Peace-in-Difference: A Phenomenological Approach to Peace Through Difference

ABSTRACT

This article develops the notion of ‘peace-in-difference’, based on a phenomenological approach to difference from German sociology in the 1920s to the French philosophies of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida. Such an attempt responds to a long-standing concern in peacebuilding theory and practice and is critical of essentialist and linear-teleological approaches to peace, as with the theoretical framework of liberal peace-building. As a consequence, ‘peace-in-difference’ is sceptical with attempts to define peace as a status, but rather envisions peace as a perennial process of dialogue. However, ‘peace-in-difference’, even though having the critique of liberal peace and subsequent research questions in common with post-liberal approaches, it is also critical with their construction of ‘the local’ as as a binary opposition to ‘the international’. Though this binary is an attempt to overcome liberal legacies in International Relations (IR) and peace studies, it nevertheless risks reintroducing essentialism. In contrast, a phenomenological approach infers a positive understanding of difference(s) which can be generative of peace, if and when perceived in non-essentialist ways and negotiated as such.

KEYWORDS:

• Difference
• de-essentialization
• temporality
• Lévinas
• Derrida
• peace-in-difference
• critical peace studies

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Xavier Matthieu and Pol Bargués-Pedreny for their invitation to the workshop on ‘Peacebuilding and the Politics of Difference’ at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research (University of Duisburg-Essen), June 26 and 27, 2017, and for careful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I also thank two reviewers of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding whose comments hugely helped to improve the article. For intense discussions on rethinking peace and peacebuilding and the possibilities of a phenomenological approach I am grateful to Giorgio Shani and Takashi Kibe from the Rotary Peace Centre, International Christian University, Tokyo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hartmut Behr is Professor of International Politics at Newcastle University. His research specialises in political theory, sociology of knowledge of IR, politics of difference, political violence, and critical European Studies. Most recent publications include A History of International Political Theory (2010) and Politics of Difference: Epistemologies of Peace (2014) as well as book chapters and articles on the themes mentioned that appeared amongst others in the European Journal of International Relations, Geopolitics, Review of International Studies, International Political Economy, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, Journal for International Political Theory, Ethics & International Affairs. He holds a PhD from the University of Cologne and was teaching and did research at Virginia Tech and the universities of Tokyo, Pittsburgh, Jena, and Ottawa.

Notes

1. Here and throughout the article, ‘otherness’, the ‘other’, and ‘self’ are written in single inverted comas to indicate that they are social and political identity constructions and no ontic entities.

2. See also Lévinas, ‘Peace and Proximity’ (1996c [1984]) which, however, did not yet generate much discussion of a phenomenological approach to peace. A phenomenological approach should not be confused or likened with post-structuralism or post-modernism (not at least because both Lévinas and Derrida in many interviews tirelessly and sometimes fiercely emphasised this difference and protested against any form of appropriation). The reason for this distinction lies in phenomenologists’ more explicit elaboration of own assumptions and in their subsequent normative approach to politics and questions of meaning (see essentially hereto Heidegger, ‘Platon: Sophistes’ [1919-1944]), a dimension which post-structuralism, at least in International Relations and Peace Studies, wilfully neglects or ignores; see representative of this neglect inter alias Campbell 1998; Richmond 2009, 2010; as well as critically Behr/Shani, ‘Critiquing critique in “critical IR”: theory, ideology, knowledge claims and the problem of normativity’ (forthcoming).

3. A fuller version of this approach would need to incorporate aspects of material and discursive power to further specify the experience and negotiation of difference(s) and the subsequent construction of otherness. Such an incorporation, however, would go far beyond the scope of this article. A promising direction could be found in complementing ‘peace-in-difference’ with a realist concept of the political in a Morgenthauian sense (see Morgenthau 2012 and the Introduction to this edition by Behr and Roesch 2012) or with post-colonial studies of asymmetric power relations between ‘the’ West and ‘beyond the West’, their histories, legacies, and threads to humanity and security (see inter alia Shani 2014).

4. Maybe non-Western philosophy does suggest and offer different legacies, but that is not addressed here. However, see inter alia Galtung 1993 (as: see also 1967); more empirical Tambiah 1992.

5. In the legacies of Western political philosophy prior to the intellectual tradition of ‘phenomenology’ we can identify five historic patterns of thinking difference which, however, all establish some form of essentialism of, and hierarchical relation between, differences and are therefore, more or less, less tuned to violence and conflict. For a more detailed discussion, see Behr 2014.

