Right now, the dominant narrative of those that occupy political and economic power-centres, and those whose careers and lives are wedded to the militaries, is that a new world war is looming, and that we need to get ready. One person with such a narrative is the Swedish commander in chief, Micael Bydén who stated that all Swedes must mentally prepare for war. The German Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, even has a year, namely 2029. The inclination of governments towards war is matched with their military spending. According to Stockholm International Peace Institute total global military expenditure in 2023 reached 2443 billion USD. That is all time high. This spending frenzy on arms takes place against a backdrop of inflation, severe debt crisis, growing inequalities, sever environmental degradation, widespread depletion of our public budgets and privatisation of public services and infrastructure. Clearly the governments prefer waging wars over building peace.   

This path we are on, where war is preferrable to peace, is abysmal. While the Swedish commander in chief is anticipating war, armed conflicts are already raging elsewhere: in Yemen, in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Ethiopia, Syria, Western Sahara to name a few. A genocide is being committed in Gaza. Too many wars have already been fought, after which the population lost as much in the aftermath of it as they did during the war. The costs for recovery have been too great, both at the interpersonal, societal and economic level. Having experienced war, displacement and the so-called reconstruction and recovery process, I speak from experience. I wonder if Micael Bydén can say the same? I wonder if instead of advising people to mentally prepare for war better advice would be to practically prepare for peace. 

Making Profit from Destruction and Reconstruction

Right now nothing is being done to prepare for peace. We live war economies. Instead of spending money on life and our well-being the money is poured into killing machines. Part of the militaristic discourse is to claim that investments in weapons are not about waging wars but about ensuring peace. More weapons mean better defence, a sort of militarised insurance, we are told. But this is nothing but gaslighting. Cynthia Enloe, one of the most prominent feminist thinkers on militarism, showed us that militarism is in fact a prerequisite to waging wars. It is deployed to both implicitly and explicitly foster societal support for and normalisation of war agendas. If we spend money on weapons instead of public good, if we allow our societies to be consumed by militarisation, while at the same time we discount peace as naïve and peace activists as dangerous, we will have war.  

As scary as it sounds, under capitalism that is ok. Profit can be made from both destruction and reconstruction. We might struggle to convince our governments that investing in social infrastructure, care, and environmental sustainability is what must be done for this planet to survive, but they don’t need any convincing to spend money on destruction. They do this knowing that not only will money be made from reconstruction efforts, but also there is profit to be made from the weakened position the countries coming out of conflict find themselves in. Especially alluring is the opportunity provided to push through neoliberal policies.       

Using peace building as an excuse, country after country has through international interventions been pushed into austerity measures, rapid privatization of social infrastructure and services and natural resource extraction. One of the key mechanisms used to apply that pressure have been the conditionalities attached to loas from the international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank Group, but also from regional mechanisms, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Through loan conditionalities countries have been encouraged to do away with labour protection, to introduce tax exemptions for corporations, and to cut down on social benefits. This neoliberal approach has not only contributed to growing inequalities, but it has also led to a systematic takedown of the core functions of a state, namely guaranteeing rights and distributing material, social and political resources, even though the lack of them is one of the key root causes to conflicts.  

Neoliberal Peace Building Model 

Neoliberal ideas have become an important part of the mainstream approach to building peace, at the global, regional and national level, to a point where we can talk about a neoliberal peace building model. The central idea of this neoliberal, capitalist approach to peace is that if countries coming out of war and conflict create an enabling environment and necessary freedoms for market forces, achieved through elimination of state influence in the economy, deregulation of the market, integration into the multilateral trading system, privatization and austerity measures, the recovering country will experience economic growth. Economic growth will lead to development and stabilisation in internal and external relationships, which in turn will lead to further growth as the market will be stabilised. This in combination with individual political freedoms and protection of private property will ensure peace.   

But the neoliberal peace building model does not operate on its own, in a vacuum. It is underpinned by many (gendered) assumptions rooted in militarism, patriarchy, racism, imperialism and of course capitalism. The militarised assumption rests on the idea that the use of force or threat of force is the most appropriate response and that it is those with guns who have the legitimacy and right to negotiate solutions to conflicts. Then there is the patriarchal assumption that it is very masculine (and thus valued) to be the gun-wielding “protector” and that women and other feminised groups are “victims” without agency (and thus devalued). The neoliberal peacebuilding model also depends on the racist assumption that some lives are worth more than others and that especially disposable are the lives of racialised communities. Then there are the imperialist and capitalist assumptions about who should decide over how a country should recover and whose interests need to be prioritised. On top of the priority list are the interests of those men who wield the guns and are the face of the war, and those that hold the money and represent the so-called international community. Conveniently their interests always align. One would not exist without the other. This neoliberal approach excludes vast segments of our societies who are designated as either a burden (e.g. internally displaced people, refugees, victims of violence), troublemakers (e.g. feminists, peace activists or those calling out the exploitative nature of this approach), or useful but politically silenced and disposable labour.  

