How Many Turns Make a Revolution? Whither the ‘Dialogue of the Deaf’ Between Peacebuilding Scholars and Practitioners

ABSTRACT

The past two decades have witnessed myriad ‘turns’ in peacebuilding scholarship. This article explores these ‘turns’ and questions their influence on peacebuilding practice – whether intended or not. It examines the features of academia under late capitalism that contribute to this, asks if these shifts are comprehensible to the agents of peacebuilding and whether implementers are willing and/or able to listen anyway. It posits that scholars and practitioners find themselves in a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ arguing that unless this is transformed then conflict-affected societies will see little benefit from the clever pirouettes occurring in the comfort of the ivory tower.

KEYWORDS:

• Local turn
• hybrid turn
• liberal peace
• critique
• peacebuilding
• policy
• practice
• scholarship

Introduction

Recent efforts by international agencies to build peace in conflict-affected societies have foundered – unable to achieve traction, failing to make short-term gains stick in the long-term or entirely back-firing (Kustermans, Sauer, and Segaert 2021). Critical voices often attribute this to ill-conceived change theories based on liberal statebuilding ‘blueprints’ that perpetuate fundamental misunderstandings (or wilful dismissal) of the socio-political orders that they seek to transform (Richmond and Mac Ginty 2015). Academics seeking to explain peacebuilding failures and imagine a better way have organised their research and discourse through various ‘turns’ expressing these critiques. Though difficult to define, a ‘turn’ can be understood as an attempt to call attention to an important theoretical, conceptual, or analytical advance that, growing in popularity, shifts or changes in the way that peacebuilding has been conceptualised or approached over time. As per Baele and Bettiza (2021), a ‘turn’ is not the same as a new ‘wave’ or ‘central theory’ within a discipline. On the contrary, they are often a device used to challenge established paradigms and can create space for marginalised scholars to become more established in their field.

Yet despite many recent ‘turns’ that seem to be advancing the conceptualisation of peacebuilding,¹ the stark disconnects between the logics undergirding international intervention and the ‘life-worlds’ of those on the receiving end endure (Grenfell 2014). Indeed, initiatives by international bodies such as the United Nations (UN) – or rather its member states – to support war-to-peace transitions in high-profile cases like Mali, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have in fact doubled-down on orthodox state-centric visions for peace (Curran and Hunt 2020). Why is this so and what should we make of it?

This article discusses if the myriad ‘turns’ in peacebuilding scholarship – whether individually or through cumulative weight – have a meaningful impact on the way peacebuilding is practiced. First, I trace the recent history of turns in peacebuilding scholarship, with a particular focus on the hybrid and local turns, discussing their emergence, motivations, and putative potential. The second section discusses the overall impact of these turns pointing to the limited influence on peacebuilding practice. The third section situates the tendency to turn in the structural and cultural conditions of academia arguing that introducing new ‘turns’ may at times be serving a purpose detached entirely from its subject. The fourth section discusses an associated credibility deficit and a resulting ‘dialogue of the deaf’ between scholars and practitioners highlighting how these shifts are often illegible to the agents of peacebuilding, while implementers are often unwilling and/or unable to listen anyway. The final part asks ‘so, what?’, and argues that leaving the status quo unchallenged will only ensure that conflict-affected communities see little or no benefit from the clever pirouettes occurring in the comfort of the ivory tower.

Just one more ‘turn’ away from a revolution?

As with the wider field of International Relations (Baele and Bettiza 2021), there have been numerous ‘turns’ in peacebuilding scholarship in the past 15–20 years (Pugh 2021). Discussed further below, each analytical reframing has been eagerly taken up by other scholars and subsequently captured in plentiful books, edited volumes, and piles of journal articles. For example, the ‘ontological turn’ aimed at elevating unorthodox worldviews hitherto omitted from dominant visions of peacebuilding (Kinnvall and Mitzen 2017), while the ‘vernacular turn’ has sought to make audible otherwise silent everyday and mundane forms of language, knowledge, and praxis (Lind and Luckham 2017). The aim of a broader ‘affective turn’ was to address the absence of emotions in peacebuilding seeking to bring about a more emotions-centric way of understanding peoples’ experiences of peace and conflict (Hutchison and Bleiker 2015; Travouillon 2021). More recently, the ‘spatial turn’ has emphasised the importance of considering the physical, social, and cultural dimensions of space and place in peacebuilding efforts (Björkdahl and Kappler 2017; Brigg and George 2020; Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2022), while the ‘relational turn’ has endeavoured to shed light on commonly obscured relationships of power that shape formations of peace (Gadinger, Chadwick, and Debiel 2013; Brigg 2016). Efforts to advance these different lenses are indicative of a ‘tendency to turn’.

