In the wake of Kenya’s 2013 elections, the term “peaceocracy” was used to capture claims that the victor had prioritized peace to the detriment of substantive democracy. Prior to the election, there were widespread fears that the country might experience similar violence to that witnessed during the country’s post-election violence of 2007/2008, in which over 1,000 people were killed and almost 700,000 others were displaced. As a result, establishment elite emphasized the need to protect a fragile peace as a way to legitimize certain activities, such as the strategic placement of security forces, and to delegitimize others, such as public protest or open debate of potentially divisive topics. While some aspects of this campaign were unique to Kenya and its 2013 election, an emphasis on the need for order to maintain a fragile peace has long been used across Africa and beyond to suppress critical voices.
Peaceocracy can be defined as a situation in which an emphasis on peace is used to prioritise stability and order to the detriment of democracy. The term can be used to refer to a short-lived or longer-term strategy whereby a prioritisation of peace—understood as the absence of widespread direct violence and/or the presence of unity and cohesion—is used to legitimize authoritarian practices such as repressive media laws and a heavy-handed state security response to protest, and to delegitimize other democratic practices such as the public criticism of incumbents and peaceful protest. Critically, this strategic use of peace can be felt not only through outright repression, but also through more subtle disciplinary techniques that seek to determine what is good and acceptable behaviour that should be encouraged and rewarded, and what is bad or unacceptable behaviour that should be avoided and punished.
Key characteristics of peaceocracy include: the presentation of an existing peace as under constant threat; a state discourse of incumbents as the unrivalled guardians of order and stability; and a normative notion of citizenship that casts the “good citizen” as someone who actively takes care to uphold and protect a fragile peace and the “bad citizen” as someone who does anything to potentially threaten the same.
These foundations ensure that while peaceocracy refers to a strategy of leadership, rather than to a discreet regime type, it is a strategy that tends to be adopted and to be most effective in post-conflict countries characterized by hybrid regimes—regimes that are neither fully democratic nor classically authoritarian. The reasons are simple. The idea of a fragile peace post-conflict can be used to help justify a prioritization of peace. A state security narrative can help incumbents to present themselves as the rightful guardians of peace. Hybridity provides a context in which incumbents are motivated to use every means available to win and are well placed to manipulate an emphasis on peace to suppress opposition activities if they so choose.
The concept of peacecroacy is thus important as it adds to our understanding of the potential violence of peace, the advantages of incumbency, and the potentially negative democratic impacts of internal conflict by highlighting the implications of conflict for discursive politics and understandings of (il)legitimate action. The concept demands that we pay more attention to how peace-messaging and building are conducted and with what potentially perverse consequences for democracy and substantive peace.
Featured image: Election (Flickr)
Gabrielle Lynch
Gabrielle Lynch is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Warwick. She has been awarded multiple grants and published widely. This includes three monographs – I say to you: Ethnic politics and the Kalenjin of Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Performances of Injustice: The politics of truth, justice and reconciliation in Kenya (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa: Democracy, Voting and Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with Nic Cheeseman and Justin Willis – and three edited collections.
