Transcending binaries in critical peacebuilding scholarship to address ‘inclusivity’ projects

Abstract

In light of the recent turn to ‘inclusivity’ in peacebuilding practice, this article problematises established ways of ‘doing critique’ in peacebuilding scholarship. Inclusivity refers to the building of peace as a situated and co-constituted process. This entails what can be termed a new epistemic commitment: the acknowledgement that peacebuilding as a dynamic and emergent phenomenon is also an epistemically co-constituted process. In the article, I make two arguments. First, the move towards inclusivity places currently dominant modes of scholarly critique at an impasse. Persistent ontological and epistemological binaries preclude a productive investigation and challenging of inclusivity projects and their epistemic commitment. Second, I argue that, by returning to historical conditions that were formative in the very emergence of the category of ‘the local’, the conceptual basis of an alternative mode of critique (re)appears. This alternative critical project allows for an analytical sensibility to peacebuilding as emergent and adaptive. It makes it possible to disentangle power relations as these emerge between different and possibly unexpected configurations of actors and knowledge claims in inclusivity projects.

Keywords:

• peacebuilding
• inclusivity
• politics of intervention
• critique
• situated knowledge

Introduction

In the picture are several people, young and old. They gather around a large map – pointing at it, drawing on it, and seemingly engaging in a lively discussion about it. The picture appears in a document that articulates goals such as ‘making cities better together’, for which ‘the inclusion of all sectors of the community [is] fundamental’.¹ As an extract from a UN-Habitat programme in post-conflict Kosovo, the picture illustrates what has recently been advanced as a novel approach to peacebuilding: ‘inclusivity’.

Inclusivity refers to how peacebuilding is to be ‘locally driven, locally owned and locally led’.² While similar aims have long been advanced in discussions on peace and development, the concept of inclusivity involves a bolder commitment to adaptability, transgression of local–international divides and knowledge co-constitution. In brief, inclusivity denotes that local knowledges should (re)shape and (re)constitute peacebuilding processes. International actors should not impose their knowledge(s), but rather refine or at least semi-abandon their pre-formed assumptions and perspectives so that the binary between the international and the local becomes blurred through a process of epistemic co-constitution.³

Instead of critiquing inclusivity per se or how it plays out in practice, this article investigates what inclusivity’s epistemic commitment and challenge to binary thinking imply for scholarly critique. I make two arguments. Following a closer presentation of peacebuilding inclusivity in the first part, the second pinpoints the research problem that drives this article. While a forceful critique of the ontology of difference that characterises much of the critical peacebuilding literature has already been made, I argue here that an equally binary epistemology is less discussed. This translates into an unquestioning acceptance of ‘the local’ as a distinct and relevant epistemic category of analysis. While this binary epistemology has played a significant role in the development of crucial post- and decolonial approaches to peacebuilding, it places critique at an impasse in relation to inclusivity. The specific problem is that current scholarly critiques of binaries and local–international relationships in peacebuilding end up reinforcing these same binaries, rather than examining how they came about and with what effects. Rather than strictly dismissing existing critical approaches, however, this argument is a first step towards a complementary mode of critiquing that is better suited to productively addressing the epistemic dynamics and unfolding hierarchies of peacebuilding inclusivity projects.

In the third part, I explore what such a critical project might look like. To do this, I begin by revisiting historical conditions of colonial knowledge production, as these helped establish ‘the local’ as an epistemic category. Much has been written on the epistemic violence of the colonial knowledge industry.⁴ However, and while simultaneously acknowledging this violence, these historical conditions can be read in another way, which focuses on knowledge production as an embodied, situated and co-constituted phenomenon. My second argument is that this alternative reading invokes an alternative epistemology that forms around the concept of ‘situated knowledge’. This conceptual baseline may, in turn, inform a new type of scholarly critique better suited to making known, disentangling and critiquing the contemporary politics and power relations of peacebuilding inclusivity projects.

In other words, by revisiting colonial conditions that helped bring the category of ‘the local’ into being, we gain insights from which to develop an alternative scholarly mode of critique that allows us to study more productively the epistemic conditions of peacebuilding inclusivity projects in the present. This mode enables an analytical sensitivity to processes of emergence and adaptation. It allows for a disentanglement of power relations between potentially varied configurations of actors and knowledges that cross conventional binaries, without ruling out that inclusivity projects may be just another example of colonial stances and epistemes being (more or less consciously) reproduced in and through the building of peace.⁵

Inclusivity and its novel epistemic commitment/challenge

In 2012, the then United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, advanced ‘inclusivity’ as a peacebuilding priority. Inclusivity should inform peacebuilding ‘from analysis, design and planning to implementation and monitoring’.⁶ And, indeed, inclusivity has ‘become the concept of choice for those seeking to reshape, both normatively and procedurally, what peace building is and how it should be practised’.⁷ That said, there is no consensus on what, precisely, the concept entails. However, it is possible to discern some distinguishing features.

