The green and the cool: Hybridity, relationality and ethnographic-biographical responses to intervention

ABSTRACT

Policy debates on conflict research, which are mostly directly used to develop practices of soft intervention (including conflict resolution, peacebuilding and statebuilding), emanate from common epistemic and ontological frameworks. Most have been produced and perpetuated by key institutions in the global North through their encounter with historical direct and structural violence, both North and South. Power has followed Enlightenment knowledge, along with its various biases and exclusions. Its progressive normative, political, economic and social assumptions about a ‘good society’ and an ‘international community’ have been fed through social science into the building of international institutions, IFIs and the donor system. Using a method called ethnographic biography (in which biography is broadly defined to include the bibliography produced by the subject, as well as interviews and discussions), this article illustrates how peace thinking is mutually constructed as both positive and hybrid, confirming earlier critical work. However, the research methods deployed to engage with the contextual production of knowledge by local scholar-practitioners are sorely underdeveloped. This is illustrated through an analysis of the work of ‘local’ conflict scholars on their own peacebuilding and statebuilding processes in Cyprus, Kosovo and Timor Leste.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

Oliver Richmond is a research professor in IR, Peace and Conflict Studies in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and the School of Department of Politics, at the University of Manchester, UK. He is also an international professor, College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tromso. His recent publications include Peace Formation and Political Order (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Failed Statebuilding (Yale University Press, 2014). He is an editor of the Palgrave book series, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, and co-editor of the Journal, Peacebuilding. Thanks to my three subject-scholars, and apologies for any misrepresentations I may have made. Thanks also to several anonymous reviewers who helped me bring more clarity to my argument and approach. An earlier version of this paper was presented in a Presidential Panel at ISA, New Orleans, 23 February, 2015.

Notes

1. All three have given their permission for my use of their work, and to make them a kind of ‘case study’, as follows.

2. I have worked directly, as well as been involved in constant discussions with Costas Constantinou on matters related to IR theory, peace and conflict and the Cyprus problems, since 1997. We have published several pieces together on these various areas (2005, 2008).

3. Much of this section is based upon regular discussions on matters pertaining to peace and conflict, as well as Kosovan politics since 2011. We have also written a recent article together on peace in Kosovo (2016).

4. Much of this section is based upon conversations and meetings in November 2008 and again in October 2012, Dili, Timor Leste.

5. Such stronger views are my interpretation of discussions with my research subjects over a long period of time.