Handbook on Intervention and Statebuilding 2019951316, 9781788116237, 9781788116220

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HANDBOOK ON INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING

Handbook on Intervention and Statebuilding Edited by

Nicolas Lemay-Hébert Senior Lecturer, Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University, Australia

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Nicolas Lemay-Hébert 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951316 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781788116237

02

ISBN 978 1 78811 622 0 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78811 623 7 (eBook)

Contents

List of figuresviii List of tablesix List of contributorsx 1

Introduction to the Handbook on Intervention and Statebuilding: moving beyond the current orthodoxy Nicolas Lemay-Hébert

2

Intervention and statebuilding beyond the human David Chandler

10

3

Knowledge, expertise and the politics of intervention and statebuilding Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Roland Kostić

19

4

Post-conflict reconstruction, the local, and the Indigenous Elisa Randazzo

30

5

Data in the context of intervention and statebuilding Isabel Rocha de Siqueira

41

6

The ambiguity of statebuilding Florian P. Kühn

50

7

International statebuilding interventions and the politics of scale Shahar Hameiri and Fabio Scarpello

61

8

Intervening in a diverse world: revisiting the ‘problem’ of difference in international statebuilding Pol Bargués-Pedreny and Xavier Mathieu

9

Decolonial ‘interventions’? Potentials and challenges of decolonial perspectives82 Philipp Lottholz

10

Democracy promotion and statebuilding Sonja Grimm

11

Post-conflict statebuilding as contentious politics Outi Donovan

104

12

State formation in the context of hybrid political orders Volker Boege

113

v

1

71

93

vi  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding 13

The everyday politics of international intervention Janosch Neil Kullenberg

124

14

Non-state actors, service delivery and statebuilding Claire Mcloughlin

137

15

Clear, hold, build … a ‘local’ state: counterinsurgency and territorial orders in Somalia Louise Wiuff Moe

16

International political sociology of interventions Médéric Martin-Mazé

17

From international justice and statebuilding to international justice as statebuilding175 Sara Dezalay

18

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding Catherine Baker and Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik

184

19

Civilian protection in the context of interventions Cecilia Jacob

198

20

The spatial dimensions of statebuilding Annika Björkdahl and Stefanie Kappler

210

21

The temporal dimension in the study of interventions Róisín Read and Roger Mac Ginty

220

22

Statebuilding and narrative Josefin Graef and Raquel da Silva

231

23

Myths and the international politics of intervention and statebuilding Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Catherine Goetze

240

24

Cyber security: states, development and intervention Kristan Stoddart

249

25

The plain drone, the armed drone and human security Astri Suhrke

260

26

New forms of intervention: the case of humanitarian refugee biometrics Katja Lindskov Jacobsen

270

27

Transnational environmental crime: from securitization to intervention and statebuilding Lorraine Elliott

28

The aid bunker: security risk management in conflict zones Florian Weigand

151 161

282 294

Contents  vii 29

From gendered war to gendered peace? Feminist perspectives on international intervention in sites of conflict Maria O’Reilly

303

30

Romanticising the locals and the externals? Identifying challenges to a gendered SSR Nina Wilén

314

31

The political economy of gender and peacebuilding Yasmin Chilmeran and Jacqui True

323

Index339

Figures

16.1

Projects and organisations of border interventions in Central Asia (1992‒2012) 169

16.2

Axis 1: autonomy versus heteronomy

170

16.3

Axis 2: development versus security

171

28.1

Aid budget and aid worker victims

296

28.2

National and international aid worker victims

300

viii

Tables

17.1

Chronological typology of international justice institutions since the twentieth century

182

23.1

Socio-political functions of myth organised by (a) source and (b) effects ascribed to myth by different myth conceptualisations

241

ix

Contributors

Catherine Baker is Senior Lecturer in 20th Century History at the University of Hull and researches the everyday politics of conflict and post-conflict settings, especially the post-Yugoslav region. Her research on the micropolitics of translation and interpreting in peacekeeping and peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been published in International Peacekeeping, Slavic Review, War and Society and elsewhere, and she is the co-author of Interpreting the Peace: Peace Operations, Conflict and Language in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her interest in transitional justice stems from her wider research on narratives of the Yugoslav wars in popular culture and everyday life, published in Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991 (Ashgate, 2010), The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and elsewhere. Her most recent book is Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester University Press, 2018). Pol Bargués-Pedreny is a Research Fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), working on the Horizon 2020 project on EU’s external action (EULISTCO). He has developed an interest in the intersection of philosophy and international relations. His work explores debates of international interventions and critically interrogates perspectives on resilience, hybridity and social critique. He is the author of Deferring Peace in International Statebuilding: Difference, Resilience and Critique (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2018). Annika Björkdahl is Professor of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. She has published widely on spatial perspectives on peace and conflict, peacebuilding and transitional justice as well as gender. Among her recent publications are Peacebuilding and Spatial Transformation: Peace, Space and Place (Routledge, 2017) co-authored with Stefanie Kappler, and Spatialising Peace and Conflict: Mapping the Production of Places, Sites and Scales of Violence (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) co-edited with Susanne Buckley-Zistel. She is the Editor in Chief of Cooperation and Conflict. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara is a Reader at Aberystwyth University’s Department of International Politics, UK, and Founding Director of the Centre for the International Politics of Knowledge. Her current research explores processes of policy-relevant knowledge production and dissemination, especially with regard to violent conflict and peacebuilding interventions, as well as the use of arts-based methods in peace and conflict studies. Previously, she has worked extensively on international statebuilding and on myths in international politics. Berit is co-editor (with R. Kostić) of Knowledge and Expertise in International Interventions: The Politics of Facts, Truth and Authenticity (Routledge, 2018) and editor of Myth and Narrative in International Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and a special issue on the International Crisis Group (Third World Quarterly, 2014). Volker Boege is Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, Tokyo, Japan; Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of x

Contributors  xi Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia; and Co-Director of Peace & Conflict Studies Institute Australia (PaCSIA). Over the last few years, Volker has worked on research projects which address peacebuilding and state formation in Pacific Island Countries and West Africa. From the 1980s through to the early 2000s, Volker worked with a number of peace research institutions in Germany and Switzerland (Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Unit for the Study of Wars, Armaments and Development of the University of Hamburg, Swiss Peace Foundation, Bern, INEF, Bonn International Centre for Conversion). He moved to Australia and started work with UQ in 2005. In 2012, he was a co-founder of PaCSIA. Volker has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, reports, conference papers and books in peace research and contemporary history. David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster and editor of the journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses. His most recent monographs are Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (Routledge, 2018); Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis: 1997–2017 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (with Julian Reid; Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); and Resilience: The Governance of Complexity (Routledge, 2014). Yasmin Chilmeran is a doctoral candidate at Monash University’s Centre for Gender, Peace and Security. Her doctoral research examines women’s civil society in Iraq and their work in the post-2003 context. She is also a PhD student under the Australian Research Council Linkage Project ‘Towards Inclusive Peace’ partnered with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Raquel da Silva is a British Academy Postdoctoral fellow in the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. Her current research explores the interplay between narratives of intervention and statebuilding and the life stories of former foreign fighters, former soldiers and their respective families. She has recently published a monograph entitled Narratives of Political Violence: Life Stories of Former Militants (Routledge, 2019). She tweets @RaquelBPSilva. Sara Dezalay is Senior Lecturer in International Law and International Relations at the Cardiff School of Law and Politics and Senior Researcher at Global Justice Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. Her research areas include international justice; law and diplomacy in global governance; and the roles played by lawyers in the transformation of the state and the position of Africa in globalisation. Outi Donovan is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Politics and International Studies at University of Leeds. Her monograph, The Contentious Politics of Statebuilding (Routledge, 2017) examines in detail the dynamics between the national and international statebuilding actors outlined in this chapter. Outi’s current research project, funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council, investigates the notion of ‘responsibility to rebuild’ as a part of the responsibility to protect principle. Her research on statebuilding has appeared in Cooperation and Conflict and Global Governance and Peacebuilding, among other journals. Lorraine Elliott is Professor (Emerita) in the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University. She led the Transnational Environmental Crime project at the ANU, funded by an Australian Research

xii  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Council Linkage grant and has published extensively in this field, along with work on global and regional (Asia Pacific) environmental governance, politics and ethics. She is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the global Earth System Governance project, the Network of Experts for the Geneva-based Transnational Initiative Against Organised Crime, and a former Chair of the Board of Directors of the Academic Council on the United Nations System. Catherine Goetze is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Tasmania which she joined in 2016. She was Head of the School of International Studies at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo from 2007 to 2014. Her research focuses on the sociology of globalisation and she has widely published in international relations, peace and intervention studies and on international political theory. She has recently published a major study on the sociology of United Nations peacebuilding missions, The Distinction of Peace (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Currently, Dr Goetze is working on a project on cosmopolitanism, families, migration and world politics. Josefin Graef is a Dahrendorf Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2017. Her research concerns the interplay between politics and language, with a particular interest in the construction of deviant politics through storytelling and its effects on policy-making. She is currently completing a monograph entitled The Politics of Reading Right-wing Violence, which explores the institutionalised narrative work that feeds the creation of knowledge about right-wing terrorism in contemporary Germany. Sonja Grimm is interim Professor at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland while being on leave from her position as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Germany. She holds a PhD from Humboldt University Berlin and has recently completed her postdoctoral qualification (Habilitation) at the University of Konstanz. She specialises in the field of democratisation, democracy promotion and development co-operation in developing, transitioning, fragile and post-conflict contexts. She has edited several special issues on post-conflict democratisation, most recently for the journal Conflict, Security and Development (18 (4) 2018) about ‘Domestic elites and external actors in post-conflict democratization’. She is a member of the External Democracy Promotion Network funded by the Leibniz Association. Shahar Hameiri is Associate Professor of International Politics at the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. He obtained his PhD from the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University in 2009. He is author of Regulating Statehood: State Building and the Transformation of the Global Order (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), co-author with Caroline Hughes and Fabio Scarpello of International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and co-author with Lee Jones, Governing Borderless Threats (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He tweets @ShaharHameiri. Cecilia Jacob is Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at The Australian National University. Her work focuses on civilian protection, internal conflict and political violence in South and Southeast Asia, and international norms of sovereign responsibility and protection. Her books include Child Security in Asia: The Impact of Armed Conflict in Cambodia and Myanmar (Routledge, 2014) and co-edited with Alistair D.B. Cook, Civilian

Contributors  xiii Protection in the Twenty-First Century: Governance and Responsibility in a Fragmented World (Oxford University Press, 2016). Stefanie Kappler is Associate Professor in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding at Durham University. Her main research interests include spatial approaches to peace, memory politics and the agency of the arts in peace processes. Recent publications include Peacebuilding and Spatial Transformation: Peace, Space and Place (Routledge, 2017), co-authored with Annika Björkdahl, as well as journal articles in Political Geography, Memory Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, Review of International Studies and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Roland Kostić is a Senior Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Uppsala University’s Hugo Valentin Centre. His current research interests include knowledge production in conflict and peacebuilding interventions, diversification and privatisation of knowledge production by think tanks, experts, policymakers and diplomats, and the transfer and shaping of intervention knowledge by means of formal and informal networks. He also works on transitional justice and reconciliation after mass violence. Roland is co-editor with B. Bliesemann de Guevara of Knowledge and Expertise in International Interventions: The Politics of Facts, Truth and Authenticity (Routledge, 2018) and author of articles on the strategic use of knowledge by intimate networks of interveners and experts in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Florian P. Kühn is Senior Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg and an Associate Researcher at the Bonn International Center for Conversion. He has previously taught at Helmut Schmidt University (Hamburg), Humboldt University at Berlin and Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (Germany). He is co-editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding and has published on security and peace, state–society relations, political economy and epistemology of international intervention. He is currently leading a research project on risk perceptions and resilience strategies in sub-state groups and is working on the book Ambiguity and Peace, which uses ambiguity theory to explain conflict dynamics. Recently, he has co-edited with Mandy Turner, The Politics of International Intervention: The Tyranny of Peace (Routledge, 2016) and a Special Forum on ‘The “West” and the “Rest” in International Interventions’ (Conflict, Security & Development 19 (3), 2019) as well as Risikopolitik – Eine Einführung (Springer, 2017). Janosch Neil Kullenberg is a PhD fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences and a member of the German Expert Pool for Peace Operations (ZIF) and the Oslo Research School on Peace and Conflict. His research interest in international interventions was sparked by four years of practical experiences in East and Central Africa, including with the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) and the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO). For his PhD on the coordination of international protection actors, he conducted expert interviews and participant observation in Geneva, New York and the DRC. He tweets @JNKullenberg. Nicolas Lemay-Hébert is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University. He is co-editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding and the Routledge Series in Intervention and Statebuilding. His research interests include the political economy of interventions, the

xiv  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding political geography of interventions, local narratives of resistance to interventions, and peacebuilding and statebuilding issues. Katja Lindskov Jacobsen is Senior Researcher at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Military Studies in the Department of Political Science. Since 2010, she has published extensively on the subject of humanitarian refugee biometrics, including a monograph (The Politics of Humanitarian Technology, Routledge, 2015) as well as several journal articles (Security Dialogue, Citizenship Studies, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, ICRC Review, and others). More broadly, her research focuses on contemporary intervention practices, with a particular interest in technology and materiality including biometric voter registration, pirate prisons, and human–machine configurations, like Red Card Holder Teams, in contemporary coalition warfare. Philipp Lottholz is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the DFG Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 138 “Dynamics of Security” and the Institute of Sociology at Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany. Besides post- and decolonial perspectives, Philipp is interested in ethnographic, practice-based and cooperative research approaches in peace, conflict and security studies and in processes of peace-/statebuilding and institutional reform in the post-Soviet space, as well as post-Socialist countries more generally. Roger Mac Ginty is Professor at the Durham Global Security Institute, and the School of Government and International Affairs, at Durham University. He co-directs the Everyday Peace Indicators (with Pamina Firchow) and edits the journal Peacebuilding (with Oliver Richmond). He is interested in the interface between top-down and bottom-up approaches to peace. Médéric Martin-Mazé holds a PhD in international relations from Sciences Po Paris, which he received in December 2013. His doctoral dissertation focused on the professionals of security who assist Central Asian Republics in securing their borders. Between 2014 and 2016, he worked as a Research Assistant at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He was in charge of mapping the institutions and professions of security in Europe for the EU-Funded SOURCE Project. Since September 2016, he has been a Lecturer at the Département de Science Politique, Université Paris VIII/CRESPPA-LabToP. His current research interests span international organisations and security aid in postcolonial States as well as the practices and effects of antiterrorist practices in Europe. He has published in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Cultures et Conflits and International Political Sociology. Xavier Mathieu is Lecturer at the Department of Politics, University of Liverpool. He was previously a Teaching Associate at Aston University and a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research (University of Duisburg–Essen). His research interests include the theory and practice of sovereignty, peacebuilding, civilisational politics and the theorising of ‘difference’ in international interventions. He has published articles on these topics in International Relations, the Journal of International Political Theory, Third World Quarterly and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. Claire Mcloughlin is a Lecturer in Political Sociology, University of Birmingham. Claire is a political sociologist specialising in sources of state legitimacy. Her special interest is on how and when public services become significant for processes of state (de-)legitimation. She has more than a decade’s experience of designing and conducting research on the politics

Contributors  xv of service delivery in divided societies and conflict-affected states. She has played a leading role in major reviews of non-state service provision in developing countries and advised aid agencies on the links between service delivery, statebuilding and stability. She is also Deputy Director of the Developmental Leadership Program, which examines the role of politics and ideas in development. Louise Wiuff Moe is an Associated Researcher at the Helmut Schmidt University. Her research combines theoretical and empirical perspectives on peacebuilding and security governance, with a regional focus on Africa.  Her recent work explores changing norms and practices of interventionism; inter-organizational conflict and collaboration in peace operations in Africa, and comparative perspectives on South-South security collaboration. Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Aston University, working on transitional justice, everyday experiences and urban geographies of violence in post-conflict settings. Her most recent work examines the reception of refugees along ‘the Balkan Route’. Her work has been published as a monograph, Ethnic Conflict and War Crimes in the Balkans: Narratives of Denial in Post-Conflict Serbia (I. B. Tauris, 2013). She is currently working on Spatial Politics of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ (Routledge Interventions, under contract). Her work has also appeared in journals including Political Geography, Journal of International Relations and Development, West European Politics, International Journal of Transitional Justice and others. Maria O’Reilly is a Lecturer in Politics & International Relations at Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her research examines gender, justice, and security in post-conflict contexts, with a focus on the region of ex-Yugoslavia. She has published Gendered Agency in War and Peace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). The research for this chapter was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/N00848/1). Elisa Randazzo is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Hertfordshire, where she is co-leader of the BA Politics and International Relations. She has previously taught at University College London, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Westminster, and is author of several peer-reviewed papers, including ‘The paradoxes of the everyday: Scrutinising the local turn in peacebuilding’ (Third World Quarterly, 2016). She has published Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding (Routledge, 2017). Her research interests include peacebuilding, local ownership, and statebuilding. Róisín Read is a Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute of the University of Manchester. Her research explores the politics of humanitarian aid. In particular, she is interested in the politics of knowledge production and how this impacts on intervention practices, with a focus on South Sudan. She is a member of the editorial team for the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs. Isabel Rocha de Siqueira is Associate Professor at the International Relations Institute (IRI), Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Researcher at the BRICS Policy Centre, its attached think tank, and reviews editor for the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. She has carried out extensive work on the intersection between development and security, fragile states, quantification and the power of numbers. She has recently initiated a project on Critical Approaches to Development, based on Southern perspectives. She has also recently produced a report for the United Nations Office for South–South Cooperation on

xvi  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding South–South Cooperation for Peace and Development, and her current work looks at feminist approaches to solidarity and activism in academia. Fabio Scarpello is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, the University of Auckland. He obtained his PhD from the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University in 2015. He is the co-author of International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), with Caroline Hughes and Shahar Hameiri, and has published in Review of International Political Economy, Journal of Contemporary Asia and Contemporary Politics, among others. He tweets @Fabio25770. Kristan Stoddart was a Reader in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University until 2018 where he was also the Deputy Director of the Centre for Intelligence and International Security Studies. From 2014 to 2017 he worked on a project examining Cyber Security Lifecycles funded by Airbus Group and the Welsh Government and is a member of the UK’s Independent Digital Ethics in Policing Panel, a member of the Project on Nuclear Issues, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has spoken at a wide number of conferences, nationally and internationally, including NATO and US Strategic Command, and for various forms of media, including the BBC. He is the author or co-author of four books and many articles. He is currently an independent researcher working on three books: Cyberwar: Threats to Critical Infrastructure, its companion volume, Cyberespionage: Russian and Chinese uses against the West, and One Ring to Rule Them All? Comparative Studies of Cyber Security between States. Astri Suhrke, a political scientist, is Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen (www​.cmi​.no). She has written widely on conflict, intervention and humanitarian policies, including When More is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan (Hurst, 2011). Her latest publication is ‘The moral economy of the resettlement regime’ (with Adèle Garnier), in Adèle Garnier, Liliana Lyra Jubilut and Kristin Bergtora Sandvik (eds), Refugee Resettlement: Power, Politics, and Humanitarian Governance (Berghahn Books, 2018). Jacqui True, FASSA is a Professor of Politics and International Relations and Director of Monash University’s Centre for Gender, Peace, and Security. She is also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Global Fellow, Peace Research Institute, Oslo. She is the author of the prize-winning book, The Political Economy of Violence against Women (Oxford University Press, 2012) and co-editor with Sara E. Davies of The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security (Oxford University Press, 2019). Florian Weigand is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research is concerned with how conflict zones, borderlands and other supposedly ‘un-governed’ spaces function. He is particularly interested in the perspective of non-state actors and he has spent an extensive amount of time conducting research in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. His forthcoming book is called Conflict and Transnational Crime: Borders, Bullets and Business in Southeast Asia (Edward Elgar). Nina Wilén is Research Director for the Africa Programme at the Egmont Institute for International Relations and Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She is also a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO). Her research interests include conflict resolution and peace processes and more

Contributors  xvii specifically the role of gender and the military in peace processes. She has published extensively on these themes in a range of international academic journals such as Gender, Work and Organization, Third World Quarterly and Journal of Eastern African Studies. She is also the author of Justifying Interventions in Africa: (De) Stabilizing Sovereignty in Liberia, Burundi and the Congo (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

1. Introduction to the Handbook on Intervention and Statebuilding: moving beyond the current orthodoxy Nicolas Lemay-Hébert

There is a wide consensus among researchers and practitioners on the importance of state weakness or state collapse in contemporary world politics. After all, a number of issues are subsumed under the wide rubric of state collapse, including ethnic conflicts, refugee flows, governance issues or threats to human security. For the authors of the 2018 SIPRI Yearbook, one of the important issues was how criminal violence thrives in areas of a country in which central state control is absent, limited or corrupted (Smith 2018, p. 19; see also Chapter 27 by Lorraine Elliott in this volume for a focus on transnational crimes and statebuilding). The everyday challenges for citizens living in Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan are hard to ignore. In the face of these challenges, only a marginal cluster of authors argue for hardline non-interventionary policies (for an overview of this discussion subsumed under the ‘fresh start’ approach, see Lemay-Hébert 2019). However, if there is a consensus on the importance of external assistance for states undergoing major crises, the exact nature of this external assistance – and the usefulness of specific types of interventions – is still widely debated. The failure of past interventions – the 2003 Iraqi military intervention and consequent occupation being on everyone’s mind – but also the lack of progress in Afghanistan since 1999, in Haiti since 2004, or in many African countries with a peacekeeping presence, has led to a new era of doubt in policy circles regarding the usefulness of interventions. After the certainties of the 1990s and early 2000s, marked by a modernistic logic of listing failed states, which legitimized subsequent top-down interventions following simple causation logics (‘intervention A’ responding to ‘problem B’ and leading to intended ‘outcome C’), interveners are now familiar with complexity theories and (sometimes instinctively) understand the full reach of possible unintended outcomes for each intervention (‘intervention A’ is meant to respond to ‘problem B’ but can lead to a multiple set of outcomes – from C to Z – as well as potentially creating new problems; see also Chapter 2 by David Chandler in this volume). The experience of Iraq – where the military intervention led to years of chaos, insecurity, and the concomitant rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (see Chapter 31 by Yasmin Chilmeran and Jacqui True in this volume for a discussion of peacebuilding in Iraq); the peacekeepers’ introduction of cholera in Haiti – an illness which killed more than 10,000 people and infected 10 per cent of the population; and the multiple sexual scandals involving peacekeepers helped drive the point home that interventions are more likely to produce non-linear outcomes. Adaptability becomes the new motto for interveners, and small, targeted interventions have tended to replace the modern top-down interventions. This Handbook starts from the premise that statebuilding is intractably linked to international interventions. For a start, we know that state fragility is linked to statebuilding interventions, both in theory and in practice (Lemay-Hébert 2020). Hence, state weakness 1

2  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding is understood to be ‘corrected’ or addressed through statebuilding interventions. But more generally, how one defines the state will have ramifications for how one conceptualizes, in turn, state fragility, statebuilding, and international interventions meant to build the peace that is supposed to follow. Through the modern – and quite mainstream – episteme, the state is understood to be a provider of public goods, and the key public good in a Weberian fashion is security provision. Max Weber’s (1948, p. 78) definition of the state ‘as a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ gained traction across various disciplines, and has contributed to cementing peace and conflict’s disciplinary focus on security provision and state institutions (Lottholz and Lemay-Hébert 2016). What came to be known as the institutional approach to statebuilding (Lemay-Hébert 2009, 2013) has also been challenged by other approaches, bundled under the wide umbrella of ‘social legitimacy’ (Lemay-Hébert 2014). However, the institutional approach has contributed to solidifying, and to a certain extent continues to drive the practices of interventions and statebuilding. This Handbook, by and large, offers a number of alternative research avenues challenging the mainstream approaches to statebuilding, moving beyond the current orthodoxy.