Inclusivity is often advanced in contrast to liberal, ‘intrusive’ peacebuilding.⁸ It refers to localised, ‘context-appropriate’ peacebuilding activities and solutions. With inclusivity, peacebuilding processes are to be ‘grounded in indigenous contexts’ and be ‘locally driven, locally owned and locally led’.⁹ This requires, first, a meaningful inclusion of a variety of actors in the peacebuilding process.¹⁰ Often mentioned are local civil society organisations, women and indigenous people.¹¹ Second, and related, inclusivity denotes that ‘local’ knowledges should (re)shape and (re)constitute peacebuilding.¹² This requires local knowledges to ‘resonate at the international level’. International actors are to be flexible and adaptable, not least vis-à-vis the process of building peace as such with its constantly changing and co-constitutive dynamics.¹³ With this comes a greater attention to process, as compared to earlier forms of peacebuilding and their focus on outcomes.¹⁴

With inclusivity, peacebuilding is thus recognised as a dynamic, co-constituted, emergent and necessarily adaptive process that includes multiple knowledges and actors.¹⁵ Internationals should not impose their knowledge but should support locally formulated knowledges, ends and capacities. Moreover, as a co-constituted, ever-shifting and adaptive process, inclusive peacebuilding acknowledges that any knowledge is necessarily ‘provisional’.¹⁶ International actors need to demonstrate an epistemic openness to refine, even abandon, pre-formed assumptions and knowledges in order to learn from and incorporate local knowledges and experiences.¹⁷

This pinpoints the novelty of inclusivity. While a greater inclusion of local actors and knowledges in peacebuilding has long been discussed, inclusivity brings what can be understood as a novel and bolder epistemic commitment (and challenge): the acknowledgement of peacebuilding as a dynamic, emergent, co-constituted and adaptive process that involves a shift from purely external to a blend of international and local knowledges, from fixed knowledge to provisional, and from international peacebuilders as providers/imposers of knowledge to themselves being subject to epistemic transformation.¹⁸ In other words, inclusivity involves the transgression of the local–international divide and a quest for knowledge co-constitution. Again, and as Thania Paffenholz puts it, ‘what matters is meaningful inclusion’.¹⁹

The policy breakthrough of inclusivity can to some extent be understood as the de facto success of critical peacebuilding scholarship with its focus on local agencies and local knowledges.²⁰ Indeed, it is precisely the link between critical scholarship and inclusivity in peacebuilding policy and practice that prompts further reflection on the tools with which scholars seek to understand, know and critique peacebuilding projects. In the next part, I will demonstrate that various scholarly efforts to critique peacebuilding binaries and divides between the international and the local paradoxically end up reinforcing these very binaries, both ontologically (more discussed) and epistemologically (less discussed). For this reason, extant modes of critique are less efficient when it comes to tackling inclusivity projects. The move towards inclusivity in peacebuilding practice thus requires a methodological and conceptual shift in the scholarly toolkit. More specifically, the epistemic commitment/challenge of inclusivity requires modes of critiquing unbound by a priori distinctions and binaries between the ‘local’ and the ‘international’.

Peacebuilding critique at an impasse

As detailed in the previous part, the epistemic commitment/challenge of peacebuilding inclusivity places questions of binaries and the local–international relationship in sharp relief. These issues have long been at the centre of critical peacebuilding scholarship. The ‘local turn’²¹ and related concepts such as ‘hybridity’ were advanced as ways to (in more conventional accounts) illustrate the significance of local institutions and ownership over peacebuilding processes²² and (in the more critical literature) reveal a variety of agencies and knowledges that constitute a repository of alternative routes to peace. For the latter, the local is a ‘potential realm of critical practice’ that may challenge the dominance of international peacebuilders and Western knowledge systems.²³ Similarly, studies of peacebuilding hybridity suggest that, in conflict and post-conflict environments, ‘liberal and illiberal norms, institutions, and actors coexist’.²⁴ Such co-existence may bring about ‘hybrid peace(s)’ that offers an alternative to international hegemony and, therefore, more legitimate governance arrangements made up of a ‘composite of exogenous and indigenous forces’.²⁵

Critique from within persistent binaries

As many have noted, though, the problem with this type of critique is that it relies on a binary ontology – an ontology of difference. It sets up a binary opposition between the local and the international, and treats these as pre-formed and ontologically distinct entities with basically set power relations between them.²⁶ Even though any ‘original position’ is hardly conceivable,²⁷ the local and the international are repeatedly and a priori made distinct.²⁸ There is, in other words, no questioning of the local as constitutively distinct from the international. Indeed, the basic problem with the concept of hybridity, says Elisa Randazzo, is that ‘if the local is the subject to be emancipated, how can the concept of hybridity do that conceptually – let alone practically – without delimiting and constraining in a binary way the identities of local and international actors?’²⁹

In a ‘critique of the critique’, then, the ontology of difference that underpins works on hybridity and the local in peacebuilding has been much criticised. Still, even works that directly target the ontology of difference may end up less epistemically transformative than suggested. Meera Sabaratnam offers a particularly forceful critical account.³⁰ By making the point that much critical work ignores the roots of peacebuilding in colonial logics and fails to analyse the standpoints of those targeted by interventions, Sabaratnam develops an alternative epistemology for the study of interventions. With inspiration in anti-colonial thinkers and feminist standpoint theory, her decolonial approach centres the voices, experiences and perspectives of the targets of interventions.³¹ The notion of ‘targets’ is understood in a positional sense rather than from within an ontology of difference. Targets inhabit certain positions within interventionist power structures. This gives them an ‘epistemically privileged vantage point’ from which to perceive, apprehend and evaluate the social orders brought into being through interventions.³² For Sabaratnam, the analysis of interventions needs to begin with such ‘situated knowledges’.³³ Nevertheless, even while repositioning them as ‘targets’ and ‘interveners’, Sabaratnam refrains from further problematising the epistemic categories of ‘local’ and ‘international’. The idea that differently positioned actors have different perspectives on the world and that we therefore need to understand knowledge as necessarily situated does not give full justice to what the concept of ‘situated knowledge’ may imply in terms of an alternative epistemology.