Two which have asserted considerable influence on peacebuilding scholarship have been the ‘hybrid’ and ‘local’ turns. Though different in their respective foci on hybridity and locality, both have put the analytical weight on people and contexts on the receiving end of intervention and assistance, sharing an interest in eschewing the liberal peace underpinnings of international interventions. Below I briefly discuss the conceptual and temporal context from which they emerged as well as their intent and objectives.

(Re)turning to hybridity

The hybrid turn in peacebuilding scholarship marked a revival of interest in the concept of ‘hybridity’ – long since popular among post-colonial and critical development scholars (Bhabha 1994; Scott 1985) and consistent with the ‘ethnographic turn’ in peace and conflict studies (Millar 2018). Hybridity became a critique of the post-Cold War statebuilding orthodoxy underpinned by Weberian models of the state and preoccupied with building formal state institutions in so-called ‘fragile’ or ‘failed’ states. On the contrary, hybridity scholars emphasised the importance of hybrid political orders and hybrid forms of peace in relation to peacebuilding and promoted greater awareness of layered and enmeshed socio-political orders that demanded an eschewing of state-centrism and claims to standardisation. In doing so, the hybrid turn promoted at once a more nuanced and more realistic rendering of conflict-affected societies that opened up the possibility of taking seriously entities and institutions that did not derive authority and legitimacy exclusively from the state. It also sought to reorient analysis from technical statebuilding to broader processes of state and peace formation. As Mac Ginty and Richmond (2016, 220) put it, hybridity offered ‘a mix of grand theory, mid-level theory and ethnographic/sociological approaches, through which the ‘habitus’ of everyday emancipatory forms of peace, connected to networks of legitimacy across scales, may be imagined and simultaneously researched’.

Seminal works including those by Boege et al. (2009a, 2009b, 2009c), (Mac Ginty 2010, 2011; Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012a) and Richmond (inter alia, 2012a) gained huge readership and were taken up by other critical peace scholars variously critiquing the fragile/failed state discourse and the liberal peace project writ large. This spawned a litany of papers addressing conceptual aspects (e.g. McLeod 2015; Jarstad and Belloni 2012; Bleiker 2012; Millar 2014; Richmond 2015) as well as detailed case study examinations (e.g. Brown and Gusmao 2009; Brett 2012; Wiuff Moe 2011; Wallis 2012; Höglund and Orjuela 2012; Wardak and Hamidzada 2012; Hoehne 2013), while other volumes explored both aspects and engaged in critique (e.g. Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012b; Richmond and Mitchell 2011; Wallis et al. 2018).

The major contributions of the hybrid turn were arguably to enable a departure from the fixed categorisations that had hitherto dominated explanations of conflict and peace. It allowed scholars to deconstruct taken for granted institutional forms and reflect the dynamism and fluidity of socio-political orders in conflict-affected societies. The hybridity lens provided significant explanatory value when seeking to understand the nature of conflict-affected societies. It also promoted a strengths-based approach that sought to identify the sites and sources of resilience in hybrid political orders in contrast to the prevailing deficit models that underpinned the fragile and failing orders narrative. This profound concern with local agency and legitimacy opened up the ‘local’ as a domain that demanded additional and detailed examination. In this sense, the hybrid turn helped handmaiden the arrival of the local turn.