FROM STATEBUILDING TO STATE FORMATION, AND BACK AGAIN Statebuilding has long been considered through a narrow perspective as the (re)building of state institutions, but other approaches are possible. It all starts from the definition of the state that one adopts. As Anthony Giddens (1985, p. 17) observes, there are two implicit concepts behind the notion of state: it sometimes means an apparatus of government or power, or sometimes the overall social system subject to that government or power. Hence, whether one adopts a ‘restrictive’ or more comprehensive conception of the state will carry specific implications for the analysis of statebuilding. The two conceptions of the state – as government or as social system – can be associated with distinct sociological camps, each with their own sets of assumptions. In this regard, the neo-Weberian approach to statehood is the starting point for a number of analyses, having attained the status of orthodoxy in the mainstream social science literature, even if to a certain extent neo-Weberians fail to do justice to the complexity of Weber’s sociology of the state (Lottholz and Lemay-Hébert 2016). State capacities to govern are deemed central to the institutionalist approach; states exist to deliver public goods which encompass a list of state institutions and functions. Following the ‘institutional approach’, the state is equated with its institutions; state collapse is understood in terms of the collapse of state institutions, and, consequently, statebuilding implies their (re)construction. While being portrayed implicitly as consensual and apolitical, the institutional approach to statebuilding carries specific consequences for theories and methodologies in peace and conflict (Lemay-Hébert 2013). However, the main practical implication of the institutional approach directly connects intervention and statebuilding together: by depoliticizing the institutional processes of statebuilding, institutionalists legitimize international interventions, meant to supplement the ‘lack of state capacity’. First, the restrictive focus on state capabilities allows one to identify failed or failing states according to institutional strength, providing the theoretical underpinnings for forecasting state failure. In this context, ‘developed countries’ of the West continue the practices of setting standards against which

Introduction  3 other states are inevitably measured. Second, the division between state structures and societal forces leads, very conveniently, to a distinction between state- and nationbuilding, so that it becomes possible to conceive of statebuilding operations being possible from the outside, without entering into the more politically contested terrain of nationbuilding (Lemay-Hébert 2009). In other words, from this perspective it becomes ‘technically’ possible to target institutions of a given state and strengthen state capabilities, without necessarily engaging with the much thornier and less ‘technical’ issue of how to improve the socio-political cohesion of an often deeply divided ‘society’. Third and finally, a ‘more is better’ approach (Lemay-Hébert 2013) follows as a policy prescription – legitimizing intrusive, top-down interventions on the grounds that they are more efficient for institutional reconstruction. Within this world-view, ‘the more intrusive the intervention is, the more successful the outcome would be’ (Zuercher 2006, p. 2). This modernistic assumption has been shattered in recent years. Based on the narrow definition of the state as institutions, one can jump to the conclusion that statebuilding ‘appears to be failed by design’ (Richmond 2014, p. 11). However, that would be overseeing the potential to redefine, and re-appropriate the concept of statebuilding in the field of peace and conflict studies, grounding it in its sociological origins and state formation debates. That means analysing the state not simply as governmental institutions, but understanding it as a complex, interrelated socio-political system. It means moving beyond the false certainty of state capacity discussions towards more complex, and difficult, discussions around societal cohesion. If it is undoubtedly true that some key texts of state formation are Eurocentric in nature and tend to focus on the administrative reach of the state apparatus, or its monopolization of violence and taxation (see for instance Tilly 1990), most of the key sociological texts demonstrate nuanced understandings of the socio-political process of the emergence and evolution of statehood, and have turned their gaze beyond the ‘liberal West’ to support their arguments (see for instance Badie 2000; Bayart 2009; Migdal 2001). That would imply connecting statebuilding with the wider state formation tradition, understood as ‘an historical process whose outcome is a largely unconscious and contradictory process of conflicts, negotiations and compromises between diverse groups whose self-serving actions and trade-offs constitute the “vulgarisation” of power’ (Berman and Lonsdale 1992, p. 5). It is also important to highlight that practitioners have ‘rediscovered’ the importance of societal cohesion and legitimacy through ‘lessons learned’ from past failures, especially in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Petraeus doctrine (or Field Manual 3-24) is a good case in point, even if the innovative framework on legitimacy and winning hearts and minds is fundamentally Weberian and actually represents ‘an unacknowledged commitment to an Americanised liberal order’ (Cromartie 2012, p. 94). The Human Terrain System deployed by the American Army in Iraq, employing anthropologists to support the army on the ground, is another example of this change of paradigm (again with controversial results). ‘Localized’ counterinsurgent warfare and statebuilding (‘small footprint’ interventions) increasingly mesh together, producing surprising results (see Chapter 15 by Louise Wiuff Moe in this volume). It is up to researchers to analyse the results of the new forms of interventions and statebuilding that are occurring around the world.

4  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding

STATEBUILDING, PEACEBUILDING, AND OTHER AFFILIATED CONCEPTS Peacebuilding has appeared in mainstream policy debates since former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s ‘An Agenda for Peace’, where he defined the concept as ‘to identify and support structures that will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992, para. 46). It connotes activities that go beyond crisis intervention, such as longer-term development, and the building of governance structures and institutions. The connection between peace and governance is clearer in subsequent academic definitions of the concept, as for instance in Charles T. Call and Elizabeth Cousens’ (2008, p. 4) definition of peacebuilding as ‘actions undertaken by international or national actors to institutionalize peace, understood as the absence of armed conflict and a modicum of participatory politics’. In contrast, statebuilding is understood as ‘actions undertaken by international or national actors to establish, reform, or strengthen the institutions of the state which may or may not contribute to peacebuilding’. For others, statebuilding seems to be an activity included in the larger peacebuilding process. Eva Bertram (1995, p. 392) defined peacebuilding missions as sharing most, if not all, of the following characteristics: (1) they deal with conflicts within rather than between states; (2) the host government is one of the parties to the conflict; (3) their aim is to develop and or implement a political transition following or accompanying an end to military hostilities; and (4) a central component is the reform or establishment of basic state institutions. In reality, there is indeed ‘as many visions of peacebuilding as there are experts on the issue and actors on the field’ (David 1999, p. 27). However, it appears that the distinction between statebuilding and peacebuilding relies on one central claim: that peacebuilding is a wider, more comprehensive enterprise than statebuilding, which is in turn defined as a technical and institutional set of practices. Hence, the distinction relies on adopting – without challenging – the neo-Weberian understanding of the state and statebuilding. The institutional approach is taken as a given, even when scholars engage critically with the concept. Compounded with this issue, understanding peacebuilding as ‘building a broad peace framework’ renders the term useless analytically, making it too vague to be helpful. It seems more fruitful to follow actors in their daily interaction on the ground, rather than artificially separating activities on the premise of their mandate or intended goals (Lemay-Hébert 2017). Furthermore, this artificial conceptual separation does not come without repercussions (for more on the contested process of knowledge production, see Chapter 3 by Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Roland Kostić in this volume). To give another example, the artificial separation between statebuilding and nationbuilding – a separation that is particularly present in the American literature on the subject1 – contributes to legitimizing statebuilding interventions on the basis that they are apolitical, technical activities, compared to the more controversial, and deeply political, nationbuilding process (Lemay-Hébert 2009). Hence, nationbuilding is defined by Call and Cousens (2008, p. 4) as ‘actions undertaken, usually by national actors, to forge a sense of common nationhood, usually in order to overcome ethnic, sectarian, or communal differences; usually to counter alternate sources of identity and loyalty; and usually to mobilize a population behind a parallel state building project’. Most authors simply dis-



1

In the American academic lexicon, nationbuilding is used to mean statebuilding.

Introduction  5 tinguish state and nationbuilding along the lines of international involvement: statebuilding would ‘only’ restructure the institutions of the state, while nationbuilding would be a more thorough process of identity reconstruction. However, this type of analysis encourages the belief that one can engage with the state (statebuilding) without engaging the nation (nationbuilding). For example, Marina Ottaway (2009) asserts that the goal of statebuilding interventions ‘should not be to impose common identities on deeply divided peoples but to organize states that can administer their territories and allow people to live together despite differences’. According to this point of view, it seems possible to ‘organize states’ while leaving the ‘identities’ of their populations intact. This semantic distinction in effect enables practitioners to legitimize interventions on the basis that they are apolitical, technocratic endeavours, in contrast with nationbuilding which is seen as attempts to redefine the identity of communities subject to the interventions. If the semantic distinction between state- and nationbuilding can be made in theory, it is a rather difficult, even impossible, distinction to observe in practice. Every statebuilding programme, however technical and apolitical they may appear to be, will have ramifications beyond the actors’ intended outcomes. ‘Nationbuilding’ is not something that simply happens through high-politics and at ‘critical junctures’ in history; as Ernest Rennan famously said, the nation is the plebiscite of the everyday (1997) [1882]. Everyday politics of statebuilding will have repercussions in the ‘nationbuilding’ sphere of local politics (see also Chapter 13 by Janosch Neil Kullenberg in this volume). The same logic can apply to the distinction between peacebuilding and statebuilding, where statebuilding is bound to impact the nature of the ‘peace’ on the ground.

EDITORIAL VISION AND ORGANIZATION OF THIS VOLUME A few rationales have guided the editing process of this Handbook. First, we have consciously adopted a more conceptual or analytical angle in regard to the literature, shedding light on recent debates in the field of intervention and statebuilding and using specific examples to support the arguments rather than just focusing on case studies. This is partly due to space constraints, but also because we wanted to make sure that this Handbook will remain topical in the future. Only time will tell if this editorial approach was the right one. Having said that, and without losing the analytical edge, some chapters are more empirical than others (see Chapter 31 by Chilmeran and True, Chapter 16 by Martin-Mazé and Chapter 15 by Wiuff Moe). Second, the Handbook adopted a gender parity approach, with a commitment to an equal number of female and male contributors; we ended up with twice as many female contributors as male contributors, which is a clear signal that there is no reason to keep perpetuating the marginalization of female scholars in edited books and Handbooks. Finally, the Handbook presents a mix of established scholars and early career researchers, identified as rising stars in the field. Taken as a whole, a number of themes emerge in this Handbook. First, and following the spirit of moving beyond the current orthodoxy as pointed out in this chapter, the Handbook is grounded in critical studies and highlights a number of research avenues and debates which could help readers enrich their own regional interest or fieldwork. Linked to this consideration, the conditions for the production of knowledge on intervention and statebuilding practices is one of the key themes of this Handbook. In Chapter 2, David Chandler questions practices of

6  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding intervention and statebuilding in a context where non-linear and emergent causality is increasingly recognized by policy actors, noticing a shift in policy circles towards richer, ‘posthuman’, understanding of knowledge generation. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Roland Kostić, in Chapter 3, explore the production and diffusion of knowledge, analysing the different strands within knowledge-focused studies in intervention and statebuilding, and in Chapter 4, Elisa Randazzo explores the limits of engaging with indigenous knowledge following the ‘relational turn’. In Chapter 5, Isabel Rocha de Siqueira also looks at knowledge production and data production, this time analysing quantification itself as the way of performing politics and how it limits the spectrum of possibilities for actors. Finally, Florian P. Kühn in Chapter 6 suggests to take ambiguity seriously. He argues that it allows giving credit to the multiple truths at work in politics revolving around statehood, violence, legal governance, and notions of progress. Another common theme explored in this Handbook is the crisis of confidence in interventionary dynamics. Chapter 7, by Shahar Hameiri and Fabio Scarpello, starts from the consensual premise – at least in this Handbook – that international interventions have failed to achieve many of their objectives, and argue that a neglected, though crucial, dimension of the struggles shaping intervention outcomes is the politics of scale. Chapter 8 by Pol Bargués-Pedreny and Xavier Mathieu analyses the current miasma of despair regarding international interventions as the result of three successive errors: silencing, problematizing and stigmatizing cultural difference. This enables the authors to suggest three new starting points: approaching difference as multidimensional, refusing to essentialize difference, and focusing on the power relations that make difference exist in the first place. In Chapter 9, Philipp Lottholz highlights how post-colonial scholarship has foregrounded enriching analyses of intervention and statebuilding, which have also helped to transcend the self-contradictions and impasse of the debate around critical approaches to statebuilding. Finally, despite the patchy record of interventions supporting democratization, Sonja Grimm in Chapter 10 argues that democratic rule is nevertheless the only legitimate option for the conflicting factions – as far as it offers an institutional solution to violent conflicts based on the participation of all relevant factions. There is also a willingness to move beyond the restrictive understanding of statebuilding, connecting with wider sociological understandings of state formation for instance. In Chapter 11, Outi Donovan argues for the need to understand the parallel, disruptive practices that directly challenge the international statebuilding project, and she offers to use the ‘contentious politics’ lens (borrowed from sociology of state formation and popularized by Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow among others) to understand how domestic statebuilding actors negotiate the shape and form of the process. Volker Boege, in Chapter 12, also looks at state formation, this time through the lens of hybridity, whereas Janosch Neil Kullenberg looks at everyday politics of intervention in Chapter 13, analysing how practices and habits shape intervention from the bottom up. Claire Mcloughlin, in Chapter 14, looks at the interplay between state legitimacy and service provision by non-state actors, calling for a more nuanced understanding of the ‘non-state’ category. Louise Wiuff Moe in Chapter 15 looks at practices re-making and decentring sovereignty, which contribute to new localized processes of self-styled state formation, and Médéric Martin-Mazé in Chapter 16 opens up new research avenues by analysing the ‘social field’ where interventions are carried out, located in the blind spot of the opposition between global experts and local brokers. Other crosscutting themes include how international justice is connected with intervention and statebuilding. Sara Dezalay, in Chapter 17, proposes a political sociology of international justice to trace the significance of international norms and international justice institutions in

Introduction  7 global and domestic politics, whereas Catherine Baker and Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik look at the convergences and divergence between transitional justice and peacebuilding in Chapter 18, and Cecilia Jacob looks at the development of international laws and norms for the protection of civilians in contexts of military intervention in Chapter 19. There is also a focus on spatial and temporal dimensions of intervention and statebuilding in the Handbook. Annika Björkdahl and Stefanie Kappler in Chapter 20 look at statebuilding as a spatial process, understanding the emergence of new states as a process that emerges from processes of place-making and space-making, whereas Róisín Read and Roger Mac Ginty in Chapter 21 analyse intervention discourses and practices through the notion of temporality. There is also an interesting discussion recording the power of narratives to understand interventions and statebuilding. Josefin Graef and Raquel da Silva in Chapter 22 provide an overview of the uses of narrative in the field to date, highlighting its value for understanding power imbalances, the complexity of human experiences and knowledge creation, and ethical challenges connected to fieldwork. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Catherine Goetze in Chapter 23 argue that myth concepts are useful to explore the powerful foundational narratives and commonly held beliefs underpinning international politics. Myths have the effect of imposing and maintaining an already dominant social order in the international system, but they also allow narratives of change to develop. There are also a number of chapters on technological advances in interventions, and how this impacts the field of intervention and statebuilding. In Chapter 24, Kristan Stoddart looks at the landscape of cyberspace in the areas of statehood and intervention; in Chapter 25, Astri Suhrke analyses the use of armed drones in interventions; and in Chapter 26, Katja Lindskov Jacobsen traces the scope and development of humanitarian refugee biometrics. Another theme that emerges in the Handbook is the logics of securitization practices of international interventions. In Chapter 27, Lorraine Elliott analyses transnational environmental crimes and offers a critique of strategies of intervention against transnational criminality that seek to replicate the practices of strong states in an orthodox Weberian sense. In Chapter 28, Florian Weigand argues that bunkerization and fortification in statebuilding processes is at odds with basic values and goals of statebuilding, peacebuilding and the delivery of humanitarian aid. In Chapter 15, as previously mentioned, Louise Wiuff Moe also contributes to widening the debate around the concepts of securitization and stabilization, and Astri Suhrke in Chapter 25 connects the use of drones with human security discussions. The Handbook also includes a number of excellent chapters on feminist research applied to intervention and statebuilding. Maria O’Reilly in Chapter 29 examines the crucial insights that are gained by bringing women, gender, and feminism into research. Nina Wilén, in Chapter 30, tries to understand why security sector reform fails to meaningfully engage with gendered considerations, and argues that it fails because a broader participation which takes into account the voices of the marginalized is not envisioned. Ultimately, for Wilén, this means that security sector reform (SSR) remains a conversation by, and for, men; an insight, I would say, that can be expanded beyond SSR to the wider field of intervention. Focusing particularly on the case of Iraq, Yasmin Chilmeran and Jacqui True, in Chapter 31, apply a feminist political economy framework to examine women’s experiences of gender-based violence and structural violence. The end result offers a glimpse into the key debates that structure the field of intervention and statebuilding, and peace and conflict more widely. I hope that readers will subsequently seize the opportunity to deepen some of these debates and analytical discussions covered in this Handbook.

8  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Edward Elgar’s editorial director, Alex Pettifer, as well as Daniel Mather for their support in producing this Handbook. I would also like to thank the contributors to the Handbook, who have managed to turn this enterprise into a very interesting and thought-provoking project. I would like to thank Rob Skinner and Joseph McKay for their useful suggestions for this chapter, as well as Mary-Louise Hickey for the copy-editing assistance provided.

REFERENCES Badie, B. (2000), The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bayart, J.-F. (2009), The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, 2nd edn, London: Polity Press. Berman, B. and J. Lonsdale (1992), Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Book One: State and Class, London: James Currey. Bertram, E. (1995), ‘Reinventing governments: The promise and perils of United Nations peace building’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 39 (3), 387‒418. Boutros-Ghali, B. (1992), ‘An agenda for peace: Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping: Report of the Secretary-General’, A/47/277‒S/24/111, 17 June. Call, C. T. and E. M. Cousens (2008), ‘Ending wars and building peace: International responses to war-torn societies’, International Studies Perspectives, 9 (1), 1‒21. Cromartie, A. (2012), ‘Field manual 3-24 and the heritage of counterinsurgency theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41 (1), 91‒111. David, C.-P. (1999), ‘Does peacebuilding build peace? Liberal (mis)steps in the peace process’, Security Dialogue, 30 (1), 25‒41. Giddens, A. (1985), The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2009), ‘Statebuilding without nation-building? Legitimacy, state failure and the limits of the institutionalist approach’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 3 (1), 21‒45. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2013), ‘Rethinking Weberian approaches to statebuilding’, in D. Chandler and T. D. Sisk (eds), The Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 3‒14. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2014), ‘The semantics of statebuilding and nationbuilding: Looking beyond Neo-Weberian approaches’, in N. Lemay-Hébert, N. Onuf, V. Rakić and P. Bojanić (eds), Semantics of Statebuilding: Language, Meanings and Sovereignty, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 89‒105. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2017), ‘Exploring the effective authority of international administrations from the League of Nations to the United Nations’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (4), 468‒89. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2019), ‘State fragility and international recognition’, in G. Visoka, J. Doyle and E. Newman (eds), Routledge Handbook of State Recognition, London: Routledge, forthcoming. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2020), ‘Peace, intervention and state fragility’, in G. Visoka and O. Richmond (eds), Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding and Peace Formation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Lottholz, P. and N. Lemay-Hébert (2016), ‘Re-reading Weber, re-conceptualizing state-building: From neo-Weberian to post-Weberian approaches to state, legitimacy, and state-building’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 29 (4), 1467‒85. Migdal, J. S. (2001), State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ottaway, M. (2009), ‘Think again: Nation-building’, Foreign Policy, 9 November, https://​foreignpolicy​​ .com/​2009/​11/​09/​think​​-again-​​ nation​​-building/​ (accessed 12 July 2019). Rennan, E. (1997 [1882]), Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Paris: Mille et une nuit. Richmond, O. P. (2014), Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State, and the Dynamics of Peace Formation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, D. (2018), ‘Introduction: International stability and human security in 2017’, in SIPRI, SIPRI Yearbook 2018: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, pp. 3‒23. Tilly, C. (1990), Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990‒1990, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Introduction  9 Weber, M. (1948), ‘Politics as a vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds and transl.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 77–128. Zuercher, C. (2006), ‘Is more better? Evaluating external-led state building after 1989’, CDDRL Working Paper no. 54, Stanford, CA: Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University, April.

2. Intervention and statebuilding beyond the human David Chandler

INTRODUCTION In the late 1990s and the 2000s, discourses of international intervention and statebuilding hailed a new policy framework: the so-called ‘bottom-up’ approach, which was to overcome the limits of overly prescriptive and generic international programmes that assumed that ‘one size fits all’ (there is an extensive literature, summarized in Bennett et al. 2016; Collinson 2016; Chandler 2017a). However, this alternative framework – one which presupposed difference as a starting point, rather than the uniformity of problems and solutions (see Brigg 2008) – similarly has reached an impasse. Alternative approaches seem mired in discussion of the problems of ‘relational sensitivity’ (Chadwick et al. 2013), the ‘local turn’ (Randazzo 2017), ‘hybridity’ (Millar 2014; Nadarajah and Rampton 2015), ‘friction’ (Björkdahl et al. 2016) or new forms of representation and inclusion (for example, Peterson 2012). In fact, as long as these alternatives still shared the assumptions of external knowledge and direction, the attention to difference merely multiplied the points of impasse, bringing into focus further limits to external policy practices and forms of knowledge (see, for example, Debiel et al. 2016; Heins et al. 2016). The focus of this chapter is the analysis of a discursive shift away from these ‘external’ articulations of alternative ‘bottom-up’ understandings of policy intervention and towards what are described here as exploratory or ‘affirmative’ forms of knowing and agency. This can be seen as a two-stage process. First, with the opening up of the ‘black box’ of endogenous social processes, there is the growing recognition of the limits of ‘bottom-up’ forms of intervention, as an attempt to establish a new ground for external problem-solving. Second, there is a shift to ‘the great outdoors’ through imagining alternative ways of perceiving and responding: understanding problems as emergent and interactive processes that are invitations to grasp the world in richer and more complex ways that are much more accepting of diverse contexts and situations.

STARTING WITH ‘THE’ PROBLEM There is a growing policy convergence in international approaches to policy intervention, increasingly covering the fields of peace and security, development and environmental sustainability, and humanitarian emergency (UN 2015a, 2015b, 2015c), cohered through the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (UN 2015d). The UN Secretary-General argues that policy-makers need to move ‘beyond short-term, supply-driven response efforts towards demand-driven outcomes’ (UN 2016, p. 29). This trope of moving beyond ‘supply-driven’ responses problematizes the established frameworks and institutional arrangements of international intervention, breaking down the silos of expertise and authoritative knowledge, key to legitimizing international policy prescriptions. However, the difficulty 10

Intervention and statebuilding beyond the human  11 of relegitimizing and repurposing international intervention is unlikely to be resolved merely through inversing the focus and direction of agency from the ‘top-down’ external ‘solution’ to the ‘bottom-up’ consensual understanding of the local ‘problem’. As the Overseas Development Institute has highlighted, the shift towards bottom-up approaches is driven by the perception that international agencies face a deep crisis of legitimacy; one that goes to the heart of their identity and the belief that international policy-interventions can be neutral or objective in the desire to problem-solve and to capacity-build, ‘regardless of context or culture’ (ODI 2016, p. 5). This idea of Western ethics, expertise and knowledge as applicable universally was crucial to humanitarian discourses, to statebuilding, and to liberal internationalist approaches to peace and development assistance. However, it is seen to be problematic today and to represent a ‘Western ethos’ that others would wish to ‘question or reject’ (ODI 2016, p. 5): …large parts of the current way the West conducts its… business – the reluctance to properly engage with and respect local authorities and cultures, the tendency to privilege international technical expertise over local knowledge and capacities, with ‘exogenous “solutions” meeting endogenous “challenges” and “needs”’ – [come] into question. (ODI 2016, p. 23)

Over recent years, there has been a refocus of international policy-intervention on the deeper engagement of international agencies and concern with developing new ‘bottom-up’ approaches to understanding problems and vulnerabilities. Rather than waiting for emergencies to happen, instead there is a deeper, longer-term engagement with on-going issues, such as extreme poverty amongst the ‘most vulnerable’. This is often based on designing indirect forms of intervention for community engagement and empowerment rather than traditional ‘top-down’ policy assistance at the level of state institutions. However, it is not easy to turn ‘bottom-up’ thinking into a viable form of problem-solving. The essential difficulty appears to be that of the barriers to access and understanding, despite an increasing awareness of the need to differentiate and prioritize by drilling down further (getting more micro-level information) and enabling interventions to be more aligned with complex processes of interaction both within and between different local actors and agencies. This is why new digital technologies are often held to be key to the reform of international practices (UN 2014; Meier 2015; Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013; Chandler 2017b), highlighted in the fact that the need to integrate new technological innovations is a constantly recurring theme for international agencies. The UN Secretary-General, for example, has urged that: ‘Data and joint analysis must become the bedrock of our action. Data and analysis are the starting point for moving from a supply-driven approach to one informed by the greatest risks and the needs of the most vulnerable’ (UN 2016, p. 31; see also Concern Worldwide 2016). The difficulty is that it seems that, whatever level of technological drilling-down or deeper forms of surveillance and information gathering may be deployed, it is not possible to capture all the potential variables within any given assemblage of interaction. It appears that any system of data gathering could never be complete or able to grasp processes of interaction in their emergence. It is therefore little wonder that many commentators doubt that the aspirations for digitally enhanced modes of access to relations, in order to fully understand a problem from the ‘bottom-up’, can be fulfilled (Read et al. 2016). As Nat O’Grady writes, the data categories used for cross-checking risk factors will always be too wide in scope and not targeted enough, thus increasing rather than ameliorating ‘the problem of rendering invisible those most vulnerable’ (O’Grady 2016, p. 78).

12  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding

MOVING BEYOND PROBLEMS AND THEIR ‘SOLUTIONS’ It, in fact, seems to be logically inevitable that any attempt to start from the perspective of the knowledge and technical mechanisms of international agencies and policy actors will constitute new forms of exclusion and marginalization. Even if not starting from ‘supply-centred’ approaches, which assume Western superiority, these approaches nevertheless assume the objective knowledge of these intervening agencies. In other words, their subject-centred perspectives (of their own role as the active agents, acquiring greater, more varied or more interactive knowledge) is not (as yet) problematized. Thus failures, to know ‘the’ problem or engage with it successfully, inevitably continue to expose external actors to accusations of being too Eurocentric or Western in their views and not being open-enough to the systems and societies in which they are engaged (Sabaratnam 2013). These forms of criticism cannot be avoided by seeking to develop and innovate technologically, whether it is through Big Data, open source mapping technologies or other means, as whatever the nature of the innovation and no matter how extensive its application and how efficient it may be in delivering information, real and complex life can never be adequately captured.1 The application of new technologies increasingly reveals the nature of the problem to be different to how it was previously imagined: they reveal communities to be much more differentiated and reveal that causal chains are often much more mediated and less linear than previously understood. Acquiring greater knowledge of depth, intricacy and complexity inevitably questions previous knowledge assumptions as well as bringing attention to the epistemological limitations of external attempts to know societies and processes from the ‘bottom-up’ (see, for example, Finkenbusch 2016). The density is overwhelming. The problem for international actors tasked with policy intervention is that discussion and reflection upon the epistemological limits of knowledge is bound up with their own external, Western positionality (see Bargués-Pedreny 2016). Contemporary debates over the limits to what international actors can achieve thus construct policy interventions as a performative epistemology (see Pickering 2010), the failure of policy-making is seen to directly manifest the limits of a Western way of knowing. This failure is driven by the conflation of epistemological limitations with a Western, Eurocentric or colonial positionality. This positionality is then held to have historically been elitist, hierarchical and exclusionist. The inability to drill-down to the required level of depth, to grasp the rich interactive density of complex relational processes, then gives the lie to Western claims of objectivity or of epistemic superiority. All interventionist actors (who, by definition, are external agents intervening with instrumentalist intentionality) are caught in the problem of their inability to see the problem in the ways in which it may appear to those more closely involved, despite their claim to be objectively knowing and addressing it. Contemporary political, scientific and philosophical sensitivities necessarily bring international aspirations ‘back down to earth’, in the knowledge that interveners cannot escape their own socially, politically and technologically mediated frameworks of understanding. It appears that ‘bottom-up’ approaches cannot step outside of their positionality, even with the nicest and most generous of intentions 1 Critics have argued that new scanning and mapping technologies may distance humanitarian actors even more from these societies (Scott-Smith 2016; Duffield 2016; Meier 2015) or that they may reproduce epistemological blind spots and exclusions in different forms (Read et al. 2016; Kitchin 2014; Aradau and Blanke 2015).