This illustrates what I would call an equally persistent, but less debated, binary epistemology in peacebuilding scholarship. Dominant modes of critique think from rather than about the category of ‘the local’ (and ‘the international’), and do not thoroughly problematise this as a relevant epistemic category. This thereby also includes alternative perspectives (such as Sabaratnam’s) that render a positional critique. As a result, there is little analytic space to think more open-endedly about potential intrinsic relations between the ‘local’ and the ‘international’.

Bruno Charbonneau makes a similar argument. He speaks of a ‘polarisation effect’ that emerges as scholars rely on a presumed distinction between ‘the external imperialist and the country united in its anti-imperialist struggle’. For Charbonneau, polarisation hides ‘fundamental connections between international and local forces’.³⁴ It is as if scholars know beforehand ‘where this line is situated between international forces of intervention and local subjects of intervention’.³⁵ Instead of proposing a middle way or treating ‘one side of this opposition as a privileged standpoint’, Charbonneau suggests that we need to problematise the emergence of this dichotomy in the first place, and treat it as having political consequences.³⁶ In other words, the making and articulation of a local–international distinction, whether by scholars or other social actors, can be understood as a performative device.³⁷ Actors may use the local–international distinction to their advantage when portraying themselves and/or others.³⁸ They may also have a split identity. For example, in an analysis of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Linda S. Bishai shows that women who have received training from USIP to fight domestic violence in Nigeria are simultaneously local and global, as is their knowledge and expertise.³⁹ In this sense, by making comparisons too quickly between peacebuilding and its colonial roots, and by relying on an a priori local–international binary, critical scholarly efforts risk overlooking more complex relationships, processes and power dynamics, as well as how the local–international distinction itself may play a role in the perpetuation of (epistemic) violence.

Going beyond binaries to address inclusivity

‘What might constitute a genuinely “critical” response?’ ask Suthaharan Nadarajah and David Rampton in a discussion of the concept of peacebuilding hybridity.⁴⁰ As suggested by the foregoing, the question is equally relevant in relation to the novel epistemic commitment/challenge of peacebuilding inclusivity projects. Against this commitment/challenge, the persistent binaries that mark much of critical peacebuilding scholarship suggest the need for a new mode of doing critique. While none of the local turn, hybridity and/or various post- and decolonial approaches are in themselves flawed or necessarily ill suited to address other issues, these modes of critique end up at an impasse in relation to peacebuilding inclusivity projects.

As discussed, these approaches reinforce (unwittingly or not) local–international binaries rather than examining how such binaries came about in the first place and with what effects. The persistent epistemological binary, with its unquestioning acceptance of the categories ‘local’ and ‘international’, becomes a hindrance to developing a critique that takes into account and deciphers the power dynamics of inclusivity as a co-constituted, emergent and adaptive process that involves emergent configurations of actors and knowledges. Critiques of inclusivity formulated from within the binary epistemology would thus do little to prompt the contextual sensitivity to emergence, adaptation and power dynamics between potentially different configurations of actors and knowledges that an analysis of inclusivity requires. Even if such processes do involve the obscuring and marginalisation of knowledges and perspectives that do not conform to or that challenge conventional peacebuilding epistemics, a critique that comes from within set binaries risks assuming rather than empirically examining how this is achieved in practice at particular sites and within particular projects.

What, then, about critical works that directly address inclusivity? Are these better suited to investigate productively the epistemic dynamics, commitments and challenges of inclusivity projects? There are, as mentioned, many affinities between the turn to inclusivity in peacebuilding practice and critical peacebuilding scholarship, particularly on the local turn.⁴¹ For this reason, too, it is unsurprising that most critical discussions about inclusivity remain within a binary epistemology. For instance, when discussing the peace process in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Timothy A. Donais argues that the lack of inclusivity is partly due to international actors’ focus on elite groups and to the paternalistic introduction of the ‘Bonn powers’ that precluded any meaningful involvement on behalf of the wider population.⁴² Other studies of inclusivity remain within the same binary thinking when they explore inclusivity as a peacebuilding norm, investigate the extent to which internationals work in accordance with inclusivity and/or consider how capacities for coordination may be improved.⁴³

