the country” (Preamble), thus, coexists with “plurinational diversity” (Article 9).32
In fact, actual identities of the indigenous population in Bolivia (and beyond) very much
correspond to this notion of dual identification. By and large, indigenous persons consider
themselves to be Bolivians while at the same time identifying themselves as members of a
specific indigenous people.33
The interesting thing about the plurinational state is that it recognizes (even constitutionally)
that multiple national identities exist and that acknowledging, in this case, indigenous nations
and peoples does not necessarily call into question an overarching national identity. On the
contrary, the Bolivian case suggests that it can even strengthen indigenous peoples’
identification with the now “plurinational” state. Yet, the indigenous claim for recognizing the
plurinational nature of the Bolivian state has been very much contested.34 Specifically, non-
31 Cf. Thorsten Gromes, Ohne Staat und Nation ist keine Demokratie zu machen. Bosnien und Herzegowina,
Kosovo und Makedonien nach den Bürgerkriegen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012).
32 República de Bolivia, Asamblea Constituyente, and Honorable Congreso Nacional, Constitución Política del
Estado. Texto aprobado en el referéndum constituyente de enero de 2009,
http://www.vicepresidencia.gob.bo/Portals/0/documentos/NUEVA_CONSTITUCION_POLITICA_DEL_ESTA
DO.pdf (accessed August 13, 2009). To be precise, the Bolivian constitution refers to “indigenous native peasant
nations and peoples” (“naciones y pueblos indígena originario campesinos”) in order to reflect the diversity of
indigenous peoples in the country.
33 For instance, a study on Bolivia’s Constituent Assembly found that 42 percent of the 74 members of the
assembly interviewed recognized “at the same time an indigenous identity and a Bolivian identity”. Moira
Zuazo, ‘Introducción’, in Lo que unos no quieren recordar es lo que otros no pueden olvidar. Asamblea
Constituyente, descolonización e interculturalidad, ed. Moira Zuazo and Cecilia Quiroga (La Paz, Friedrich-
Ebert-Stiftung, 2012): 13. In fact, also the self identification as indigenous – as opposed to “white” or “mestizo”
– is rather fluid. For instance, in the 2012 polls of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), 79
percent of the respondents from Bolivia considered themselves “mestizo” (and a mere 15% “indigenous-native”)
– and yet, 68 percent also considered themselves belonging to one of the country’s indigenous or native peoples.
Vanderbilt University, ‘The Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)’, Database: Bolivia 2012,
http://lapop.ccp.ucr.ac.cr/Dummies.html (accessed February 24, 2014).
34 For these reasons, constitutional changes during the 1990s stopped short of recognizing Bolivia as a
plurinational state and only referred to the country as “multiethnic” and “pluricultural”.

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indigenous Bolivians feared a kind of reverse discrimination and, in fact, in the draft
constitution adopted by the constituent assembly in 2007 any reference to the “Bolivian
nation” was missing and critics noted that formulations privileged the indigenous population.
This was, however, changed when Bolivia’s parliament revised the draft constitution in
October 2008. In general, the constituent assembly has been marked, inter alia, by the
multifold clash between contradictory identity claims – triggered, in particular, by the
unprecedented presence within such a state institution of representatives of the indigenous
population, which is diverse but united by centuries of discrimination and a corresponding
demand for a new phase of decolonization.35
To be sure, disputes about the meaning and significance of the recognition of plurinationality
in Bolivia persist until today, and are not likely to be resolved soon (just as entrenched
patterns of discrimination exist to this day). Since 2010, some of Bolivia’s most important
indigenous organizations also have increasingly questioned whether the Morales government
was still committed to the promises implied by the notion of a plurinational state, most
notably collective indigenous rights.36 Yet, at least at a general and symbolic level,
constitutional change in this dimension has led to a new kind of identification with the state
among those parts of the Bolivian population that did not really feel represented by previous
state institutions – no matter that these, too, had been democratically legitimated.37
This debate about, and movement towards, a plurinational state is clearly most advanced in
Bolivia, which is the only country in the region that features both an indigenous majority and
strong indigenous movements.38 But, in general, recent changes in Bolivia are part of a
region-wide trend, which, since the 1980s, has seen an increasing recognition of indigenous
identities, peoples and rights across Latin America (and is also connected to broader
international trends). The other country in which a new constitution refers to the plurinational
state is Ecuador, where the indigenous population represents a minority, but a period of
exceptional indigenous mobilization still paved the way for a remarkable recognition of
indigenous rights. Yet, the gap between constitutional promises and the reality of a
government which, by now, explicitly defies many of the indigenous collective rights is much
wider in Ecuador than in the case of Bolivia.39
35 See, for instance, the contributions to Zuazo and Quiroga, Lo que unos no quieren recordar.
36 Cf. Dunia Mokrani Chávez and Marxa Nadia Chávez León, ‘Perspectivas del proceso de cambio tras la
última victoria electoral del Movimiento al Socialismo’, in El primer gobierno de Evo Morales: Un balance
retrospective, ed. Tanja Ernst and Stefan Schmalz (La Paz: Plural, 2012), 375–95.