Intervention and statebuilding beyond the human  13 (or with the most reflexive awareness of the recursive processual nature of assemblages and emergent causality; see Körppen et al. 2011; Ramalingam 2013; de Coning 2016). Bottom-up or post-liberal interventions (see Chandler and Richmond 2015), while appreciating non-linear and emergent causality, appear to be unable to overcome the epistemological limits of international policy-intervention. Intervention, as a ‘problem-solving’ discourse appears trapped in a modernist deadlock, still reproducing ‘objective’ Western understandings in the attempt to externally ‘resolve’ problems. However, I argue here, this experience has opened the possibilities for these limits to be legitimized or worked around. In response to the problems of legitimizing knowledge claims, policy innovators are increasingly shifting perspective towards a richer ‘posthuman’ understanding of knowledge generation.2 Problems are increasingly recast as ones of phenomenology rather than merely epistemology. Access to and the construction of ‘the problem’ is transformed through the attention to the understanding or perceptions of other agencies or actors. This shift begins to go beyond the assumptions that the problems are merely ones of epistemology: of extending the knowledge of external actors themselves. Considering how the world might be perceived and questions articulated in different ways, with different tools and techniques, begins to raise questions about the nature of the problem itself (see also Barad 2007). It is at this point that the necessary limits to ‘bottom-up’ approaches of designing problem-solving interventions appear to become much clearer. Attempting to resolve ‘the problem’ is then no longer a purely epistemological concern of extending modernist forms of knowledge deeper into social and cultural processes of interaction by fine-tuning techniques of data gathering and breaking down categories of analysis or speeding up the feed-back from digital recording and sensing equipment. A fundamental gulf opens up between the agency of the international policy actors and the problem itself. Or rather the understanding that there is ‘a’ problem constitutes a fundamental gap between the intervener and the society concerned, which is continually apparent when the intervener needs to acquire knowledge in order to address the problem through providing information and assistance or in terms of knowing more about capacities, choices and needs. Bottom-up interventions emphasized the need for intervention to be ‘bottom-up’ but increasingly it becomes apparent that there is no ‘bottom’ to be found; no solid ground for external problem-solving knowledge and expertise. With this shift, inevitably, governing and knowing agency necessarily becomes understood as more widely distributed. The shift to ‘bottom-up’ or ‘problem-centred’ approaches seeking to redesign policy interventions, appears to have had the additional implication of making societies and ‘problems’ much more opaque, or rather infinitely complex, than initially imagined. Thus forcing problems to be increasingly recast as ontological rather than merely epistemological. The point of the distinction is the vantage point or positionality of the knowledge that is required. 2 Posthumanist phenomenology is often seen as starting with Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (1974) or with Deleuze and Guattari’s popularization of Jacob von Uexküll’s ‘ethology’ (Deleuze 1988, pp. 124‒6), drawing attention to how our perceptions of the world are very different to those of other actors and agencies. This approach pluralizes the world, enabling us to see the world as constituted through many multiple ways of being, decentring the human as an all-knowing actor. A variety of related approaches – such as speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, actor network theory, new materialism and post-phenomenology – have extended the pluralizing perspectives of critical, gender, feminist, black and decolonial studies to the nonhuman, thus radicalizing perspectivism (see, for example, Bogost 2012; Bryant 2011; Ihde 2009; Morton 2012; Harman 2016).

14  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding An epistemological problem can be solved through an expansion of existing frameworks of knowledge, from the subject position of an external actor (in this case, the international agency concerned). An ontological shift in perspectives also makes the problem itself less clear, even knowing what ‘the problem’ is cannot be resolved through such an extension and requires indirect access through the ways of thinking and relating internal to the policy target or situation itself. The question is then no longer: ‘How can we understand more?’ or even ‘What do they want?’ or ‘What do they need?’ but an entirely different presentation of the question, away from the initial assumption of the existence of ‘a’ problem. Instead the starting point is more a question of the ways of knowing of others: ‘How do they think?’ ‘How do they see the world?’ ‘What language do they use?’ ‘How do they use it?’ ‘What tools do they use?’ ‘What instruments or technologies do they use to make sense of the world?’ The knowledge sought is how phenomena appear – how information is processed and things are perceived – to others. In this way, the barriers revealed by the ‘bottom-up’ approach appear as the barriers of the modern or Western episteme itself and the renegotiation of intervention as a set of knowledge practices begins to formulate the problem in terms which parallel discussions of posthuman or object-oriented ontologies: as the object of analysis seems to be increasingly obscure: to withdraw or recede from the direct or unmediated view of the external actor (see, for example, Harman 2016). The more that the external intervening agency or actor thinks that it grasps the problem in bottom-up approaches – understands the processes involved, locates the most vulnerable, finds the mechanisms of mediation, interpretation and translation – the more the problem recedes or disaggregates; and it is clear that what was mistakenly taken as knowledge of ‘the problem’ was merely a self-projection of the categories and understandings of the external actor itself. Rather than coming closer to the problem, to addressing causes and removing barriers, the problems appear to be further away, or, more precisely, to have much more relational depth.

POSTHUMAN(ITARIAN)ISM The critique of earlier ‘top-down’ or ‘supply-centred’ policy approaches as well of those of the alternative ‘bottom-up’ or ‘demand-driven’ solutions is precisely that both remain based on projections of Western understandings: of a liberal, modernist or Eurocentric episteme, which makes ‘God’s eye view’ assumptions that the epistemological barriers to problem-solving can be overcome while ignoring the possibility of ontological barriers to knowledge (see, for example, Chandler 2015). In the work of object-oriented ontology or speculative realism, this problem of ignoring ontological barriers is often termed ‘correlationism’, a problematic, first coined by Quentin Meillassoux (Meillassoux 2008, pp.  5‒7), which is seen to stem from Kant’s transcendental idealism. Phenomenological barriers to knowledge are not taken seriously as it is assumed that we never have access to the inner world of experience of other subjects or objects, only to the world as we perceive and experience it, trapped within our own phenomenological world of perception. Thus problems are always understood epistemologically: within our own set of correlations between the world and ourselves. Problems thus are always framed as ‘problems for us’, never constructed in the ways in which they may appear for other forms of being or ways of existing. The perceived need to overcome or to bypass these limits has been increasingly raised by decolonial approaches (see, for example, Mignolo 2011; Mignolo and Escobar 2010; Shilliam 2015; Wynter 2003)

Intervention and statebuilding beyond the human  15 and these fit well (in this regard) with the concerns of posthumanist, speculative realist or object-oriented theorists. The key problematic for bottom-up forms of intervention, is thus that of not taking alterity seriously enough (Candea in Carrithers et al. 2010, p. 175), the study of different local relations and interactions from the God’s eye view of a Western observer or governance agency appears to risk affirming the modernist worldview (of ‘phenomenology-of’) rather than questioning the hegemonic Western assumptions about the objective or scientific nature of knowledge; that is, that the world is single and uniform and only socio-cultural understandings and responses differ (Holbraad in Carrithers et al. 2010, p. 181). This reversal of positionality in relation to the problem increasingly links new developments in policy practices with posthuman, speculative or object-oriented approaches. In international policy discourses, bottom-up approaches are fundamentally challenged by the need to go beyond correlationism; beyond merely the projection of a Western external, or modernist, framing of problems and solutions in order to think outside these mental constraints. As Meillassoux puts it, this shift can be understood as an exciting challenge of entering ‘the great outdoors’ (Meillassoux 2008, p. 7), no longer forced to be constrained by traditional frameworks of gaining access to problems but rather to explore other ways of being and knowing. It cannot be emphasized enough that previous approaches to international policy-intervention are seen to have black-boxed societies, being too little interested in their internal workings and relationships and instead focusing on surface appearances and offering policy advice and assistance on this basis. The opening up of this black box has provided the dynamic which is driving and transforming the design of policy intervention, which increasingly seeks to draw from the rich plurality of the new worlds opened up in the problematization of a narrow ‘bottom-up’ approach. In fact, as articulated here, it becomes clear that there are two stages of the opening up of the problem. The first stage, external and subject-centred, seeks to drill-down, operating within the legacy of the modernist episteme, pluralizing the variables and localizing the factors (as described above). The second stage begins to shift to a less modernist framework with a pluralizing ontology, speculating upon multiple ways of knowing or perceiving reality, or of being in the world. The attempt to move away from addressing a problem to exploring the ways in which it may appear to others transforms the self-understanding of intervening actors. This shift from a subject-centred humanism or humanitarianism (which assumes a universal or objective positionality) to a posthuman approach is often unclear in the remaking of international discourses of policy intervention because this means dealing with the alien nature not of objects but of communities constituted as vulnerable or ‘at risk’. Thus Meillassoux’s ‘great outdoors’ becomes recast as an open-ended engagement with the ‘other’, with the ‘local’ or with ‘grass-roots communities’ (see, for example, Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013). The fact that the other can never really be known is not a problem but, on the contrary, positive and enabling, and ‘expands possibilities for opening to “new” understandings of difference’ (Brigg and Muller 2009, p. 136) where external actors can ‘value cultural difference independently of claims to have or know culture, attend directly to the process of constituting culture, and open to other ways of knowing human difference’ (Brigg and Muller 2009, p. 138). Regardless of the ‘bottom-up’ terminology through which this shift is recast, the phenomenological framing is the same: policy interventions increasingly start from the perceptions of actors closer to the problem itself and its articulation in its concrete ‘local’ context. The problem is then posed in terms of the ways of knowing and interacting of the ‘local’, vulnerable, marginalized or most at risk. Thus the ‘project design’ shifts from assuming the problem

16  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding and looking for its solution to a more open-ended enquiry into understanding the perceptions of the ‘other’ or the ways in which the problem emerges ‘for-itself’ (see, for example, Bahadur and Doczi 2016). Thus interventions seek to see a more affirmative mode of engagement, exploring how other actors and agents see and understand these interactions, grasping the world in its ‘ontological multiplicity’. This provides a major challenge to the approach of drilling down to access and open up problems to an external understanding, as these ‘bottom-up’ approaches are limited by retaining the baggage of the modernist episteme.

CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to bring clarity to the discussion of the limits and possibilities of the practices of international policy-intervention, which bring to the surface the difficulty of maintaining the legitimacy of the internationalist imaginary of intervention from a universalist, detached, or objective perspective (even if it were possible for policy interventions to be free from the blinkers of power or ideology). Understanding the ‘conditions of impossibility’ for traditional or modernist conceptions of international intervention – the inability to legitimate the separations and cuts necessary to demarcate a distinct or separate policy sphere – shines an important light on the frameworks through which policy interventions are understood and contested today. It also suggests that to dismiss posthumanist, speculative realist or object-oriented approaches, as somehow not ‘policy relevant’ would be to miss the broader context in which both academic and policy processes are evolving.

REFERENCES Aradau, C. and T. Blanke (2015), ‘The (big) data-security assemblage: Knowledge and critique’, Big Data and Society, 2 (2), 1‒12. Bahadur, A. and J. Doczi (2016), ‘Unlocking resilience through autonomous innovation’, ODI Working Paper, London: Overseas Development Institute. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, London: Duke University Press. Bargués-Pedreny, P. (2016), ‘From promoting to de-emphasizing “ethnicity”: Rethinking the endless supervision of Kosovo’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (2), 222‒40. Bennett, C., M. Foley and H. B. Krebs (eds) (2016), ‘Learning from the past to shape the future: Lessons from the history of humanitarian action in Africa’, Humanitarian Policy Group Working Paper, London: Overseas Development Institute. Björkdahl, A., K. Höglund, G. Millar, J. van der Lijn and W. Verkoren (eds) (2016), Peacebuilding and Friction: Global and Local Encounters in Post-Conflict Societies, Abingdon: Routledge. Bogost, I. (2012), Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brigg, M. (2008), The New Politics of Conflict Resolution: Responding to Difference, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brigg, M. and K. Muller (2009), ‘Conceptualising culture in conflict resolution’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 30 (2), 121‒40. Bryant, L. R. (2011), The Democracy of Objects, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Carrithers, M., M. Candea, K. Sykes, M. Holbraad and S. Venkatesan (2010), ‘Ontology is just another word for culture: Motion tabled at the 2008 meeting of the group for debates in anthropological theory, University of Manchester’, Critique of Anthropology, 30 (2), 152‒200. Chadwick, W., T. Debiel and F. Gadinger (eds) (2013), ‘Relational sensibility and the “turn to the local”: Prospects for the future of peacebuilding’, Global Dialogues 2, Duisburg: Käte Hamburger Kolleg/ Centre for Global Cooperation Research.

Intervention and statebuilding beyond the human  17 Chandler, D. (2015), ‘Reconceptualising international intervention: Statebuilding, “organic processes” and the limits of causal knowledge’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (1), 70‒88. Chandler, D. (2017a), Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1997‒2017, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chandler, D. (2017b), ‘Securing the Anthropocene? International policy experiments in digital hacktivism: A case study of Jakarta’, Security Dialogue, 48 (2), 113–30. Chandler, D. and O. P. Richmond (2015), ‘Forum: Contesting postliberalism: Governmentality or emancipation?’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 18 (1), 1‒24. Collinson, S. (2016), ‘Constructive deconstruction: Making sense of the international humanitarian system’, Humanitarian Policy Group Working Paper, London: Overseas Development Institute. Concern Worldwide (2016), ‘Establishing early warning thresholds for key surveillance indicators of urban food security: The case of Nairobi’, Nairobi: Concern Worldwide. Debiel, T., T. Held and U. Schneckener (eds) (2016), Peacebuilding in Crisis: Rethinking Paradigms and Practices of Transnational Cooperation, Abingdon: Routledge. de Coning, C. (2016), ‘From peacebuilding to sustaining peace: Implications of complexity for resilience and sustainability’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, 4 (3), 166‒81. Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, San Francisco: City Lights. Duffield, M. (2016), ‘The resilience of the ruins: Towards a critique of digital humanitarianism’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, 4 (3), 147‒65. Finkenbusch, P. (2016), ‘Expansive intervention as neo-institutional learning: Root causes in the Merida initiative’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (2), 162‒80. Harman, G. (2016), Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Heins, V. M., K. Koddenbrock and C. Unrau (eds) (2016), Humanitarianism and Challenges of Cooperation, Abingdon: Routledge. Ihde, D. (2009), Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures, Albany: State University of New York. Kitchin, R. (2014), ‘Big data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts’, Big Data and Society, 1 (1), 1–12. Körppen, D., N. Ropers and H. J. Giessmann (eds) (2011), The Non-Linearity of Peace Processes: Theory and Practice of Systemic Conflict Transformation, Opladen: Barbara Budrich Verlag. Mac Ginty, R. and O. P. Richmond (2013), ‘The local turn in peace building: A critical agenda for peace’, Third World Quarterly, 34 (5), 763‒83. Mayer-Schönberger, V. and K. Cukier (2013), Big Data: A Revolution that will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, London: John Murray. Meier, P. (2015), Digital Humanitarianism: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response, London: CRC Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2008), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, London: Continuum. Mignolo, W. (2011), The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, London: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. and A. Escobar (eds) (2010), Globalization and the Decolonial Option, Abingdon: Routledge. Millar, G. (2014), ‘Disaggregating hybridity: Why hybrid institutions do not produce predictable experiences of peace’, Journal of Peace Research, 51 (4), 501–14. Morton, T. (2012), Ecological Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nadarajah, S. and D. Rampton (2015), ‘The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace’, Review of International Studies, 41 (1), 49‒72. Nagel, T. (1974), ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, Philosophical Review, 83 (4), 435‒50. ODI (Overseas Development Institute) (2016), ‘Time to let go: A three-point proposal to change the humanitarian system’, Humanitarian Policy Group Briefing, London: Overseas Development Institute. O’Grady, N. (2016), ‘A politics of redeployment: Malleable technologies and the localisation of anticipatory calculation’, in L. Amoore and V. Piotukh (eds), Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 72‒86. Peterson, J. H. (2012), ‘Creating space for emancipatory human security: Liberal obstructions and the potential of agonism’, International Studies Quarterly, 57 (2), 318‒28. Pickering, A. (2010), The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of another Future, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ramalingam, B. (2013), Aid on the Edge of Chaos: Rethinking International Cooperation in a Complex World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Randazzo, E. (2017), Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding: A Critical Exploration of the Local Turn, Abingdon: Routledge. Read, R., B. Taithe and R. Mac Ginty (2016), ‘Data hubris? Humanitarian information systems and the mirage of technology’, Third World Quarterly, 37 (8), 1314‒31.

18  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Sabaratnam, M. (2013), ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’, Security Dialogue, 44 (3), 259–78. Scott-Smith, T. (2016), ‘Humanitarian neophilia: The “innovation turn” and its implications’, Third World Quarterly, 37 (12), 2229‒51. Shilliam, R. (2015), The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections, London: Bloomsbury Academic. UN (United Nations) (2014), ‘A world that counts: Mobilising the data revolution for sustainable development’, http://​www​​.undatarevolution​​.org/​wp​​-content/​uploads/​2014/​12/​A​​-World​​-That​​-Counts2​​.pdf (accessed 2 July 2019). UN (United Nations) (2015a), The Millennium Development Goals Report 2015, New York: United Nations. UN (United Nations) (2015b), Report of the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations in Uniting Our Strengths for Peace: Politics, Partnership and People, New York: United Nations. UN (United Nations) (2015c), Challenges of Sustaining Peace: Report of the Advisory Group of Experts on the Review of the Peacebuilding Architecture, New York: United Nations. UN (United Nations) (2015d), Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015, New York: United Nations. UN (United Nations) (2016), One Humanity: Shared Responsibility: Report of the Secretary-General for the World Humanitarian Summit, New York: United Nations. Wynter, S. (2003), ‘Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3 (3), 257‒337.

3. Knowledge, expertise and the politics of intervention and statebuilding Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Roland Kostić

INTRODUCTION In recent years, studies of international politics have seen a rise in works interested in questions of knowledge – its history, philosophy and sociology – and of knowledge production, transfer and diffusion, including the role of policy experts, think tanks and epistemic communities, in enabling, sustaining, or altering political processes and orders. Studies of international intervention and statebuilding have been no exception. Early studies on organisational learning – often manifesting in “lessons learnt units” as part of intervening organisations or missions – could be seen as first knowledge-centred works in the problem-solving strand of intervention research (e.g. Benner and Rotmann 2008; Campbell 2008; Junk et al. 2017). Going well beyond this early focus, in recent years knowledge-centred studies have come to ask a whole range of fundamental questions: How do policymakers and practitioners know what they know about a violent conflict or an intervention into another state? Which actors shape this knowledge and where do they derive their authority from? Which role does strategic knowledge production and dissemination – or even manipulation – play in the run-up to and course of international interventions? What is the role of discourse, language and meaning-making in shaping intervention politics? Through which epistemic practices and infrastructures are international interventions rendered knowable, and with which effects on what is considered “interventionary objects” (Danielsson 2017)? Tying these different types of knowledge studies together is an overarching interest in the question of how certain knowledges become authoritative and dominating over other, alternative knowledges and with what effect on intervention and statebuilding politics. Authors have also been interested in questions regarding epistemology, methodology and methods of academic knowledge production about intervention and statebuilding, with critical peace, feminist and postcolonial studies, for instance, suggesting how to address the power relations imbued in the academic production of intervention knowledge (e.g. Mac Ginty 2015; McLeod and O’Reilly 2019; Reeves 2012; Sabaratnam 2017) and more scholars now talking about the challenges and failures of fieldwork in areas of intervention (e.g. Bliesemann de Guevara and Bøås forthcoming; Kušić and Zahora forthcoming; Tomiak 2018). Others have looked into how knowledge production in and about conflict and intervention is influenced by neoliberal ideology (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić 2017). And more recently, the idea of a “post-truth” era or “post-factual” politics – where the factual content of political debates has lost significance and “hybrid warfare” tactics based on computer algorithms are used to manipulate politics and society – have posed new questions to knowledge and expertise studies (Berling and Bueger 2017; critical: Käihkö 2016). This chapter attempts to give a – necessarily cursory – overview of the burgeoning literature addressing knowledge-related questions in/about international intervention and statebuild19

20  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding ing. To organise this overview, the chapter loosely borrows the idea of “three generations” of expertise studies in International Relations (Berling and Bueger 2016). The first section discusses actor-centred approaches which aim to gauge the influence of specific knowledge producers on intervention and statebuilding politics. Second, we turn to language-focused approaches which highlight the role of knowledge regimes and meaning-making processes in policy knowledge production. The third section addresses the set of works that focus on how knowledge is produced, centring on epistemic practices and infrastructures and their political effects. In lieu of conclusions, we review emerging relational approaches that aim to bridge the divide between what Danielsson (2018) has called “knowledge-authority affirming” and “knowledge-authority problematising” critical approaches in intervention and statebuilding studies that, we suggest, offer interesting avenues for future research on the global epistemics of intervention and statebuilding politics.

ACADEMICS, EXPERTS, STRATEGISTS: ACTOR-CENTRED APPROACHES A number of works approach the question of knowledge and expertise in international interventions from the perspective of actors, their sources of authority, and their (causal) influence on intervention policymaking and practice. In the following we discuss three paradigmatic examples of epistemic actors: academics, experts and strategists. One question asked by intervention and statebuilding scholars is whether and how their academic research feeds into policymaking and practice. Waldman (2014), for instance, has explored the use of statebuilding research in UK policymaking in Afghanistan, Nepal and Sierra Leone and has found that while the use of research by statebuilding practitioners in the field is incentivised by their organisations and uptake has grown considerably, a lot of the use of academic research has the purpose to justify, rather than inform, policymaking. New findings hardly find their way into programmes, and there are practical hurdles to the uptake of research, not least the need to translate academic findings into practical lessons (Waldman 2014; cf. Varisco 2014). While Waldman’s study points to practical challenges of knowledge transfer at the nexus between academia and the policy world, Woodward (2007) points out a more fundamental problem. She argues that conventional knowledge about what hindered intervention success – a failure to tackle “the root causes of conflict” – shared by an influential part of the academic community and policy practitioners, kept these actors from asking the more fundamental question of “whether international mediation and peace operations, because of the greater willingness to act earlier to stop the violence, are creating a world that is less stable rather than more”. And she wonders about academia’s role in this: “Does the emerging research interest in ‘post-conflict violence’ and in fragile or crisis states, by disguising outcomes in new concepts, prevent asking that question directly?” (Woodward 2007, p. 145). Woodward’s argument points to hierarchies of intervention knowledge that are created by different academic knowledges’ closeness to or distance from policymaking processes. She finds that some academic knowledge can and does inform policy, but may do so with detrimental effects, obscuring nuanced findings and keeping policymakers and scholars from addressing uncomfortable questions. A second strand of actor-centred studies focuses on experts such as transnational think tanks and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) providing analysis of areas

Knowledge, expertise and the politics of intervention and statebuilding  21 in violent conflict and engaging in advocacy around questions of intervention. Some authors have researched particular organisations, such as Human Rights Watch (Bake and Zöhrer 2017; Markland forthcoming) or the International Crisis Group (contributions in Bliesemann de Guevara 2014; Markland forthcoming; Stone 2019), studying their organisational culture, staff backgrounds, epistemic practices and advocacy strategies, knowledge production on specific conflicts, position in the wider marketplace of expert knowledge, and potential influence on agenda-setting, policy and practice of international interventions. Approaches to the study of such expert organisations has ranged widely, from studies aiming to gauge these actors’ authority and influence as “policy entrepreneurs” in the transnational realm, to those which take a critical view on the wider effects of conflict expertise. For example, looking into knowledge production and advocacy by the International Crisis Group (ICG), Stone (2019) conceptualises this organisation as an “example of a well-connected transnational policy entrepreneur that is more ‘near-governmental’ than ‘non-governmental’”, which explains its specific organisational strategies in seeking to influence political agenda-setting. The research interest here is in how and to what extent transnational non-governmental actors can influence inter-/ governmental global governance processes. By contrast, drawing on a Foucauldian approach, Grigat (2014, p. 563) critiques that in the case of Indonesia the ICG aimed to “educate its audience into a liberal governmentality characterised by practices and procedures which effect a de-politicisation of violence, foster liberal forms of governance and self-government and thus contribute to sustaining liberalism as a global ‘regime of power’”, and Hochmüller and Müller (2014, p. 705) draw on postcolonial security studies and critical policy analysis to unveil the “Western-centrism” of the ICG’s conflict expert knowledge in the case of the Mexican drug war, which they argue produces a “de-politicising and overly technocratic crisis narrative”. Rather than seeing the ICG as a non-governmental policy entrepreneur with the potential to influence governmental policy processes, these authors rather highlight the expert organisation’s – witting or unwitting – complicity in upholding global power hierarchies between “the West and the rest”. A third set of actor-centred approaches studies strategic knowledge production as a central technique in diplomatic counterinsurgency, with their focus often on elite actors and their aim to determine the course of policymaking in intervention contexts regardless of formal structures. Kostić (2017), for instance, employs a diplomatic counterinsurgency lens (Leroux-Martin 2014) to highlight the strategic side of knowledge production and policy narratives resorted to by different informal networks competing for dominance over the intervention process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A characteristic of core actors in these networks is that they are what Wedel (2009) has called “flexians” – individuals who often hold several roles at the same time, capitalise on their access to different forms of information enabled by these multiple roles, and use their knowledge and links to cut across formal organisation and bureaucratic processes (Kostić 2014; Gentry 2016). By unveiling intimate networks of think tank experts, diplomats, international organisations’ staff, military and intelligence officers, and unearthing these networks’ strategic production, retention, and use of knowledge (cf. Roselle et al. 2014), this kind of research raises serious questions about accountability in global governance that go far beyond the usual concerns, and it also shows the limits of intervention research based on official documents and formal interviews in analysing the “off-stage” dynamics of intervention politics (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić forthcoming). Fisher (2015, 2017) draws attention to the role that Southern governments play in such struggles, for example by controlling access to certain regions of their country or actively engaging in knowledge pro-

22  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding duction (cf. also Lewis 2017), while Moe and Müller (2018) draw attention to “transnationally connected military knowledge entrepreneurs” from the Global South and their role in promoting counterinsurgency. Diverging from this focus on elite networks, Leander (2014) argues that all conflict-related knowledge, while being highly essential to policymaking processes, is embattled. Through a study of the knowledge–expertise–policy nexus around the 2013 Sarin gas attacks in Syria, she shows that not only experts backed up by powerful states but a whole range of actors including laypersons and social media users engaged in battles over the interpretation of events. While this cacophony of voices renders blind trust in expertise an impossibility, it also has a positive effect: “expertise is embattled and in fact must remain so if it is to be more than the expression of already privileged views” (Leander 2014, p. 35; cf. Leander and Waever 2018, on assembling and attribution of expertise). Rather than just being a tool of the powerful, epistemic struggles can keep the powerful on their toes.

LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, NARRATIVE: HERMENEUTICAL AND POST-STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES TO MEANING A second strand within the knowledge and expertise literature on international interventions and statebuilding revolves around language, rationalities and meaning. Of the many works that could be discussed in this section, we will limit ourselves to examples of two types: post-structuralist approaches which highlight the broader – liberal or post-liberal – power/knowledge regimes of which international interventions are part; and hermeneutical approaches which focus on how recipient countries of interventions are socially constructed in interveners’ language use with material effects on intervention policies and practices. Post-structuralist authors see meanings as derived from quasi-structures governed by hegemonic discourse. Discourse-analytical studies of intervention and statebuilding have tended to be conducted from such a post-structuralist perspective (e.g. Daley 2014; Hansen 2007). For example, Hansen (2007) has employed discourse-analytical theory and methodology to explore the construction of foreign identity and otherness in the case of the Western political, academic and media discourses accompanying the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and traced their genealogy over time. Other works have taken a Foucauldian approach to the role of discourse and knowledge in conflict and intervention. Broadly speaking, they see power and knowledge as intrinsically linked in hegemonic regimes that dominate all ways of knowing about war and peace at specific times. For example, a range of different authors have argued that the “liberal peace” that underpinned international intervention and statebuilding politics in the first two decades – and that has now arguably given way to a “post-liberal peace” (Chandler and Richmond 2015) – is such a hegemonic discourse structuring interventions and their objectives to (re)build liberal states and societies after violent conflict (e.g. Daley 2014; Grigat 2014; Jabri 2007; Richmond 2010). In this perspective, intervention policy is not derived from the meaning constructions of subjects – here: the interveners – with situated agency that reflects their contextual construction of and interaction with the world, but rather from larger overarching hegemonic discourses emanating from given international power structures. While hegemonic discourses may evolve, they constitute fairly stable power/ knowledge regimes which leave little room for agency, be it on the side of the intervening states and agencies, or of the recipient societies of intervention and those states who openly

Knowledge, expertise and the politics of intervention and statebuilding  23 reject liberal ideology (for a critique based on the example of authoritarian peacebuilding, see Lewis 2017). In contrast, hermeneutical approaches have addressed processes of meaning-making in ways that give a larger role to subjects. They argue that the agents of intervention socially construct the type of international policy problem a conflict-affected country is seen to pose, and show how the (sometimes polysemic) images and interpretations of countries in conflict or under intervention shape international interveners’ actions (e.g. Bliesemann de Guevara and Goetze, Chapter 23 in this volume; Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2015; Heathershaw 2009; Lemay-Hébert et al. 2013). For example, studying historical discourses concerning what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Dunn (2003) looks at four periods – early Belgian colonialism, and the eras of the Congo/Zaire’s political leaders Lumumba, Mobutu and Kabila – to show how the country was internationally imagined and its identity constructed, and with what effects on current policies towards the DRC. Autesserre (2012) and Koddenbrock (2012, 2014) both analyse simplifying narratives about politics and violence in the Congo that guide today’s interventions in the DRC and the policy solutions they imply. They show how these narratives on the one hand enable outside actors to make sense of and act upon violence in the DRC, while on the other hand their over-simplicity creates obstacles to achieving their own objectives (Autesserre) and preclude more nuanced imaginations of the DRC which would enable different policy approaches (Koddenbrock). Perera’s (2017a) auto-ethnography of research in the DRC, too, calls for more nuance to account for the messiness of different meanings given to an event. By highlighting the oft-encountered impossibility to triangulate information into a coherent picture of “the situation on the ground”, she calls on both policymakers and researchers to avoid the tendency of simplification that has characterised both mainstream and critical studies of violent conflict. What all these works show is how “the Congo” upon which international interveners act is a specific knowledge construct by outsiders that is historical and thus contingent, but hides this contingency behind essentialising narratives which enable entrenched forms of political action, while precluding alternative forms of thinking and engagement.

DATA, FIELDWORK, BUREAUCRACIES: EPISTEMIC PRACTICES AND INFRASTRUCTURES A third strand of research looks at knowledge and expertise in international intervention from the perspective of “the practices of expertise and how these are situated in various historical situations and material arrangements” (Berling and Bueger 2016; cf. Bueger 2015). With a lot of authors basing their works in Science, Technology and Society Studies theory and assemblage thinking, such an approach does not look at who produces the expertise about a conflict-affected country or a specific security issue, but rather how it is produced and disseminated or diffused, and with what effects on political power in international intervention politics. For example, Kosmatopoulos (2014, pp. 598, 613) argues from a perspective inspired by techno-politics that ICG’s publication format of the CrisisWatch report, which he studies in the case of Lebanon, “presents itself as an assemblage of a series of technical characteristics that help to shrink the world and make it fit the model format of the crisis expert”. The format of the report enables a politics of “constant alertness” and the surveillance of those who are constructed as “crisis rebel entities”. In the following, we briefly discuss two types of

24  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding epistemic practices typically found in international intervention contexts – quantification, and practices aiming to access “local knowledge” – before turning to examples of broader epistemic infrastructures and how they affect intervention knowledge. The chosen practices and authors are, again, only examples of a much broader literature, and other foci – for example, knowledge practices involving visual politics, arts and crafts – would be thinkable (e.g. Bleiker 2018; Leander and Della Ratta 2018). Quantification, and quantification-based forms of hierarchisation of states through rankings, indices and benchmarking and of modelling and simulations, are one common type of epistemic practices in international intervention politics. While indices of factors such as “state fragility”, “corruption perceptions” and “democratic transformation” have been criticised on statistical grounds (e.g. Ziaja 2012), they have nonetheless been extremely powerful in hierarchising states in the international system by measuring their supposed pathologies or failures against a set standard of normalcy (Broome and Quirk 2015; Grimm et al. 2015; Lemay-Hébert and Visoka 2017). Technologies and methods that have aided quantification practices range from more traditional – and highly political – forms such as surveys using deductive or inductive indicators (Firchow 2018) and body counts (Krause 2018), to remote technologies such as satellite imagery, interactive mapping and behaviour pattern simulations (Duffield 2014), social media and SMS data (Read et al. 2016), crowdsourcing technologies (Perera 2017b), and big data (Chandler 2015). Quantifying practices and technologies used to collect the data upon which quantifications, simulations and models are based, all share a claim to quasi-scientific objectivity: they are based on large(r) amounts of data and seem untainted by the messiness of other methods such as fieldwork, thus allowing to see larger patterns and trends and develop preventive measures and emergency plans. Researchers have warned, however, that these practices are riddled with problems and negative effects such as a lack of capacity to meaningfully analyse vast amounts of data (Read et al. 2016), the reification of “simplistic or misleading understandings of the drivers of conflict” and promotion of “elite interests at the expense of the marginalized voices” (Perera 2017b, p. 803), a depoliticisation by “reducing governance to an ongoing and technical process of adaptation” (Chandler 2015, p. 835), and a “shift from the politics of solidarity to the neoliberal marketisation of the sub-prime tele-economic conditions encountered in the Global South” (Duffield 2014, p. S75). A second set of common epistemic practices revolves around field-based access to “local knowledge”. International commissions of inquiry, for example, function as fact-finding bodies, which employ on-site visits, forensic techniques, and witness statements to inquire into the “truth” about, for instance, an alleged genocide (e.g. Henderson 2017). Similarly, weapons inspectors sent by the UN or international watchdogs travel to sites of alleged chemical weapons use, take substance samples, visit hospitals and employ scientific techniques to determine the truth about the deployment of proscribed weapons. “Being on the ground” also plays a role in think tank and INGO work. Bake and Zöhrer (2017) analyse representations of field research methodologies and personifications of truth in the figure of the witness used in the production of knowledge expertise in human rights reporting and comics journalism, and show that in both cases “having been there” and having access to people involved in abuses is at the heart of claims to authenticity and truth (cf. also Bliesemann de Guevara 2017). In this sense, Markland (forthcoming) speaks of recipient countries of intervention as “extractive spaces”, where expert organisations generate the “authentic insights”, data and legitimacy they use for advocacy in arenas of international policymaking. This stands in contrast to the often highly selective experience of “the reality on the ground” of practitioners, expert

Knowledge, expertise and the politics of intervention and statebuilding  25 analysts or travelling politicians in theatres of international intervention and statebuilding. As new-materialism-inspired studies have shown, the experiential knowledge held by intervention practitioners is shaped to a large extent by the material realities they interact with – from bunkerised aid compounds, to grand hotels and SUVs, and to intervention souvenirs – which hint at the distance, selectivity and processes of othering involved in experiential intervention knowledge (Fisher 2017; Kühn 2016; Mac Ginty 2017; Smirl 2015; Weigand and Andersson 2019). Studying the UNIFIL II mission in South Lebanon, Daniel (2018) shows how peacekeepers nonetheless become deeply entangled in their everyday practices with the hybrid local political order and how this shapes not least their generation of knowledge (and ignorance). Some authors have highlighted how epistemic practices interact with material arrangements, sites and institutional settings in the production and diffusion of knowledge, forming what could in the widest sense be termed “epistemic infrastructures”, understood as the larger formations that connect practices and sites of knowledge production with each other (Bueger 2015). For example, Nay (2014) has studied the role of OECD and World Bank in the diffusion of the “fragile state” concept through epistemic practices such as statistics and definitions and the concept’s adoption by other international organisations in an institutional network in which OECD and World Bank functioned as “knowledge hubs”. Veit and Schlichte (2012) have shown how knowledge production practices depend on the differing logics of interaction in different arenas of intervention – from the headquarter level down to the field office. And using the example of statebuilding in Somalia, Bakonyi (2018) draws attention to the logics of bureaucracy and “the managerial rationality of interventions” as an explanation for the quest for ever better and more detailed knowledge, which however at the same time produces ignorance and unknowns. Pointing out conscious arrangements of knowledge and ignorance by the interveners, she argues that “omission, silence, secrecy, and strategic and bureaucratic ignorance enabled the program to delineate the interventionist terrain as technical and to depoliticize state-building”, while helping “to expand liberal modalities of government to ‘remote’ and ‘unruly’ Somali villages” (Bakonyi 2018, p. 256; on ignorance, cf. also Leander and Waever 2018). By analysing practices and sites together, the epistemic infrastructures approach is promising in terms of nuancing the practical side of knowledge production in intervention and statebuilding.

TOWARDS RELATIONAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING KNOWLEDGE To conclude this chapter, we review a number of newer relational approaches to intervention and statebuilding knowledge, which have chosen to take a more comprehensive approach rather than singling out specific actors, discourses or practices, and which we suggest are valuable starting points for future engagements with knowledge and expertise in the international politics of intervention and statebuilding. Reviewing the knowledge-centred literature in intervention studies, Danielsson (2018) has pointed to the antagonistic debate between “knowledge authority-affirming” and “knowledge authority-problematising” critical approaches, a divide that runs through the three “generations” of critical knowledge studies discussed above. In knowledge authority-affirming studies authority is seen to ground in a “representation of peacebuilding as constituted by a given, largely homogeneous, and authoritative knowledge system that nevertheless may face local challenges”, while knowledge authority-problematis-

26  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding ing scholars conceptualise authority “as an entry point into explorations of the conditions of possibility of certain knowledge to become authoritative”. The question she raises is whether these diverging assumptions and observations about epistemic authority in international interventions need to be mutually exclusive. A number of authors suggest that this does not have to be the case. Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić (forthcoming) borrow on literature that conceptualises the state as simultaneously a fairly static image of what a state is and the myriad practices by a range of actors that may strengthen or weaken this image, to argue that peacebuilding interventions similarly consist of an image based in a largely stable knowledge system, while at the same time encompassing constant struggles between networks of actors over knowledge authority and thus the course of action of specific interventions. Other authors have drawn on Bourdieu’s relational sociology to make sense of epistemic authority and epistemic struggles in international interventions. Goetze (2017) focuses on the emergence of “peacebuilding” as a semi-autonomous field within global governance, in which international agents hold positions of epistemic authority (cf. also Sending 2015). She is particularly interested in the conditions of possibility of this authority, which she traces though peacebuilders’ socio-economic backgrounds, education, values and world views, their career trajectories, and interpersonal networks in peacebuilding. She shows how agents become invested in the field, whose doxa – that is, the taken for granted assumptions about peacebuilding – they do not question, while they engage in struggles over the boundaries of the field and the rules of the game that structure competition within it. Similarly drawing on Bourdieusian concepts, Markland (forthcoming) shows how the epistemic practices of INGOs and think tanks producing knowledge about conflict are shaped by a range of social relations including the competition between these organisations in a marketplace of advocacy-knowledge, their condition of dependence on the policymakers they aim to influence, and the professional backgrounds and trajectories, dispositions, and socialisation of their staff (cf. also Distler 2016, on socialisation; Autesserre 2014, on communities of practice). By showing how orthodoxies become crystallised and embedded within the practice of transnational advocacy, Markland also raises critical questions about the privileged position of INGO practitioners and their complicity in the exclusion of marginalised or heterodox voices within global advocacy fora. What these and similar studies (esp. Danielsson 2019) hint at is that epistemic authority may be more fruitfully conceptualised not from one of the above “generations of knowledge studies” nor from just one side of the authority affirming versus problematising debate in critical peacebuilding studies, but rather as emerging relationally in an intersubjective field – offering possible avenues for future research seeking to integrate the diverse strands and findings of the global epistemics of international intervention and statebuilding politics.

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Knowledge, expertise and the politics of intervention and statebuilding  27 Benner, T. and P. Rotmann (2008), ‘Learning to learn? UN peacebuilding and the challenges of building a learning organization’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2 (1), 43–62. Berling, T. V. and C. Bueger (eds) (2016), Security Expertise: Practice, Power, Responsibility, London: Routledge. Berling, T. V. and C. Bueger (2017), ‘Expertise in the age of post-factual politics: An outline of reflexive strategies’, Geoforum, 84 (August), 332–41. Bleiker, R. (ed.) (2018), Visual Global Politics, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. (ed.) (2014), ‘Knowledge production in conflict: The International Crisis Group’, Third World Quarterly, Special Issue, 35 (4), 545‒722. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. (2017), ‘Intervention theatre: Performance, authenticity and expert knowledge in politicians’ travel to post-/conflict spaces’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 58–80. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. and M. Bøås (eds) (Forthcoming), Doing Fieldwork in Areas of International Intervention: A Guide to Research in Violent and Closed Contexts, Bristol: Bristol University Press. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. and R. Kostić (2017), ‘Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention: Finding “facts”, telling “truth”’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 1–20. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. and R. Kostić (Forthcoming), The Peacebuilding Effect: Intimate Networks and Conflict Knowledge in International Politics, London: Routledge. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. and F. P. Kühn (2015), ‘On Afghan footbaths and sacred cows in Kosovo: Urban legends of intervention’, Peacebuilding, 3 (1), 17–35. Broome, A. and J. Quirk (eds) (2015), ‘The politics of numbers’, Review of International Studies, Special Issue, 41 (5), 813‒1010. Bueger, C. (2015), ‘Making things known: Epistemic practices, the United Nations, and the translation of piracy’, International Political Sociology, 9 (1), 1–18. Campbell, S. P. (2008), ‘When process matters: The potential implications of organisational learning for peacebuilding success’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, 4 (2), 20–32. Chandler, D. (2015), ‘A world without causation: Big data and the coming of age of posthumanism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43 (3), 833–51. Chandler, D. and O. Richmond (2015), ‘Contesting postliberalism: Governmentality or emancipation?’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 18 (1), 1–24. Daley, P. (2014), ‘Unearthing the local: Hegemony and peace discourses in Central Africa’, in N. Megoran, F. McConnell and P. Williams (eds), The Geographies of Peace, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 66–88. Daniel, J. (2018), ‘Navigating hybrid political order: UNIFIL II in South Lebanon’, in International Organisations in Peacebuilding: Critical Assessments and Future Impulses, ASPR Report No 2, Stadtschlaining: Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, pp. 30–39. Danielsson, A. (2017), ‘Programming peacebuilding: Representations, misrepresentations and a shift to the production of interventionary objects’, Journal of International Relations and Development, DOI: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​s41268​-017​-0121​-1. Danielsson, A. (2018), ‘On epistemic authority in peacebuilding: Revisiting and leaving behind a knowledge tension’, paper presented at the Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Prague, 12–15 September 2018. Danielsson, A. (2019), ‘Reconceptualising the politics of knowledge authority in post-conflict interventions: From a peacebuilding field to transnational fields of interventionary objects’, European Journal of International Security (forthcoming). Distler, W. (2016), ‘Intervention as a social practice: Knowledge formation and transfer in the everyday of police missions’, International Peacekeeping, 23 (2), 326–49. Duffield, M. (2014), ‘From immersion to simulation: Remote methodologies and the decline of area studies’, Review of African Political Economy, 41 (suppl. 1), S75–S94. Dunn, K. C. (2003), Imagining the Congo. The International Relations of Identity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Firchow, P. (2018), Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation after War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, J. (2015), ‘Writing about Rwanda since the genocide: Knowledge power and “truth”’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (1), 134–45. Fisher, J. (2017), ‘Reproducing remoteness? States, internationals and the co-constitution of aid “bunkerization” in the East African periphery’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 98–119. Gentry, J. (2016), ‘Toward a theory of non-state actors’ intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security, 31 (4), 465–89. Goetze, C. (2017), The Distinction of Peace: A Social Analysis of Peacebuilding, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

28  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Grigat, S. (2014), ‘Educating into liberal peace: The International Crisis Group’s contribution to an emerging global governmentality’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4), 563–80. Grimm, S., N. Lemay-Hébert, and O. Nay (eds) (2015), The Political Invention of Fragile States: The Power of Ideas, London and New York: Routledge. Hansen, L. (2007), Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War, London and New York: Routledge. Heathershaw, J. (2009), Post-Conflict Tajikistan: The Politics of Peacebuilding and the Emergence of Legitimate Order, Abingdon: Routledge. Henderson, C. (ed.) (2017), Commissions of Inquiry: Problems and Prospects, Oxford and Portland: Hart Publishing. Hochmüller, M. and M.-M. Müller (2014), ‘Encountering knowledge production: The International Crisis Group and the making of Mexico’s security crisis’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4), 705–22. Jabri, V. (2007), War and the Transformation of Global Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Junk, J., F. Mancini, W. Seibel and T. Blume (eds) (2017), The Management of UN Peacekeeping: Coordination, Learning and Leadership in Peace Operations, Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Käihkö, I. (2016), ‘All krigföring är av hybrid natur’ [All warfare is hybrid], Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 118 (4), 623–41. Koddenbrock, K. (2012), ‘Recipes for intervention: Western policy papers imagine the Congo’, International Peacekeeping, 19 (5), 549–64. Koddenbrock, K. (2014), ‘Malevolent politics: ICG reporting on government action and the dilemmas of rule in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4), 669–85. Kosmatopoulos, N. (2014), ‘Sentinel matters: The techno-politics of international crisis in Lebanon (and beyond)’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4), 598–615. Kostić, R. (2014), ‘Transnational think-tanks: Foot soldiers in the battlefield of ideas? Examining the role of the ICG in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2000–01’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4), 634–51. Kostić, R. (2017), ‘Shadow peacebuilders and diplomatic counterinsurgencies: Informal networks, knowledge production and the art of policy-shaping’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 120–39. Krause, K. (2018), ‘Bodies count: The politics of assembling war and violent death data expertise’, in A. Leander and O. Waever (eds), Assembling Exclusive Expertise, London: Routledge, Kindle edition. Kühn, F. P. (2016), ‘The ambiguity of things: Souvenirs from Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (1), 97–115. Kušić, K. and J. Zahora (eds) (forthcoming), Fieldwork as Failure: Living and Knowing in the (IR) Field, Bristol: E-International Relations. Leander, A. (2014), ‘Embattled expertise: The knowledge‒expert‒policy nexus around the sarin gas attack in Syria’, Politik, 2, 26–37. Leander, A. and D. Della Ratta (2018), ‘Art as expertise? Creative expression in the Syrian conflict resolution’, in A. Leander and O. Waever (eds), Assembling Exclusive Expertise, London: Routledge, pp. 189–212. Leander, A. and O. Waever (eds) (2018), Assembling Exclusive Expertise: Knowledge, Ignorance and Conflict Resolution in the Global South, London: Routledge. Lemay-Hébert, N., N. Onuf, V. Rakić and P. Bojanić (eds) (2013), Semantics of Statebuilding: Language, Meanings and Sovereignty, London: Routledge. Lemay-Hébert, N. and G. Visoka (2017), ‘Normal peace: A new strategic narrative of intervention’, Politics and Governance, 5 (3), 146–56. Leroux-Martin, P. (2014), Diplomatic Counterinsurgency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, D. (2017), ‘The myopic Foucauldian gaze: Discourse, knowledge and the authoritarian peace’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 21–41. Mac Ginty, R. (ed.) (2015), Alternative and Bottom-Up Peace Indicators, London: Routledge. Mac Ginty, R. (2017), ‘A material turn in international relations: The 4x4, intervention and resistance’, Review of International Studies, 43 (5), 855–74. Markland, A. (Forthcoming), Global Advocacy, Global Knowledge: NGOs and the Limits of Expertise, London: Routledge. McLeod, L. and M. O’Reilly (eds) (2019), ‘Critical peace and conflict studies: Feminist perspectives’, Peacebuilding, 7 (2), 127–242. Moe, L. W. and M.-M. Müller (2018), ‘Counterinsurgency, knowledge production and the traveling of coercive realpolitik between Colombia and Somalia’, Cooperation and Conflict, 53 (2), 193–215. Nay, O. (2014), ‘International organisations and the production of hegemonic knowledge: How the World Bank and the OECD helped invent the fragile state concept’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (2), 210–31.