To move beyond this state of critical impasse in relation to inclusivity, I follow Charbonneau’s suggestion that we should – without dismissing sensitivity to peacebuilding’s colonial and imperialist roots – problematise the emergence of the local–international dichotomy, and acknowledge that whenever and wherever this distinction emerges it is not as a neutral designation but as a move that carries political significance. In the next part, I concretise this by revisiting historical conditions of colonial knowledge production that helped produce ‘the local’ as an epistemic category in the first place. The part begins by exploring the conventional reading of colonial knowledge production as expressed in writings from travels and scientific expeditions during the late eighteenth, the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. This conventional understanding has greatly influenced dominant modes of critique in present-day peacebuilding scholarship. However, as I go on to explore, it is at the same time possible to reveal alternative readings of such accounts and of colonial knowledge production. These alternatives, in turn, reveal another mode of knowing and critiquing peacebuilding. This alternative epistemology conceives of knowledge production as situated, co-constitutive and politically charged processes, through which the local and the international are emergent and mutually generative rather than distinct and pre-formed. Co-constitutive processes in peacebuilding environments are not unacknowledged by the literature.⁴⁴ However, as an alternative mode of knowing and of critiquing, this needs to be fleshed out in relation to the epistemic commitment/challenge of peacebuilding inclusivity projects.⁴⁵

Revisiting the formation of ‘the local’ to reconfigure critique(s) of inclusivity in the present

This part, which seeks an alternative mode of knowing and critiquing peacebuilding, begins by revisiting historical conditions of knowledge production during the colonial era that helped produce ‘the local’ as an epistemic category. One way to do this is via writings from travels and scientific expeditions of the late eighteenth, the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, as these were intimately tied to colonial projects. In what follows, I first introduce the conventional reading of such accounts. However, and as the burgeoning academic field of travel-writing studies shows, it is possible to also read the writings from colonial travels and expeditions in slightly different ways. In the second section, I explore and illustrate how alternative readings emphasise epistemic co-constitution and a transcendence of conventional binaries between the local and the European/colonial. As I argue in the third section, this perspective on knowledge and knowledge production renders conceptual grounds for a more productive (and responsible) mode by which to study and criticise peacebuilding inclusivity projects in the present.

Peacebuilding as a historically conditioned practice of epistemic domination

Knowledge produced during travels and scientific expeditions between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries conditioned colonial projects and played a constitutive role in colonial violence and oppression. This functioned not only through the ways in which expeditions and journeys provided ‘practical information for colonization’, but also through the ‘Othering’ that was effectuated by colonial epistemes.⁴⁶ As Claire Lindsay suggests, ‘if the imperial centre depended on representations of its peripheries and others to know itself, and to provide a sense of ownership, entitlement and legitimacy, travel-writing served up plenty of material for that purpose’.⁴⁷

The knowledges, perspectives and modes of signification produced during travels and scientific expeditions were crucial for colonial ‘naming’, and thereby for the possibility of laying claims to territorial ownership.⁴⁸ In addition, the knowledge produced and the bringing into being (rather than discovery) of ‘the local’ as ‘backward’, ‘traditional’, ‘prescientific’, ‘exotic’ and ‘irrational’ conditioned colonisers’ claims to (epistemic) dominance. This rested on created binaries, hierarchies and temporal distinctions between the European and the local, on the silencing of local actors and local knowledges and on an unquestioned assumption that the ‘origin of knowledge [rested] within the European subject’.⁴⁹ Colonial knowledge production thereby also conditioned the construction of a European self.⁵⁰ Phillip B. Wagoner summarises this as ‘epistemological’ violence. While colonial knowledge was produced in the colonies, it was ‘not of the colony’.⁵¹

This reading of colonial knowledge production has been imperative for deciphering the conditions, assumptions and power relations of colonial projects, and colonisers’ claims to epistemic domination. Critiques of how colonial knowledge production involved the subjugation, marginalisation or erasure of local knowledges⁵² have furthermore greatly influenced the local turn and works on hybridity in the peacebuilding literature. Indeed, dominant approaches within critical peacebuilding scholarship tend to see peacebuilding as an imposed global liberal order.⁵³ Peacebuilding is analysed as marked by a marginalisation, overwriting, absence and/or subjugation of local knowledges – a logic that is considered to have its roots in colonial structures of epistemic domination. Local agencies and local forms of knowledge that challenge or resist international initiatives are found to be suppressed and not afforded an epistemological value.⁵⁴ As Roger Mac Ginty puts it, ‘processes of empire, colonialism and globalisation’ have contributed to the ‘disruption’ of the local and of local knowledges, and to the construction of these as hindrances and/or as requiring ‘taming’.⁵⁵ From this follows a need to counter such disruptions and displacements.⁵⁶

Colonial knowledge production as a co-constituted process

Parallel to the conventional reading, however, are alternative readings of colonial knowledge production that focus on partly different epistemic dynamics. The established view of colonial knowledge production as denoting the imposition of predetermined categories and knowledges has been criticised for its homogenising and essentialising tendencies, and for – as a result of this – upholding the local–international binary.⁵⁷ The similarities to dominant modes of critique in peacebuilding scholarship are indeed striking. The risk, as argued also above, is that this type of critique replicates the binaries once established in and through colonial knowledge production, rather than exploring how such distinctions were made possible and practically achieved in the first place.