37 Cf. Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD), Los cambios detrás del cambio. Informe
Nacional sobre Desarrollo Humano en Bolivia (La Paz: PNUD Bolivia, 2010).
38 Cf. Donna Lee Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America. The Evolution of Ethnic Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America.

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Reorganizing the state
If recognizing the plurinational state is to be more than a symbolical act, it also requires
redistributing political power and reorganizing the state. In Bolivia, this can be directly seen
in the changing territorial structure of the state: The new plurinational state, inter alia,
acknowledges spheres of indigenous self-government (“indigenous autonomies”) which add
to – and partially cut across – the usual levels of the state (from the central to the municipal
level).40 Again, this clearly deviates from liberal notions of the state: Indigenous autonomies
in Bolivia are to be governed not by unitary liberal principles, but in accordance with their
customary “norms, institutions, authorities and procedures” (Article 290). This, however, does
not imply an open rupture with the liberal state either. First, as the first attempts to construct
indigenous autonomies clearly show, the internal political practices used within these “self-
governed” areas are hybrids that include quite a few liberal mechanisms of constituting and
controlling political authority.41 Second, these indigenous forms of self-governance do indeed
exist in the overall framework of a unitary state that is basically liberal in its overall setup.
Still, the functional and territorial reach of the state is clearly limited by the establishment of
non-electoral, communal forms of indigenous self-government. Hence there have been
concerns – if clearly exaggerated – that indigenous autonomies could lead to “a gradual
construction of political, parastatal and independent entities within the Bolivian state”.42
The same tension – and difficult balancing – between the authority of the state (in
representation of the Bolivian people) and indigenous collective rights (expressing the self-
government of the indigenous peoples) can also be seen with a view to a particularly
contested issue: territorial rights and the exploitation of non-renewable resources. According
to the new Bolivian constitution, the collective land rights held by indigenous peoples are
inalienable, indivisible and unseizable (Article 384). With a view to the exploitation of non-
renewable resources in such territories, indigenous communities have a “right to mandatory
prior consultation by the state, in good faith and in a concerted fashion” (Article 30). At the
39 Cf. Marc Becker, ‘The Stormy Relations between Rafael Correa and Social Movements in Ecuador’, Latin
American Perspectives 40, no. 3 (2013), 43–62.
40 But this reorganization of the state has, of course, not only a territorial dimension. For instance, Bolivia’s new
constitution also recognizes indigenous languages as “official languages of the state” on an equal footing with
Spanish (Article 5) and, correspondingly, obliges every civil servant at the central and the departmental level of
government to speak at least two such languages (Article 234).
41 Cf. Franz Barrios, ‘The Bolivian Invention. Plurinationality and indigenous people within an unusual
composite state structure’, in Federalism, Plurinationality and Democratic Constitutionalism. Theory and cases,
ed. Ferran Requejo and Miquel Caminal (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012): 266-294; María Tereza Zegada et al., La
democracia desde los márgenes. Transformaciones en el campo político boliviano (La Paz: CLACSO and Muela
del Diablo Editores, 2011), 175–98.
42 Carlos Cordero Carraffa, ‘La Asamblea Legislativa: Plurinacional Estructura y Organización’, in Reflexión
Crítica a la nueva Constitución Política del Estado, ed. Susanne Käss and Iván Velásquez Castellanos (La Paz:
Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2009): 166.

11
same time, however, natural resources are owned by the “Bolivian people” and administered
by the state on behalf of “the collective interest” (Article 349) – and this collective interest is
still very much understood, also by the Morales government, in terms of a maximum
exploitation of extractive resources. As a consequence, the government’s claim to represent
the people frequently clashes with claims made in the name of collective indigenous rights. To
the extent that this conflict involves incompatible conceptions of development, it cannot be
solved by the norms of prior consultation. But the related procedures, if respected, do at least
offer mechanisms for handling such conflicts in a peaceful manner, including by reducing
socio-environmental damages and guaranteeing some kind of compensation.43
Further examples of the contentious reorganization of the state concern the recognition of
indigenous justice systems discussed below, but also the introduction of special electoral
districts for indigenous people that live in rural areas and represent a minority in their
respective department. In order to guarantee the representation of such indigenous minorities
in parliament, the constitution provides for special seats that are to be elected alongside the
general elections and are, thus, exempt from the principle of proportional representation. Yet,
while candidates for these special districts can be selected based on indigenous customs and
practices, the election itself follows the liberal-democratic voting mechanism. Furthermore, in
the implementation of the constitutional provision, the number of special seats in parliament
was restricted to seven out of 130, way below the 18 or even 36 demanded by indigenous
movements. While a crucial mechanism for guaranteeing some representation of indigenous
minorities in parliament, this innovation therefore, again, does only marginally modify the
individualist logic of liberal-democratic representation.
