New Visions, Critiques, and Hope in the Post-Liberal Age? A Call for Rethinking Intervention and Statebuilding

ABSTRACT

This editorial is a call for radical work that deconstructs and creatively reimagines intervention and statebuilding discourses, processes, practices and tools. For over two decades, critics of liberal interventionism have advocated for the need to rethink its dominant top-down and state centric logics. We now see a new generation of scholars that mobilize feminist, marxist, queer, or decolonial theories to critically engage with the ongoing transformation of the post-liberal order. Interventions and statebuilding processes are key to these changes. As scholars and practitioners, we have an opportunity to partake in shaping emerging visions and nurture hope in complex times.

KEYWORDS:

• Liberal peace
• hybrid
• gender
• intervention
• statebuilding
• black studies
• resilience

Introduction

The daily news of January 2023 is unsettling, especially for readers in search of reassurances that their lives will remain untouched by global crises. After the United States and their allies ramped up pressure, Germany finally broke historical anti-militarist rule and decided to supply Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine to face the Russian invasion; drones attacked an Iranian government weapons factory; Burkina Faso requested France to withdraw its troops and welcomed the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group to provide security against the jihadists. The most optimistic readers might still think that at least ‘the world keeps turning’ – before learning that a new study has found the earth’s inner core is slowing down and could go into reverse.

Turning to forecast reports, the trends are alarming. According to the World Bank (2023), food insecurity has increased worldwide due to the Russia-Ukraine war, supply chain disruptions, and the food price rises. Another report estimates that hotspots of climate migration will spread and intensify in the coming decades, overpopulating some regions and emptying others (by 2050, Sub-Saharan Africa could see as many as 86 million; East Asia and the Pacific, 49 million; South Asia, 40 million internal climate migrants) (Clement et al. 2021, xxii). Scientific studies foresee the total disappearance of the Arctic’s ice over the summer with high probability of that happening before 2040, posing environmental challenges as much as increasing economic and geopolitical competition over trade routes, rich fishing waters, natural gas and oil (LePan 2020).

Analyses of the international governance of conflict and security constantly defy neat conclusions. Some see ‘counter-peace processes’ and ‘peace-breaking dynamics’ to be more dominant and plausible than any peace process (Pogodda, Richmond, and Visoka 2022), while others observe ‘small acts of peace’ in the gestures of compassion, forgiveness, and solidarity of the people in conflict-affected societies that could disrupt conflict (Mac Ginty 2021, 2). New imaginaries of human and non-human entanglements inspire many scholars to search for more context-sensitive, bottom-up and less-human centred interventions (Ide, Palmer, and Barnett 2021; Randazzo and Torrent 2021; Rosenow 2018); while others turn to revisit old imaginaries such as the ‘international society’ with attempts to foster the resilience of global governance institutions and reform them to meet new challenges (Flockhart and Paikin 2022).

Despite these massive shifts in the challenges we face and in the way we see and experience the world, most International Relations (IR) debates seem too absorbed with beliefs in (and critiques of) a world of linear certainties as well as Western-led and hierarchical interventions to rebuild state institutions. A modernist logic has driven the rebuilding of weak states since the end of the Cold War, which was invigorated by data, rationalist analyses and explanations (Fukuyama 2005; Ghani and Lockhart 2008), while critiques assessed the failure of many of these engagements and lamented their political and ethical consequences (Campbell, Chandler, and Sabaratnam 2011). But these analyses and critiques do not capture all current intervention and statebuilding practices, movements, strategies, and logics. To be clear, the point is not to deny that the liberal peace and liberal interventions and statebuilding are still alive, ordering, controlling, and dividing. Rather, there is an increasing need to recognise that IR cannot remain as silent and hesitant vis-a-vis the increasing pluralization and complexification of the international governance of states and societies (Lemay-Hébert 2019). New interventions and understandings, driven by new interests and hopes, are already shaping the world around us. As the old liberal order collapses and new orders emerge, let us take a moment to talk about this transformation.

This article is a call for radical scholarship; a plea to broaden and deepen our analytical repertoires. It seeks to set a programme for deconstructing and reconstructing intervention and statebuilding that learns from actor network theory, new materialism, pragmatism, marxism, feminism, queer, decolonial, Black and indigenous studies. As scholars and practitioners, we cannot miss this opportunity to partake in shaping emerging visions and nurture hope in complex times.

