Beyond Silence, Obstacle and Stigma: Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Difference in Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

Whereas practitioners and mainstream approaches to intervention are concerned about the inability to manage difference in a way that is conducive to peace, critical scholars worry about the inability to write difference without essentializing ‘it’ or reproducing and legitimizing power structures. Can we revert the pessimism regarding the possibility to engage with others sensitively and build peace in a diverse world? In this article, we argue that the current miasma of despair regarding international interventions is the result of three successive errors in the process of seeking to build a peace sensitive to the other: silencing, problematizing and stigmatizing difference. After examining these three errors, we outline three analytical starting points that offer a better understanding of difference: multidimensionality, anti-essentialism, and a focus on power struggles. This discussion opens the Special Issue and hopes to stimulate further conversations on the role of difference in peacebuilding by focusing on its conditions of emergence.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacebuilding
• Difference
• Power
• Multidimensionality
• Performance
• Critique

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all the contributors to this Special Issue and the editors of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding for their enthusiasm for this project and their dedication to see it succeed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Pol Bargués-Pedreny is a research fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. He has developed an interest in the intersection of philosophy and international relations. His work critically interrogates international interventions and perspectives on resilience, hybridity and social critique. He is author of Deferring Peace in International Statebuilding: Difference, Resilience and Critique (Routledge 2018).

Xavier Mathieu is a Teaching Associate at Aston University. His research focuses on sovereignty, peacebuilding, the Responsibility to Protect as well as the notion of difference in international relations.

Notes

1. For heuristic reasons, this ‘history’ of peacebuilding is presented in a linear fashion. In reality, the three errors discussed here have co-existed and still do.

2. Recognitions of the limits of these academic attempts abound and are usually linked to the fact that the local Other cannot be identified as a fixed interlocutor – ‘the local’ has multiple, contingent and heterogeneous political identities which rely on perceptions and are thus dependent on the subjectivity of the scholar herself. See examples of these recognitions in Wanis-St. John (2013, 363), Mac Ginty (2015, 841–842), Björkdahl and Gusic (2015, 269), Mac Ginty and Firchow (2016), and for a more problem-solving approach recognising the ambiguities of the local see Schaefer (2010).

3. For a recent example of this problem see Visoka and Richmond (2017) and for a critique see Randazzo (2016).

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to the Centre for Global Cooperation Research (University of Duisburg-Essen) – and in particular Julia Fleck – for the financial and logistical help provided in organizing the workshop that led to this Special Issue.