Redefining the rule of law
Another crucial issue in the peace- and statebuilding debate is the rule of law – and, more
specifically, the tension between the liberal state law that is to be implemented “from above”
(but usually does not work very well) and local forms of community justice that exist at the
grassroots level (and frequently work much better but exhibit non- or illiberal features).44 The
same kind of tension exists in a series of Latin American countries and concerns the existence
of indigenous or community justice at the local level – also not least a result of the factual
lack of reach and accessibility of the state’s judicial institutions especially in rural areas.
43 Cf. Iván Bascopé Sanjinés, ‘Consulta previa: reto de democracia comunitaria’, in Santos and Exeni, Justicia
indígena, plurinacionalidad y interculturalidad en Bolivia, 381–406; Almut Schilling-Vacaflor and David
Vollrath, ‘Indigenous and peasant participation in resource governance in Bolivia and Peru’, in Civil Society and
the State in Left-Led Latin America. Challenges and Limitations to Democratization, ed. Barry Cannon and
Peadar Kirby (London: Zed Books, 2012): 126–40.
44 Cf. Michael Schoiswohl, ‘What’s law got to do with it? The role of law in post-conflict democratization and
its (flawed) assumptions’, in Tadjbakhsh, Rethinking the Liberal Peace, 110–27.

12
Responding to this reality and to increasing claims by indigenous movements, several Latin
American countries since the 1990s have increasingly recognized indigenous customs and
practices or indigenous community justice.45
Bolivia, again, represents the most far-reaching experience, at least as far as the constitutional
situation is concerned. The new Bolivian constitution goes so far as to place ordinary and
indigenous legal jurisdiction on an equal footing (Article 179). The main instruments through
which the tensions between liberal state and indigenous community justice are to be handled
are the new Plurinational Constitutional Court, which includes representatives of both justice
systems, and a Law on Jurisdictional Delimitation. This latter law, adopted in 2010, explicitly
limits “the scope of applicability of indigenous law to cases where personal, territorial and
material indigenous jurisdictions are simultaneously at work” and includes a “long list of legal
areas over which indigenous authorities have no jurisdiction”, including corruption, rape and
homicide.46 While thereby solving the most pressing concerns over community justice that
have been voiced from liberal perspectives, these restrictions tend to contradict the basic
notion of “judicial pluralism and equal ranking of the different justice systems”.47 Still,
tensions with liberal civil rights norms persist, for example with a view to principles of due
process, norms of gender equality or the issue of physical punishment. 48 In this sense, the
debate about how to deal with legal pluralism in Bolivia persists – as does the politico-judicial
process of finding norms and mechanisms that may best realize the constitutional recognition
of both ordinary and indigenous justice.49
In general, the research on indigenous community justice in the Andean region shows that it
works relative well: When compared to the state’s justice system, which is often hardly
present in rural areas and frequently perceived as alien, community justice provides an
important mechanism for resolving a broad range of conflicts in ways that local populations
generally regard as much more efficient and legitimate.50 While research shows that
45 Cf. Idón Moisés Chivi Vargas, ‘El largo camino de la jurisdicción indígena’, in Santos and Exeni, Justicia
indígena, plurinacionalidad y interculturalidad en Bolivia, 275–379.
46 Anna Barrera, ‘Turning Legal Pluralism into State-Sanctioned Law: Assessing the Implications of the New
Constitutions and Laws in Bolivia and Ecuador’, in Nolte and Schilling-Vacaflor, New Constitutionalism in
Latin America, 371–90.
47 Agustín Grijalva Jiménez and José Luis Exeni Rodríguez, ‘Coordinación entre justicias, ese desafío’, in
Santos and Exeni, Justicia indígena, plurinacionalidad y interculturalidad en Bolivia, 703.
48 Cf. John L. Hammond, ‘Indigenous Community Justice in the Bolivian Constitution of 2009’, Human Rights
Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2011), 677–80.
49 Grijalva and Exeni, ‘Coordinación entre justicias’, 729; PROJURIDE, Sistemas jurídicos indígena originario
campesinos en Bolivia. Tres aproximaciones: Curahuara de Carangas (Oruro), Sacaca (Potosí) y Charagua
Norte (Santa Cruz) (La Paz: GIZ, 2012), 174.