Confronting liberal triumphalism

The foundation of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding in 2007 was tied to a clear goal: To ‘step back from the policy briefs, statements of intent and congratulatory self-assessments of international actors’ and provide a new forum for scholars and practitioners to critically assess the impact of the liberal statebuilding project (Chandler, Chesterman, and Laakso 2007, 1). Security concerns created by the US-led ‘war on terror’ had already tainted the post-Cold War halcyon moment of trust in the potential of liberal development, peacebuilding and democratisation (Jahn 2007). Still, the most influential organisations and policymakers continued to present state weakness and failure as responsible for chronic underdevelopment, instability, and conflict around the world and liberal interventions as the panacea. To effectively address international crime, drug trade and terrorism, international interventions quickly developed a dual focus with short- and long-term goals. Hard security and military action were designed to combat rebels and insurgents and create the conditions for a negative peace, while the reform of liberal state institutions aimed to govern seemingly ‘dysfunctional’ populations and their leaders (Hughes and Pupavac 2005). UN peacekeeping entered an era of ‘enforced peacekeeping’, drawing on strategic communication, military intelligence and taking offensive action to combat rebels, terrorists and organised crime, often undermining the basic principles of peacekeeping – consent of local parties, impartiality, and non-use of force (Peter 2015). As a result, these projects frequently hindered instead of helping the development of democracy, liberal values and institutions (Goodhand and Walton 2009; Richmond 2009).

The articles published in JISB throughout the 2010s (along with those published in other critical outlets like Contemporary Security Policy, Cooperation and Conflict, International Peacekeeping, Third World Quarterly, Peacebuilding or Review of International Studies, to name a few) documented and analysed the numerous consequences of international interventions and statebuilding practices that changed regimes, institutions, communities, cultures, and landscapes (Kühn and Lemay-Hébert 2016). The growing body of literature dedicated to this topic did for instance trace the increasing militarization of West Africa by foreign forces (Charbonneau 2017), or the negative portrayals of the Sahel as an ungoverned place with endless violence and dysfunctional states and leaders, which justified further statebuilding and military deployments such as the Operation Barkhane under the G5 group or European Union peace missions that seem ‘laboratories of intervention’ (Lopez Lucia 2017; Raleigh, Nsaibia, and Dowd 2021).

Other authors showed how the ‘robust turn’ of peacekeeping in African conflicts indirectly harmed local people, exposed communities to protracted violence and constrained the possibility of reaching inclusive political settlements (Hunt 2017; Russo 2021). Indeed, the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq would become paradigmatic of the impossibility of internationally-led statebuilding without local consent; a strategy with tragic consequences for the people and for regional security that last until today (Dodge 2021; Mako and Edgar 2021). Transitional justice interventions, closely tied to the liberal peace and statebuilding project, quickly multiplied and diversified, taking on ever-larger responsibilities. Initially hailed as an effective way to ensure accountability for human rights and protect vulnerable people in the post-conflict recovery phase they were soon subjected to a similarly negative verdict. Scholars judged the impact of transitional justice’s heavily legalised approach to address the legacies of violent conflict ‘at best ambiguous and at times disappointing’ (Gready and Robins 2014, 340).

These perceived shortcomings of liberal interventionism triggered fierce debates about the need to revisit, rethink, pluralize and reformulate interventions away from liberal and security, top-down and state-centric logics (Chandler 2017; Finkenbusch 2016; Rampton and Nadarajah 2017). Critical scholars advocated for more inclusive and context-sensitive strategies, adapted to the needs and preferences of local people. Indeed, empirical analysis of intervention practices had already shown that successful peacebuilding often rested on formal and informal strategies of cooperation between diverse actors on the ground (Debiel and Rinck 2016). So called ‘hybrid clubs’, clusters of local and international actors, and ‘hybrid justice practices’ which combined state legal systems with customary law and practice were for example important to sustain peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Dunn 2021; Martin de Almagro 2018). In Ghana, forms of indigenous peacemaking enhanced by state institutions were fundamental to solve the protracted conflict (Paalo and Issifu 2021). With their emphasis on hybridization and the plurality of post-conflict spaces these and other empirically informed studies challenged the dominant binary distinctions and linearity assumed by liberal interventions and statebuilding (Forsyth et al. 2017; Wilcock 2021). Driven by similar concerns over the invisibility of domestic agency in dominant intervention narratives, the ‘local turn’ spurred influential debates and analysis highlighting the everyday struggles of people in intervened countries for their recognition as influential and capable actors instead of mere passive recipients of external policies (Belloni 2012; Mac Ginty 2010; Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck 2015).