Knowledge, expertise and the politics of intervention and statebuilding  29 Perera, S. (2017a), ‘Bermuda triangulation: Embracing the messiness of researching in conflict’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 42–57. Perera, S. (2017b), ‘To boldly know: Knowledge, peacekeeping and remote data gathering in conflict-affected states’, International Peacekeeping, 24 (5), 803–22. Read, R., B. Taithe and R. Mac Ginty (2016), ‘Data hubris? Humanitarian information systems and the mirage of technology’, Third World Quarterly, 37 (8), 1314–31. Reeves, A. (2012), ‘Feminist knowledge and emerging governmentality in UN peacekeeping: Patterns of co-optation and empowerment’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 14 (3), 348–69. Richmond, O. P. (2010), ‘Resistance and the post-liberal peace’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 38 (3), 665–92. Roselle, L., A. Miskimmon and B. O’Loughlin (2014), ‘Strategic narrative: A new means to understand soft power’, Media, War and Conflict, 7 (1), 70–84. Sabaratnam, M. (2017), Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique, London: Rowman and Littlefield. Sending, O. J. (2015), The Politics of Expertise: Competing for Authority in Global Governance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Smirl, L. (2015), Spaces of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism, London: Zed Books. Stone, D. (2019), ‘Transnational policy entrepreneurs and the cultivation of influence: Individuals, organizations and their networks’, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2019.1567976. Tomiak, K. (2018), ‘Fieldwork and emotions: Positionality, method choices, and a radio program in South Sudan’, in L. Johnstone (ed.), The Politics of Conducting Research in Africa: Ethical and Emotional Challenges in the Field, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 97‒113. Varisco, A. E. (2014), ‘The influence of research and local knowledge on British-led security sector reform policy in Sierra Leone’, Conflict, Security and Development, 14 (1), 89–123. Veit, A. and K. Schlichte (2012), ‘Three arenas: The conflictive logic of external statebuilding’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Statebuilding and State-formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 167–81. Waldman, T. (2014), ‘The use of statebuilding research in fragile contexts: Evidence from British policymaking in Afghanistan, Nepal and Sierra Leone’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 8 (2–3), 149–72. Wedel, J. R. (2009), Shadow Elite, New York: Basic Books. Weigand, F. and R. Andersson (2019), ‘Institutionalized intervention: The “bunker politics” of international aid in Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, DOI: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 17502977​.2019​.1565814. Woodward, S. L. (2007), ‘Do the root causes of civil war matter? On using knowledge to improve peacebuilding interventions’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 1 (2), 143–70. Ziaja, S. (2012), ‘What do fragility indices measure? Assessing measurement procedures and statistical proximity’, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 6 (suppl. 1), 39–64.

4. Post-conflict reconstruction, the local, and the Indigenous Elisa Randazzo

INTRODUCTION In the past two decades a comprehensive critique has emerged aimed at problematising the logic as well as the practice of post-conflict reconstruction in war-torn areas. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the most recent evolution of critical peacebuilding and statebuilding theory by looking at how it relates to Indigenous1 knowledge. The chapter begins by exploring the ‘local turn’ and its subsequent critiques. These critiques, it is suggested, have highlighted the need to step beyond abstraction, and to consider the continued potential for marginalisation and instrumentalisation of local agency and knowledges. From the limits of the local turn, scholarship has pointed to the possibility of engaging meaningfully with multiple cosmologies of peace, an endeavour only deemed conceivable with substantial openness to alterity, as well as to different, often non-linear worldviews. Indigeneity has been considered an essential part of this shift for two reasons. First, interaction with it is believed to allow communities usually marginalised within states subjected to peace interventions, to empower and emancipate themselves, by enabling Indigenous knowledge to take centre stage in the management of post-conflict governance issues, through the dissemination of traditional practices of non-violent interaction and conflict resolution. Second, interaction with Indigenous peoples is also believed to more widely enable us to unlock a fruitful openness to complexity; this is because Indigenous worldviews may contain, in their cosmologies, flat, relational ontologies which resist hierarchisation amongst and between actors, both human and non-human (Roberts 2008). Whilst a turn towards indigeneity may enable critical scholarship to tune into a material and pragmatic engagement with locals, particularly Indigenous communities themselves, the chapter suggests that this shift would not be free from its own potential problems. The chapter raises the question of what the purpose of a turn towards indigeneity in post-conflict reconstruction is, suggesting that its emancipatory aims may not so readily benefit the communities wherein Indigenous insights generate. Indeed, the perspective taken in this chapter is cognisant of the concerns emerging particularly from within Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS) itself, where the very possibility of the application of Indigenous analytics for non-Indigenous contexts is a highly central point of contention. The chapter draws on CIS to reflect on the 1 Whilst it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the ongoing debates on the differences amongst Indigenous experiences (see Aikau et al. 2016), it is important to note that the term ‘Indigenous’ is used here to reflect on both shared approaches to relationality and self-determination coming from critical Indigenous scholars (see Whyte et al. 2017, p. 155), as well as the portrayal and categorisation of certain marginalised communities standing in opposition to settler colonial states, by scholars of peacebuilding and statebuilding, rather than as an objectively existing amalgam of cosmologies, ecologies and customs.

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Post-conflict reconstruction, the local, and the Indigenous  31 wider debate of the interaction between Indigenous knowledge and western frameworks, of which post-conflict intervention is a primary example. The chapter warns that an uncritical engagement with Indigenous knowledge within peacebuilding and statebuilding frameworks wherein understandings of rights, norms, legitimacy and normativity remain fundamentally unquestioned, may at best only treat Indigenous knowledge as supplementary, and at worst, even raise the spectre of appropriation and manipulation. With that in mind, the author does not seek to assess whether certain analytics are appropriate to critical Indigenous academic thought, nor to claim to be able to ascertain whether or not certain frameworks may be more suitable to Indigenous worldviews themselves. Instead, the following reflection seeks to raise points which may be necessary to nuance the nature of the engagement between post-conflict reconstruction and non-liberal, non-western worldviews. Ultimately, whilst the chapter points to several areas for assessing the nature of the engagement with indigeneity, the latter part of the chapter sketches the contours of a dialogue wherein Indigenous knowledge can be crucial in helping critical theory ‘short-circuit’ the assumptions that have underpinned decades of engagement with post-conflict territories, many of which have led to the development of specific normative ideas of what conflict, peace, and governance ought to look like. In this sense, peacebuilding and statebuilding can accept the critical gift provided by Indigenous knowledge, but only in so far as its warnings about the nature of the conceptual engagement are carefully heeded.

THE ‘LOCAL TURN’ AND ITS CRITIQUE: TOWARDS RELATIONALITY Critics of post-conflict reconstruction efforts have long since been lamenting a lack of engagement with local agendas, in what they identify as attempts to promote ‘flat-packed’ peace plans (Mac Ginty 2010, p. 396), superimposed forcefully (Donais 2009) upon local realities, showcasing a lack of knowledge of local contexts (Lemay-Hébert 2011), as well as of interest in local needs (Cubitt 2013; Gordon 2014). These critiques point to several negative by-products of this top-down, institutionalised form of peace intervention, from local co-option (Kappler 2014), to resistance (Mac Ginty 2012), to the marginalisation of vulnerable non-elite agents such as women, the poor, and children (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, p. 4). In opposition to what is perceived essentially as an out-of-touch framework, these critics have drawn on various critical theories to articulate alternatives that range from the promotion of positive hybrid peace (i.e. outcomes of the encounter between local and international which are essentially peace-affirming and socially progressive) (Richmond 2015; Mac Ginty 2011a), to reflective analyses of the complex nature of the post-conflict arena in itself, through concepts such as the ‘local-local’ (Richmond 2012), and ‘friction’ (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013) to explain interactions and processes of peacebuilding and statebuilding. Due to their rejection of the linearity, universality and objectivity inherent in the modernist framing of the liberal peace, these accounts’ emphasis on locality serves the purpose not only to replace the international with the local, but to dispute, in general terms, the existence of dichotomies and hierarchies between these two, in favour of a search for an ontology of peace that can do justice to the multiplicity and plurality of the post-conflict milieu and its agents (Wallis and Richmond 2017; Shinko 2008).

32  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding These critical accounts, housed under the general label of the ‘local turn’, are essential to understanding the search for relationality, understood as the attempt to overcome the violence done to the ‘local’ by western liberal and modernist frameworks, by engaging openly with alternative worldviews and knowledges. Whilst it is beyond the remit of this chapter to delve into the nature of the local turn itself, it is worthwhile mentioning that these perspectives have, themselves, been the subject of critique. Some of the critiques of the local turn contend that it has not sufficiently displaced the primacy of the liberal peace and its structures and, as such, more radical forms of emancipatory frameworks may be required (Nadarajah and Rampton 2015; Sabaratnam 2011); others suggest that the shift retains elements of normativity which are not sufficiently problematised (Randazzo 2016; Millar 2014). Finally, several commentators are concerned over the manner in which the local is still carved out as an ‘Other’ to engage with, for statebuilding’s sake, retaining an artificial dichotomy between international and local which fixes an infrastructure of power wherein the local is subordinated to the international (Bargués-Pedreny 2016). What some of these critiques also point to, is a general concern for the abstraction brought about by the local turn, and for its inability to focus on the material expressions of decades of western/northern imposed liberal solutions (Nadarajah and Rampton 2015). From the limits of the local turn itself, further attempts have emerged to conceptualise a more fundamental departure from modernist ontologies and thus a deeper engagement with non-western Others. Here, again, the critical scholarship requests taking a step towards overhauling the epistemological assumptions behind the whole endeavour of peacebuilding and statebuilding, rather than merely extending local ownership or replacing top-down with bottom-up, by starting particularly with the recognition that certain local communities subjected to interventions do not share western/northern understandings of agency, norms, rights or even time (Boege 2012). Specifically, authors point out that certain subjects of statebuilding and peacebuilding are characterised by a ‘reliance upon dispersion and embeddedness’ based on relationship and relatedness, which Morgan Brigg suggests is rather different from the western understanding of aggregation grounded in a belief on exclusive rights of ownership of country and land (2007, p. 409). These communities’ understandings of rights may be exercised and protected in ways which may be at odds with the structures of governance identified with liberal democratic systems of the Global North. These customary structures of governance then inform practices, which, in the case of Indigenous communities in particular, affect processes such as conflict mediation and resolution, through a variety of activities ranging from informal dialogue, to art, literature and music (Bertha and Mohammed 2009; Mwikisa and Dikobe 2009). This appreciation for different worldviews has sparked a lively debate on how indigeneity can contribute to our understanding of post-conflict reconstruction and its practices, particularly relevant to international/local interactions where the local is Indigenous in nature, as is the case for several communities which exist within territories that have so far been the subject of liberal peacebuilding. For instance, In Burundi and Rwanda, Kipuri notes, conflicts have been understood mainly as revolving around two main ethnic groups, ‘largely ignoring the fate of the indigenous Batwa who also bears the brunt of the conflict’ (2017, p. 73). Similarly, in Guatemala, Brett suggests that the official peacebuilding effort has not been able to respond to the demands of the majority Indigenous populations because of a lack of flexibility of what are seen as rigid liberal peace frameworks (2013). In both cases Indigenous groups have managed to find space for their narratives and customary practices, in order to exercise their agency and

Post-conflict reconstruction, the local, and the Indigenous  33 give visibility to their agendas. Engaging with Indigenous communities, in addition, is not only said to be beneficial in shedding light on previously hidden customary efforts at peace that directly affect how Indigenous communities govern themselves and their insecurities, but more widely, scholars believe that Indigenous communities can share their governance insights into non-violence in a way that can affect scenarios far beyond their own. Indigenous peoples in the African continent, Kipuri notes, employ strategies to resolve disputes with neighbouring communities which often go unreported; Kipuri notes that this is a missed opportunity, and points to the need to ‘investigate what these peacebuilding methods are … and to explore possibilities of mainstreaming them’ to resolve disputes at the national, regional, and international levels (2017, p. 77). In the context of moving away from the dogmatic linearity of modernist thinking, engaging with traditional and Indigenous worldviews is therefore believed to be not only beneficial for re-thinking post-conflict reconstruction practices by focusing on the fluid and open nature of co-becoming processes that shape actors and their surroundings (Country et al. 2016), but is also seen as essential to empowering communities dispossessed by centuries of imperialism and colonialism, and whose narrative voices have been silenced in favour of a preference for scientific and objective accounts of violence and conflict (Dauphinee 2015). Policy-makers also appear to exhibit an emerging sensibility towards Indigenous communities, through an increase in the reliance on the rhetoric of indigeneity. Since the coming into force of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, and prior to that through the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN in particular has been committed to raising awareness of Indigenous issues, particularly as it pertains to development and conservation. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) Division for Social Development of Indigenous People takes note of improvements to inclusivity in UN-wide agendas thus far. For instance, in relation to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted in 2016 by the General Assembly of the UN, DESA points out that the final resolution ‘refers to Indigenous peoples 6 times’ in the context of hunger, education, and political participation (UN DESA n.d.). The European Union, too has enshrined its commitment to indigeneity under the rubric of poverty reduction particularly, by focusing on Indigenous groups’ status as disadvantaged ‘in all societies’.2 A number of projects have also been funded, which place Indigenous knowledge at the centre of complex governance issues weaving poverty, conflict and environmental protection together. Examples of such projects are the EU-sponsored ‘Sustainable Local Development in Colombia’, funded through the Development Cooperation Instrument, and ‘Using Indigenous Knowledge to Reverse Land Degradation in Angola’ supported by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. The former aims to support ‘local inhabitants, including afro-Colombians and Indigenous peoples’ in order to ‘contribute to peacebuilding through green growth in marginalized areas that have been affected by violence, by promoting local sustainable development and livelihoods of populations living in socially and environmentally sensitive areas’;3 the latter seeks to strengthen ‘sustainable management of natural resources’ by promoting the mainstreaming of adaptive techniques and capabilities of the Herero, Khoisan and Muimba agro-pastoral Indigenous groups, who have so far been forced to ‘adapt to a new reality’ brought about by environmental 2 As stated in Europeaid’s web page: https://​ec​.europa​.eu/​europeaid/​sectors/​human​-development/​ social​-inclusion/​Indigenous​-people​_en. Accessed 4 July 2019. 3 Details of the project, including budgeting, can be found at: https://​ ec​ .europa​ .eu/​ europeaid/​ projects/​sustainable​-local​-development​-colombia​_es. Accessed 4 July 2019.

34  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding degradation.4 Both cases are examples of dual attempts to frame Indigenous communities as receivers of development aid, as well as empowered producers of knowledge useful for wider disaster and conflict management. Nevertheless, critics have looked upon institutional engagement with Indigenous knowledge with a high degree of suspicion, and with a concern for the potential exploitation and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. Odora Hoppers for instance, suggests that Indigenous knowledge has ‘always been an open treasure box for the unfettered appropriation of items of value to the western civilisation’ (2002, p. 108). This warning points to the possibility that inclusivity of indigeneity without appropriate codes of conduct regulating the interaction between systems may result in Indigenous customs, history, literature, medicine, and sciences, being commercially exploited, and thus come to further disadvantage Indigenous communities who do not see any ‘financial benefit, but also… respect and official recognition’ (Hoppers 2002, p. 109). In part because these actors represent an international governance system embedded in liberal precepts and reinforced by hundreds of years’ worth of colonial and imperial legacies, critics are sceptical about the ability of former colonial actors to engage with indigeneity whilst divesting themselves of their respective ties to histories of violence, domination and exploitation. Institutional organisations such as the UN, and the World Bank, by attempting to determine who is Indigenous, are also part of ‘a quest for definitional authority’, which impacts communities by threatening distinct Indigenous identity, heritage, and history with encroachment by ‘settler societies and states’ and by ‘elements of the imperial institutional network’ (Alfred and Corntassel 2005, p. 599). To counter the potential for manipulation that liberal institutions are associated with, scholars supportive of a more reflective engagement with the Indigenous suggest that such engagement can bring about a local-centric understanding of emancipation which can consciously engage with the material sources for the exploitation and marginalisation of the ‘Other’ and its non-liberal worldview. Indigeneity is then seen as a solution to push the boundaries of the critique of the liberal peace, calling for a total overhauling of the premises underpinning how we think about community interaction, from conflict mediation, to resource management (Pkalya et al. 2004). Indigenous knowledge, traditions, and governance models are then ushered in as viable alternatives capable of integrating the local turn’s concern for the empowerment of the local agent with a bid to open up the conceptual field to multiple ontologies.

THE LIMITS OF A POSSIBLE TURN TO INDIGENEITY IN POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION Whilst some scholars have been cautiously optimistic about the contribution provided by the interconnection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews, others are much more careful about the potential pitfalls that may result from assuming an equivalence between the unique Indigenous experience and other, non-Indigenous groups and communities. On the one hand, for instance, Kim Tallbear, whilst pointing out the tendency of western and Indigenous schools of thought to run on separate but parallel tracks, also proposes the possibility of a non-exclusive relationship based on exploration and openness, on either side (2016). On 4 See FAO’s website: http://​www​.fao​.org/​in​-action/​using​-Indigenous​-knowledge​-to​-reverse​-land​ -degradation​-in​-angola/​en/​. Accessed 4 July 2019.

Post-conflict reconstruction, the local, and the Indigenous  35 the other hand, other CIS scholars such as Moreton-Robinson, Whyte, and Champagne, have expressed deep concerns over the manner in which Indigenous knowledge is handled and integrated by non-Indigenous fields. Moreton-Robinson suggests that Indigenous analytics cannot be generated by those who do not share the Indigenous experience (2016). Whyte also shows concern for the ulterior motives that may drive western scholarly engagement with Indigenous worldviews, from guilt to narratives of saviourship (2018). Others, additionally, doubt whether western academic disciplines are able to engage with contemporary indigeneity analytically (Champagne 2007), insofar as Indigenous knowledge is often placed on a secondary level to scientific, positivistic knowledge, and therefore understood as supplementary to western knowledge, rather than as a primary source of engagement with the world (Leduc 2006). Wider questions have also been raised by scholars, pertaining to a more fundamental incompatibility of epistemologies (see, for instance Wilson 2008). The concerns highlighted above are of profound importance to the current state of re-conceptualising post-conflict reconstruction, as they point to two important insights pertaining to a potential turn to indigeneity in theory. Whilst on the one hand it is recognised that Indigenous knowledge can provide materially and historically grounded experiences of local agency, it is also the case that these experiences run the risk of being corrupted, amended and diluted in their encounter with liberal frameworks. This has, already, to an extent, been visible in the discussion on environmental conservation in development and post-conflict settings. Whilst Indigenous knowledge is nominally praised as a source of knowledge on adaptive systems in the face of adversity, where these practices clash with western understandings of conservation, they are usually side-lined. This has an impact on lifestyle, traditions and worship, but also severely restricts the capacity to exercise self-determination over land. As an example, Kipuri discusses the implementation of a wildlife conservation project in Tanzania, where Indigenous lands have been appropriated, carved out and re-arranged according to western agendas on conservation, but with little consideration of local communities. Here, a common narrative concerning Indigenous peoples as destructive to their environment ‘justifies their evictions even from environments they created and nurtured for decades to create the world-famous wildlife sanctuaries of the region’ (Kipuri 2017, p. 72). Likewise, fire ceremonies in Karuk ancestral lands (Northern California and parts of Oregon) have also been outlawed in conformity with several western environmental guidelines, despite being central elements in Karuk stewardship and worship rituals and serving important social and ecological functions in their respective ecosystems (Whyte 2017). In relation to peacebuilding, Mac Ginty has also noted that where traditional knowledge forms have been used to inform practice, as in the case of hybrid courts in Rwanda and Afghanistan, these have been adapted so as to remove elements that are incongruent with western norms regimes. In Afghanistan, for instance, this has been done, Mac Ginty notes, by including women in Loya Jirga councils. Whilst Mac Ginty argues that this is seen as problematic by some in the community as a faulty translation of customary practices (Mac Ginty 2011b), one can also question the extent to which ‘traditional’ practices are deemed ‘indigenous’, and also the extent to which these are applicable to all ‘local’ or ‘traditional’ communities. Indeed, in some cases, these traditional and customary practices are believed to have a much wider hold on the population that they might actually do. The Loya Jirga, for instance, has its roots in the customs of Pashtun communities, and its immediate applicability to and legitimacy for other local communities is arguably questionable.

36  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Indeed, the allure of Indigenous knowledge rests on the contribution it can provide to our knowledge of other worldviews, practices and experiences. In this regard, Indigenous narratives are considered to be essential to access these worldviews. Yet, whilst certainly crucial to Indigenous lives themselves, a call for engaging with these narratives does not automatically guarantee the absence of misappropriation, misuse or marginalisation. Notably, storytelling and narrative knowledge have previously been included in post-conflict frameworks, particularly as part of transitional justice initiatives such as truth and reconciliation commission proceedings, and are also central to civil society engagement with post-conflict territories, though this has not guaranteed the prevalence of certain narratives over others, or the predominance of donor-driven projects, where narratives come to be seen as merely complementary evidence to already established goals and agendas. The risk is, in sum, that Indigenous narratives yet again are used to ‘save peacebuilding and statebuilding’ whether they intend to or not.

INDIGENEITY AND RELATIONALITY: ‘SHORT-CIRCUITING’ KNOWLEDGE The core question is thus for whom would the turn to indigeneity function. If the aim is to improve peacebuilding and statebuilding theory and practice per se, this may run the risk of co-opting (and largely generalising) a wide array of non-liberal knowledge, for pre-existing purposes dictated by unchanged goals. In such cases, then, any turn to the Indigenous would be no different from earlier iterations, and as such, may run similar risks as the perspectives are critiqued as insufficiently reflective and unfailingly modern. If, on the other hand, the turn takes place with the empowerment of Indigenous communities in mind, this may, still, conceal another potential pitfall, in that Indigenous narratives may be used by theory and practice to access local realities in order to ‘emancipate’ them, thus reproducing what Whyte has identified as narratives of ‘saviourship’ (Whyte 2018) wherein traditional knowledges, on the brink of extinction, are subordinated to ‘mainstream’ messiah-like paradigms. With all this in mind, does the inevitable conclusion indicate that Indigenous knowledge should not be considered when thinking about re-conceptualising post-conflict reconstruction? On the contrary, the question raised by these concerns is one that begs for a qualification of the terms of the engagement. In so far as recent attempts to re-conceptualise the field have had, in mind, a concern for a substantial ontological ‘revolution’ to peace-thinking, then the Indigenous turn can certainly be relevant to operating such a monumental shift. Yet, whereas so far the attempt has been to reconcile the Indigenous and traditional knowledges with current peacebuilding thought, a more nuanced, reflective engagement with indigeneity may shine a light on the very purpose of engaging with different worldviews to re-think peace. This form of engagement may then reflect on the relational cosmology inherent in traditional knowledges in order to ‘short-circuit’ the most foundational certainties at the core of peace-thinking. Indigenous knowledges would then ‘gift’ a critical ‘breath of life’ into theoretical debates on post-conflict reconstruction, and one which may then take them in a variety of different directions, many of which are not yet fully conceptualised, though without the presumption of being able to ‘emancipate’ or ‘save’ Indigenous communities as a result of this interaction. This would allow us to avoid framing alternative knowledges as purely supplemental (Whyte 2017) to western knowledge, in that the very interaction with different worldviews is undertaken with the specific aim of unsettling pre-established assumptions concerning the social and the

Post-conflict reconstruction, the local, and the Indigenous  37 political, to reflect, iteratively, about the processes, principles and frameworks of governance we identify as ‘normal’ or ideal. In practice, and to zoom in on a particular micro-level, this may ultimately generate a more materially engaged form of peace-thinking, one which opens political space for normatively open-ended discussions about the nature of peace interventions and their very possibility. Wolff for instance, suggests that at the very least, Indigenous worldviews open up the field to evidence of non-liberal and post-liberal governance systems (Wolff 2015). Yashar, too, suggests that Indigenous movements in conflict-affected areas with substantial experience of peace missions such as Latin America are already challenging mainstream conceptions of citizenship and nation state, with resistance as a productive way to exercise agency as well as work towards the emancipation of marginalised groups (Yashar 2005). The question may be not so much about how to capture this agency to improve the performance of post-conflict reconstruction, but rather to enable it to affect our modes of thinking about peace, allowing critical scholars to reflect on those regimes of power that we have come to construct as the edifice of post-conflict reconstruction, with its moral and ethical justifications, its actors and its legitimations.