50 See Hans-Jürgen Brandt and Rocío Franco Valdivia, eds., El tratamiento de conflictos. Un estudio de actas en
133 comunidades (Lima: Instituto de Defensa Legal, 2006); and Hans-Jürgen Brandt and Rocío Franco Valdivia,
eds., Normas, valores y procedimientos en la justicia comunitaria. Estudio Cualitativo en Comunidades
Indígenas y Campesinas de Ecuador y Perú (Lima: Instituto de Defensa Legal, 2007).

13
indigenous community justice is not at all arbitrary, but follows specific rationalities, its logic
is clearly different from the rationality guiding ordinary (liberal, state) justice: The overall aim
is to preserve the social harmony of a given community; its main strategy is some kind of
(re-)conciliation.51 From this perspective, for instance, long-term imprisonment is irrational,
while what is regarded as physical punishment from a liberal perspective (e.g., whipping with
nettles, ice water baths) is considered rather symbolic acts of purification and/or
reconciliation. Yet, research also clearly shows that the practice of lynching – a serious
problem in Bolivia and often misleadingly related to indigenous justice – is, in fact, not a part
of indigenous norms of community justice.52
Just as in quite a few post-conflict societies legal pluralism in the Andean region is, thus, both
an empirical reality and a normative challenge – and research on the experiences in Bolivia,
Colombia, Ecuador and Peru offers a series of crucial insights about both the diverse practices
of indigenous/community justice and about different ways of dealing with legal pluralism in
more or less pluralist ways.
Broadening democratic participation
In the mainstream model of liberal democracy, the people does not in fact govern but through
elected representatives. In debates about peace- and statebuilding, a common criticism has
precisely been directed against an overly focus on (early) elections.53 In South America,
disenchantment with the ways in which real-existing representative democracy worked made
the call for a turn to “participatory democracy” so attractive. In the case of Bolivia, this
broadening of political participation includes five elements.54 First, in terms of direct
democracy, the new constitution offers expanded opportunities for referenda and citizens’
legislative initiatives, including the need for the popular ratification of constitutional changes
and international treaties that affect national sovereignty. Second, the introduction of recall
referenda, by giving voters the opportunity to revoke the mandate of elected office holders in
the executive and the legislature, establishes a new kind of popular checks on representatives.
Third, the reach of popular elections is expanded to include the top echelons of the judiciary
51 Cf. Xavier Albó, ‘Justicia indígena en la Bolivia plurinacional’, in Santos and Exeni, Justicia indígena,
plurinacionalidad y interculturalidad en Bolivia, 207–13; Martín Bazurco Osorio and José Luis Exeni
Rodríguez, ‘Bolivia: Justicia indígena en tiempos de plurinacionalidad’, in Santos and Exeni, Justicia indígena,
plurinacionalidad y interculturalidad en Bolivia, 129–31; Brandt and Franco, El tratamiento de conflictos, 195–
206; Brandt and Franco, Normas, valores y procedimientos en la justicia comunitaria, 165; Hammond,
‘Indigenous Community Justice’, 660, 680.
52 Hammond, 672. The Bolivian Law on Jurisdictional Delimitation explicitly prohibits lynching (and, in line
with constitution, any kind of death penalty).
53 Edward Newman, ‘The international architecture of peacebuilding’, in Mac Ginty, Routledge Handbook of
Peacebuilding, 318–9.
54 Cf. Wolff, ‘Towards Post-Liberal Democracy’, 41–52.

14
(which are elected in direct elections, based on a pre-selection effected by parliament). Fourth,
the new constitution entitles indigenous organizations and citizens’ groups to compete for
elected public office, thereby ending the monopoly on representation traditionally held by
political parties. Finally, “organized civil society” gains rights to participate “in the design of
public policies” as well as to exercise “social control” over state administration, public
enterprises and institutions (Article 241).55
As a result, the new constitutional setup increases the possibilities of the population to shape
and control political institutions and decisions. In contrast to the liberal mainstream model, it
is rather vertical accountability to the people than horizontal accountability exercised by
parliament or a supposedly apolitical judiciary that is privileged.56 At the same time, and in
line with the notion of post-liberal democracy outlined above, this broadened range of
channels and mechanisms of political participation remains embedded in a predominantly
representative political system. In the end, it is parliament that regulates most non-
conventional forms of political participation (through so-called organic laws). Given the
presidentialist nature of the political regime, the executive also retains quite a lot of power to
use and possibly also misuse plebiscitary instruments.