By the end of the decade, in 2020, policymakers and scholars from all ends of the political spectrum agreed that the liberal international order is in crisis. Spurred by increasing geostrategic competition and the ‘fantasmatic logic’ of populist narratives (Freistein and Gadinger 2020, 221), this crisis has been varyingly described as manifesting in a ‘crisis of leadership’, ‘a crisis of democracy’ or a ‘crisis of multilateralism’ (Flockhart 2020). This new consensus has clear consequences for the conceptualisation, implementation, and perception of liberal interventions and statebuilding practices. The United Nations (UN), as the former bearer of the liberal peace and self-proclaimed moral leader of world-politics as well as other international organisations now promote their interventions in less ambitious terms, routinely emphasizing pragmatism as a guiding principle of cooperation (Moe and Stepputat 2018). Over the past decades, UN peacekeeping missions have become increasingly constrained by cuts in budgetary resources and wide dissensus, resulting in ‘smaller, cheaper and less intrusive missions’ (De Coning and Peter 2019; Donais and Tanguay 2020). The European Union’s foreign policy is also slowly moving away from the overt promotion of liberal norms and has instead turned to more pragmatic geopolitical action (Alcaro and Tocci 2021; Juncos 2017). Emboldened by the revived ‘America First’ stance, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from multilateral accords and initiatives. Only a few years later, the world witnessed the chaotic retreat of foreign troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, prompting President Joe Biden to declare that the era of nation-building to transform other nations via military means was over (Shear and Tankersley 2021). Simultaneously, actors and activists in the very countries that were so pivotal to the UN’s narrative of global movement and liberal progress like Afghanistan or Cambodia are increasingly rejecting international actors’ tendency to view politics in their country through the lens of liberal interventionism and its legacies. As the end of history has been postponed indefinitely, these emerging actors press their international partners to frame the modalities of international cooperation in new terms and to different ends (Travouillon and Bernath 2021).

These dynamics and events must be of consequential importance to critical intervention scholarship. For about two decades, this body of work has derived much of its meaning and purpose from its critique of liberal triumphalism. Given the widespread consensus that the liberal model of interventions has failed, such criticism now appears to be obsolete, seemingly depleting critical intervention debates of their momentum (Bargués-Pedreny 2019). Yet, as we would hold, a sustained critical and constructive focus on the transformative potential of intervention and statebuilding is now perhaps more important than ever. We are already witnessing a myriad of new interventions, driven by new actors, interests, and goals; innovative critiques of structures of oppression and opportune responses to violence; as well as emerging practices and narratives about everyday experience, emotion, love and care that open up future possibilities for the field. Large-scale, top-down, model-driven liberal interventions that dominated international relations and our debates may be on the decline, yet intervention and statebuilding remain important analytical categories to understand and reflect on the complex practices inaugurating a post-liberal age of international relations. These practices, however, only come into our field of vision if we are prepared to let go of the very templates that liberal interventionism with its linear certainties and self-evident hierarchies imposed on us. As the following section shows, just as interventions broaden and complexify their strategies and aims, so should our analytical vocabulary and our field of vision.

Intervention and statebuilding in a post-liberal age

One key element of such a wider focus is the recognition that a plethora of actors with competing, overlapping and shared interests are driving interventionist projects (Pingeot 2022; Turner and Kühn 2019). States of the global south have long been eager to shed their image as mere recipients of aid and express confidence in their new leadership status to support and create new security and peace schemas (Travouillon 2021). Emergent powers such as India and China shape peacebuilding initiatives with motivations and practices that co-exist with (and sometimes compete and contest) the liberal agenda of Western actors (Adhikari 2022), while African countries draw inspiration for their unique and shared post-colonial history of peacekeeping, counter-terrorism and solidarity (Fischer and Wilén 2022; Njoku 2021). Indeed, the top twenty troop and police contributors to UN peacekeeping missions are African and Asian countries. Already, multiple international, regional and local actors cooperate over governance agendas and goals, in complex and tense interactions with many risks but also with the potential to meet the ideal of ‘hybrid peace’ (Moe and Geis 2020; Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent 2016).