By contrast, and by resisting binaries, totalising meta-narratives and the ‘projection-model’ of knowledge,⁵⁸ alternative readings of travel and expeditionary writing from previous centuries depict knowledge production as a practical, embodied and situated process. Specifically, they demonstrate the co-generative formation of the local and the European/colonial. In other words, by emphasising knowledge production as a co-constitutive process, which also challenged and transformed Europeans’ assumptions and knowledges, these readings problematise the view that colonial knowledge was not of the colony.⁵⁹

To begin with, feminist and poststructuralist readings of period travels and scientific expeditions stress knowledge production as an embodied process. With knowing bodies immersed in natural environments, the production of colonial knowledge was a multi-sensuous, highly affective process. For one thing, travellers experienced shifting moods and struggled to display ‘self-composure’ and a ‘scientific distance’. In addition, the dominant mode of vision was complemented by hearing, smelling and touching.⁶⁰ Nature, in particular, overwhelmed travellers.⁶¹ Mary Kingsley’s experiences in West Africa in the 1890s are telling. While ‘Kingsley attempted to be identified as an objective, masculine observer’, she represents best ‘an observer located within the landscape’, smellscape and soundscape in which she found herself.⁶² Kingsley formed meaning and produced knowledge through her situatedness in particular spaces and natural environments. The landscape had ‘its own unpredictable agency’, as it upset established categories and any ‘disembodied gaze’⁶³: As Kingsley herself writes:

… on my first voyage out I did not know the Coast, and the Coast did not know me, and we mutually terrified each other… but we gradually educated each other … One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around me, and found them either worthless or wanting.⁶⁴

During his travels in the Americas between 1799 and 1804, Alexander von Humboldt became overwhelmed by nature. It unsettled and disrupted his established categories of knowing and created space for new knowledge(s). At the same time, Humboldt struggled to familiarise himself and to order the new to follow already established categories and perspectives. In this process, the unknown/known constantly ‘jostle[d] and confound[ed] each other’.⁶⁵

A further aspect of the co-constitution of the local and the European/colonial during travels and expeditions concerns travellers’ practical dependence on local artefacts, as well as the epistemic consequences of the very modalities and materialities of travel. Humboldt’s journeys in the Americas were ‘tactical forays, improvisations and performances on the wing’ rather than pre-planned and fixed. The forms and modalities of his travels meant that his writings could not produce the expected ‘linear progression from darkness to light’.⁶⁶ Moreover, travels and expeditions depended on a number of things. Alongside scientific instruments and tools brought from Europe, travel depended on various artefacts acquired from local traders.⁶⁷

Third, the conditions of colonial knowledge production involved not only engagement with but also active dependence on local actors and local forms of knowledge.⁶⁸ Travels relied on large networks of people and auxiliaries. This social conditioning shaped not only the routes taken but also the knowledge produced.⁶⁹ Beyond logistical matters, travellers depended on local knowledge ‘even before they themselves were ready to produce the kind of knowledge they were expected to bring back’.⁷⁰ Such dependence on and engagement with local knowledge and people were, however, often cast in instrumental terms. Fabian gives the following example from the writings of the Belgian military and explorer Camille-Aimé Coquilhat:

Everybody and their wives settles [sic] down in my dining room around the beer pot … I use these meetings to obtain the occasional geographic information …. Little by little, tongues loosen. People stop addressing me. In fact, I try to make them forget I’m there. They get to questions currently debated among the Bangala. And, almost imperceptibly, the conversation gets to be so interesting that I keep leafing through my copybook, pretending I’m not listening. It is incredible how many facts, projects, and current ideas I learn in this manner.⁷¹

Summing up, the illustrations taken from alternative readings of knowledge production during travels and scientific expeditions in the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries show this as a situated, practical and locally–internationally co-constituted process. They demonstrate how local actors, knowledges, artefacts and natural environments were the product (object) as well as (co-)producers of European/colonial knowledges. This involved a continuous unsettling of established categories and concepts, which often resulted in transformed European/colonial knowledges.⁷² In this sense, colonial knowledge was of the colony – or, rather, of particular sites and socio-material arrangements in terms of actor constellations, environments, objects and power dynamics.

What is significant about these alternative readings is that they highlight co-constitution in the sense of how European/colonial knowledges would not have existed in their particular forms had it not been for the generative role played by local agencies, artefacts, natural environments and knowledges. The notion of co-constituted knowledge disrupts binary ontologies and epistemologies as it refers to how the European/colonial and the local made each other possible throughout situated, simultaneous, open-ended, and ultimately contingent and transformative processes. Indeed, ‘insisting on co-constitution’, Anna Leander and Tanja Aalberts argue, ‘is a way of underscoring that the productive relationship between these two sides … is not sequential but simultaneous’.⁷³ The aforementioned alternative accounts illustrate one side of co-constitution. Works that show local knowledges as simultaneously global and local show the other side.⁷⁴

‘Situated knowledge’ as informing a re-energised critique of peacebuilding inclusivity

The above alternative rendition of colonial knowledge production sketches the contours of a different critical project that is based in an alternative epistemology, formed around the concept of ‘situated knowledge’,⁷⁵ and targeting co-constituted epistemic processes.⁷⁶ In this section, I unpack what difference this alternative critical project might bring to the analysis of peacebuilding inclusivity. First, I introduce the concept of ‘situated knowledge’ and locate the epistemological and ontological consequences of making this a key concept around which the alternative critical project crystallises. Following this, I argue that attention to knowledge as situated and co-constituted offers a conceptual baseline from which a ‘genuinely “critical” response’ to peacebuilding inclusivity projects can be formulated.⁷⁷ This alternative mode enables a perspective that reconfigures the ontological status of the local and the international. It makes the local and the international emergent and mutually generative rather than distinct and pre-formed, while taking into account power dynamics and the fact that actors may advance claims about ‘local’ or ‘international’ knowledges and distinctions.