CONCLUSION Decades of foreign involvement in post-conflict territories have opened up intervening actors and agendas to a whole range of critiques, many of which have zeroed in on the problems that peacebuilding and statebuilding have been unable to address or have, in some cases, even been responsible for exacerbating. The local turn in particular, spearheaded a strong critique of the western liberal hubris deemed responsible for these faults. The local turn’s concern for appreciating complexity and multiple cosmologies of peace has thus given birth to attempts to further and deepen our understanding of engaging with ‘the local’. Within this logic, Indigenous and traditional knowledges have been engaged with, in order to meaningfully ground critical approaches to re-thinking post-conflict reconstruction, as well as to provide pragmatic solutions to the problem of governing in complex post-conflict scenarios, whilst maintaining the focus on empowering and emancipating communities whose livelihoods, culture, worldviews and governance systems have so far been marginalised by a general preference for western liberal governance. Indigeneity promises access to relational ontologies that can unlock practices of human and non-human coexistence that may be central to environmental conservation and social reconciliation. These are governance insights that are deemed to be central to groups themselves, who may have seen their customs slowly but inexorably thinned down by decades of settler colonialism and western hubris, but are also heeded as exemplars of responsible, non-hierarchical and non-linear governance, a different way to look at interactions, and a different way to think about solutions, planning for and governing insecurities. Where, however, this promise has been grasped in order to address the general abstraction of theoretical local turn frameworks’ engagement with ‘locality’ and ‘alterity’, the chapter has suggested that engagement with indigeneity may not be straightforwardly bound for harmony. The chapter suggested the need for a reflection on re-conceptualising post-conflict reconstruction from within the paradigm itself, in order to interrogate the intentions and aims behind this recent surge of interest in indigeneity. CIS enables us to do so by providing us with

38  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding insights on some of the by-products of the encounter between Indigenous worldviews and governance systems as well as epistemological frameworks that remain primarily attached to the legacy of settler colonialism, or western hubris more generally. CIS suggests, in the first place, that attempts to speak to Indigenous knowledges in wider social sciences have so far problematically understood the former primarily as supplemental knowledge to the western one. Applied to building peace the danger could be that customary forms of reconciliation may merely be shoehorned into unchanged western moulds, but only to the extent that they do not challenge or question some of the points that western liberal actors are unwilling to re-think or unpack. Additionally, CIS also warns against the potential violence of using Indigenous knowledge to ‘save’ Indigenous communities, thus portraying these communities as already failed subjects. Translated to the thematic of reconstruction, the danger here might be that a narrative of saviourship is promoted, which frames Indigenous knowledge as a tool, but does not question the capability of peacebuilders and statebuilders to empower, emancipate and ‘save’ the marginalised communities. Finally, CIS more fundamentally questions the possibility to coherently match epistemological and ontological worldviews which may be fundamentally different to the extent of making consensus and common ground problematic to the extreme. In post-conflict contexts, this may mean that the very endeavour to open up to multiple worldviews can bring about insights into governance which fundamentally cast a shadow of doubt on what those tasked with reconstruction perceive to be priorities or unquestionable truths pertaining to peace goals, including what peace, reconciliation, rights, representation, and self-determination might look like.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank Hannah Richter and Adam Barker for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

REFERENCES Aikau, H., N. Goodyea-Ka’opua and N. Silva (2016), ‘The practice of Kuleana: Reflections on critical indigenous studies through trans-indigenous exchange’, in A. Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Critical Indigenous Studies, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 157‒75. Alfred, T. and J. Corntassel (2005), ‘Being indigenous: Resurgences against contemporary colonialism’, Government and Opposition, 40 (4), 597–614. Bargués-Pedreny, P. (2016), ‘False promise: “Local ownership” and the denial of self-government’, in T. Debiel, T. Held and U. Schneckener (eds), Peacebuilding in Crisis: Rethinking Paradigms and Practices of Transnational Cooperation, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 227–39. Bertha, Z. O. H. and A. N. Mohammed (2009), ‘Enhancing the positive contributions of African culture in peacebuilding and development’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, 4 (3), 1–5. Björkdahl, A. and K. Höglund (2013), ‘Precarious peacebuilding: Friction in global–local encounters’, Peacebuilding, 1 (3), 289–99. Boege, V. (2012), ‘Hybrid forms of peace and order on a south sea island: Experiences from Bougainville (Papua New Guinea)’, in A. Mitchell and O. P. Richmond (eds), Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-Liberalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 88‒106. Brett, R. (2013), ‘Peace stillborn? Guatemala’s liberal peace and the indigenous movement’, Peacebuilding, 1 (2), 222–38. Brigg, M. (2007), ‘Biopolitics meets terrapolitics: Political ontologies and governance in settler-colonial Australia’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 42 (3), 403–17.

Post-conflict reconstruction, the local, and the Indigenous  39 Champagne, D. (2007), ‘In search of theory and method in American Indian Studies’, American Indian Quarterly, 31 (3), 353–72. Country, B. et al. (2016), ‘Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a relational understanding of place/space’, Progress in Human Geography, 40 (4), 455–75. Cubitt, C. (2013), ‘Responsible reconstruction after war: Meeting local needs for building peace’, Review of International Studies, 39 (1), 91–112. Dauphinee, E. (2015), ‘Narrative voice and the limits of peacebuilding: Rethinking the politics of partiality’, Peacebuilding, 3 (3), 261–78. Donais, T. (2009), ‘Empowerment or imposition? Dilemmas of local ownership in post-conflict peacebuilding processes’, Peace and Change, 34 (1), 3–26. Gordon, E. (2014), ‘Security sector reform, statebuilding and local ownership: Securing the state or its people?’, Journal of Intervention and StateBuilding, 8 (2), 126–48. Kappler, S. (2014), Local Agency and Peacebuilding: EU and International Engagement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus and South Africa, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kipuri, N. (2017), ‘Indigenous peoples’ rights, conflict and peace building: Experiences from East Africa’, in Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ed.), Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Unreported Struggles: Conflict and Peace, New York: Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University, pp. 68‒79. Leduc, T. (2006), ‘Inuit economic adaptations for a changing global climate’, Ecological Economics, 60 (1), 27–35. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2011), ‘The bifurcation of the two worlds: Assessing the gap between internationals and locals in state-building processes’, Third World Quarterly, 32 (10), 1823–41. Mac Ginty, R. (2010), ‘Hybrid peace: The interaction between top-down and bottom-up peace’, Security Dialogue, 41 (4), 391–412. Mac Ginty, R. (2011a), ‘Hybrid peace: How does hybrid peace come about?’, in S. Cambpell, D. Chandler and M. Sabaratnam (eds), A Liberal Peace? The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding, London and New York: Zed Books, pp. 209‒25. Mac Ginty, R. (2011b), International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Mac Ginty, R. (2012), ‘Between resistance and compliance: Non-participation and the liberal peace’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 6 (2), 167–87. Mac Ginty, R. and G. Sanghera (2012), ‘Hybridity in peacebuilding and development: An introduction’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, 7 (2), 3–8. Millar, G. (2014), ‘Disaggregating hybridity: Why hybrid institutions do not produce predictable experiences of peace’, Journal of Peace Research, 51 (4), 501–14. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2016), ‘Locations of engagement in the first world’, in A. Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Critical Indigenous Studies, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 3‒18. Mwikisa, P. W. and M. M. Dikobe (2009), ‘Stories and literature in culture as sources of indigenous insights in peacebuilding and development’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, 4 (3), 46–56. Nadarajah, S. and D. Rampton (2015), ‘The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace’, Review of International Studies, 41 (1), 49–72. Odora Hoppers, C. (2002), ‘Indigenous knowledge systems, sustainable livelihoods and the intellectual property system: A peace action perspective’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, 1 (1), 106–12. Pkalya, R., M. Adan, I. Masinde, B. Rabar and M. Karimi (2004), Indigenous Democracy: Traditional Conflict Resolution Mechanism, Nairobi: Intermediate Technology Development Group Eastern Africa. Randazzo, E. (2016), ‘The paradoxes of the “everyday”: Scrutinising the local turn in peace building’, Third World Quarterly, 37 (8), 1351–70. Richmond, O. P. (2012), ‘A pedagogy of peacebuilding: Infrapolitics, resistance, and liberation’, International Political Sociology, 6 (2), 115–31. Richmond, O. P. (2015), ‘The dilemmas of a hybrid peace: Negative or positive?’, Cooperation and Conflict, 50 (1), 50–68. Roberts, D. (2008), ‘Hybrid polities and indigenous pluralities: Advanced lessons in statebuilding from Cambodia’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2 (1), 63–86. Sabaratnam, M. (2011), ‘IR in dialogue… but can we change the subjects? A typology of decolonising strategies for the study of world politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39 (3), 781–803. Shinko, R. E. (2008), ‘Agonistic peace: A postmodern reading’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 36 (3), 473–91.

40  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Tallbear, K. (2016), ‘Dear indigenous studies, it’s not me, it’s you: Why I left and what needs to change’, in A. Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Critical Indigenous Studies, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 69‒82. UN DESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) (n.d.), ‘Indigenous peoples and the 2030 agenda’, https://​www​​.un​​.org/​development/​desa/​Indigenouspeoples/​focus​​-areas/​post​​-2015​​ -agenda/​the​​-sustainable-​​ development-​​ goals​​-sdgs​​-and​​-Indigenous​​.html. Accessed 2 June 2019. Wallis, J. and O. Richmond (2017), ‘From constructivist to critical engagements with peacebuilding: Implications for hybrid peace’, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2 (3), 422–45. Whyte, K. (2017), ‘What do indigenous knowledges do for indigenous peoples?’, in M. K. Nelson and D. Shilling (eds), Keepers of the Green World: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 4‒57. Whyte, K. P. (2018), ‘Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1 (2), 1–19. Whyte, K. P., C. M. Caldwell and M. Schefer (2017), ‘Indigenous lessons about sustainability are not only for all humanity’, in J. Sze (ed.), Situating Sustainability and Social Justice, New York: NYU Press, pp. 149‒79. Wilson, S. (2008), Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing. Wolff, J. (2015), ‘Beyond the liberal peace: Latin American inspirations for post-liberal peacebuilding’, Peacebuilding, 3 (3), 279–96. Yashar, D. J. (2005), Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5. Data in the context of intervention and statebuilding Isabel Rocha de Siqueira

INDICATORS AND STATEBUILDING More, better and disaggregated data is now a mantra in policy-making (ECOSOC 2018). Accompanied by the words ‘statistics’, ‘indicators’, ‘methodology’ and ‘technology’, they form a set of guidelines for information production and political action (Davis et al. 2012a; Davis et al. 2012b; Cooley 2015). A diagnosis of a country post-conflict situation, prioritization for aid allocation, attribution of success regarding a project or programme, the call for action in emergency situations, effective lobbying and political action, all these require data; nowadays this means, mostly, numerical data or statistics. Numerical data – henceforth simply ‘data’ – is the substance of indicators, as opposed, for instance, to photographs and qualitative assessments (Davis et al. 2012a). Methodologies for data collection vary according to indicators and are increasingly reliant on rapidly evolving technologies to produce data or on new uses of old devices like mobile phones. Seldom, however, do they all walk along at the same pace. A most famous case in point, the UN 2030 Agenda divides its 232 indicators into tiers: tier I for indicators for which there are internationally established methodologies and regular production of data; tier II for indicators that have such methodologies but which have infrequent data collection; and tier III for indicators without methodologies of collection (IAEG-SDGs 11 May 2018). This is an example of the fact that, in practice, more often than not we are presented with two extremes when analysing countries’ (and other political units’) performances: either the aim is high and we need to fortify even further our data industry, constantly chasing for numbers and developing new information and communications technologies; or we are content to have what we can measure and the aims become whatever is closest to the real objectives and is quantifiable. These dynamics look more and more like a race: it seems goals either chase data or data chase goals, and there is little that is left outside of that race in matters of statebuilding. In fact, even if there is not enough evidence to testify to the ultimate influence of data on decision-making, indicators and data are ubiquitous, perhaps because, in a simplified way, they do provide easy support for ad hoc claims of accountability, objectivity and transparency (Porter 1995; Bhuta et al. 2018). The fact is that today there is no major form of intervention in international affairs that is not monitored and evaluated against a set of indicators. Indicators are ‘diagnostic tools for identifying problems and needs; instrumental measures of performance; techniques of awareness-raising and public advocacy; instruments of change’, therefore, ‘indicators are interventions’ (Davis and Kingsbury 2011, p. 1). By simplifying complex issues, naming them and offering a point of comparison, indicators frame social problems, and in that frame, it is just as important what stays outside as what stays in. As widely discussed in the professional

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42  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding and academic literature on statebuilding, rankings such as the Fragile States Index1 or lists that indirectly rank, as the World Bank’s Harmonized List of Fragile Situations,2 not only measure issues like number of children out of school, number of violent deaths, social cohesion and other complex political matters, but also indirectly determine a standard of what and how a functional state should perform (see Gutiérrez Sanín 2009; Gutiérrez Sanín et al. 2013). By intervening through indicators, rankings effectively project statebuilding: the constant monitoring and evaluating required to update such rankings mould state action so that ministries can provide the crucial data needed, for instance, and improve performance in key sectors; moreover, indicators in the form of rankings and other monitoring and evaluation systems have influence over the allocation of official development assistance and humanitarian response, besides influencing relations of accountability and the actions of civil society (see Jerven 2011; Rocha de Siqueira 2014; Urueña 2018). The power of numbers in global governance has been intensely debated through different theoretical lenses, as we will see next. Meanwhile, the challenges to development and security, for instance, are not withering: there is still too much inequality and oppression. The latest UN reports on the progress in achieving development goals affirms, for instance, that ‘[g]lobally, 18,000 children still die each day from poverty-related causes’,3 while the latest data by the Peace Research Institute Oslo indicates that non-state violence has peaked in 2017 (Dupuy and Rustad 2018). As the world fails to meet expectations, we proceed to gather more, better and disaggregated data, refining our methodologies, improving frequency and scope of data collection, and investing in visualization. Known as single-loop learning, this means, not always but quite often, that we have been thinking about how ‘to do the wrong things righter’ instead of questioning our assumptions (Ramalingan 2013). Data are definitely necessary to design interventions that can strengthen governance capacity; data, however, are not the whole story, and as a widespread enchantment with numbers and technologies take hold, it is important we keep asking ‘what for?’ and ‘at what cost?’ (see Löwenheim 2008; Engle Merry 2011). Big data for a while now has been the new kid on the block, with promises of catering more correlations – and thus, more context – and an increased probability of flagging outliers (UN Global Pulse 2016; see also Hansen and Porter 2017). Yet, as pointed out by many, there is a cost to a ‘data revolution’ (IEAG 2014); that cost is not only financial, but also points at behavioural change and to a threat of further inequality. There is a risk that politicians, practitioners and academics will increasingly seek to propose objectives that can be monitored and evaluated in quantifiable ways (Jerven 2017). This is already a reality for those who apply for grants to develop social and research projects: very often, if not always, the proposal needs to point out selected indicators for monitoring and evaluation systems and, for that, results need to be quantifiable. There is also a risk that data and related technologies can become new referents of inequality, as data collection and analysis require material resources, qualified personnel and technology. Jerven highlights for instance, that until recently ‘only about 60 countries in the world ha[d] the vital registrations systems required to monitor basic trends in

See Fragile States Index at http://​fundforpeace​.org/​fsi/​(accessed 1 September 2018). See Harmonized List of Fragile Situations at http://​ www​ .worldbank​ .org/​ en/​ topic/​ fragilityconflictviolence/​brief/​harmonized​-list​-of​-fragile​-situations (accessed 1 September 2018). 3 See Sustainable Development Goal 1 at https://​sustainabledevelopment​.un​.org/​sdg1 (accessed 1 September 2018). 1 2

Data in the context of intervention and statebuilding  43 social indicators’ (Jerven 2017, p. 34). This means yet another form of differentiating capacity among countries, and the gap can get bigger with the rapid advance of technology. In the following, by looking at the impacts of data and indicators as interventions in the projection of statebuilding, I want to explore a few main areas of concern. First, it is key to understand how a quantifying reasoning has taken hold of statebuilding by analysing different theoretical contributions. This is then followed by an overview of the many ways some academics and practitioners have been working with and around critiques concerning the simplifying nature of data, advancing tools like theories of change and working with the notion of complexity. At that point, I briefly discuss the role of these contributions in what concerns the complex correlations between development and security. The aim with all that is to come to the point where we question the role of the non-quantifiable in a quantified world: is it the end of theory? Will there be space for slow-reasoning and creativity? What is the role for non-quantifying kinds of knowledge? In intervention and statebuilding, these are crucial questions; they inform human relations on the ground, general and specific goals, issues of causality, attribution and prioritization.

STATEBUILDING RESULTS DEFINED BY DATA Statistics were borne from the will to govern. In order to govern, one needs to know their subjects and the collective they compose; one needs also to know the rules of behaviour that govern them in this collective and the regular results of intervention in their actions. Some of our key statistical truths, like the normal curve, are rooted in this obsession with regularities (Hacking 1990; Desrosières 1998). ‘Data sciences such as statistics, probability, and analytics have emerged not because they have merely quenched our curiosities but because these sciences have been useful for the objects and subjects they have brought into being for the purposes of governing and/or profit’ (Ruppert et al. 2017, p. 1). Yet today, the Internet, the sheer amount of connected devices, the way we often volunteer our own data, the increasing use of artificial intelligence and algorithms, all that means the collection of data about populations has long ceased to be a national endeavour. The transnational character of data collection nowadays answers to and feeds the multiplicity of actors – human and non-human – involved in knowledge production (Hansen and Porter 2017). The role of the state has been exploded to an infinite number of particles that are taken by international organizations, think tanks, NGOs, activists, academics and foreign governments everywhere. All aspects of state performance are constantly measured, compared and ranked. Rankings like the Doing Business Index, Corruption Perceptions Index, Human Development Index, and Global Peace Index resort to different sources of data – administrative and survey data, produced by states, NGOs, academics and international organizations. From how indicators are defined, where data come from, how ratings impact political leverage, local accountability and the capacity to attract foreign investment, one can say, at the minimum, that full access to the data industry is unequal. Again, let us take the case of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is perceived as the most ambitious agenda in international politics, encompassing issues from economic growth to homicide rates and rule of law. Just as with the 2000 Millennium Development Goals, the 17 SDGs established in 2015 require an enormous effort of monitoring and evaluation. It is estimated these efforts can cost from 60 to 150 billion USD (Jerven 2017). The UN

44  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding is investing in a Technology Facilitation Mechanism4 and just recently a Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries has been launched in Turkey.5 All this is supposed to help finance the ‘data revolution’ the SDGs have been promoting (IEAG 2014). The data revolution is not so much a rupture but an intensification of an established reasoning: ‘A sound indicator framework will turn the SDGs and their targets into a management tool to help countries and the global community develop implementation strategies and allocate resources accordingly’ (SDSN 12 June 2015, p. 7, emphasis in original). The centrality of a management mentality is of course much related to neoliberalism and globalization, as amply discussed (see, for instance, Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić 2017). Academics have for a while now aimed at unpacking the knowledge/power relations fomented by this managerial thinking. Most of the recent studies are inspired by Foucault and/or borrow from science and technology studies, looking at the materiality and social impacts of indicators. Among these authors, Espeland and Stevens (2008), in their ‘sociology of quantification’, have pointed out that quantification turns difference into quantity, disciplining and normalizing (pp. 408, 414). As a key reference for studying not only the relation between knowledge and power but also power’s diffuse and productive character, Foucault also inspires others to look at the impact of governance from a distance over issues of responsibility and self-disciplining (Engle Merry 2011). Other academics, in turn, mobilize a combination of historical sociology, political sociology and science and technology studies, searching for clues as to how quantification became so widespread and so imbricated in the way we apprehend and make sense of the world (Lampland and Star 2009). Similarly but largely inspired by Hacking’s work on style and reasoning, my own approach aims at questioning the epistemological and ontological limits of this thinking while acknowledging the powerful pervasiveness of numbers (Rocha de Siqueira 2016, 2017). There are yet those who have been inspired by Latour’s Actor Network Theory and who have sought to demonstrate the materiality of the ‘knowledge-producing networks’ that come to govern through numbers (Porter 2012), computers, databases, experts, reports, websites, mobile phones, satellites all join up in producing and reproducing numerical knowledge about populations, governments, and flows of goods and services. This information has a life of its own; it wanders around and comes to have uses that can greatly vary from their original purposes (see Porter 2012; Leite and Mutlu 2017). Finally, many have also been exploring the politics of data: Ruppert et al., inspired by science and technology studies, Bourdieu and other scholars, question our own roles as objects of knowledge. Moreover, by addressing the multiplying controversies over issues of privacy, expert knowledge, power struggles, and inertia, the authors put ‘method and data regimes’ under scrutiny over the conditions of possibility of worlds, subjects and rights. They call for our transformation from data subjects into data citizens (Ruppert et al. 2017).

REALITY IS TOO COMPLEX I believe that to become a data citizen, one needs to start by questioning not the obvious fact that numbers simplify the incredibly complex realities of society and government but

See https://​sustainabledevelopment​.un​.org/​tfm (accessed 28 August 2018). See https://​www​.un​.org/​ldcportal/​ldc​-technology​-bank​-launches​-in​-turkey/​ (accessed 1 September 2018). 4 5

Data in the context of intervention and statebuilding  45 its exponential implication that we are getting addicted to simplification. We read short sentence-summaries of news in social media, we want graphs to tell us of the economic situation, we expect statistics to offer us a quick view of the dynamics of violence and war, and we trust politicians and practitioners to trust numbers. Not by chance we are now officially in the era of fake news (Davies 2016). As activists, academics and civil society in general get caught in the need to answer fast to a quantifying way of doing business, there has been little room to question quantification itself as the way of performing politics; time pushes for trying to work around, with and inside ‘method and data regimes’ (Ruppert et al. 2017). In her poetic call for a middle ground, Zimbabwean activist Everjoice Win wrote a fake letter to a former friend-turned-development-expert, mostly wording her resentment towards the ‘templates’, like the (in)famous logframe6 (see World Bank 2005), whose categorizing nature is fed by and feeds the quantifying reasoning in interventions: ‘Nobody understood this method and the logic behind it. It did not make sense for many of us who are Ndebele- or Shona-speaking. In our languages we express ourselves in paragraphs, not in short phrases or sentences. We are an oral people. We don’t think in boxes either’ (Win 2004, p. 125). She goes on: ‘Instead of writing reports or documenting experiences in ways that help us to learn, we spend a great deal of time trying to please you and doing what you want’(p. 126). Like Win, many have advocated for plurality of methods, better contextualization and more nuanced approaches to interventions (Mosse 2005). These critiques have been central, for instance, for people living in locations affected both by poverty and conflict, where indicators like ‘building human resources’ might not adequately indicate progress considering the point of departure, nor the value of minor achievements when faced with the adversity of instability and violence (see, for instance, g7+ 2013). I have explored elsewhere how the correlations between security and development have been nurtured and have greatly nurtured the quantifying reasoning we discuss here (see Rocha de Siqueira 2017), the increasing understanding that it was necessary to consider security and development issues together when designing and monitoring interventions was boosted after 9/11, influencing organizational re-structuring and new monitoring and evaluation systems (Rocha de Siqueira 2017). The way development issues, like poverty, might influence crime, violence and instability and vice versa has fascinated practitioners and academics; crucially, the more data is produced, the greater the realization that methods need to be flexible to capture context. Evaluators must prepare for risks, develop robust designs, and ensure sufficient flexibility to counter the challenges of unpredictability and complexity. They should select methods that help to capture complex social change processes and illuminate interactions between interventions and the context. (OECD 2012, p. 32)

So far, flexibility and contextualization have mostly induced the adoption of theories of change instead of logframes and considerations regarding systems and complexity theory. As a consequence of our mindsets being (de)formed by a modernistic educational and social system, we believe that order and control of the social processes in which we are involved can be achieved.

6 The logical framework is a matrix, vertically establishing ends and means ‘with objectives, goals and purposes (the nomenclature varies), then outputs, then the activities intended to achieve the outputs’, and horizontally moving ‘from narrative summary to objectively verifiable indicators and means of verification’. A last vertical column reports assumptions (Chambers and Pettit 2004, p. 145).

46  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding The dogmatic use that many development agents make of the Logical Framework as a development project management tool is a clear example of this. Even today there is a trend to believe in the existence of absolute truths, static, total certainty. And if that were not enough, we continue to believe that the best manner to measure that truth is using quantitative approaches. (Retolaza Eguren 2011, p. 1)

Theories of change, as alternatives to the logframe, do not prescind numbers, but in their ‘thinking-action focus’, indicators need to answer to a theory about the change one wants to see and to one’s assumptions about how this would take place. Ideally, in this case, indicators need to be thought through with people on the ground and to be constantly re-evaluated. It is about ‘reading the context’ in a qualitative way, as well as quantitative (Retolaza Eguren 2011). Still, when faced with the daunting number of variables, the speed with which they change and the unexpected results of these changes, developing a theory of change that is not absolutely attached only to a micro scenario means that research about intervention in complex contexts is an enormous challenge. Ramalingan has offered a great contribution to this debate, revisiting work done by Warren Weaver on complexity theory and applying it to the challenges of aid and statebuilding (Ramalingan 2013). Most concerns today would be issues of organized complexity, that is, problems that are located between organized systems and chaos, about which the average says little – we have instead some surprising regularities: the way investments in secondary education impact violence rates; the speed of post-conflict aid disbursement and its relation to the durability of posterior peace; the design of cash-transfer programmes and its connection to social cohesion, all these are complex correlations. If we are to overcome the fixity denounced in traditional quantification, however, we also need to ask ourselves: ‘how can we engage with complexity and emergence without paralyzing analysis and decision making with the unpredictable and inexplicable?’ (Ramalingan 2013, p. 149). In one example cited by Ramalingan, the success of a peace process for the Democratic Republic of Congo at the international level was damaging prospects of success at the national level, and this was only better understood once a system map was elaborated by the team, making it possible to visualize the ‘emergent property of interactions and feedback processes between them’ (p. 253). Ramalingan argues intervention and its monitoring need to be dynamic, adaptative, more systemic and networked. Intervention would move from being an ‘external push’ to an ‘internal catalyst’ (p. 361), promoting an understanding of context based on interconnectedness, dynamic causality and feedback, and holism (p. 253). That thinking changes the game for causality and attribution. It defies the neat distribution of cases of success, but it might make real success more plausible. Such thinking is closer to what more critical academic and activist voices have been bringing to the fore for decades in the social sciences. Feminists have long argued for more relational approaches (see Barad 2007; de la Cadena 2010; Costa 2014; Butler 2017), for a more plural engagement with objectivity or a plural understanding of authoritative knowledge that defies the hegemony of Western ‘expertise’ (Espinosa Miñoso et al. 2014; Harding 2015) – and for theorizing as a form of activism (Hill Collins 2002; hooks 2017 [1994]). Theirs is a crucial contribution, seeing that in general they have in common a direct engagement with the implications of their ideas, which should resonate with the constraints of a debate about intervention. Similarly, epistemological critiques from the Global South – among them, some feminists cited above – have argued that tools such as indicators, as defining parts of Western science, have contributed to extinguishing diverse forms of being in the world, some of which are relational, not individualist: ‘There is a rhizome “logic” to these entanglements, a “logic”

Data in the context of intervention and statebuilding  47 that is impossible to follow in any simple way, and very difficult to map and measure, if at all; it reveals an altogether different way of being and becoming in territory and place’ (Escobar 2016, p. 18; see also Smith 2008; Rojas 2016). The systems advanced with interventions are, thus, also ontological systems, with impacts over the very existence of alternative worlds.