Turning to the local

An earlier interest in the local dimensions of peace and ‘peace from below’ (Lederach 1995; Pouligny 2006)² resurfaced when a local turn in the field of international development in the early twenty-first century was transposed to international peace and security realm reaching its zenith in critical peacebuilding scholarship in the mid-2010s (Leonardsson and Rudd 2015; Ejdus 2021). As with the hybrid turn, this scholarship drew from a critical tradition, leaning on post-colonial and post-structuralist theory. This shift to localism had three main drivers. First, in line with a widespread antipathy towards liberalism among critical peacebuilding scholars, it was another response to the continued failure of externally imposed top-down and technocratic national and state-centric blueprints to promote lasting peace (exemplified by the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq). It therefore constituted a fundamental challenge to the hubris of the liberal peacebuilding project and mounting evidence of its inability to address the root causes of violent conflict (Autesserre 2010). Second, it was grounded in empirical realities and growing recognition of the relative successes and ability of sub-national and local actors and institutions from different countries and regions to build order, peace and form effective alternative security governance architectures (Kreikemeyer 2020; Wiuff Moe and Geis 2020). Third, it also gained momentum due to increasingly audible voices of actors from the global south, including those rising through the ranks of peacebuilding bureaucracies (Adhikari 2022).

The aim of the local turn was to draw attention to the importance of local actors, processes, and politics in peace formation and to therefore take local dimensions of peace more seriously. It sought to facilitate a shift in the focus from international actors and their interventions to working through and upon local societal dynamics as part of peacebuilding in conflict-affected societies (Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck 2015a). This step was predicated on the growing recognition that local actors – non-state actors including civil society bodies, and so on – often have a deeper understanding of the context and needs in their communities (Randazzo 2017). Peace, so the argument goes, is more likely to be sustainable when it is built from the ground up, by the people and communities directly affected by conflict who are better placed to diagnose problems as well as design and implement peacebuilding initiatives.

As with the hybrid turn, a number of key contributions (e.g. Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Mac Ginty 2014) laid the foundations for a huge body of work with articles exploring the local turn conceptually (e.g. De Coning 2013; Richmond 2012b; Paffenholz 2016; Randazzo 2016; Bräuchler and Naucke 2017; Vogel 2022; Ljungkvist and Jarstad 2021), others empirically delving into detailed country-specific and thematic cases (e.g. Lee 2019; Simangan 2017; Lundqvist and Öjendal 2018); while edited collections combined these in comprehensive volumes (Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck 2015b; Lee and Özerdem 2015; Ojendal, Schierenbeck, and Hughes 2018).

The local turn represented an important shift in thinking about how best to address and prevent conflict. It enabled scholars to reveal how international interventions are often resisted, contested, co-opted and modified by local actors to serve their peculiar interests (Kappler and Richmond 2011; Ejdus 2018; Richmond 2010). It was also instrumental in justifying existing and new efforts to empower local actors and communities to play a greater role in shaping the processes and outcomes of peacebuilding efforts. In doing so it provided support to and amplified the voices of those calling for more locally-led and locally-owned approaches to peacebuilding, highlighting the importance of more inclusive and participatory modes of peacebuilding (Donais 2012).

Turning to what ends?

Considering these turns collectively or cumulatively, it seems that peace and conflict studies is still maturing, catching up with other more established fields of study such as sociology and social theory – continuing to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, borrowing from Foucault et al. to bring more nuance and depth to our analysis. The spatial turn, for instance, draws on Foucauldian thinking regarding the social construction of ‘space’ and how that influences the trajectories and possibilities for conflict and peace (Foucault [1967] 1986; Lefebvre 1991). And, why not? Perhaps with each additional ‘turn’ we get a step closer to a ‘thicker’ conceptual understanding of war and peace and enhancing more context-sensitive peacebuilding. It may be that one of these turns could be the harbinger of the revolution in peacebuilding theorising and praxis – the ‘turn’ that leads us to and beyond the tipping point where the insights and evidence-base elicited from such scholarly pursuits are able to overcome universal templates, realpolitik and vested interests of established powers in the international system to the benefit of the masses. Such a tighter grasp on the tangible dynamics of conflict and peace could enable a more ‘enlightened’ set of peacebuilding practices that can mitigate the risks, avoid the pitfalls and harness the positive potential of an eagerness and willingness to support conflict-affected societies. It may even eventually unlock the secrets to more ethical, effective and emancipatory peacebuilding.

