Statebuilding Beyond Western Interventions: Rising Powers, Emerging Modes of Institution-Building, and the Implications for Peace Studies

Abstract Over the last three decades, statebuilding, or the process of building political institutions in conflict-affected states (CAS), as a part of a negotiated peace settlement, has been associated with peacebuilding interventions supported by Western states. Non-western rising powers, in turn, are seen to disengage from statebuilding given their ambivalence towards the liberal peacebuilding agenda, and support for the norm of sovereignty. Challenging this dominant narrative, this article examines how India and China have shaped political institutions central to the peace process, such as federalism and inclusion, in two CAS in their regional neighborhood, Nepal and Myanmar, despite not pledging to the international statebuilding agendas. It firstly argues that India and China have influenced the institutional design of political institutions in three ways: directly through coercive diplomacy and economic incentives, indirectly as CAS borrow from the domestic experience of India and China to design their political institutions, and unintendedly as a by-product of their large-scale infrastructures and investments, which alters the distributional consequences of the postwar institutions. Secondly, the article asserts that such institution-building experiences of non-Western states challenge three established scholarly canons in peace studies: role of coercion in peacebuilding by highlighting how illiberal and coercive modes of institution-building can foster liberal outcomes, the Eurocentricity or the “West” as the source of influence for institutional design by outlining how CAS increasingly look to the domestic institutional experiences of non-Western states to emulate, and need to broaden the scope of what constitutes institution-building to include physical infrastructures that significantly shape political institutions.