The concept of ‘situated knowledge’ is perhaps best known in relation to Donna Haraway’s work. Haraway advanced the concept in a 1988 rethinking of feminist standpoint theory. The aim was to counter established ideas about objectivity and the disembodied subject, while avoiding binaries and essentialist reasoning that assumed a similar female standpoint for all female subjects.⁷⁸ The question was, thus, how to avoid reinserting the essentialism that standpoint epistemologies sought to avoid while maintaining a political project and attention to power relations.⁷⁹

Key to Haraway’s rethinking is a reconsideration of objectivity.⁸⁰ With situated knowledge, objectivity goes from being about the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ to being about ‘particular and specific embodiment’.⁸¹ Objectivity re-emerges in a way that transcends the distinction between subject and object, and that recognises all knowledge practices and claims as embodied, partial and socio-materially situated. Situatedness, positionality and the socio-material conditions of knowledge production matter for the construction of the object, and thus for the content of knowledge. This also entails an expansion in terms of which and whose perspectives and knowledge claims are made visible and potentially authoritative.

Moreover, from a perspective of situated knowledge, epistemic practices, positionality and situatedness are imbricated with ontology. This makes ‘unexpected openings’ possible.⁸² In other words, being is ‘mutually implicated’ with modes and practices of knowing.⁸³ Binaries, identities and connections between certain knowledges and certain actors are emergent and thus inherently unstable.⁸⁴ Actors and knowledges are never ‘simply there’, ‘pre-existing’ or ‘before’, but come into being (and are constantly made) co-constitutively, through processual entanglements. Distinctions and/or boundaries between certain configurations of actors and knowledges – thus both generated and generative – emerge and unfold in practice from within certain socio-material arrangements.⁸⁵ This ontology of emergence and co-constitution involves not only humans but also a (co-)constitutive role for material objects, tools and natural environments. This means paying attention to ‘embodied humans within a material world’.⁸⁶ For Haraway, the material world is not ‘a [passive] screen or a resource’, but an active force.⁸⁷ Situated knowledge thus involves an ontology of becoming in which the generative force of material objects and natural environments is intertwined with knowledge production.

In relation to the epistemic commitment/challenge of inclusivity, the concept of situated knowledge offers a baseline from which a novel critical project may develop. This helps us to break out of the binary epistemology that haunts current peacebuilding scholarship. From this follows a reconfigured ontological status of the local and the international. More specifically, the concept of situated knowledge shifts away from pre-formed or pre-existing (sets of) actors who can be labelled international or local and who are assumed to hold particular types of knowledge (such as technical and institutional versus local and context sensitive). Instead, it moves the analytic focus to the possible existence of multiple types of configurations of actors and knowledges, and to how these emerge and unfold in relation to each other in specific socio-material contexts. Significant here, then, is firstly that such configurations of actors and knowledges emerge relationally rather than existing as distinct and somehow pre-formed. This requires, as mentioned, paying attention also to the generative force of built and natural environments as well as material objects and tools. An illuminating example of this is offered by Lisa Smirl in her discussion of interventions and the ‘spaces of aid’. Smirl finds that aid workers’ interpretations of events and of their surroundings, and the knowledge these actors generate in situ, are inherently shaped by spaces such as the gated compounds in which these workers often live and the SUVs they often travel in.⁸⁸ Moreover, and significantly, these emergent configurations might traverse conventional boundaries between local and international. For instance, studies have shown that in specific contexts ‘local’ actors may support ‘international’ agendas.⁸⁹

For these reasons, situated knowledge is key to a new mode of scholarly critique that is better equipped to address the epistemic commitment/challenge of peacebuilding inclusivity and claims about co-constitution, adaptability and transformation. That said, it is crucial not to forget what history teaches us with regard to epistemic violence.⁹⁰ In other words, while this mode of critique would address inclusivity processes from a perspective of co-constitution, emergence and transcendence of conventional distinctions and boundaries, it is imperative to pay close attention at the same time to the power relations that such processes bring into being. Still, any suppression and marginalisation of certain perspectives and knowledges should be treated as something achieved in practice in specific contexts. Even if inclusivity projects may well end up obscuring and marginalising knowledges that do not conform to or that explicitly challenge certain agendas, the importance of the concept of situated knowledge is that it enables a critique of how this is achieved in practice at particular sites. It does not deny differences and power dynamics; it only denies that these can be assumed prior to the analysis.