Furthermore, transnational economic processes and the private sector may play a key role in the negotiation and implementation of peace agreements, as well as in post-conflict statebuilding (Rettberg 2019). Indeed, international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF promote Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) for large-scale extraction and export of natural resources to fund post-war economic reconstruction and statebuilding (Cohn and Duncanson 2020). For example, Liberia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, co-designed by the World Bank and the Liberian government, prioritised opening the country to FDI, primarily for the extraction and export of palm oil, forestry, rubber, and iron-ore that created winners and losers, exacerbating social tensions (Paczynska 2016, 298). In response, in order to counter protests against extractivism in countries like Liberia, extractive transnational corporations engage in legal and social engineering, undertake obscure security and stability practices and discipline dissent (Hönke 2018; Johnson 2021; Verweijen and Dunlap 2021).

Yet, in order to map and engage the new intervention landscape we do not only need to turn more decisively towards new actors. Contemporary practices of international intervention and statebuilding are often very different from the democratisation-focused schemas of the liberal peace. The idea of resilience has been indicative of this transformation. Highly influential since the early 2010s, the concept heralded a new rationale for interventions in crises situations (Bourbeau 2015; Cavelty, Kaufmann, and Kristensen 2015). Rather than setting clear objectives from the beginning, policies to foster resilience are generally more flexible, less linear and goal oriented, adapting to change and evolving circumstances on the ground. Rather than state-centric, resilience usually emerges at the community level, in the everyday struggles of the people, sometimes undermining ethnic, racial and class divides; and rather than imposing Western norms and ideals, approaches of resilience tend to work through context-situated practices, rely on local resources and on how ‘individuals may build new connectivities with and within their social ecologies’ (Clark 2022, 103; Juncos and Joseph 2020). Of course, as critical studies of resilience have underlined, over the years approaches to resilience have been demonstrated to fall short in their presumably transformative agenda (Korosteleva 2020). They have been tied to structures of power, neoliberal logics, and ultimately criticised as ‘always too oriented to adapting to feedbacks and modulating around sustaining what exists’ (Chandler 2019, 305). What matters, however, is that resilience approaches have been premonitory examples of broader visions and new forms of intervention and statebuilding.

In contrast to liberal interventions that derived much of their drive and support from optimistic proclamations of a more peaceful and prosperous order, many of the new interventions are guided by pessimistic assessments and (post-)apocalyptic scenarios (Cassegård and Thörn 2018; Rothe 2020). The era of the Anthropocene is marked by the realisation that human interventions have caused global warming and altered the Earth’s ecosystems – most likely irreversibly so. Shifting landscapes result in increased competition over land and natural resources and planetary urbanisation, intensive farming, and mineral exploitation, continuing the destruction of lands and oceans. In this context, scholars have contributed to understanding how natural resource (mis)management and land-related grievances catalyse armed conflict and have brainstormed ideas for rethinking governance in these uncertain and unstable times (Bakker and Ryan 2021; Johnson 2021; Unruh 2022).

These developments fundamentally unsettle people’s relationship with the world they inhabit. Interventions designed to address the conflictual potential of these practices and events are often reactive, such as the design of new technologies for oil-spill remediation in case of oil spill disasters or carbon capture and storage of the CO₂ generated by industries. Others are more speculative and bottom-up, adapting to a context of high uncertainty and driven by the shared recognition that resilience to crises relies on constant innovation, experimentation and inclusive action (Bargués-Pedreny and Schmidt 2019). The broad field of environment, conflict and peace, for instance, brings together a diverse set of disciplinary perspectives to investigate the integration of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, as well as land and natural resource management into conflict prevention, resolution, and recovery to support peace and environmental sustainability (Ide et al. 2023). Recent works have studied examples of successful customary, bottom-up mechanisms of promotion of sustainable use of natural resources, such as the tara bandu processes in Timor-Leste (Ide, Palmer, and Barnett 2021). Taking on a diversity of feminist, indigenous, and political ecology traditions, McDonald (2021) exposes the myriad ways in which climate change has been dangerously securitised and proposes instead a nuanced ecological security approach to climate security in which fostering resilient ecosystems, and not resilient societies or countries, should be the direct referent of political action.