However, it could be argued that scholars of peacebuilding have ‘turned’ so many times already that we have become dizzied or disoriented. One turn enabling a step forward (in understanding) only to be swiftly confronted with another that leads to two steps backwards (perhaps more accurately two steps to the side). How many turns are possible before we have revolved – gone full circle and end up facing back in the same direction? It also begs the question what is the impact of this avalanche of work beyond the scholarly conferences and pay-walled journals of academe? It would be unreasonable to judge the impact of these scholarly shifts in thinking based on the outcomes of recent peacebuilding interventions. After all, it is not always, or even often, the case that academics first have ideas that practitioners subsequently try to implement. In reality, there is a more iterative process of coevolution and mutual learning that takes place. It nevertheless seems fair (and important) to consider whether these ideas – again focusing on the hybrid and local turns – are permeating thinking and beginning to shape policy and practice. While it is difficult to assess the impact of these ‘turns’ on practice, research has identified challenges and limitations.

In parallel to an increasing popularity in scholarly circles, the ideas and language of hybridity did begin appearing in the rhetoric and policy documents of peacebuilding organisations in the early 2010s (OECD 2010, 2011; World Bank 2011; UNDP 2011). Moreover, it was also incorporated into the rationale and design of peacebuilding interventions (Wiuff Moe 2014). However, this influence has not been without concern. First, its use has been characterised by a ‘shallow understanding of the concept and its implications’ (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016, 227). This has contributed to misguided attempts to manufacture hybrid orders as documented by Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent (2016) in relation to political reconciliation and transitional justice programming. In this sense to the extent hybridity was incorporated into peacebuilding practice it was merely instrumentalised by western donors to retrofit their extant development and statebuilding endeavours (Jarstad and Belloni 2012; Richmond, Björkdahl, and Kappler 2011). Attempts to engage more seriously with the hybrid nature of socio-political order have therefore tended to instrumentalise emplaced sources of authority and co-opt alternative sites of legitimacy rather than enable substantively different and potentially emancipatory formations of peace (Hunt 2018). Others have suggested that its internalisation by some international organisations and their member states was a stratagem to justify a disengagement from interventionism – a neoliberal approach of redistributing responsibilities and reducing costs of intervention – in the aftermath of calamities in Afghanistan and Iraq (Chandler 2014). While many advocates of hybridity have deep reservations about attempts to operationalise hybridity in peacebuilding programming, even worse efforts at manufacturing hybridity from distant (western) capitals (Brown 2018), the potential of the hybrid turn to change peacebuilding practice has been at best partially realised with some potentially negative side effects.

Regarding the local turn, it has been argued that its impact is evidenced by an increased number of references to civil society or local ownership in the description and articulation of the programmes, projects and policies of a wide array of peacebuilding organisations (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Leonardsson and Rudd 2015). But despite this apparent rhetorical shift, the ideas and imperatives associated with the local turn have not really been realised in practice (Lee 2020). Ejdus (2021) recently described a ‘dire implementation gap’ and there remains a huge distance between the rhetorical commitments and the manifest reality as international interventions have continued in their failure to factor in local perspectives, promote local agency and establish local ownership (von Billerbeck 2016, 4). In this sense, peacebuilding practice continues to amount to little more than ‘adding a little more local and stirring’ – for which the local turn provides ‘rhetorical cover’ (Chandler 2011) but is ultimately still abused as a ‘legitimising concept’ for business as usual liberal state-/peace-building where local ownership remains little more than a catchy phrase du jour (Wilén 2009). Indeed, others including Sabaratnam (2013) have argued that the local turn may have paradoxically reinforced liberal peacebuilding because its thinking stems from Eurocentric ontology that underlies its key concepts and the local-international dichotomy. Or, as with the hybrid turn, the language and discursive shift has simply been appropriated as part of neoliberal alterations to liberal peacebuilding. Invariably this has resulted in encouraging more local buy-in to the same top-down externally designed interventions to make extant approaches more effective without achieving any of the emancipatory aims (Bräuchler and Naucke 2017).

The lack of traction of the local turn has been attributed to a range of shortcomings. First, that it emphasises ‘what should be done’ without explaining ‘how it can be done’ (Lee 2020). This is not helped by the enduring and widely acknowledged conceptual fuzziness of ‘the local’ (Mac Ginty 2015; Paffenholz 2015; Hirblinger and Simons 2015; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Fjelde and Höglund 2012), leading to accusations that it tends to overlook normative questions about who exactly is to be emancipated (Randazzo 2016). Despite warnings to the contrary (Richmond 2009), efforts to emphasise local agency continue to fall into the trap of essentialising and romanticising autochthonous, traditional or customary entities, favouring the superficial involvement of particular exclusive local elites (Simangan 2017), while vilifying international involvement in peacebuilding (Lundqvist and Öjendal 2018). As a result of these issues, the local turn remains, perhaps unavoidably, incoherent (Narten 2008; Mac Ginty 2015, 846).