The neoliberal peacebuilding model has been challenged by researchers, practitioners, and those living on the receiving end of its policies, and especially feminists have shown that this approach has led to compounding conflicts and inequalities. Political, economic and social disempowerment of people, dislocation of power and decision-making structures, depoliticization of the conversations on peace, depletion of people and nature, and rapidly growing intersecting inequalities are some of the most serious documented consequences of this approach, based on the irrational belief that it is the economic growth and not the distribution of resources and community building that matters. On top of that, this growth imperative, deeply embedded in the capitalist political economy, is dependent on an extractivist, exploitative and militarised order, nationally and globally, and as such is not only devastating for the people but also for the environment. The only ones benefiting from such an approach are the international and national political and economic elites. For the vast majority of us this model does not work, yet it is enforced upon countries as the most natural thing in the world.  

From Afghanistan to Ukraine and Beyond 

Take Afghanistan for example. Instead of promised prosperity in the aftermath of the US invasion, the neoliberal approach applied led to nurturing a protracted conflict within Afghan society, feeding off food insecurity, poverty, civilian casualties, and harms, ultimately leading to complete disintegration of Afghanistan’s government which enabled the Taliban to return and take over the country. The state-building interventions championed by the occupying power, the US government, with support from the European Union and other countries, were driven by neoliberal assumptions that the market forces will lead to peace. Popalzai, Deputy head of research at the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Afghanistan argues that this approach, instead of promised stability and prosperity, nurtured corruption, political instability, and widening of social and economic gaps. This reconfiguration of the society, including through the creation of a false sense of security, spearheaded by massive military spending, ultimately cleared the path for the Taliban to return. Despite the failures they directly contributed to, the US and the supporting countries were able to leave Afghanistan without being held to account. 

The costs of this failed approach have been tremendous for all Afghans, but for Afghan women and girls it has been catastrophic. Women have lost everything to this misogynist regime. They have been systematically deprived of their fundamental human rights. They have lost their freedom of movement and with it their access to socio-economic rights, especially their right to work and education. They have now even been banned from speaking in public. Despite the extreme difficulties, the Afghan women have organised. Among other things they have put forward demands that the humanitarian aid must aim at disrupting existing power structures instead of normalization of oppression, and that the support must be part of broader strategies for peace, equality and justice. All of which is currently lacking, as the international actors continue to apply the same, failed model. As per the militarised assumption it is the men with guns that hold the solution, hence the international actors favour talking to the Taliban over talking with women, who are, as per the patriarchal assumption seen as mere victims. Victimising Afghan women and taking away their agency is however nothing new. A weaponised gender equality narrative, underpinned by an orientalist, patriarchal discourse of “liberating” Afghan women was central to the framing of the US invasion in the first place.   

In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country I come from, the push to transform the political economy and to integrate the country into the global capitalist market, as per the imperialist interests, was far greater than the desire to deal with the consequences of war. The trust in the market forces was so great that the new Bosnian constitution, an integral part of the Dayton Peace Agreement brokered in 1995, in its preambular said “Desiring to promote the general welfare and economic growth through the protection of private property and the promotion of a market economy”. Subsequently and as part of peace building efforts the international actors focused on reforms deeply embedded in capitalist political economy, such as rapid and massive privatization of socially own enterprises and infrastructure, reforms of taxation laws and introduction of banking system and business-related laws to better aligned them with interests of those countries and financial institutions that were “investing in peace”, namely US, EU, Germany, UK, France, Turkey, IMF, the World Bank, to name a few.  The reforms undertaken, however, never touched the structures of power created by the Dayton Peace Agreement. The interests of the domestic ethno-nationalist elites, and the political and economic control exercised by the international community has remained intact – even now, 30 years after the war.  

Supported by Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Bosnian feminists have been looking into the failures of the neoliberal experiments in Bosnia and Herzegovina for more than a decade now. We have been arguing that the international community, through their imperialist approach, along with the local ethno-nationalist political elite has treated the people as if they don’t have any political agency. We have been demanding a bottom-up approach to political and economic processes, free from imperialist interests and geopolitical scheming; we have been demanding an informed and inclusive social dialogue, and prevention of furthering of the neoliberal agenda which has caused a fast deterioration of women’s rights and equality compared to the pre-war socialist period. We have argued that the claim that neoliberal reforms are the only way possible, coupled with the failure to recognize the importance of addressing gendered experiences of war and patriarchal and structural inequalities within the peace process, has led to the failed state that Bosnia and Herzegovina is today. The failure to course correct, has led to a reality in which we don’t live peace but a temporary absence of war.  