In addition, the concept of situated knowledge goes, as mentioned, beyond conventional binaries in favour of a more open-ended scrutiny of configurations potentially organised around other lines of differentiation and performative modes of distinction. Although local–international distinctions may reappear, this line is thus not given but understood as a claim that may have political consequences. For example, studies of contemporary peacebuilding show that actors who seek positions of epistemic authority present themselves as having ‘local knowledge’.⁹¹ ‘Local knowledge’ has become a global currency claimed by a multitude of actors, including those conventionally labelled ‘international’, in a quest for authority and expert status.⁹² By basing the critique of peacebuilding inclusivity on the concept of situated knowledge, scholars are able to detect and untangle these more complex configurations of actors and knowledge and the power relations that are brought into being through them. This translates into a more productive critical perspective on peacebuilding inclusivity and its epistemic commitment/challenge – paying attention not to pre-formed categories, hierarchies and power relations, but to which type of and whose knowledge becomes authoritative in inclusivity projects and how.

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined the state of critical peacebuilding scholarship in light of the recent development towards inclusivity in peacebuilding practice. I have made two main arguments. The first is that a persistent, but relatively little discussed, binary epistemology characterises dominant modes of critique in the peacebuilding literature. While this stance also involves crucial post- and decolonial perspectives, it places critique at an impasse in relation to inclusivity and its claimed epistemic commitment. Second, I argued that by revisiting conditions of colonial knowledge production – which helped establish ‘the local’ as a key epistemic category – we gain, at the same time, insights into an alternative epistemology. By reading this epistemology as formed around the concept of situated knowledge, the article proposed an alternative critical project from which to make known and disentangle the politics and power relations of peacebuilding inclusivity projects. This perspective is unrestrained by conventional binaries between the local and the international, yet does not neglect the power relations that are brought into being as actors and knowledges emerge in various configurations. Moreover, it does not dismiss the possibility of local–international distinctions, but treats these as never given but claimed and achieved in practice, and as having political ramifications.

Is this alternative critical endeavour less critical? As mentioned, the idea here is not to supplant post- and decolonising approaches, as these and other types of critique may offer crucial insights into other phenomena. Furthermore, although the proposed critical project stems from an alternative perspective on colonial knowledge production, it is crucial not to disregard the epistemic (and other forms of) violence characteristic of colonialism. Rather, it is vital to keep the two things in mind simultaneously. This means using the proposed perspective to investigate empirically and make known specific inclusivity projects in the present, situated at concrete sites, and disrupt how they bring into being certain power relations and claims to knowledge – processes that well may involve different articulations of epistemic violence. Besides offering a more productive critique of peacebuilding inclusivity projects and their epistemic commitment/challenge, this delivers a more responsible critique.⁹³ By approaching the question of knowledge, epistemic dominance and epistemic differences in peacebuilding inclusivity projects as necessarily situated, practical and achieved rather than given, it becomes possible to disentangle and disrupt the processes whereby certain viewpoints and voices become authoritative in such projects (at the expense of others), which in turn may involve various forms of scholarly knowledge(s).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council (Grant no. 2015-00566).

Notes on contributors

Anna Danielsson

Anna Danielsson is an Assistant Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Government, Uppsala University. Her research is situated at the nexus of (critical) war studies, social theory, peace and conflict studies, and the history and sociology of knowledge.

Notes

1 MuSPP, Making Cities Better, 7.

2 IDPS, “Stockholm Declaration,” 2.

3 Gruener, Person, and Smith, Inclusivity in Peacebuilding, 3; Ò Súilleabháin, Leveraging Local Knowledge, 2; Castillejo, Dilemmas and Experiences of International Support, 2; Donais and McCandless, “International Peace Building,” 293.

4 eg Barnett, “Impure and Worldly Geography,” 244.

5 Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention.

6 UN, “Peacebuilding in the Aftermath of Conflict,” 12.

7 Donais and McCandless, “International Peace Building,” 291.

8 Donais, “Dayton +20,” 9.

9 IDPS, “Stockholm Declaration,” 2.

10 Ò Súilleabháin, Leveraging Local Knowledge, 1; Castillejo, Dilemmas and Experiences of International Support, 1, 4; Donais, “Dayton +20,” 10; Rausch and Luu, Inclusive Peace Processes, 2.

11 Jayasundara-Smits, “Bracing the Wind,” 234.

12 Does, Inclusivity and Local Perspectives, 2; Gruener, Person, and Smith, Inclusivity in Peacebuilding, 1; Ò Súilleabháin, Leveraging Local Knowledge, 1.

13 Does, Inclusivity and Local Perspectives, 3–4, 8.

14 Rausch and Luu, Inclusive Peace Processes, 1; Donais, “Dayton +20,” 10.

15 Does, Inclusivity and Local Perspectives, 4; Castillejo, Dilemmas and Experiences of International Support, 2.

16 de Coning, “Adaptive Peacebuilding,” 309.

17 Gruener, Person, and Smith, Inclusivity in Peacebuilding, 3; Ò Súilleabháin, Leveraging Local Knowledge, 2; Castillejo, Dilemmas and Experiences of International Support, 2; Donais and McCandless, “International Peace Building,” 293.

18 Inclusivity is part of a global governance trend that sees adaptation and the provisional as explicit aims; see Leander and Wæver, Assembling Exclusive Expertise, 4.

19 Paffenholz, “Inclusive Politics,” 89 (emphasis added).

20 Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding,” 867; see also Ejdus and Juncos, “Reclaiming the Local in EU Peacebuilding.”