Broadening human rights
A related criticism of liberal peacebuilding concerns its focus on a relatively narrow, and
specifically liberal, set of political and civil rights. Especially when combined with neoliberal
recipes of economic reform, this frequently implies a disregard for economic, social and
cultural rights, which are equally established as human rights at the international level.57 Yet,
given the existing socioeconomic conditions in the Global South, liberal democracy’s
emphasis on formal political equality rings quite hollow to most people. This is, at least, the
experience from Latin America where two decades of formal democracy that have not been
accompanied by a significant reduction in the dramatic socioeconomic inequalities have led,
since the turn of the century, to a reemergence of the “social question” and the “left turn”
discussed above.
55 According to the 2013 Law of Participation and Social Control (Ley de Participación y Control Social), the
right to participation and social control is exercised by either individuals, which may register in an issue-specific
way, or by social organizations that represent either social sectors, neighborhood associations, trade-union
organizations, indigenous peoples, or intercultural or Afro-Bolivian communities. Their rights include, inter alia,
to participate in the design of public policies and planning processes at all levels of the state as well as to
exercise social control with a view to the execution of public policies (plans, programs and projects).
56 In the actual practice of Bolivian politics, this vertical accountability, however, is still largely exercised in
informal ways, i.e., through the mobilization “on the street” and following negotiations between protestors and
state representatives. Cf. Wolff, ‘Towards Post-Liberal Democracy’, 45–6.
57 Cf. Kristoffer Lidén, ‘Building Peace between Global and Local Politics: The Cosmopolitical Ethics of
Liberal Peacebuilding’, International Peacekeeping 16, no. 5 (2009), 616–34; Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace,
25–43.

15
In the case of Bolivia, the “fundamental rights” recognized by the new constitution clearly go
beyond the usual series of political and civil rights and strengthen both socioeconomic and
collective (cultural) rights. The latter specifically concern the rights of indigenous peoples and
have already been discussed above. The former include universal entitlements to free
education and health care, access to drinking water and sewerage, electricity, cooking gas, and
basic postal and telecommunication services as well as social security and retirement (Articles
16–20, 45). The flip side of such socioeconomic rights is constituted by restrictions on
property rights and of private economic activities: Economic activities are required to play a
positive social, economic and environmental role (Article 312); the right to private property is
conditional on its performing a “social function” (Article 56), land rights are limited by a ban
on the latifundio, an upper limit of 5,000 hectares and the requirement of land to fulfill a
“social-economic function” (Article 398); and the privatization of basic public services –
water/sewage, public health, social security – is prohibited (Articles 20, 38, 45).
In response to this emphasis on socioeconomic rights, the Morales government has indeed
significantly expanded social policies, rates of poverty and inequality have fallen, and the
provision with basic public services has improved.58 Yet, Bolivia is of course still far from
realizing universal socioeconomic rights. The broad catalog of human rights contained in the
new constitution, in this sense, is rather a promise of progressive change than an immediately
effective guarantee. As such, the socioeconomic rights also constitute an important normative
reference point for social mobilization.
Transforming the economy and the state-economy relationship
A common feature of the region-wide turn to the left has been the critique of, and partial shift
away from, “neoliberalism”, the agenda of liberalization, privatization and deregulation that
characterized economic reforms in Latin American throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the
comparative literature on the left turn, Bolivia is usually discussed as one of the countries in
which this turning away from neoliberal policies has been relatively pronounced, if not as
radical as in Venezuela.59
58 Cf. Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), Panorama Social de América Latina
2013 (Santiago de Chile: CEPAL, 2013). See also Fernando Mayorga, ‘La democracia boliviana: Avances y
desafíos’, in Democracias en Transformación: ¿Qué hay de nuevo en los Estados andinos?, ed. Anja Dargatz
and Moira Zuazo (La Paz: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2012), 70–5; Fernando Molina, ‘¿Por qué Evo Morales sigue
siendo popular? Las fortalezas del MAS en la construcción de un nuevo orden’, Nueva Sociedad, no. 245 (2013),
6–10.
59 Cf. Steven Levitsky and Kenneth M. Roberts, eds., The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore,
MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Macdonald and Ruckert, Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas;
Pablo Stefanoni, ‘Posneoliberalismo cuesta arriba. Los modelos de Venezuela, Bolivia y Ecuador en debate’,
Nueva Sociedad no. 239 (2012), 51–64; Weyland et al., Leftist Governments in Latin America.

16
In line with his promise to break with “neoliberalism”, the Morales government has
significantly increased the role of the state in the economy. This increase includes efforts to
expand regulation of the private sector, to raise the fiscal share of economic profits, and to
expand the active economic role of the state via public investment and public enterprises.