But the example that most clearly shows how deeply influential neoliberal thinking is when it comes to dealing with conflicts and wars, is Ukraine. The extent of the commodification of people’s suffering and the involvement of private actors and foreign interests in the reconstruction efforts in the country is unprecedented.   

While Ukraine has not been a stranger to neoliberal policies it is only after the second Russian invasion in February 2022 that the most extreme interventions were pushed through, by those claiming to be “in solidarity” with Ukraine. Among other things the Ukrainian government has been encouraged to radically intervene in the labour laws. That has led to introduction of several changes towards ensuring more power to the capitalist class, e.g. the employers were given the right to unilaterally suspend collective agreements, organising in trade unions was made difficult, and those employed in small and medium-sized companies, some 70 per cent of the work force, were removed from the country’s existing labour protection laws. 

In an extraordinary demonstration of how wedded to the neoliberal approach Ukraine is, the government of Ukraine has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the global investment fund, BlackRock. BlackRock is controversial. In 2022 feminists from around the world came together in their demand to UN Women to end its partnership with BlackRock due to its record of prioritizing profits over human rights or environmental integrity. The global campaign Corporate Accountability has put BlackRock on its Corporate Accountability’s Corporate Hall of Shame for its role in driving climate catastrophe, its investments in weapons production and role in militarization, and the Jubilee Debt Campaign claims that BlackRock is making profit out of Zambia’s debt crisis. 

Despite all of this, Blackrock has been tasked with guiding the Ukrainian government in accessing and managing private capital and investments as part of the recovery process. This level of finacialisation of the recovery process is unprecedented, even though using private capital and investments for recovery is of course not a new model. International financial institutions, particularly the World Bank, have been strong advocates of this approach for decades now. What is new is the extent to which it is being used in Ukraine, and that it seems to be taking the neoliberal co-optation of the recovery process to a whole new level. Whereas Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and Palestine who were going through some form of peace negotiations and signing of agreements during the ‘80s and ‘90s seem to have been testing grounds for the neoliberal peace building, in Ukraine this approach seems to have been perfected.   

The influence of Blackrock in Ukraine’s recovery process is visible everywhere. It is visible in the way Ukraine’s president “markets” Ukraine to the global capital. As an example, his statement at the New York Stock Exchange painted the reconstruction process in Ukraine as an opportunity for corporations to invest in projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars and the online platform called Advantage Ukraine promises that Ukraine is “The greatest opportunity in Europe since World War II”. 

This platform invites entrepreneurs to invest in hundreds of projects, and among other things offers them in return deregulations and financial stimulations, up to ten years exemption from corporate income tax, up to 500 permits for public business services. On the investment menu on offer is the military industry, natural resources, energy sector, logistics and infrastructure, agro-industrial complex, power industry and much more. 

The idea of attracting private capital as a key source of recovery has been a red thread throughout Ukraine’s recovery approach, visible in both internal strategies and external support. It is undisputable that Ukraine, due to damage and destruction caused by Russia, needs massive amount of financial and other support. Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment released by the Government of Ukraine, the World Bank Group, the European Commission, and the United Nations estimates as of December 2023 that Ukraine will need 486 billion USD over the next decade. But the reliance on the market-forces and influence of the private capital on the reconstruction process means that profit will be put ahead of the interest of the people. Following the simple logic of capitalism, for any capital investments to make sense an expectation of profit must exist. Money is not invested to meet people’s needs or build sustainable and just peace, but to make more money. That means that people’s suffering from war and violence, and their needs, will remain at the periphery of investments, or will be focused on if these can be turned into commodities. Reconstruction of housing, of social infrastructure and services, such as healthcare, education, cultural institutions, child and elderly care – all that needs to become profitable if a capitalist is to make an investment. Once the initial and basic investments have been made, private investors will start looking at what generates “real” profit: private hospitals, private pharmacies, private child and elderly care, high value apartments and luxury compounds, privatised public transport, private theatres, museums etc.   

One of the strongest pushes towards usage of private capital comes from the so-called “Team Europe”, namely the EU Commission, European Bank for Reconstruction and Recovery (EBRD) and European Investment Bank (EIB). Ukraine’s recovery approach is closely knit together with the country’s EU accession approach and a closer look at the various strategies and discussions at the EU level clearly show that the “solidarity” that is often referred to by the EU officials is centred around the idea that it is the private capital that will save Ukraine. The flagship of EU’s support to Ukraine, the Ukraine Facility, has stated objectives like “Mobilise investments in private sector for fast economic recovery and reconstruction” and the 33 billion EUR worth of loans and grants planned to be disbursed by 2027 will be raised on the financial market. The so-called support is leading to an ever growing debt that will become a powerful, disciplinary tool in the hands of international financial institutions. 