6. Early twentieth century phenomenologists, mainly sociologists, are thus the inventors of what has become mainstream in the discipline of International Relations only some 60 years later, namely ‘constructivism’ and the focus on socially constructed norms to explain actor’s behaviour.

7. ‘Temporal’ and ‘temporality’ mean in the most basic sense the fluid and transformative (in contrast to an essentialised) ontological status of a thing that we become aware of through a proactive processuralization of its empirical appearances by unpacking and destabilising its dynamics, ambiguities, disunities, and perspectives (see the more detailed discussions below p. 9, esp. on the activity of ‘temporisation’ in Heidegger and Derrida). This understanding is critically different to how this term is used frequently in many contemporary social science debates on time that focus on and explore very importantly the historical, present, and future time dimension of politics as these discussions elaborate and actually focus on time-framing (time-making) and time-narration, however, not on ‘temporality’ in the technical sense (see with regard to Peace Studies, inter alia McMahon 2016; also representative of this misconception is Mueller 2016). These debates should therefore speak of time dimensions, time perspectives, or time horizons and thus of ‘historic’ and ‘transient’ rather than of ‘temporal’ dimensions. In how far both understandings interrelate would need careful consideration elsewhere.

8. This book has not yet been translated into English. The title would be something like Inquiries into forms of sociation; see further two (also untranslated) articles: ‘Beiträge zur Philosophie der Geschichte’ (1909; would be: ‘Essays on the philosophy of history’) and ‘Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens’ (1918; ditto: ‘On the nature of historical understanding’).

9. This important, early argument may be quoted in full in its German version:

Dies macht die Gesellschaft zu einem, seinem inneren Wesen nach, historischen Gebilde, d.h. sie ist nicht nur ein Gegenstand der Geschichte, sondern die Vergangenheit hat in ihr noch wirksame Realität … in der Form der gesellschaftlichen Überlieferung wird das Geschehen zum Bestimmungsgrunde des Gegenwärtigen. (1909)

In English: ‘This turn society into an inherently historical constellation, i.e., it is not only an “object” of history, but the past is always lively present in the presence. As social heritage the past becomes the conditioning ground for the presence’ (translation by the author).

10. Very instructive here is also Vierhaus (1977).

11. Simmel notes: ‘Die stetige Bewegtheit des Lebens ist der formale Träger des Verständnisses (…) von Sachgehalten, die ihrerseits das lebendig konkrete Vorkommen dieser Sachgehalte erst verständlich machen’ (Simmel 1918; also 1980, 1977). In English: „The permanent motion of our lives is the carrier for/the condition of our understanding of ‘things’ which itself makes possible the existence of these things in the first place’ (translation by the author).

12. See hereto also Michael Shapiro who speaks of only momentary and transient ‘here and nows’ (1992) as there would be no structure, essence, or identity. All we have are continually transforming appearances (‘transformativity’ rather than ‘identity’ as argued in Behr 2014), exploring their emergence and developments via genealogies, and acting towards them in dialogical empathy.

13. For a discussion of his criticism of Western philosophy see also ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’ (1951); here in Lévinas 1996.

14. In The Other Heading, Derrida writes:

This duty also dictates opening Europe (…) opening it onto that which is not [and] never was (…) The same duty also dictates welcoming foreigners in order not only to integrate them but to recognize and accept their alterity (…) The same duty dictates cultivating the virtue of such critique, of the critical idea, the critical tradition, but also submitting it, beyond critique and questioning, to a deconstructive genealogy that thinks and exceeds it without yet compromising it. (Derrida 1992, 77)

15. A making-possible of being in multiplicity links back to democracy and (Derrida’s vision of) Europe as spaced for this making-possible.

16. For the post-liberal framing of the local-international dichotomy, see inter alia Kappler 2015.

17. There may be individual and temporary exceptions of this general proposition where conflict parties have to affirm a certain identity, for example, to gather and position themselves to be listened to and thus as a condition to mobilise and voice their political ideas. This can be called ‘strategic essentialism’. See originally Spivak 1988 who, however, disapproved of her term later because of its instrumental deployment in theory and practice (see Spivak 2007). For this discussion see also very interesting Benhabib et al. 1995.