Theorizing Postcolonial Deliberation and Deliberative Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

Given a legitimation problem of vertical (state vs society) and horizontal (modernity vs tradition) inequalities and differences as a historical and cultural cause of conflict, deliberation is instrumental in addressing this legitimation problem and transforming conflict into peace in the postcolonial, post-conflict context. Although deliberation has gained academic attention as a means of addressing the legitimation crisis in Western liberal democracies, its application to contemporary peacebuilding remains under-researched. This article thus aims to theorize postcolonial deliberation and deliberative peacebuilding, highlighting postcolonial history and culture and the critical role that agencies have played in deliberation to re-legitimize the non-Western polity and transform conflict into peace. It then deduces a hypothetical mechanism of the different paths to peace either with or without the external intervention that signifies how agencies deliberate.

Keywords:

• Deliberation
• Peacebuilding
• External Intervention
• State-Society Relations
• Legitimacy
• Space
• Power
• Postcolonialism
• Critical Realism

Acknowledgements

Although I appreciate the anonymous reviewers, I am responsible for all errors and misunderstandings, if any.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Yoshito Nakagawa http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5610-1316

Notes

1. Use of the terms ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ require caution. This paper links the modern and the traditional to the exogenous Western ‘colonial’ and the endogenous indigenous ‘precolonial’, respectively, and employs them to conceptualize inequalities in a non-Western context; yet they are not fixed but change over time, from colonization to decolonization and postcolonization given global, national, and local politico-economic and sociocultural relations from one context to another.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yoshito Nakagawa

Yoshito Nakagawa, PhD (Manchester), an independent researcher and consultant based in Japan. He has worked in peacebuilding and development programmes in Asia (East Timor, Palestine), Africa (Somalia, South Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire), and Latin America (Nicaragua, Paraguay). His current research interests include comparative politics, peace and conflict studies, and development studies (governance and public policy).