Moreover, where the local turn has been incorporated into policy discourse and governance rationales it has brought inadvertent harms. First, we have seen a perverse effect when it has led peacebuilders to divert too much attention to the local level at the expense of broader structural dynamics (van Leeuwen et al. 2020; Öjendal and Ou 2015; Donais 2012, 12 and 37). Second, the turn to localism may have acted to reinscribe problematic western ontologies including a binary between international and local (Paffenholz 2015, 862; Schierenbeck 2015, 1028; Hameiri and Jones 2018). Third, the local turn rhetoric has been coopted by semi-authoritarian post-conflict governments (Piccolino 2019) and enabled states to abrogate responsibility for providing public goods (Wallis 2017). Fourth, and more pernicious, it has opened up the local as a site for intervention and signified new ways of legitimating social engineering informed by liberal peace thinking (Chandler 2013a, 2013b, 2014). Critical scholars have also shown how it has become intwined and converged with counter-insurgency – including cooption of local self-defence militia to bear the risk and burden of violence in such settings (Wiuff Moe 2016; Wiuff Moe and Müller 2017).

As a consequence of these and other ‘problems and contradictions’ (Paffenholz 2015),³ the local turn has not (yet) been effective in moving practice beyond traditional, externally-driven approaches that have often been criticised for being too prescriptive and not sufficiently attuned to local context. So, while high-profile international peacebuilding interventions in recent years may have pared back on visions of comprehensive liberal peacebuilding (Wiuff Moe and Stepputat 2018; Karlsrud 2019), in some instances they have neglected local agency entirely with the focus on securitised and more orthodox state-centric approaches to stabilising and consolidating peace in places such as Mali, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the DRC (Day and Hunt 2020).

There is a more nuanced story to tell about the infusion of the rhetoric and ideas emanating from these ‘turns’ and their influence on emergent policy making. However, the broad brushstroke analysis offers little support. Rather than provide clarity of vision or a foundation for improved peacebuilding approaches, this collection of ‘turns’ have struggled to achieve their transformative objectives (at least not yet) and have not had a lot on impact on the ground, neither in terms of results nor conceptual approaches. Yet these ‘turns’ have often been reified and presented as a panacea when they might at best be part of incremental steps in the accumulation of better knowledge.⁴ If the gains have only been modest, why do relatively minor advances have to be presented as knowledge revolutions, or a ‘paradigmatic change’ in scholarship, to retain their place in academic parlance? What else might explain this phenomenon?

Academia under late capitalism and the ‘dialogue of the deaf’ between peacebuilding scholars and practitioners

The ‘turn’ has long been a fashion in academia – an intellectual hook on which to hang one's research agenda and, of course, one's publishing strategy.⁵ However, the fashions change rather quickly in this particular ideas-marketplace. Each ‘turn’ in the scholarly community quickly and surely produces a ‘cottage industry’ of journal article writers, weaving the implications of the latest turn through their specific case study expertise or thematic specialties. This is convenient in an academic culture that incentivises paradigmatic work and an era where it is sometimes said, apparently channelling Joseph Stalin, that publication ‘quantity has a quality all of its own’. In many ways, this is a self-critique as I have engaged in and benefitted from this practice to some extent (e.g. Hunt 2017, 2018; Aning et al. 2018). This is a contradiction in play in my own work that I continue to grapple with and that leads to an empathy for others in a similar situation.

It may be that the inescapable political economies of the academy at work render the turns a symptom rather than the root cause of the problem.⁶ But even if turns are a product of the current structural academic condition, it still matters. Particularly if these conditions of academia – where publications and publication strategies, not necessarily ideas, decide academic careers – mean that introducing new ‘turns’ can serve a purpose detached entirely from its subject.⁷ As an epistemic community, do these steps enrich, deepen understanding and validate influential arguments or could the cynic see the tendency to turn as self-serving? If it is the latter, then this can be counter-productive if it stretches and jeopardises credibility in the view of the putative end users.