A central observation from critical studies is that intervention and statebuilding do not constitute exceptions to which there is a before or an after when ‘normalcy’ can be restored (Lemay-Hebert and Visoka 2022, 150–151). While traditional models of peace and security (and their most antagonizing critiques) build upon decisive and powerful moments of intervention that suspended sovereignty and ‘normal’ politics, scholars like Huysmans gear attention to ‘the little security nothings’ – ‘devices, sites, practices without exceptional significance’ – that reproduce violence and insecurities (Huysmans 2011, 377; see further, Aradau, Blanke, and Greenway 2019; Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2020). There is no return to a normal, peaceful life, or an end-state of intervention and statebuilding, but a permanent state of insecurity, inequality and loss (Grove 2019). Indeed, feminist, decolonial and Black studies, perspectives have denounced the violence and blood that have been constitutive of the world of modernity and global power structures which continue to embody this legacy to this day (Agathangelou 2021; Runyan 2020; Rutazibwa 2020; Zalewski 2013). To these critical studies, the political work necessary to confront this situation involves two tasks: Simultaneously, liberal forms of intervention and statebuilding must be deconstructed and resisted, while alternative ones, grounded in the positionalities of those historically and systematically excluded from being (subjects), must be enabled. Indeed, many scholars that critically observe and engage with the political, social, and environmental factors that transform our world are already contributing to this task, a challenge that Blaney and Tickner (2017, 295) so neatly summarised as the necessity to ‘generate the possibility of participation in the simultaneous unmaking of the colonial universe and cultivation of the pluriverse’.

A commitment to this dual responsibility defines the study of intervention and statebuilding in the post-liberal age. The task of deconstruction is, in the first instance, tied to the conviction that radical change cannot be inspired by the desire to reform the status quo. Critical theories such as decoloniality and feminism have long insisted on the necessity of targeting the deep epistemic structures that inform interventions and statebuilding, which downplay and ignore the fundamental impact of spiritual and ecological violence that women suffer in times of conflict (Danso and Aning 2022; Yoshida and Céspedes-Báez 2021). Studies show how security constructs that are rooted in Western epistemologies enable and perpetuate oppressive social structures and systems, for instance, by repackaging and legitimising initiatives for ‘crisis conservation’ of nature in contexts of violent conflict and of minerals and natural resources (Marijnen, de Vries, and Duffy 2021; Vogel 2022). By tying observable intervention outcomes to the ingrained notions of dominance and insubordination that inform social and political hierarchies, this work rejects the simplistic compartmentalisation of ‘problems’ and their ‘solutions’ (Martin de Almagro 2021) – for instance by demonstrating that the effective implementation of peace agreements is deeply intertwined with the quality of women’s daily security (McLeod and O’Reilly 2019; Martin de Almagro and Ryan 2019).

Most of this critical scholarship embraces the endless task of deconstructing, unsettling, discomforting the neo-colonial heteropatriarchal capitalist foundations of international interventions, ‘for constant disruptive thinking [helps to] keep off the comforting conventional path’ affirms Zalewski in a conversation with Christina Masters (2020, 351). Deconstruction is important to detect and undo the exclusions and injustice of dominant approaches but also to enable other narratives with transformative agendas to emerge (Shepherd 2021). Ultimately, this critical scholarship is interested in making visible ‘stories of co-option, domestication and ghettoization’ which have been ignored, overlooked, and considered as unimportant by the IR canon (Soreanu and Hudson 2008; Shilliam 2020). What unites this work is the conviction that intervention and statebuilding studies will only be able to decentre and refuse patriarchy, colonialism and racism in the study of processes such as conflict management, resolution, critical and emancipatory peacebuilding, and social justice if they engage in a fundamental transformation of knowledge production practices (Hedström 2019; Maiangwa, Essombe, and Byrne 2022; Tamale 2020).

The new programme intends to explore new visions and provide hope. Scholars accompany the work of unlearning, unmaking and unsettling with that of mending and suturing the wounds of precarious life. This entails empirical and theoretical investigations into the complex entanglements of ideologies and political rationalities with the temporal, spatial, or emotional dimensions of intervention practices (Burke et al. 2016; Lisle 2021). The objective is to achieve more just and equitable social and political orders and to challenge previously unquestioned ontological assumptions by paying attention to affect and emotions (Christie and Algar-Faria 2020). Scholars are also committed to the creation of new worlds by ‘thinking-with/in and designing-with/in the world’ in complex cooperative processes that involve ‘persons, animals, objects, technologies, affects, aesthetics, and more’ (Austin and Leander 2021, 129). Feminist approaches push for bringing in experiential and granular knowledge about the consequences of peace agreements on villages, families and individuals (Curtis, Ebila, and Martin de Almagro 2022; Madhani and Baines 2020), while Black studies invite black people to assemble a series of stories, songs, poems and other ‘rebellious methodological work’ and ‘shar[e] ideas in an unkind world’ (McKittrick 2021, 7). Transitional justice scholarship, for its part has embraced temporal and emotional perspectives to show the struggles of actors whose voices and viewpoints are marginalised by (neo)liberal discourses of recovery and advocate for their right to forge new paths to address trauma and care (Pupavac 2004), while recent peacebuilding scholarship draws on interdisciplinary concepts of space to rethink and re-assess agency and the human connections that are vital to building peace (Bell and Wise 2022; Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2022). In many cases, the possibilities for new avenues to cooperation and peace will manifest through concrete practices of engagement. Fieldwork in areas of intervention, for example, may be messy, complex, and marred with ethical dilemmas, but it can also become a resource for understanding, intimacy and learning (Bliesemann de Guevara and Bøås 2020).