These changes particularly concerned the country’s most important export sector, namely gas.
Following Morales’ declaration of a “nationalization” of the country’s gas resources in May
2006, international companies were forced into new contractual relationships; the control of
the state, and of the state-owned gas company YPFB, in the hydrocarbon sector was
strengthened; and taxes on gas companies were increased. At the same time, the government
used rising revenues from hydrocarbon and mineral resources to expand social spending and
public investment.60 Overall, Morales’ economic policies are best called “heterodox”: In the
sense of a gradual shift away from neoliberal recipes, they are characterized by “selective,
rather than comprehensive, forms of state intervention that challenge orthodox principles
without fully abandoning the market-led model or making the state the primary engine of
development” as well as by “redistributive social policies” that include “increased
expenditure, extended coverage of existing social programs, and redistribution through labor
market policies”.61 While generally committed to property rights, in some areas the Bolivian
government has taken “bolder measures to redistribute assets and wealth”.62 This, specifically,
concerns land reform as well as the policy of nationalization that has mainly affected the gas
sector. But even in these areas, agrarian reform has mainly consisted of the redistribution of
public land to poor peasants and indigenous communities, and nationalization has usually
involved compensation.
Implications for the debate about post-liberal peacebuilding
There are interesting trends in Latin America, and most notably in Bolivia, that point towards
the possible emergence of post-liberalism in the sense discussed by Richmond.63 At least,
60 Cf. George Gray Molina, ‘The Challenge of Progressive Change under Evo Morales’, in Leftist Governments
in Latin America: Successes and Shortcomings, ed. Kurt Weyland, Raúl L. Madrid, and Wendy Hunter
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 57-76; Jeffery R. Webber, ‘From Naked Barbarism to
Barbarism with Benefits: Neoliberal Capitalism, Natural Gas Policy, and the Evo Morales Government in
Bolivia’, in Macdonald and Ruckert, Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas, 105–19; Mark Weisbrot, Rebecca Ray,
and Jake Johnston, ‘Bolivia: The Economy During the Morales Administration’ (Washington, DC: Center for
Economic and Policy Research, 2009), http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/bolivia-2009-12.pdf
(accessed April 15, 2010).
61 Steven Levitsky and Kenneth M. Roberts, ‘Introduction: Latin America’s “Left Turn”: A Framework for
Analysis’, in Levitsky and Roberts, The Resurgence of the Latin American Left, 22–3.
62 Ibid., 23.
63 To be sure, David Chandler uses the concept of post-liberalism in a very different way. See David Chandler
and Oliver Richmond, ‘Contesting postliberalism: governmentality or emancipation?’ Journal of International
Relations and Development 18, no. 1 (2015): 1–24.

17
there are features of political change that go beyond mainstream templates of liberal
democracy and (neo-)liberal market economy. In this final section, I summarize the ways in
which these experiences might serve as inspirations for the academic debate about
peacebuilding and discuss insights into the contradictions and risks involved in the search for
post-liberal ways of organizing political rule.
Inspirations
In a very basic way, recent political changes in Latin America may inspire researchers as well
as peacebuilders – whether internationals or locals or something in between. Of course,
everyone knows that democracy is an essentially contested concept,64 but it is contemporary
Latin America where (a) actual contestation of democracy is combined with attempts to
change the parameters of democratic order in ways that are also, if differently, democratic.
Another dimension (b) concerns the (post-neoliberal) recuperation of the state as an active
agent of social change and development. In this regard, there are also important contemporary
experiences elsewhere, but what appears to be specific about South America’s left turn – and
justifies the qualifier “left”, in contrast, for instance, to contemporary China – is the
combination of poverty reduction with (c) a significant decline in inequalities. This is all the
more notable because Latin America has traditionally been the most unequal region of the
Global South. Furthermore, the (gradual) reduction in socioeconomic inequalities is
accompanied by (d) an increasing political participation of marginalized sectors of society. If
certainly not in all countries of the region, there is at least a general trend in this direction and
remarkable experiences in some individual countries (like Bolivia). In fact, the so-called left
turn is, in many ways, the result of the mobilization of different kinds of disadvantaged
sectors of society: the unemployed movements in Argentina, Brazil’s landless movement,
indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador etc.65 The relationships between these social
movements and the left or center-left governments they helped to bring to political power
have been contradictory and conflict-ridden.66 Still, it might serve as an inspiration that it was
resistance and mobilization “from below” that created the political opportunities for
64 W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167–98.
65 Cf. Susan Eva Eckstein and Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, eds., Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America
(New York, NY: Routledge, 2003); Hank Johnston and Paul Almeida, eds., Latin American Social Movements.