The recurrent turns referred to above generate and perpetuate vocabularies of those ‘in the know’. This can create barriers between those who are and those who are not conversant with the terminology and language. There are clearly ethical and practical issues here regarding the very constituencies many of these turns advocate for – i.e. disempowered, silenced and overlooked ‘locals’. Perhaps most importantly, the relationship between researchers and those that they study is clearly at stake here as local communities are represented in a conceptual vocabulary that they do not use and may not understand.

The ‘dialogue’ between scholars and practitioners is also affected with implications for the relationship. Of course, scholars and practitioners are not mutually exclusive categories and the distinctions between them are often subtle and nuanced. Many straddle the two worlds simultaneously while many more move back and forth between these two forms of employment. This dichotomy is nonetheless useful for purposes of the argument made here.

One major concern that the process by which knowledge informs practice is perverted.⁸ Where scholarship is saturated with jargon, potentially useful analytical advances can become inaccessible or unintelligible to policy-makers and takers. This is not to say practitioners are not capable of understanding this work but rather find it difficult to see how it is relevant to their own everyday practice. In addition, scholars appear unable or (to be generous) unwilling to acknowledge sufficiently the practicalities of ‘doing’ peacebuilding (Peake 2010). Some of the most cited work in the field regularly overlooks or dismisses the bureaucratic logics, budgetary and other resource limitations and time constraints facing international peacebuilding organisations. They treat the international peacebuilders of Peaceland as monolithic rather than the highly fragmented, layered and differentiated set of actors involved. Furthermore, the political imperatives shaping action and producing inconsistency among practitioners is used by scholars as proof of their own moral high ground rather than evidence of the realities that constrain the way the local can be engaged vis-à-vis sovereign states in bilateral engagements or that moral clarity is much more elusive when faced with real dilemmas at the coalface (Guéhenno 2015). This renders much peacebuilding scholarship highly artistic but not really engaged in the art of the possible.

On the other hand, practitioners sometimes fail to grasp or are denied the latitude to fully acknowledge the politics of their peacebuilding efforts. The political agendas and calculations that underpin the selective engagements and particular modalities of international peacebuilding agencies are often left unspoken and occasionally refuted. This is underpinned by equally unconscious ontologies and epistemologies that crucially frame – but also foreclose on other ways of – thinking, understanding and operating.⁹ This blinkeredness inevitably results in simplifications of complexity – downplaying the wickedness of problems and ignoring that these contexts are not ripe for ‘mastery’ and control. Furthermore, the bureaucracies of peacebuilding can be restrictive (Lee 2020, 34). Its agents are invariably preoccupied with annual budget cycles and expenditure reducing the bandwidth available to learn from programmatic experience, let alone digest and incorporate the litany of reports, papers, and advisory notes that are sent their way. The pay-walled journal articles of the academy are usually even further off the radar (Peake and Marenin 2008; Mosse 2011; Autesserre 2014).

This points to the structural incompatibilities of practice and academia. Different career paths, funding cycles, and political demands generate forms of knowledge that are not always mutually accessible for these groups. As a result, the relationship between the community of peacebuilding scholarship and the community of peacebuilding practice is characterised by growing distance and frustration (Bargués 2020). Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that scholars and practitioners of peacebuilding are caught in a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ (Adebajo and Scanlon 2006; Tadjbakhsh 2011). This is not new, but it is also not a helpful status quo. In the best-case scenario this means the two ‘industries’ are speaking in different languages, operating at cross-purposes, and failing to understand each other well. One possible outcome of this modus operandi is that we are destined to keep ‘reinventing the flat tyre’. In this scenario, cursory attempts are made to adapt policy according to the latest buzz-words and popular publishing trope (i.e. reinvention) but the change in practice is invariably superficial and fundamentally reproduces the same ineffectual thing (i.e. the flat tyre) that ultimately has us all going around in circles. Another more worrying and regularly highlighted possibility is that the policy and praxis community wilfully misinterpret or instrumentalise these developments in a way that provides them with additional leverage without the benefits for the disempowered and overlooked sought by the scholarly community (Brown 2017; Lemay-Hébert and Kappler 2016). The ‘turns’ can therefore become progenitors of the latest buzzwords or policy jargon, influencing the rhetoric but not necessarily the ethics and politics (i.e. the substance) of peacebuilding policy and programming.