21 On the local turn, see for example Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building”; Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding.”

22 See Brinkerhoff, Governance in Post-Conflict Societies; Chesterman, “Ownership in Theory and in Practice.”

23 Mitchell, “Quality/Control,” 1628 (emphasis in original); see also Mac Ginty, “Where Is the Local?”; Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-Liberal Peace.”

24 Belloni, “Hybrid Peace Governance,” 22.

25 Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,” 392.

26 Laffey and Nadarajah, “Hybridity of Liberal Peace”; Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism”; Charbonneau, “Imperial Legacy of International Peacebuilding,” 612.

27 Belloni, “Hybrid Peace Governance,” 23.

28 Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding,” 858; Nadarajah and Rampton, “Limits of Hybridity,” 66–7; Randazzo, “Paradoxes of the ‘Everyday,’” 1360–1; Hameiri and Jones, “Against Hybridity,” 100.

29 Randazzo, “Paradoxes of the ‘Everyday,’” 1360.

30 Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention.

31 Ibid., 8, 17.

32 Ibid., 49.

33 Ibid., 49–50.

34 Charbonneau, “Imperial Legacy of International Peacebuilding,” 608, 623.

35 Charbonneau, “War and Peace in Côte D’Ivoire,” 509.

36 Charbonneau, “Imperial Legacy of International Peacebuilding,” 608, 613.

37 Ibid., 609.

38 Ibid., 614–15, 626.

39 Bishai, “Who Knows Nigeria?”

40 Nadarajah and Rampton, “Limits of Hybridity,” 71.

41 Donais, “Dayton +20,” 9.

42 Ibid., 20–1.

43 eg Donais and McCandless, “International Peace Building”; Martin, Bojicic-Dzelilovic, and Benraïs, “Introductory Article: Mind the Gaps”; Dressler, “Decentralising Power: Building Inclusive Peace?”

44 Charbonneau, “War and Peace in Côte D’Ivoire,” 508–24; see also Nadarajah and Rampton, “Limits of Hybridity,” 51; Hameiri and Jones, “Against Hybridity”; Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity.

45 Similarly, many recent works on the epistemics of intervention lack attention to the local–international binary; in fact, some studies even reify it – see for instance Goetze, Distinction of Peace.

46 Smethurst, “Discoverers and Explorers,” 232; see also Grewal, Home and Harem, 87.

47 Lindsay, “Travel Writing and Postcolonial Studies,” 25; see also Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism, 32.

48 Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism, 32.

49 Barnett, “Impure and Worldly Geography,” 244.

50 Said, Orientalism; Inden, Imagining India.

51 Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,” 784 (emphasis in original).

52 eg Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

53 eg Cooper, Turner, and Pugh, “End of History”; Turner, “Completing the Circle”; Richmond, “Pedagogy of Peacebuilding”; Ejdus, “Local Ownership as International Governmentality.”

54 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building,” 768, 772; Autesserre, Peace Land; Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-down and Bottom-up Narratives.”

55 Mac Ginty, “Where Is the Local?,” 842.

56 See Cunliffe, “Still the Spectre at the Feast,” 429 for how ‘mainstream’ peacebuilding literatures, too, draw parallels between peacebuilding and imperialism.

57 eg Clifford, “Reviewed Work(s): Orientalism.”

58 Barnett, “Impure and Worldly Geography,” 241.

59 Fabian, “Remembering the Other,” 53.

60 Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 93, 185.

61 Ibid., 94.

62 Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism, 81.

63 Gregory, “Cultures of Travel,” 303–4.

64 Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, 5–6.

65 Gregory, “Cultures of Travel,” 302.

66 Ibid., 301–2.

67 Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 126.

68 Barnett, “Impure and Worldly Geography,” 245.

69 Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 29, 71, 209.

70 Ibid., 276.

71 Coquilhat quoted in Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 75.

72 Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Eaton, “(Re)imag(in)ing Other²ness”; Gregory, “Cultures of Travel”; Clifford, “Reviewed Work(s): Orientalism.”

73 Leander and Aalberts, “Introduction: The Co-Constitution of Legal Expertise,” 787.

74 Clifford, Routes. Travel and Translation; see also Nygren, “Local Knowledge in the Environment–Development Discourse”; and Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

75 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.”

76 For a similar interpretation, see also Bracewell, “Europe,” 341; and Campbell, “Travel Writing and Its Theory.”

77 Nadarajah and Rampton, “Limits of Hybridity,” 71.

78 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581.

79 Hinton, “‘Situated Knowledges’ and New Materialism(s),” 101.

80 See also Harding, Science Question in Feminism.

81 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581, 582.

82 Ibid., 590.

83 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

84 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 586.

85 Ibid., 595.

86 Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 3.

87 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 592.

88 Smirl, “Spaces of Aid.”

89 Hameiri and Jones, “Against Hybridity,” 100.

90 Grewal, Home and Harem, 81; Fabian, “Remembering the Other,” 52; Barnett, “Impure and Worldly Geography,” 240.

91 See further discussion in Danielsson, “Reconceptualising the Politics of Knowledge Authority.”

92 Ibid.

93 See also Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 583.