Globalization, Democratization, and Transnational Networks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006);
Eduardo Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
66 Cf. Ulrich Brand and Nicola Sekler, ‘Struggling between Autonomy and Institutional Transformations: Social
Movements in Latin America and the Move toward Post-Neoliberalism’, in Macdonald and Ruckert, Post-
Neoliberalism in the Americas, 54–70; Jonas Wolff, ‘(De-)Mobilising the Marginalised. A Comparison of the
Argentine Piqueteros and Ecuador’s Indigenous Movement’, Journal of Latin American Studies 39, no. 1 (2007),
1–29.

18
progressive change and, thereby, also increased the avenues for political participation of
marginalized sectors.
Across the four dimensions mentioned, Latin American experiments with post-liberal politics
also includes more specific experiences that may be useful to consider as inspiration for
rethinking politico-economic order beyond the liberal template: participatory budgeting, recall
referenda or the electoral participation of indigenous and citizens’ groups, the nationalization
of extractive industries and different (targeted versus universal, conditional or unconditional)
kinds of social programs, or indigenous justice systems and the coordination and delimitation
of state and community justice.
Furthermore, political changes in Latin America have led to conceptual innovation which
might be useful for academic and political debates also outside this specific region. This
concerns, for instance, the debates about the plurinational state and the notion of post-liberal
democracy.
Caveats
Latin America also offers insights into the contradictions and risks involved in the search for
post-liberal ways of organizing political rule. This concerns, again, the four dimensions
discussed above. Contestation of democracy is (a) not simply nice and democratic, but also
potentially conflict-ridden. If the very fundamentals of political order are up for discussion,
this plausibly increases the risk of violent conflict. In fact, the process of constitutional
change in Bolivia was characterized by an open clash between different conceptions of
democracy – and by mutual allegations that what was presented as democratic by the
opponent was precisely the opposite (colonial or imperialist, exclusive or secessionist,
autocratic or totalitarian).
The Bolivian attempt to construct some kind of post-liberal democracy also brought about
more specific risks. On the one hand, the transition process as such meant dismantling an
existing structure of democratic institutions and, thus, led to a certain, if temporary,
institutional vacuum during which the democratic shape of the future political order was
uncertain (at least from the perspective of the opposition). On the other hand, features of
Bolivia’s new political order such as the emphasis on direct (or plebiscitary) democracy do
not only increase the power of the people, but more specifically the power of the majority; at
the same time, a popular president can use plebiscitary mechanisms to further increase and
consolidate his/her power vis-à-vis the opposition, minorities or other powers and levels of
the state.

19
This already points to the ambivalences in the dimension of (b) the recuperation of the state.
Strengthening the role of the state, in the context of Latin America’s presidentialist regimes,
has meant strengthening the executive level of the state. In this sense, it is specifically the
governments (in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela) that claim to promote “participatory
democracy” that are criticized, as much by the right-wing opposition as by critics from the
left, for concentrating power in the hands of the incumbent presidents. 67 In general,
strengthening the state in the name of democracy is an ambivalent agenda: On the one hand,
state institutions that are relatively autonomous from the social forces and economic powers
that be are necessary if the state’s democratic setup is to have any meaning; on the other, a
strong and relatively autonomous state tends to undermine society’s capacity to
democratically control its affairs. A similar ambivalence applies to the notion of participatory
democracy: It requires institutionalizing social participation, which at the same time threatens
to undermine the very autonomy of those groups that are supposed to control the state.68
Furthermore, critical studies on the different left and center-left governments have also shown
that (c) the reduction in inequalities is still gradual at best, and that Latin American
governments have generally not been able to tackle the structural causes of the deeply rooted
and multiple social inequalities that persist in all countries of the region.69 In the same vein,
even in the case of Bolivia, which has seen a really remarkable improvement in the
representation and participation of the indigenous majority of the population, important parts
of the indigenous and poor population still (and again increasingly so) consider themselves as
fairly excluded from national politics. In general, many of the successes in the increased
political participation of marginalized sectors of society have tended to be rather temporal,
depending less on a new institutional framework of participation than on continued political
mobilization. This is the case of the indigenous movements in Bolivia or Ecuador, but also of
the unemployed movements in Argentina.70
What is crucial for the issue of peacebuilding is the recognition that the search for (some kind
of) post-liberal political order – and, thus, also for post-liberal peace – is itself a conflict-
ridden process. While “localizing” peacebuilding may plausibly reduce conflicts between
67 See, for example, the discussion in Dargatz and Moira Zuazo, Democracias en Transformación.
68 Cf. Ulrich Brand, ‘El papel del Estado y de las políticas públicas en los procesos de transformación’, in Más
allá del desarrollo, ed. Grupo Permanente de Trabajo sobre Alternativas al Desarrollo (Quito: Abya Yala, 2011),
145–57; Benjamin Goldfrank, ‘The Left and Participatory Democracy: Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela’, in
Levitsky and Roberts, The Resurgence of the Latin American Left, 162–83; Moira Zuazo, ‘¿Los movimientos
sociales en el poder? El gobierno del MAS en Bolivia’, Nueva Sociedad, no. 227 (2010), 120–35.