So, what? Why should we care?

It may be the case that knowledge production and associated scholarly developments and analytical advances are neither intended nor designed for use by communities of practice or policy. Certainly, not all turns are the same or have the same aims. For some, practical significance is their raison d'être. The local turn was much more concerned with influencing policy than the spatial turn being more academic and focused on raising awareness, adding new/different perspectives to long-standing and intractable issues.

And to be clear, I am not arguing that academic research should have a policy impact to be valuable and certainly not that it should be measured against that standard. On the contrary, I have deep reservations about the ‘impact agenda’ and its own impact on the nature and opportunities for academic inquiry in the future, not to mention the commodification of higher education under conditions of late capitalism more generally. Where scholars see their work as critical it is not intended to influence the world as we find it or improve praxis as currently conceived and contribute to problem-solving. Indeed, there is much to be said for the critical scholarship that aims to challenge dominant paradigms and hold these elite constituencies to account for missteps and more duplicitous actions, contributing to the longue durée of debates on peace and conflict rather than inspiring and fuelling (or at best tweaking incrementally) their interventions and activities (Thiessen and Byrne 2018; Bright and Gledhill 2018; Gnoth 2020).

However, it is also worth remembering that even Cox (1981) highlighted the importance of theory for the production of practical knowledge in the opening remarks of his seminal article on critical theory versus problem-solving approaches (See also: Davies 2014).¹⁰ Moreover, many critical theorists do indeed engage with policy makers. Their articles and books begin with critique of current practice and often propose an alternative vision or approach to doing peacebuilding even if that is usually esoteric and conceptual rather than actionable in the near term. See, for example a range of authors who have attempted to ‘blueprint’, ‘toolbox’, and ‘operationalise’ hybridity (see, for example, Millar [2014] and Uesugi et al. [2021]). Furthermore, many large-scale academic projects that draw from a critical tradition include commitments to convene meetings with, target recommendations at, and of course take money from the bodies who are implementing peacebuilding programmes in the field. There are, no doubt, many reasons for this but the demands on scholars to (i) demonstrate ‘translational’ effects as part of the ‘impact agenda’ in academia; and (ii) contribute to ‘real-world policy outcomes’ required by their funders, surely register highly amongst them. However, it appears to be perpetuating a vicious circle where scholars capture a series of important insights in a ‘turn’, recommend that other scholars and perhaps the policy community take it seriously, but then are indignant when the idea is misunderstood, co-opted or implemented differently to how it is envisaged in their books.

The inability of scholars to bridge the divide and translate these intellectual(ised) steps into applied thinking that peacebuilding agencies can access and interpret (e.g. more accurate conflict analysis) renders them vulnerable in at least two key ways. First, it does little to guard against the intrumentalisation they fear and leaves these possibilities of misappropriation open. Second, it prohibits reaching more deeply into the bureaucratic logics of peacebuilding organisations and understanding why and how these misunderstandings and vulgarisations occur, as opposed to simply lamenting it all when they do. It is also potentially counter-productive for academics themselves. The practice of ‘biting the hand that feeds you’ could be interpreted as hypocrisy that only further discredits researchers while widening the schism between them and the practitioners of peacebuilding. This will be a cause for concern as government research council grants become ever more contingent on clearly articulated impact pathways while peacebuilding organisations are increasingly building up their own in-house research capacity – a trend likely to displace and diminish requests and support for related academic research in the future.¹¹

Regardless of where one falls on the arguments surrounding the purposes of peacebuilding scholarship,¹² for those who do seek (or are contractually required) to ‘speak to’ the world of praxis but simultaneously lament its shortcomings and proclivity to instrumentalise, the inability to transmit and communicate the critique in a way that is legible and convincing to those who it targets is surely a problem. So, those scholars in particular are faced with a vexing question. How can this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ be transformed? How can the insights from the various ‘turns’ in peacebuilding scholarship be harnessed to speak constructively with and be heard by those who resource, design and implement peacebuilding programs? How can this be done ‘without losing the critical edge and being co-opted into the pre-existing grid of post-colonial and neoliberal institutions and practices’? (Ejdus 2021, 53). How, too, can scholars better listen and see what enables and inhibits those who are the subjects of the studies and critique? If this is not attempted and/or achieved, then peacebuilding scholarship will struggle to reach the places where better approaches to peacebuilding are most needed.

