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ABSTRACT
In the face of the repeated failure of international peacebuilding to build peace, one strand of the literature argues that failure can only be understood by ‘zooming in’ – by focusing on peacebuilders, the local populations they purport to help, and the relationship between them. This article draws on the insights of this literature to argue that international peacebuilding should be understood as an instance of structural injustice. Studies of the encounter between international interveners and local populations tend to focus on the differences between these groups and their problematic relationship. I argue that ‘zooming in’ reveals much more than the differences between interveners and locals: it uncovers how their relationship presents parallels and similarities with others, such as the relation between colonizers and colonized. The relationship between internationals and locals is problematic not because of each group’s characteristics and their difference, but because of the social positions they relate from. These hierarchical social positions give some groups the power to intervene in the lives of others. The article argues that the encounter between internationals and locals should be ‘de-exoticized’ and that hierarchy, rather than difference, should be at the centre of the critical peacebuilding literature.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Lou Pingeot is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Université de Montréal and the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Her research focuses on the link between states’ intervention abroad and the formation of their domestic security apparatus.
Notes
1 In line with much of the literature on the issue, I adopt a deliberately broad and vague definition of ‘peacebuilding’. See e.g. Goetze (Distinction of Peace, 1): ‘Peacebuilding has no proper definition, as the term is shorthand for many different activities conducted in countries and societies riddled by violent conflict, including humanitarian assistance, demilitarization and demobilization, human rights education, police force training, administration, and rights. It is often indistinctively used as synonym for statebuilding, democratization, humanitarian intervention, or peacemaking—peacebuilding’s definition all too often depends on the contexts and actors.’
2 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building.”
3 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders.”
4 Bräuchler, “Cultural Turn in Peace Research.”
5 Millar, “Ethnographic Peace Research,” 658; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders,” 5.
6 Mitchell, “Quality/Control,” 1623. See also: Autesserre, Peaceland; Duffield, “Risk-Management and the Fortified Aid Compound”; Richmond, “Eirenism and the Everyday.”
7 Autesserre, “Going Micro.”
8 Hierarchy is ‘understood broadly as any system through which actors are organised into vertical relations of super- and subordination’ (Zarakol, “Theorising Hierarchies,” 1). Hierarchy is a form of socially-organized domination analytically distinct from authority, which supposes some form of legitimacy and consent on the part of the subordinate (see e.g. Pouliot, International Pecking Orders, 259–65).
9 Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention; Goetze, Distinction of Peace.
10 Young, Responsibility for Justice.
11 The assumption of failure is shared by the literature examined in this section, although not by all the peace operation literature.
12 See references in the introduction, footnotes 2 to 7.
13 Some of these approaches explicitly reject making policy recommendations, see for instance Goetze, Distinction of Peace.
14 E.g. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace.
15 Braüchler and Naucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations of the Local,” 423.
16 Goetze, Distinction of Peace, 4.
17 Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions.
18 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace.
19 Lottholz, “Critiquing Anthropological Imagination,” 698.
20 Millar, “Engaging Ethnographic Peace Research,” 597.
21 Ibid.
22 Braüchler and Naucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations of the Local,” 422.
23 Bräuchler, “Cultural Turn in Peace Research,” 21.
24 Autesserre, Peaceland.
25 Goetze and Bliesemann de Guevara, “Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of Peacekeeping,” 772.
26 Richmond, “Eirenism and the Everyday,” 566.
27 Goetze, Distinction of Peace, 199.
28 Goetze and Bliesemann de Guevera, “Statebuilding Habitus,” 27. See also Goetze and Bliesemann de Guevara, “Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of Peacekeeping,” 801.
29 Autesserre, Peaceland, 98.
30 See for instance Hirblinger Simons, “The Good, the Bad, and the Powerful”; Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn”; Nadarajah and Rampton, “Limits of Hybridity”; Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism.”
31 Goetze, Distinction of Peace, 4.
32 Nadarajah and Rampton, “Limits of Hybridity,” 60.
33 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders.”
34 Ibid., 5.
35 Millar, “Ethnographic Peace Research,” 660.
36 Lottholz, “Critiquing Anthropological Imagination”; Bräuchler, “Cultural Turn in Peace Research.”
37 Bargués-Pedreny, “Never-Ending Critiques of Liberal Peace,” 217; Mathieu, “Critical Peacebuilding,” 37.
38 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 35.
39 Cf. Sabaratnam on Autesserre (Decolonising Intervention, 31).
40 Randazzo, “Paradoxes of the Everyday,” 1355.
41 Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition?” 3.
42 Hameiri Jones, “Beyond Hybridity,” 55.
43 Nadarajah and Rampton, “Limits of Hybridity,” 55.
44 Björkdahl et al., Peacebuilding and Friction.
45 Boege and Rinck, “Local/International Interface in Peacebuilding.”
46 Björkdahl et al., Peacebuilding and Friction.
47 Chandler, “Uncritical Critique of Liberal Peace,” 146.
48 Chadwick, Debiel, and Gadinger, Relational Sensibility.
49 Chandler, “Relational Sensibilities,” 20.
50 Brigg, “Relational Sensibility in Peacebuilding,” 13.
51 Hirblinger and Simons, “The Good, the Bad, and the Powerful,” 423.
52 Zanotti, “Imagining Democracy,” 542.
53 Tomforde, “Introduction,” 451. See also Rubinstein, Peacekeeping under Fire; Duffey, “Cultural Issues in Contemporary Peacekeeping.”