69 See, for example, the contributions to the journal Nueva Sociedad, no. 239 (2012).
70 Cf. Jonas Wolff, ‘Movimientos sociales y la lucha por la democratización de la democracia: Experiencias
recientes en América del Sur’, in Democracia y reconfiguraciones contemporáneas del derecho en América
Latina, ed. Stefanie Kron, Sérgio Costa and Marianne Braig (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2012), 297–322.

20
external and local actors, it may well increase intra-local struggle – precisely because local-
local interactions then become decisive. As seen, the transformation initiated by the Morales
government in Bolivian provoked the fierce resistance from formerly privileged sectors of
society, which happened to be concentrated in the south-eastern lowlands and organized
around autonomy movements; in 2008, conflict escalation brought the country to the brink of
civil war. Important motives behind this resistance and conflict escalation included the
rejection of the (post-liberal) model of democracy, the (plurinational) notion of the state and
the (post-neoliberal) changes in economic policies promoted by the Morales government.
Furthermore, while the construction of a post-liberal democracy promises a locally
appropriate and appropriated political system, there is not necessarily a positive correlation
between legitimacy (in terms of local perceptions) and effectiveness (in terms of conflict
resolution). In fact, since 2010, sociopolitical conflicts have again been on the rise in Bolivia
– and the capacity of the new political system to deal with them in a constructive way has so
far been limited.71
Finally, when trying to draw lessons from contemporary Latin American politics for the
debate about peacebuilding, there is also one crucial limitation, which concerns the issue of
sequencing. In Bolivia (as in other countries of the region), the contemporary attempt to move
towards some kind of post-liberal democracy followed two decades of democratic rule and
economic reform that were basically guided by (neo-)liberal templates. This sequence is, in
fact, at the heart of notions of post-liberalism and post-neoliberalism. The same holds true for
the struggle to create a plurinational state, which follows, in this case, almost two centuries of
independent statehood organized around the idea of the nation-state. Arguably, the political
success of the Morales government as well as the relative peacefulness of the whole process
of change in Bolivia depended, inter alia, on this strong (liberal) legacy. This led to the
mentioned persistence of basic features of the pre-existing politico-economic order which was
not, in fact, openly challenged: “Participatory democracy” was never to replace representative
democracy (in fact, representative institutions continue to dominate the Bolivian polity);
“nationalizations” and redistributive measures were accompanied by a basic continuity in the
economic order (in fact, macroeconomic policies of the Morales government have been fairly
conservative); the recognition of indigenous nations and peoples never meant the rejection of
Bolivia as a unitary state (in fact, the Morales government has always combined an emphasis
on indigenous rights with a basically national-popular discourse). In imposing limitations on
71 This remains true even if this limited capacity in terms of conflict resolution is arguably less due to the
institutions of post-liberal democracy as such, but rather related to the specific ways in which the Morales
government is dealing with protest and opposition (which, at times, includes the deliberate ignorance of existing
mechanisms of conflict resolution).

21
the self-declared “revolutionary” process of change, these postcolonial legacies of the
previous liberal order created important continuities that have rendered the emerging order
much more acceptable to the political opposition, the regional autonomy movements and the
(old) economic elites. These continuities – although certainly problematic in terms of the far-
reaching promises of “re-founding” and “decolonizing” Bolivia – have been crucial in
facilitating a largely peaceful process of change.
Conclusion
The most important feature of the debates about both post-liberal peace, post-neoliberal
economics and post-liberal democracy is, arguably, that they are not aimed at identifying yet
another universal template. If anything, the main academic and political purpose is to open up
discussions that have been too narrow and closed for too long. Thinking about alternatives,
however, still requires also concrete ideas about elements and characteristics, dynamics and
paths that may characterize (different) post-liberal configurations. And while theoretical
reflections are certainly needed, the very idea of post-liberalism as something arising “bottom
up” from dynamics at least partially driven by local knowledge and local agency points to the
need to empirically study developments that point in some post-liberal direction. In this sense,
this article has argued, recent experiences from Latin America do offer political inspirations as
well as important caveats which might be of interest for both scholars of peacebuilding and
for those engaged in building whatever kind of hybrid peace in their country.