Conclusion

This article has considered the general utility of the myriad ‘turns’ in peacebuilding scholarship over the past two decades. It has argued that, notwithstanding the benefits of more nuanced analysis enabled, these ‘turns’ may not lead to a revolution in doing better peacebuilding. This is not a detailed study of the impact of these turns, indeed that is well beyond its scope. Such empirical research – drawing on content analysis and interviews with scholars and practitioners – to track the impact of these ‘turns’ would be a worthwhile avenue for future studies and could contribute to bridging the policy-research gap. Such work must keep in mind that the relationship between research and practice is not linear and unidirectional. Scholarship evaluates changing practices as well as seeks to transform them, just as practice can both trigger and respond to debates in the literature.

I have posited that the structural conditions of academia under late capitalism that incentivise paradigmatic work means that these ‘turns’ are often over-valued, reified and sold as a silver bullet when they might at best be part of incremental steps in the accumulation of better knowledge. Moreover, it argued that the language deployed in these endeavours distances the work from its subjects and often renders the findings illegible to those under scrutiny. This has ramifications for the credibility of those peacebuilding scholars who do seek to influence the world around them – if not in general then certainly in the eyes of practitioners. Unless the insights gleaned from these turns are communicated in accessible ways and discussed across institutional silos – remaining critical and independent but constructive and imaginative¹³ – then the majority of scholars and practitioners will continue to participate in (or observe from the margins) a ‘dialogue of the deaf’. In this scenario, the risks of misinterpretation or wilful instrumentalisation will remain and conflict-affected communities will see little or no benefit from the clever pirouettes occurring in the comfort of the ivory tower.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the journal editors, anonymous reviewers, and many colleagues/friends who have read, sat through and provided insightful feedback on this article at various stages of development. Engaging with them on this topic and these arguments has been extremely rewarding and I have learned a lot in the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council through the Discovery Early Caereer Researcher Award fellowship [DE170100138].

Notes on contributors

Charles T. Hunt

Charles T. Hunt is an Associate Professor of Global Studies in the School of Global, Urban & Social Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne, and a Senior Fellow at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research in New York and Geneva. His research is focused on peacekeeping and peacebuilding in conflict-affected societies with recent articles published in International Peacekeeping, Civil Wars, Survival, Cooperation and Conflict, and Global Governance.

Notes

1 While it is difficult to set a threshold or measure this, a simple Google Scholar search for ‘local turn in peacebuilding’ returned over 73,000 results.

2 For further discussion of the genealogy of the local turn, see: Paffenholz 2015.

3 Other criticisms include: exacerbating gender inequalities in peacebuilding contexts (Rigual 2018); and, echoes of the late colonial principle of indirect rule (Ejdus 2021, 50).

4 It is important to recall here that for some critics or debates, the goal has been more about ‘opening up’ or ‘a reflection’ or ‘conversation’ aware that the work constituted ‘incremental steps’. See below for further discussion of the ultimate objective of critical peace research.

5 It is worth noting here that, in a positive sense, ‘turns’ can also be tools for marginalised scholars to become more established in the field.

6 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for reminding me of this and the turn of phrase.

7 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight.

8 Recalling, as discussed above, that this process is not linear or unidirectional but rather complex, iterative and co-evolutionary.

9 By way of comparison, think similarly of the disconnect between what we know about climate change and how much of this knowledge actually influences policymaking. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight.

10 There are, of course, many other voices that could be brought in here to discuss the relationship between critical scholarship and practice – including those who have advocated some of the ‘turns’ discussed herein. However, Cox's distinction between problem-solving and critical scholarship is useful for the purposes of this article. For further discussion of this in the context of peacebuilding, see: Pugh 2013.

11 I am again grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight.

12 For more on the critical versus practical intent of peace studies scholarship see debates accompanying the emergence of peace studies in UK universities – e.g. O’Connell 1986; Woodhouse 2010.

13 To be sure, there are many within the peacebuilding research community who work in this way and provide fine examples to follow.