DATA AS INTERVENTION: AVENUES FOR RESEARCH There is no going back from numbers. We need data for all kinds of intervention and change. Vulnerable populations everywhere benefit from existing statistically for the purpose of public policy and statebuilding. What the debate on the role of data and indicators in the context of interventions shows, nonetheless, is that we, academics, practitioners, all who resort to data to analyse and make decisions, are fortifying an industry: investments have been enormous and are bound to increase exponentially, and the amount of resources involved tends to perpetuate the need for numbers. As more technologies are developed, the reasoning for numbers is strengthened and the demand naturally increases. We should bear in mind at this point that some key avenues for research need to be further explored. A 2008 article in Wired, by Chris Anderson, hypothesized the ‘end of theory’ that would follow a ‘data deluge’: correlations are enough; all we need is patterns (Anderson 2008). This reasoning is not much different from the thinking when statistics was being born, yet we came a long way since then, technologically speaking, and this cannot possibly mean just an increase in quantity. What about the insights such as those derived from complexity theory and the powerful critiques of feminists and others? A qualitative improvement in quantification might involve thinking more about theorizing as activism. We need to qualify information, identify the routines that generate obsolete data, and reorient key investments in times when we risk mistaking the means of intervention for its ends. Key initiatives are emerging: in theory and academia, calls for ‘slow-reasoning’ have led to important questions about how we see our authority in knowledge, creating space for hesitation instead of automatic decisioning, and reflecting about activism in academia (as exemplified, respectively, by the many citations of Stengers 2005, and the work represented by Leyva et al. 2010). In addition, various works are being developed to combine key qualitative approaches, like ethnography, with data science in innovative ways (Knox and Nafus 2018). In the realm of activism, projects like the Responsible Data initiative do crucial work, reminding the world of the pitfalls of statistical visibility for vulnerable groups.7 At the end of the day, if indicators are interventions, we need to talk ethics: what is it we are building with them, how is construction taking place, who is involved, and what is not being done for the sake of producing data?

REFERENCES Anderson, C. (2008), ‘The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’, Wired, 23 June. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway, Durham and London: Duke University Press.



7

See Responsible Data at https://​responsibledata​.io/​(accessed 1 September 2018).

48  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Bhuta, N., D. V. Malito and G. Umbach (2018), ‘Introduction: Of numbers and narratives – indicators in global governance and the rise of a reflexive indicator culture’, in N. Bhuta, D. V. Malito and G. Umbach (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1‒29. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. and R. Kostić (2017), ‘Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention: Finding “facts”, telling “truth”’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 1‒20. Butler, J. (2017), ‘Vulnerabilidad corporal, coalición y la política de la calle’, Nómadas, 46, 13–29. Chambers, R. and J. Pettit (2004), ‘Shifting power to make a difference’, in L. Groves and R. Hinton (eds), Inclusive Aid: Changing Power and Relationships in International Development, Sterling, VA: Earthscan, pp. 137‒62. Cooley, A. (2015), ‘The emerging politics of international rankings and ratings: A framework for analysis’, in A. Cooley and J. Snyder (eds), Ranking the World. Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1‒38. Costa, C. L. (2014), ‘Os estudos culturais na encruzilhada dos feminismos materiais e descoloniais’, Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, 44, 79‒103. Davies, W. (2016), ‘The age of post-truth politics’, New York Times, 24 August, https://​www​​.nytimes​​ .com/​2016/​08/​24/​opinion/​campaign-​​ stops/​the​​-age​​-of​​-post​​-truth​​-politics.​​ html (accessed 11 July 2019). Davis, K. E., A. Fisher, B. Kingsbury and S. E. Merry (eds) (2012a), Governance by Indicators. Global Power through Classification and Rankings, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, K. E. and B. Kingsbury (2011), ‘Indicators as interventions: Pitfalls and prospects in supporting development initiatives’, Report, New York, December, http://​iilj.​​ org/​wp​​-content/​uploads/​2016/​ 08/​Davis​​-Kingsbury​​-Indicators​​-as​​-Interventions​​-Pitfalls​​-and​​-Prospects​​-in​​-Supporting​​-Development​​ -Initiatives-​​ Rockefeller​​-Foundation​​-2011​​.pdf (accessed 11 July 2019). Davis, K. E., B. Kingsbury and S. E. Merry (2012b), ‘Indicators as a technology of global governance’, Law and Society Review, 46 (1), 71‒104. de la Cadena, M. (2010), ‘Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond “Politic”’, Cultural Anthropology, 25 (2), 334‒70. Desrosières, A. (1998), The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dupuy, K. and S. A. Rustad (2018), Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946–2017, Conflict Trends, Oslo: PRIO. ECOSOC (2018), ‘Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Report of the Secretary-General’, in United Nations Economic and Social Council (ed.), New York, High-level political forum on sustainable development (HLPF). Engle Merry, S. (2011), ‘Measuring the world: Indicators, human rights, and global governance’, Current Anthropology, 52 (Supplement 3), S83‒S95. Escobar, A. (2016), ‘Thinking-feeling with the earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the south’, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 11 (1), 11‒32. Espeland, N. W. and M. L. Stevens (2008), ‘A sociology of quantification’, European Journal of Sociology, 49 (3), 401‒36. Espinosa Miñoso, Y., D. Gómez Correal and K. Ochoa Muñoz (eds) (2014), ‘Tejiendo de otro modo: Feminismo, epistemología y apuestas descoloniales en Abya Yala’, Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca. g7+ (2013), Note on the Fragility Spectrum, Kinshasa, g7+. Gutiérrez Sanín, F. (2009), ‘The quandaries of coding and ranking: Evaluating poor state performance indexes’, Crisis States Research Centre Working Paper 58, London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Gutiérrez Sanín, F., D. Buitrago and A. González (2013), ‘Aggregating political dimensions: Of the feasibility of political indicators’, Social Indicators Research, 110, 305‒26. Hacking, I. (1990), The Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, H. K. and T. Porter (2017), ‘What do big data do in global governance?’, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 23 (1), 31–42. Harding, S. (2015), Objectivity and Diversity. Another Logic of Scientific Research, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hill Collins, P. (2002), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (2017 [1994]), Ensinando a transgredir, São Paulo: Martins ntes. IEAG (2014), A World that Counts. Mobilizing the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, New York: United Nations. IAEG-SDGs (11 May 2018), Tier Classification for Global SDG Indicators, New York: United Nations Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators.

Data in the context of intervention and statebuilding  49 Jerven, M. (2011), ‘The quest for the African dummy: Explaining African post-colonial economic performance revisited’, Journal of International Development, 23, 288‒307. Jerven, M. (2017), ‘How much will a data revolution in development cost?’, Forum for Development Studies, 44 (1), 31‒50. Knox, H. and D. Nafus (eds) (2018), Ethnography for a Data-Saturated World, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lampland, M. and S. L. Star (2009), Standards and their Stories. How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Leite, C. C. and C. E. Mutlu (2017), ‘The social life of data: The production of political facts in EU policy governance’, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 23 (1), 71‒82. Leyva et al. (2010), Conocimientos y prácticas políticas: reflexiones desde nuestras prácticas de conocimiento situado, Chiapas, México: D.F., Lima y Ciudad de Guatemala, CIESAS, PDTG-USM, UNICACH. Löwenheim, O. (2008), ‘Examining the state: A Foucauldian perspective on international “governance indicators”’, Third World Quarterly, 29 (2), 255‒74. Mosse, D. (2005), ‘Process-oriented approaches to development practice and social research’, in D. Mosse, J. Farrington and A. Rew (eds), Development as Process: Concepts and Methods For Working With Complexity, London: Routledge, pp. 2‒29. OECD (2012), Evaluating Peacebuilding Activities in Setting of Conflict and Fragility. Improving Learning for Results, Paris: DAC. Porter, T. (2012), ‘Making serious measures: Numerical indices, peer review, and transnational actor-networks’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 15, 532‒57. Porter, T. M. (1995), Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ramalingan, B. (2013), Aid on the Edge of Chaos. Rethinking International Cooperation in a Complex World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retolaza Eguren, I. (2011), Theory of Change. A Thinking and Action Approach to Navigate in the Complexity of Social Change Processes, Guatemala: UNDP/Hivos. Rocha de Siqueira, I. (2014), ‘Measuring and managing “state fragility”: The production of statistics by the World Bank, Timor-Leste and the g7+’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (2), 268‒83. Rocha de Siqueira, I. (2016), ‘Development by trial and error: The authority of good enough numbers’, International Political Sociology, 11 (2), 166‒84. Rocha de Siqueira, I. (2017), Managing State Fragility: Conflict, Quantification and Power, London: Routledge. Rojas, Cristina (2016), ‘Contesting the colonial logics of the international: Toward a relational politics for the pluriverse’, International Political Sociology, 10 (4), 369‒82. Ruppert, E., E. Isin and D. Bigo (2017), ‘Data politics’, Big Data and Society (commentary), 1‒7. SDSN (12 June 2015), Indicators and a Monitoring Framework for the Sustainable Development Goals. Launching a Data Revolution for the SDGs, New York: Leadership Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Smith, L. T. (2008), Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples, London and New York: Zed Books. Stengers, I. (2005), ‘The cosmopolitical proposal’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 994‒1003. UN Global Pulse (2016), Integrating Big Data into the Monitoring and Evaluation of Development Programmes. Urueña, R. (2018), ‘Activism through numbers? The Corruption Perception Index and the use of indicators by civil society organisations’, in D. V. Malito, G. Umbach and N. Bhuta (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 371‒87. Win, E. (2004), ‘“If it doesn’t fit on the blue square it’s out!” An open letter to my donor friend’, in L. Groves and R. Hinton (eds), Inclusive Aid . Changing Power and Relationships in International Development, London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan, pp. 123‒27. World Bank (2005), The Logframe Handbook. A Logical Framework Approach to Project Style Cycle Management, Washington, DC: World Bank.

6. The ambiguity of statebuilding Florian P. Kühn

INTRODUCTION Besides Gould’s (2003), work, few people have paid attention to ambiguities in peace processes, let alone in interventions. Ambiguity, in good Enlightenment tradition, is being denounced as only lacking precise expression. This implies that a subject is understood to be ontologically unique, that it cannot be two things at the same time. This chapter argues that this misses a main point in intervention and statebuilding, and in international politics more generally, namely the duality (or plurality), of ontologies. One ‘thing’, such as a state, or an international mission, can be two (or more) things at the same time in the eyes of different audiences and actor groups. Such ambiguities arise from different systems of reference within which those meanings are socially enacted. This chapter explains how including ambiguity into the analysis helps unpacking the dynamics of contention in international statebuilding. Conflicts arise, in statebuilding and interventions, when one notion is enforced by a group at the expense of the notion of another group. Such processes of disambiguation juxtapose different, but equally true versions of reality, often violently clashing or leading to transformations of the dominant group’s vision.

WHAT IS AMBIGUITY? To establish truths about the world, since Enlightenment, attempts to disambiguate dominate knowledge production. In the process, ambiguities are eliminated, leaving monovalent interpretations portrayed as objective facts. Thus, a thing can be understood ideal-typical as one thing only, which cannot be showing characteristics of another thing. In any case, a ‘thing’ is a social reference, and as such can be subject to social research, such as ‘sovereignty’, the ‘state’ or ‘international conflict’; it may also be an actual object. An object may be approached from different angles and provide a variety of sensual experiences. Smirl (2011), illustrates how these qualities form the intervention’s point of view and structure the detail of the picture that humanitarians see. Andersson and Weigand (2015, pp.  524‒6), illustrate how broader material manifestations of hierarchies separate the social spaces of internationals and the national population, distributing risk and danger according to value ascribed to life. The material quality of objects charged with meaning by their users, of actual things is inseparable from their environment, and co-constitutes what is seen as truth about the world (Kühn 2016b). If material objects shape the way we see the world, they become also part of the non-material truths that derive from a co-constituted meaning system. Powerful groups practise what they do ‘as if’ the foundation of their action is the only truth that may exist. This allies neatly with modern science’s pretence to have access to truth: science follows an ever expanding drive to explain more and more aspects of (social), life, nature, and the cosmos, in the process incidentally delegitimizing the acceptance of ambiguities by establishing a systematic and dis50

The ambiguity of statebuilding  51 ciplinary need to come to clear terms when describing the world (Levine 1985). This has led to a near-totalitarian exclusion of non-Western forms of knowledge, including derogatory sentiments towards narratives of ghosts, animism and other ways of seeing the world non-compliant with Western rationality (Sillitoe 2011). Rationality, as some (March and Olsen 1998; Horst et al. 2013; Lobo-Guerrero 2011, pp. 125–6; Walker 2010, pp. 106‒7) have highlighted, as a basic assumption for action is in itself dependent on specific rationalities associated with power and domination (but see Blumenberg 2006, pp. 15‒16). If constructing the world is not in itself rational but contingent on contextual rationalities, then several degrees of (ir-)rationality, bounded and limited in reach and self-contained in its coherence, become mandatory as points of reference (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2015): that to accept the inherent irrationality of Western politics, society, ways of doing things would necessarily imply accepting other non-rational ways of thinking and including them and their sub-systemic logics into social inquiry. Accepting ambiguity as a starting assumption of research of social phenomena allows accounting for two (potentially more), equally true and valid ways of seeing the world. Ambiguity has been systematically researched as a linguistic phenomenon. Within a system of logic (language), ambiguity still may exist without challenging the general grammar of a language. However, more universally, any item which is also a sign can be ambiguous within an otherwise closed system of interpretation (Bauer 2011, pp. 30‒5). A social phenomenon can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the previous experience of those interpreting an activity, on the existence of a common system of reference, and on a social space shared by actors to whom those meanings may be relevant. In the social world, where meaning systems exist in parallel, based on experience by people belonging to different groups and employing different meaning systems between them, a system of reference structures how they make sense of their world: one phenomenon can be interpreted according to different premises. Depending on the meaning system, a nocturnal light can be a supernatural occurrence, or an aurora borealis; an eclipse may be an astronomical spectacle, or a doomsday harbinger; and so on. What is important is that it is impossible to clarify, to definitely settle for one single interpretation. In addition, what at some point in time seems clear will be subject to new evaluations over time; in this case, the meaning system changes slightly, so that different truths become possible for different groups. What de Beauvoir describes as ‘ethics of ambiguity’ is in fact the problem of the inclusion of the future in perceptions of the present: whatever the present is understood to mean, it includes an aspect how it will be viewed with hindsight. Strategically creating the world, man interprets and acts in the present with the aim to shape the future in purposeful ways (de Beauvoir 1948). Taking this into account, ambiguity of statebuilding and intervention needs to be analysed along two dimensions. One is the temporal dimension, which means that policy now, with all restrictions, lack of information, and intrinsic incapacities relates to an unknown future which it hopes to shape; the second, political dimension is the parallel existence, and political salience, of plural realities constructed by different groups who share the same political space but whose construction of reality sits within diverging systems of reference.

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WHAT AMBIGUITY IS NOT Ambiguity of social ‘things’ needs to be distinguished from complexity. Complexity is a category useful for systems, describing interaction and interdependency of systems’ components. It thus is useful as a secondary criterion for a system itself. It derives from observations about systemic interaction and refers to the structure. Complex systems can be disentangled by breaking them down into their constituent parts, the problem being to identify the mechanisms by which particular component parts interact (Rothe 2015). How parts work, and how they influence each other, is subject to complexity research which challenges simple assumptions of causality. As a rule of thumb, one can observe that with rising specificity of components and higher density of interaction, complexity increases (Coker 2009, pp. 69–75; Kühn 2017, pp.  124‒5). Complexity is not necessarily determined in time and space – ambiguity, vice versa, has its specific social space and has a temporal effect. As such, it is determinable in an identifiably social space and within a process, or sequence, of mutually oriented actions. Part of this action–reaction scheme is a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of the situation by all actors involved. Needless to say that in complex systems components may of course be ambiguous. Ambiguity needs to be distinguished from the system as it derives from actors and actions. A linguistic sign or a thing only becomes ambiguous by the way people act with and around it, that is according to the meaning it is ascribed. Upon hearing a foreign language the words of which are unknown, ambiguity cannot exist as no meaning can be ascribed. Ambiguity only can exist in interaction, in the linguistic case that of the sign and the meaning system in which it is embedded. One person, however, will always understand something in a certain way and not necessarily question it – unless a differing interpretation, often represented by another person, appears. Interaction itself is influenced by cultural factors, which bears different levels of ambiguity tolerance (see below; Bauer 2011, p. 47). Ambiguities are, systematically as well as empirically speaking, often and easily confused with contradictions. Quite obviously, two truths about the same ‘thing’ which do not easily correspond to each other, and which may cause different actors to behave in very distinct ways towards them, are often perceived and described as contradictions. This, of course, is a misinterpretation if the ontological core, the nature of these things, derives from different meaning systems. However, the broad (and often implicit) influence of Hegelian philosophy in Western understandings of the world implies that things that cannot be fitted seamlessly together must necessarily be contradictory. What is more important is the daring drive to reconcile contradictions, which requires as a necessary precept to disambiguate these ambiguities understood to be ‘contradictions’. In a Hegelian sense, contradictions are – at least in principle – open to a resolution by synthesizing the opposing parts which make up the contradiction. For Kant still, reason allows man to shape her surroundings. Since Hegel’s times, and later radicalized by German romanticism, an over-arching idea and spirit (History, Weltgeist), is viewed to be shaping the environment; human agency is pushed to the background. It is but a casual step from Enlightenment to counter-Enlightenment thinking: Hegel disputes the contingency of history and establishes domination’s legitimacy as direct manifestation of the time and individual-transcending spirit. The drive inherent in Kant’s thinking to shape the world (also part of de Beauvoir’s idea about a future-oriented making of meaning by man; de Beauvoir 1948), makes way for Hegel’s assumption of necessity within which the policy for shaping the world is enshrined in government and (legal) rule:

The ambiguity of statebuilding  53 This means quite a new attitude of philosophic thought towards the political and historic world. For now philosophic thought gives up all claims to reform this world, to mold it into new shape. It becomes its highest and its only aim to understand and to interpret it – to describe the historical reality as it is, not as it ought to be. (Cassirer 1979, p. 226; Cassirer’s emphasis)

The march of the absolute idea, according to Hegel, is compelling and it is not human’s destiny to help it become real; man is no midwife to the spirit. The historicity of all philosophical thinking allows forgetting its epistemic, grounding conceptions of reality. While contradicting Kant with regard to man’s influence on progress, Hegel in his unidirectional unfolding of history (and philosophy), leaves no room for ambiguity. And yet, they are well aligned in succumbing to a non-ambiguous understanding of the world, prominent within a cohort of thinkers denouncing ambiguity (also Bauman 2005). They follow the general sentiment growing stronger in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that ambiguity is worthless and distorting man’s vision of truth: The heightened prestige of mathematical expression encouraged philosophers to assault types of utterance that fed on ambiguity. John Locke, in… ‘On the Abuse of Words’, lampooned the ways men communicate by rendering signs less clear and distinct in their signification than they need to be, as, for example, ‘When Men have names in their Mouths without any determined Ideas in their Minds, whereof they are the signs’… In a concluding snipe at the masters of rhetoric, Locke asserts that ‘all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats’ and goes on to suggest that ‘those, who pretend seriously to search after, or maintain Truth, should think themselves obliged to study, how they might deliver themselves without Obscurity, Doubtfulness, or Equivocation, to which Men’s Words are naturally liable’. (Levine 1985, p. 3; quoting Locke [1690] 1975, pp. 504‒9; italics are Locke’s)

Social science, to this day, continues to pretend that ‘obscurity, doubtfulness, or equivocation’ can be eliminated in mathematical models or through rigorous research methodologies. In funding decisions, for example the allocation practice of big research funding organization, the mathematically unequivocal, the bijective is preferred over the detailed observation of the messy reality that people tend to create in social life; empirics, this way, changes its meaning no longer describing the observation of reality, but a set of data. ‘Evidence’-based policy making, often demanded from academics, is part of power-driven moves to delegitimize and deprecate anything slightly ambiguous – often at the expense of the ability to be able to describe the world. In such a cultural context, ambiguity analysis needs to make use of different systems of reference to establish a profound understanding of different interpretations, in literary contexts one might speak of ‘different readings’. For a social science analysis of political contexts, it is equally important in order to find legitimacy, to distinctly reconstruct the systems of reference at play – both systems of reference which constitute an ambiguous situation by providing the interpretative background for actors need not be understood in their entirety. Identifying in actions different terms of reference provides the analytical tools, by tracing them back to norms, values, codes of behaviour and sign systems structuring systems of reference (Kühn 2014, pp. 204‒5).

54  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding

TOLERANCE TO AMBIGUITY AND SCIENTIFIC POLITICS Bauer (2011, p. 47), shows in a diachronic analysis how Islam’s pre-colonial ambiguity tolerance has quite fundamentally changed cultural practice from one embracing and cherishing ambiguity in poetry (which may have taken the form of glorification of the Prophet which at the same time could be read as an erotic poem), to one connecting truth claims to single, determined and exclusive meanings (see also on the legal status of foreigners and citizenship Bauer 2011, pp. 349‒66). Across history, different levels for tolerance of ambiguity can be observed. This means ambiguity lends itself particularly well to conflict analysis (Bergamaschi 2019). In fact, ambiguity itself can be conflictual, depending on actors’ or actor groups’ inclination to accept something as alternative truth, as will be shown in the next section. Alternative truth, of course, is not to be understood as ‘alternative facts’ (Bradner 2017), which derive from and are used to deceive within the same system of meaning; alternative truth is understanding of a social ‘thing’ derived and hence valid within an alternative system of meaning. The challenge, much more than is the case for measuring inauguration crowd size, is usually to determine whether alternative truths are indeed ‘alternative facts’, for example, given in full knowledge that the transmitted information is false or misrepresented. When ambiguity is derived from different meaning systems, a number of options exist about how to deal with it. Maybe both parties just walk away. An ambiguous situation may then just end, unnoted, with no further consequences. Another option is, if both actors involved demonstrate high levels of ambiguity tolerance, to bear the situation unresolved. There may be a variance in interpretation for different actors but all involved accept that they act in parallel according to different rules which they do not necessarily understand but which need not be reconciled for their own identity to remain intact. Disambiguation is a wholly different matter: it is required if a party demonstrates a limited tolerance for ambiguity. Disambiguation can be accomplished by forcing one interpretation on the other. It is clear that power is an important source of disambiguation drives – the most extreme form being the extermination of the other party. In between extermination and ambiguity tolerance, there is a wide variety of forms disambiguation moves may take (Habermas 1996). Science and connected truth claims based on reason and methodical grasp of phenomena are one way; religious and transcendental ‘last’ truths maybe another one.1 The general trend, however, is directed against ambiguities. Scientific minds claimed a universal mode of establishing knowledge, expanding way beyond the areas of scientific scrutiny: Hume attacked poetry as the work of professional liars who seek to entertain by fictions, and Bentham portrayed poetry as a silly enterprise, full of sentimentalism and vague generalities, proving nothing. For Bentham, in fact, the ideal language would resemble algebra: ideas would be represented by symbols as numbers are represented by letters, thus eliminating ambiguous words and misleading metaphors. (Levine 1985, p. 3)

Needless to say, not only did writers include such demands in their poetics, to the day, science bases truth claims on descriptions of a phenomenon which allow to portray the phenomenon ontologically (and, in turn, epistemologically), as one thing, and one thing only. As a conse-

1 On science replacing religion for the construction of meaning see Parfitt (2002, pp.  18‒20), Bernstein (1996), but see also Gray (2007).

The ambiguity of statebuilding  55 quence, quantitative research and non-ambiguous research designs have dominated academic knowledge-production since. ‘Benignly tolerat[ing]’ (Levine 1985, p. 21), ambiguity has not been the pronounced ability of Western scholarship (Sillitoe 2011). Still, more striking is that in the attempt to eliminate ambiguity from Western methodology, language, and thinking, ambiguity as an object of study itself became sidelined. Systematically, ambiguity as a research tool needs to accept at its outset that one thing can be two things at a time. There is no reconciling move, no synthesizing of contradictions and their resolution involved when describing phenomena in their double nature. This proves admittedly difficult, as culture and professional training have forced a disambiguation drive upon us which serves as a basic threshold to credibility of research, but also of political action. Even if it is possible to identify two equally valid and consequential ‘versions’, ‘tropes’, or interpretations, one tends to ask which is the correct one? Which one is more plausible, more logical, in other words, more rational? Focusing on ambiguity in research means locating (figuratively spoken), parallel and equally valid meanings within their respective systems of reference. In turn, the aspects of an ambiguous situation (which may appear as a contradiction), may be put in relation. A ‘thing’ may be part of different systems of meaning, and conflict over an ambiguous thing arises when actions seemingly demand clarification of its status. Ordering an analysis in this way, it becomes possible to escape the bias of favouring one interpretation over another, and getting to the roots of social conflicts.