54 Brigg, “Culture: Challenges and Possibilities,” 339.
55 Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo, 25.
56 Goetze and Bliesemann de Guevera, “Statebuilding Habitus.”
57 Fetherston and Nordstrom, “Overcoming Habitus,”102.
58 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 102.
59 Duffey, “Cultural Issues in Contemporary Peacekeeping,” 163.
60 Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition?” 20.
61 Autesserre, Peaceland.
62 Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below, 273.
63 Autesserre, Peaceland, chapter 2.
64 Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World, 7.
65 Autesserre, Peaceland, 248.
66 Ibid., 69.
67 Lidén, Mac Ginty, and Richmond, “Beyond Northern Epistemologies of Peace,” 594.
68 Sending, Why Peacebuilders Are “Blind” and “Arrogant”.
69 Sending, Why Peacebuilders Fail to Secure Ownership, 4.
70 Randazzo, “Paradoxes of the Everyday,” 1354.
71 Sending, Why Peacebuilders Are “Blind” and “Arrogant”; Autesserre, Peaceland.
72 Cunliffe, “Still the Spectre at the Feast,” 429.
73 Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below, 156.
74 Autesserre, Peaceland, 100.
75 Ibid.
76 Goetze, Distinction of Peace, 222.
77 Autesserre, Peaceland, 202.
78 Ibid., 253.
79 Goetze, Distinction of Peace, 222.
80 Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention, 31.
81 See for instance: Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace.”
82 See e.g. Chandler, The Twenty Years' Crisis, chapter 4.
83 Bliesemann de Guevara, ed. Statebuilding and State-Formation.
84 Iniguez de Heredia, Everyday Resistance, 1.
85 Björkdahl and Höglund, “Precarious Peacebuilding,” 289.
86 Jones, “Bringing Social Conflict Back In,” 548.
87 Iniguez de Heredia, Everyday Resistance, 11. Emphasis added.
88 Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below, 182.
89 Kühn, “Universal Patterns of Intervention,” 259.
90 Iniguez de Heredia, Everyday Resistance, 11.
91 Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below, 251. Emphasis added.
92 Iniguez de Heredia, Everyday Resistance, 22.
93 Jones, “Bringing Social Conflict Back In,” 566.
94 Goetze, Distinction of Peace, 105–6.
95 Ibid., 105.
96 Autesserre, Peaceland, 97. See also Sending, Why Peacebuilders Are “Blind” and “Arrogant”.
97 See e.g. Mair, Ruling the Void.
98 Goetze, Distinction of Peace; Autesserre, Peaceland.
99 E.g. Paquot, Ghettos De Riches.
100 Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo, 255.
101 Autesserre, “Hobbes and the Congo,” 263–4.
102 Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 233. Emphasis in original.
103 Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 272.
104 Richmond, “Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism,” 326.
105 See e.g. Wilkinson and Pickett, Spirit Level.
106 Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 266. See also Chandler, “Uncritical Critique of Liberal Peace.”
107 Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention, 22.
108 Chandler, “Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism?”
109 Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism.”
110 McCoy, Policing America's Empire; McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible; Barder, Empire Within.
111 McCoy, Policing America's Empire.
112 Barder, Empire Within, 79.
113 Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 9.
114 Netzloff, England's Internal Colonies.
115 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge.
116 Harig, “Synergy Effects”; Müller, “Entangled Pacifications”; Schuberth, “Brazilian Peacekeeping?”; Sotomayor, Myth of the Democratic Peacekeeper.
117 Gomes, “Analysing Interventionism,” 14.
118 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 57.
119 See e.g. the 2018 report of the OECD on “A Broken Social Elevator?”
120 Chandler, “Relational Sensibilities,” 25.
121 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders,” 14.
122 Barnett, “Hierarchy and Paternalism,” 69.
123 Ibid., 52.
124 Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 272.
125 Mathieu, “Critical Peacebuilding,” 40. Emphasis in original.
126 Bargués-Pedreny, “Never-Ending Critiques of Liberal Peace,” 217.
127 Mathieu, “Critical Peacebuilding,” 37.
128 Ibid., 4.
129 Lottholz, “Critiquing Anthropological Imagination,” 700.
130 Mathieu, “Critical Peacebuilding,” 44.
131 Lottholz, “Critiquing Anthropological Imagination,” 607.
132 Sabaratnam, Decolonizing Intervention, 34.
133 Chandler, “Relational Sensibilities,” 20.
134 Chandler, “Relational Sensibilities.”
135 Richmond, “Dilemma of the Peacebuilding Consensus,” 15.
136 Nadarajah and Rampton, “Limits of Hybridity,” 53.
137 Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 73.
138 Ibid., 9.
139 Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention; Goetze, Distinction of Peace.
140 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 17.
141 Ibid., 39.
142 Markell, “Recognition and Redistribution,” 455.
143 Fraser, “Social Justice,” 36.
144 Markell, “Recognition and Redistribution,” 455.
145 Koddenbrock, “Strategic Essentialism,” 28 (discussing Chandler).
146 Brown, Regulating Aversion, 16.
147 Chandler, “Relational Sensibilities”; Mathieu, “Critical Peacebuilding”; Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention.
148 Lottholz, “Critiquing Anthropological Imagination,” 607.
149 To borrow from Escobar, Encountering Development. There are many parallels between the debates reviewed here and debates around ‘post-development.’ See e.g. Ziai, Post-Development.