Ukrainian political economist Yulia Yurchenko has pointed out that Ukraine had serious economic and social issues even before the Russian invasion. Ukraine was one of the poorest and most indebted countries in Europe and its public infrastructure was chronically underfunded. Already in early 1990’s during its transition to market economy Ukraine was heavily conditioned by the International Monetary Fund to, in exchange for loans, reduce subsidies and introduce targeted assistance to the population. It was also mandated to speed up the privatisation of public enterprises, reduce state deficits and deregulate the market. Even though this approach contributed to the Maidan protests in 2013 the current international support plan, under the guise of solidarity, is based on the same recipe. The main purpose of this approach is not to build peace but to ensure that Ukraine’s economy and budget are stable enough to repay the growing debt, no matter the costs for the population at large. The expectation is that, even though cutting back on public spending on health care, education and social support will create a gap in access to rights, private actors and private money will pick up the slack, for a “small” profit in return. Yurchenko, along with other Ukrainian feminists has called for a radically different approach to recovery – a feminist one. A recovery that would, among other things, be based on the principle of social solidarity, aligned with international commitments to women’s human rights.  

Politically Economy of Peace 

So how do we build peace that aligns with people’s needs? What kind of political economy is needed?  Feminist peace activists have been looking at this question for decades. This has been especially urgent for those of us that are living outside of the capitalist core; in countries that are popularly referred to as the Global South and those located at the core’s semi-periphery. We have not only been living with war, threats of war or violence for years but also with the devastating effects of the neoliberal onslaught on our societies. We have been looking at the everyday lives of women and other oppressed groups, at their experiences, traumas as well as their agency and their needs and interest during the process of reconstruction. In collaboration with feminists from around the world, both practitioners and academics, we have been deconstructing the narrative that the neoliberal approach to dealing with conflicts is the only way forward, and that the risk we must live with is measured in potential for new conflicts to arise.  

What we have learnt is that recovery and reconstruction after a conflict is not linear. It is a complex, continuous process and the economic framework of it cannot be detached from the overall societal needs that arise because of the war but quickly get compounded with everyday life needs and challenges. The economic framework of it must intersect with questions of justice, equality and solidarity. It must be put in the service of transforming structures that led to the conflict in the first place, something that the neoliberal approach, with its focus on economic growth for the benefit of the few, has failed with spectacularly.  

Whether we talk about efforts to support countries recovering from war, or if we are trying to stop the next war, our efforts to build peace need to change dramatically. We need to be talking about what peace really means and what policy choices we need to be making to ensure that peace is not just a respite between times of war (during which we prepare for more war), but an ideological choice that is constantly reaffirmed through our policies, norms, values. How this looks exactly is of course contextual. But what feminist peace activists have been able to show is that across many different contexts, and despite temporal and geopolitical differences, efforts needed to build sustainable peace need to be just, inclusive and transformative. 

A different, feminist approach starts with ensuring full inclusion in peace negotiations and plans for recovery. At the centre of these plans cannot be private actors and foreign countries but women and all the other oppressed and marginalised groups that bear the brunt of the conflict consequences. Their inclusion is imperative to our understanding of the gendered harms and violations that took place and what needs to be done to start a process of restorative justice. This will require some form of material and nonmaterial reparations, which should be front and centre of the recovery and reconstruction plans, as they will inevitably intersect with the overall developmental needs of the society. What they will not intersect with is the interest of the capital, either domestic or foreign.  

Thus, as part of the restorative justice approach instead of fiscal constraints what we need to be doing is expanding the investments in public sector and services. How and where we invest in social infrastructure must be informed by an understanding of the gendered division of labour. Across conflicts the cost for social reproduction is overwhelmingly paid by women who provide the labour necessary to sustain communities during times of conflict. In planning the recovery and reconstruction efforts this labor needs to be made visible, and it needs to be valued. Our policies need to aim towards transforming patriarchal power structures, gendered division of labor, and the oppression that is inherent to social reproduction under the conditions of capitalist political economy.   

For people recovering from war justice is not only a question of dealing with war crimes, although that is of course a big part of it. But we also need accountability for the violations of our rights when neoliberal reconstruction policies go bad, and for the conditionalities that push countries into neoliberal austerity measures that leave people hungry, disillusioned, afraid, and easily manipulated. Justice is also about transforming the power relationship between our communities and those international and national elites that claim to represent us. Peace is recognising the power and agency of our communities. It is the policies and structures we put in place to repair and restore our dignity and agency throughout all the process starting with peace negotiations all the way through building sustainable peace.