Importantly, scholars emphasise that the emergence and sustenance of truly creative visions of peace rely on our ability to resist the pull of the ‘state’ as the dominant actor and ordering principle. Collective efforts have to be bold and not shy away from openly rejecting the ‘nation state as a given fixture’ (Rusche 2022, 25). Inspired by anarchist theory, Jonas Rusche (2022, 25) argues that this commitment is crucial to ‘facilitate peace on the basis of non-domination, allowing radically participatory and horizontal institutions to take root’. A commitment to this task of creative re-imagination and transformation does therefore invite us to be artful (perhaps even playful and joyful). It encourages us to see art like painting, music and dance as integral elements to the task of building peace – not mere distractions or embellishments. Elizabeth Grosz (2008, 23–24) argues that art has the capacity to nurture both ideational and material becomings by generating and intensifying ‘sensation’. As such, art interventions have the potential to provide and challenge the status quo and counter violent logics of regulation. As a result of their sonic analysis of the spatial transformation of the city of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cole and Kappler (2022), for example, show how a sound art intervention disrupts the visual representations that depict Mostar as a divided and violent city. Sound, they note, inspires hidden memories and creative thoughts, potentially redefining identities and entertaining alternative imaginaries and materiality of peace. Indeed, so does dancing to electronic music in the cities of Belfast and Sarajevo, where young people have gathered in outdoor raves to ‘temporarily outlive the militarized everyday politics’ and to survive and resist during conflict (Deiana 2022). As we engage with the transformation of global order, these scholars can inspire us to push for new, more just, more inclusive visions for the future.

Conclusion

As editors of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding we are observing an increasing number of contributors, reviewers and readers exploring, interrogating and rethinking a post-liberal age of intervention and statebuilding. To some scholars and practitioners, the very idea of the twilight of the liberal world order invokes uncertainty, if not anxiety. It implies letting go of linear, predictive models of peace and order to confront the ‘failures’ of old models and to restore, reform, or fix them. For others, as well as for us, it is an opportunity for pluralization. To start anew. The task is one of simultaneous radical deconstruction and creative constructive reimagining of order, security and peace.

By turning to the important work of scholars who are already engaged in these debates for a myriad of reasons, we have ascertained the outlines of a new grammar and a research programme for intervention and statebuilding. We draw inspiration from pragmatism, new materialism, feminism, queer, decolonial, Black, and indigenous ethics and stress the importance of listening, generosity, companionship and care. Now, more than ever, there is an urgent need for a strong commitment to confront moments of exclusion in all aspects of academic discourse and knowledge production and engage in a rigorous review of how we forge the collaborations and networks necessary to think and create alternatives.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, David Chandler, Florian Kühn, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, and Maxine McArthur for comments on previous drafts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pol Bargués

Pol Bargués, María Martín de Almagro, and Katrin Travouillon are Editors of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

Dr Pol Bargués is Senior Research Fellow at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). He has explored the intersection of philosophical pragmatism and International Relations and contributed to debates on international intervention to build order, security, resilience, and peace. He has conducted projects critically examining the European Union approach to crisis and conflict management.

María Martín de Almagro

Dr María Martín de Almagro is Assistant Professor at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at the University of Ghent (Belgium). Her research is at the intersection of gender studies, international peacebuilding governance, and the role of knowledge production and meaning-making practices in world politics. She has written extensively on the advocacy around, and implementation of, the United Nations Security Council's Women, Peace, and Security agenda at global, national, and local levels in post-conflict contexts.

Katrin Travouillon

Dr Katrin Travouillon is Lecturer at the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University. Her research centres on the discursive and affective dimension of political change with a particular focus on Cambodia. She is interested in how the liberal peacebuilding project has shaped political ideas, identities, and interactions between domestic and international actors.