THE AMBIGUOUS ENDEAVOUR OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING Lisa Smirl (2015) identifies in her ‘rite of passage’-analysis of how people work in intervention contexts a ‘liminal space’ which is the social, and also geographic, space within which interventions, humanitarian aid and statebuilding missions take place. As she points out, the home country provides the formative context from which humanitarians draw their repertoire of possible action; at the same time, the humanitarian situation dictates ways of social behaviour, not only in the interaction with ‘locals’, but also within the peer group. Not only do vast differentials in wealth and personal opportunities distinguish between actor groups, but also the political leverage of being able to behave in varieties of ways differs according to which group a person belongs to. As a structure of social interaction, this prescribes hierarchies to an extent where a sense of entitlement becomes part of international personnel’s identities (Smirl 2012, p. 238). In a similar way, space is divided into areas accessible to some and non-accessible to others. That may mean that city dwellers in intervention capitals cannot move freely but are directed by different levels of security parameters, ‘green’ areas and such like. The perusal of other people’s time is an exacting of power, accordingly, deciding who needs to wait and who is waved past check points or whose cars may use preferential lanes (Fisher 2017; Andersson and Weigand 2015; Duffield 2010). Vice versa, travelling is segmented, as aid professionals cannot simply go where they want but have to follow security rules and protocols regulating their social interaction according to risk calculations (Kühn 2017, pp. 138‒45; Kühn 2016b; Smirl 2015). The ambiguity stems from different reference systems, that is urban space, but also norms of social behaviour, which mean different things in different settings. In the ‘liminal space’ of not-here/not-there, these systems of reference overlap in settings of international intervention.

56  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding For intervention professionals, comparison of the ‘there’ with the ‘here’ presents an unresolvable ambiguity. Not only are entitlements in intervention contexts part of the job, and become part of identity, the moral codes and normative guidebook for behaviour are only partly applicable. The irresolvable situation of working in a mission may, and does in Smirl’s account (2015), cause emotional stress. It is important to note that Bauer (2011, p. 39), distinguishes between ambivalence and ambiguity; ambivalence is an inner state between hatred and love, closeness and distance, between wanting and not-wanting, in short: of emotional indecisiveness. Ambivalence is a feeling, a state of emotions, while ambiguity is socially constituted.2 Ambiguity on the other hand can be observed outside a person and describes the circumstances and life-world and the structures of knowledge and understanding which guide life and behaviour in it. What intervention professionals may experience, may cause ambivalent feelings for them, but the situation within which they act is ambiguous. International interventions have become increasingly lax in terms of defining political aims and achievable ends; they have abstained from clearly locating responsibility; in order to deflect blame for failures, intervening countries have used pragmatist positions to not put the bar too high (Chandler 2015; Kühn 2012; Pospisil and Kühn 2016; Kühn 2016a). Because individual motivations guiding behaviour in different situations of interventions cannot be clarified, social interaction is always potentially ambiguous. However, institutionalizing social activity in the liminal field of interventions turns this ambiguity endemic, and renders dynamic social practice consisting of individual and group activity as ambiguous endeavours politically relevant (Kühn 2014). An ambiguity analysis of intervention thus has several levels it can focus on. I will highlight a non-exclusive list of aspects, before turning to Gould’s approach to ambiguity as a source of conflict to conclude this chapter.

AMBIGUITIES IN INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING: LIFE-WORLD AND POLITICS Lisa Smirl’s (2015), Mark Duffield’s (2001), and others’ research is focused on the life-world of interveners, highlighting the political dimension of the circumstances under which interventions and statebuilding missions take place, how policies are negotiated and implemented, or hybridized. The notion of hybridity (Mac Ginty 2011; Lemay-Hébert and Freedman 2017; Hameiri and Jones 2017), attempts to address an observation similar to ambiguity research’s. Beside the above-mentioned liminality of the life-world, ambiguities are enshrined in the form violence takes in interventions, the role the state plays on the international level, and the legal regulations within which interventions are being governed. Suhrke (2011, 2016) explains why the intervention in Afghanistan following 2001 could not escape its core ambiguity. The relationship between violence and peace was not a simple means-ends affair but a complex interaction whereby the two sustained as well as grated on each other. Most obviously, the peacebuilding aspect provided a measure of legitimacy that helped sustain political support for the military operations; on the other hand, the violence that soon spiralled into a war undermined the peacebuilding agenda. (Suhrke 2016, p. 163)

2 Bauman (2005), using the term ambivalence in the sense ambiguity is used here, lacks this terminological clarity.

The ambiguity of statebuilding  57 Highlighting the ambiguity of political aims, running in parallel with military ‘necessities’ to stabilize a polity, allows to not understand the unfolding dynamics as contradiction but, Suhrke implies, as mutually constitutive aspects of interventions (see also Goetze 2016). Both are valid and true at the same time. That a soldier may be viewed, and be mandated (see below), to support peacebuilding, while appearing as a threat to life and lifestyle, part of an oppressive force and unhinging political sovereignty to someone else, is just one part of the ambiguous situation. Different systems of reference are made politically salient through ongoing political mobilization, ideologies, and practiced ways of engagement and resistance (Cramer 2006, pp. 243‒4). The legitimacy of attempts to regulate the use of violence according to civil and human rights is in question when the political motivation behind supporting such policies is suspected to be subversive: since interventions take place after or to end violence, the suspension of domestic power struggles by outside (military) powers creates fertile ground for undermining and delegitimizing the ensuing political order. What Rogers (2000) has called ‘lidism’ (putting a lid on a boiling pot of conflict), fails to pacify but re-directs in unpredictable ways how violence plays out. Whether violence is employed in a law-making or a law-enforcing manner, to put it differently, following Benjamin’s distinction (1989, pp. 186‒7; see Kellogg 2011, p. 87), depends on whether one views the interventionist violence as creating a new legal order, or transgressing against a continuously existing one. This notion, of course, points to ambiguous time frames within which interventions take place. Irrespective of the historical genesis of a conflict, or of particular state formation, or social experience preceding external statebuilding missions, intervention personnel often view the moment when an intervention begins as zero hour; vice versa, for most people on the ground, an intervention may constitute an important change of the predominant order of violence but none which changes the rules of the game entirely. Also, the prospect of an intervention taking few or many years, or even turning into a prolonged trusteeship, gives political actors different scales of expectations to work with (Kühn 2011). In statebuilding, paradoxically, the state in question is guaranteed by an international order which is comprised of nation states by definition – statebuilding can only take place where formally a state already exists. However, besides structural requirements, the necessity for statehood derives from their ordering function within the system: none is entitled to lawlessness wherein security threats may emanate for other states. Interventions and statebuilding, necessarily based on the framework of international law, hence aspire to establish a legal order which replaces another, maybe informal, legal order (van der Pijl 2002, p. 804; Duffield 2001; Kühn 2010, pp. 198‒205). From alternative viewpoints, this means that an international set of norms is being applied to settings which, henceforth, lack the opportunities to gradually develop their own, singular ways of regulating social life legally. They are, thus, being treated differently in international politics, hierarchically subordinated to the politics of states upholding the order but also subject to the norms enshrined in it. Legally, interventions create ambiguous groundings for orders the legitimacy of which is in dispute from different systems of reference. From the international perspective of interveners, statebuilding fulfils what is invested in the very notion of statehood itself, while for the intervened, these regulations are – irrespective of whether they are normatively acceptable or not – imposed for the security of the interveners. The security gains are thus distributed unevenly, contributing to ambiguous notions of the legality of interventions themselves (see Gordon 2014).

58  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Legal systems of reference, to be sure, differ in statebuilding missions to the extent to which they are backed up militarily. Rules of engagement, but also military practice from gathering intelligence to torture or extra-legal killings, are designed outside the political space of the intervention itself; thus, and quite illiberal in its pretext, rules apply to how people can behave and how they die, in the formulation of which they have no say, no way of appealing against decisions, and which they have no prospect of being able to change in the future. While a broad mandate for international engagement is usually viewed to be broadly supporting a mission (e.g. backed up by many nation states), the political process on which the mandate rests hardly works to deliver a mission from its perceived imposition. Working within a hierarchically superior framework, a mission claims legality while dismantling a system of legal reference through which it could only be legitimated by popular consent. These alternative notions cannot, of course, be reconciled. The ambiguity remains, even though much effort is being invested to establish interim and elected governments. These supposedly sovereign units then agree to the statebuilding mission which put them in place, and work to establish a legal framework which ought to create such legitimacy ex post (Chesterman 2004).

CONCLUSION: AMBIGUITIES ABOUT HIERARCHY AND OF SYSTEMS OF REFERENCE Gould maintains that on the interpersonal level conflict and violence result from ambiguities about social rank; aspiring to gain dominance, in his view, motivates people to behave violently in order to subordinate others. Essentially, once subordination is established as relatively stable order, violence will decline. These groups, however, depend on solidarity to be successful in establishing order (Gould 2003, p. 149). In interventions, solidarity can be a driving force for some groups, but is replaced for the interveners by a political consensus supporting the practice; endogenously, a mission depends on professionalized solidarity of interventionist elites (Kühn 2019, p. 258). The situational similarity to Gould’s approach is the international system of equal units, implying competition about rank, in spite of the hierarchical practice of international politics. On the political level, whether it is the use of violence, its monopolization, regulating political decision-making or establishing a legal order, on the surface appears to be conflictive because hierarchies are not (yet) in place. Gould’s idea suggests that ambiguities exist somewhere ‘out there’ and that understanding them in a particular setting opens up conflicts to analyses. While hierarchies are important to keep in mind, especially when actors have ample resources to disambiguate a subject in their own favour, analysing ambiguities resulting from their embeddedness in original systems of reference leads much further. Not only do reconstructions of systems of reference – legal, cultural, international, and orders of violence – point out ways of political engagement, since longue durée meanings will prevail even after disambiguation may have taken place. Also, analysing truth claims on their own terms prevents us from prioritizing truths according to which group adheres to them. Ambiguity analysis, pointing out particulars of conflicts which stem from different epistemic backgrounds, unpacks the dynamics of conflict misunderstood in many cases. Ambiguity and peace are tightly connected – these connections need to be unearthed, understood and factored into political practice in order to avoid the conflict-driving mistakes inherent to intolerance towards ambiguities.

The ambiguity of statebuilding  59

REFERENCES Andersson, R. and F. Weigand (2015), ‘Intervention at risk: The vicious cycle of distance and danger in Mali and Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (4), 519‒41, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2015.1054655. Bauer, T. (2011), Die Kultur der Ambiguität. Eine andere Geschichte des Islams [The Culture of Ambiguity. A Different History of Islam], Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen. Bauman, Z. (2005), Moderne und Ambivalenz [Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity 1991], Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Benjamin, W. (1989), Gesammelte Schriften, II-I. 2nd edn, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bergamaschi, I. (2019), ‘“Working misunderstandings” and ambiguity: The labels and practices of international intervention in Mali since 2012’, unpublished manuscript. Bernstein, P. L. (1996), Against the Gods. The Remarkable Story of Risk, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. and F. P. Kühn (2015), ‘On Afghan footbaths and sacred cows in Kosovo: Urban legends of intervention’, Peacebuilding, 3 (1), 17‒35, DOI:​10​​.1080/​21647259​​.2014​​.969508. Blumenberg, H. (2006), Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bradner, E. (2017), ‘Conway: Trump White House offered “alternative facts” on crowd size’, CNN, 23 January, https://​edition.​​ cnn​​.com/​2017/​01/​22/​politics/​kellyanne-​​ conway​​-alternative​​-facts/​index​​.htm (accessed 28 June 2019). Cassirer, E. (1979), Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935‒1945, edited by D. P. Verene, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Chandler, D. (2015), ‘Reconceptualizing international intervention: Statebuilding, “organic processes” and the limits of causal knowledge’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (1), 70‒88, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2015.1015247. Chesterman, S. (2004), You, the People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coker, C. (2009), War in an Age of Risk, Cambridge: Polity. Cramer, C. (2006), Civil War is not a Stupid Thing, London: Hurst. de Beauvoir, S. (1948), The Ethics of Ambiguity, Secaucus: Citadel. Duffield, M. (2001), Global Governance and the New Wars. The Merging of Development and Security, London and New York: Zed. Duffield, M. (2010), ‘Risk-management and the fortified aid compound: Everyday life in post-interventionary society’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4 (4), 453‒74, DOI: 10.1080/17502971003700993. Fisher, J. (2017), ‘Reproducing remoteness? States, internationals and the co-constitution of aid “bunkerization” in the East African periphery’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 98‒119, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2016.1260209. Goetze, C. (2016), ‘Warlords and states: A contemporary myth of the international system’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics: An Interpretative Approach to the Study of International Relations, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 129‒46. Gordon, E. (2014), ‘Security sector reform, statebuilding and local ownership: Securing the state or its people?’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 8 (2‒3), 126‒48, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2014.930219. Gould, R. V. (2003), Collision of Wills. How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gray, J. (2007), Black Mass. Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Habermas, J. (1996), Die Einbeziehung des Anderen. Studien zur politischen Theorie [The Inclusion of the Other], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hameiri, S. and L. Jones (2017), ‘Beyond hybridity to the politics of scale: International intervention and “local” politics’, Development & Change, 48 (1), 54–77, DOI: 10.1111/dech.12287. Horst, J., A. Jünemann, F. P. Kühn, E.-M. Maggi and D. Rothe (2013), ‘Logics of action in the Euro-Mediterranean political space: An introduction to the analytical framework’, in J. Horst, A. Jünemann and D. Rothe (eds), Euro-Mediterranean Relations after the Arab Spring: Persistence in Times of Change, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1‒17. Kellogg, C. (2011), ‘Walter Benjamin and the ethics of violence’, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 9 (1), 71–90, DOI: 10.1177/1743872110388215. Kühn, F. P. (2010), Sicherheit und Entwicklung in der Weltgesellschaft. Liberales Paradigma und Statebuilding in Afghanistan [Security and Development in World Society. Liberal Paradigm and Statebuilding in Afghanistan], Wiesbaden: VS.

60  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Kühn, F. P. (2011), ‘Less is more: International intervention and the limits of external stabilization’, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, 17 (2), 62‒74, DOI:​10​​.1080/​11926422​​.2011​​.559107. Kühn, F. P. (2012), ‘The peace prefix: Ambiguities of the word “peace”’, International Peacekeeping, 19 (4), 396‒409, DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2012.709785. Kühn, F. P. (2014), ‘“We are all in this together…”: Deutschland in der Ambiguität der Afghanistanintervention’ [Germany in the ambiguity of intervention in Afghanistan], in M. Daxner (ed.), Deutschland in Afghanistan, Oldenburg: BIS Verlag, pp. 193‒211. Kühn, F. P. (2016a), ‘International peace practice: Ambiguity, contradictions and perpetual violence’, in M. Turner and F. P. Kühn (eds), The Politics of International Intervention: The Tyranny of Peace, London: Routledge, pp. 21‒38. Kühn, F. P. (2016b), ‘The ambiguity of things: Souvenirs from Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (1), 97‒115, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2015.1137397. Kühn, F. P. (2017), Risikopolitik – Eine Einführung [The Politics of Risk – An Introduction], Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Kühn, F. P. (2019), ‘Universal patterns of intervention: Practice, no “-isms”’, Conflict, Security & Development, 19 (3), 257‒62, DOI: 10.1080/14678802.2019.1608020. Lemay-Hébert, N. and R. Freedman (eds) (2017), Hybridity: Law, Culture and Development, Abingdon: Routledge. Levine, D. N. (1985), The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lobo-Guerrero, L. (2011), Insuring Security. Biopolitics, Security and Risk, Abingdon: Routledge. Mac Ginty, R. (2011), International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. March, J. G. and J. P. Olsen (1998), ‘The institutional dynamics of international political orders’, International Organization, 52 (4), 943‒69. Parfitt, T. (2002), The End of Development? Modernity, Post-Modernity and Development, London and Ann Arbor: Pluto. Pospisil, J. and F. P. Kühn (2016), ‘The resilient state: New regulatory modes in international approaches to state building?’, Third World Quarterly, 37 (1), 1‒16, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1086637. Rogers, P. (2000), Losing Control: Global Security in the Twenty-First Century, London: Pluto Press. Rothe, D. (2015), Securitizing Global Warming. A Climate of Complexity, London: Routledge. Sillitoe, P. (2011), Local Science vs Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development, New York: Berghahn. Smirl, L. (2011), ‘Drive by development: The role of the SUV in international humanitarian assistance’, unpublished paper, https://​spacesofaid​​.wordpress​​.com/​2014/​03/​11/​drive​​-by​​-development​​-the​​-role​​-of​​ -the​​-suv​​-in​​-international-​​ humanitarian​​-assistance/​ (accessed 18 December 2018). Smirl, L. (2012), ‘“The state we are(n’t), in”: Liminal subjectivity in aid-worker autobiographies’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Statebuilding and State-formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention, London: Routledge, pp. 230‒45. Smirl, L. (2015), Space of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism, London: Zed Books. Suhrke, A. (2011), When More is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan, New York: Columbia University Press. Suhrke, A. (2016), ‘Waging war and building peace in Afghanistan’, in M. Turner and F. P. Kühn (eds), The Politics of International Intervention: The Tyranny of Peace, London: Routledge, pp. 163‒78. van der Pijl, K. (2002), ‘Imperiale Ethik und die Ästhetisierung der Weltpolitik’, Das Argument, 44 (5/6), 802‒17. Walker, R. B. J. (2010), After the Globe, Before the World, London: Routledge.

7. International statebuilding interventions and the politics of scale Shahar Hameiri and Fabio Scarpello

INTRODUCTION International statebuilding interventions (ISBIs) have become ubiquitous since the end of the Cold War, as a means of promoting peace and development. Yet, despite the often significant resources and efforts involved, many now acknowledge they have frequently failed to achieve their intended objectives in the targeted states and societies (Fritz and Rocha Menocal 2007; Kwon and Kim 2014; UNDP 2004, p. 18). Rather than a blanket failure, however, their results have been highly uneven across countries and intervention domains. In some countries, like the Solomon Islands, apparent successes in building up police capacity and state revenue collection were matched by evident failures in reining in corruption and public expenditure. In Iraq and Afghanistan, on the other hand, interveners have not even managed to stop large-scale violent conflict, despite the deployment of considerable manpower and resources. The key question academics and practitioners have been asking, especially over the past decade, is why. Increasingly, they have converged on the idea that intervention outcomes are shaped by the interaction between interventions and the societies and states in which they intervene. We agree. This focus is a clear improvement on earlier waves of both policy-focused and critical scholarship on international intervention that looked almost exclusively at the interveners’ ideas and intervention modalities. Two main bodies of literature have emerged to investigate the interaction between interveners and the intervened: the hybridity literature in peacebuilding, located mainly within the field of International Relations, and the ‘political economy turn’ in development studies and practice (Hameiri and Jones 2015; Hameiri and Scarpello 2018). These approaches look at similar phenomena but rarely intersect, reflecting the wider separation of the theory and practice of peacebuilding and development. Notwithstanding the valuable insights they provide on international intervention, neither satisfactorily conceptualises and theorises how interventions affect, and are affected, by local politics in recipient states and societies. Our main contention is that their key, shared, weakness is the neglect of the politics of scale as a crucial dimension of the conflicts shaping the outcomes of ISBIs. We have critically evaluated these literatures in greater detail elsewhere (Hameiri and Jones 2017; Hameiri and Scarpello 2018; Hameiri et al. 2017). In brief, however, the hybridity literature does implicitly consider the politics of scale, by focusing on the hybrid outcomes of interactions between international interveners and local recipients of intervention. However, its problematic tendency for working through binaries, which is inherent in the notion of hybridity – most notably the dichotomisation of modern/liberal internationals and traditional/ non-liberal locals – fatally hampers its analytical usefulness (e.g. Belloni 2012; Richmond and Mitchell 2012). Hybridity scholars have recognised that alliances emerge across the 61

62  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding international–local divide and that recipients are themselves fragmented. These insights cannot be adequately understood within a dichotomising approach, however. Within the political economy community, a liberal–pluralist stream is hindered by its view of development as a ‘public good’ and limited theorisation of state–society relations (e.g. Batley et al. 2012; Leftwich 2012). This results in a problematic analysis of power relations in recipient states and societies that does not translate well into programmes for action. Another political economy approach, based on Gramsci’s state theory, has overcome the limits of the liberal–pluralist approach by viewing development as a contested historical process of structured change produced through struggles between socio-political coalitions across the state and society divide (Hutchison et al. 2014). This approach provides a clear analysis of the power relations underpinning state power and the precise social forces whose interests are advanced or marginalised. This important advance notwithstanding, like its liberal–pluralist counterparts, the Gramscian approach remains limited by its ‘methodological nationalism’. Methodological nationalism refers to the tendency to see national societies as natural units of analysis and thus reify the divide between domestic and international politics (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). In this case, political economists treat donors as external to domestic power relations, which they see as the key factor shaping the outcome of interventions, neglecting that ISBIs blur the divide between domestic and international politics. To overcome these limitations, we combine the insights of Gramscian state theory with attention to the politics of scale. The ‘politics of scale’ is a concept widely used in political geography. It builds on a specific understanding of ‘scales’ as vertically differentiated, hierarchised social, political and economic spaces, each denoting ‘the arena and moment, both discursively and materially, where sociospatial power relations are contested and compromises are negotiated and regulated’ (Swyngedouw 1997, p. 140). Scales are not neutral. The scalar arrangement of political life is contested because different scales privilege different configurations of actors, power, resources and political opportunity structures (Hameiri and Jones 2015). This means that whether a particular issue is governed at a local, national, regional or global scale, will considerably shape the outcome of social and political conflicts over it. Hence, rescaling – or the attempt to shift power to a specific scale and associated mode of governance – can alter the power balance on a given issue and potentially change political outcomes (Gough 2004). The politics of scale, in turn, refers to ‘contestation over the construction of scales, as well as differentiation and ordering among various scales’ (Brenner 2001, pp. 599‒600). The politics of scale is an especially important aspect of the dynamics of international intervention, since ISBIs operate through state transformation (Hameiri 2010). Rather than usurping the formal sovereignty of intervention’s recipients, ISBIs typically aim to transform parts of the ostensibly domestic administration and governance processes of targeted states, such that they become responsive, not to domestic popular and political pressures, which are viewed as pernicious and deleterious for peace and development, but to international objectives and targets (Hameiri 2010; Harrison 2004). In other words, interveners attempt to rescale parts of recipient states, taking them out of their hitherto domestic context, as a means of attaining preferred political outcomes. But interveners’ ‘scalar strategies’ of internationalisation will be met by different scalar strategies – rejection, selective adoption and localisation – seeking different political outcomes, with the outcomes of intervention shaped by these contending strategies and the relative power of the contending coalitions.

International statebuilding interventions and the politics of scale  63 In the following, we begin by elaborating on the two theoretical streams that inform our approach – Gramscian state theory and the politics of scale. We then outline a four-step approach that concretely guides analyses of ISBIs and which provides tools for explaining interventions’ uneven outcomes.

THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE POLITICS OF SCALE APPROACH In this section, we briefly introduce the two primary theoretical foundations of our approach, beginning with Gramscian state theory. Gramscian state theory builds on Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) conceptualisation of the state and civil society as parts of a single social whole. This basic insight was later developed by state theorists, predominantly Nicos Poulantzas (1978) and Bob Jessop (1990, 2002, 2008). According to Poulantzas and Jessop, state power is seen as a social relation and expression of power. It reflects conflicts and compromises among historically specific socio-political coalitions rooted primarily in the political economy – classes, class fractions, distributional coalitions and other social groups, such as ethnically or religion based organisations (Hewison et al. 1993, pp. 4‒5). These coalitions, often straddling the state–society divide, struggle to make and remake key political, economic and social institutions, especially of the state, to entrench or increase their own power and wealth and marginalise their opponents. States, and institutions more generally are therefore not neutral. They are ‘strategically selective’ – structured to be systematically more open to some social forces pursuing certain social and political agendas, through certain strategies, while marginalising others (Jessop 2008). For example, in capitalist states, the state is invariably strategically selective in favour of capital, relative to other societal groups, though the particular sections of capital ascendant and their relations with other social forces may vary considerably across time and space. Indeed, this strategic selectivity is dynamic and may shift, in response to the changing political economy and the strategies of social forces both within and outside the state. The concept of strategic selectivity is useful in the context of ISBIs. Interveners often attempt to change the political outputs of state institutions, for instance to favour market-led development (Carroll 2010). Through the lens of Gramscian state theory, we understand these as attempts to alter the strategic selectivity of the state to privilege strategies of accumulation based on liberal markets, instead of pre-existing arrangements, which may privilege resource distribution via leaders’ patronage. As donor efforts often challenge how power and wealth are produced and distributed via targeted states’ institutions, they will typically elicit responses from both those who stand to lose and from those who seek to gain from these efforts. As a result, coalitions emerge, straddling both the divide between state and society, and between domestic and international, to support, reject or co-opt intervener programmes and projects. These struggles have an inherent scalar dimension, and hence require attention to the politics of scale. Political geographers have long argued that space and society are mutually constituted: power relationships run through the construction of space and, in turn, the spatial organisation of political and economic governance helps (re)produce particular power relations in society (Harvey 2006). As such, struggles over the organisation of space form a crucial aspect of socio-political struggle. Societal and state actors seek to manipulate space and its political

64  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding consequences by adopting ‘territorial strategies… mobilizing state institutions to shape and reshape inherited territorial structurations of political-economic life, including those of state institutions themselves’ (Brenner and Elden 2009, p. 368). In the context of ISBIs, such efforts manifest typically as a politics of scale. Scales can be existing administrative tiers within a state, but they can also cut across these, manifesting, for example, in scales such as ‘the global’, ‘bio-regions’, ‘eco-systems’, or ‘local communities’. While scales are ubiquitous, the scalar arrangement of political life is always contested because different scales afford different configurations of actors, power, resources and political opportunity structures (Hameiri and Jones 2015). Hence, rescaling is often part of a wider effort to shape the outcomes of conflict over a particular issue. For example, Gibson (2013) shows how authoritarian subnational elites in democratic states strive to keep issues ‘local’, since at this scale their interests prevail. Conversely, their opponents often try to transform issues into ‘national’ matters, since they can find more allies and resources at this scale to tilt the balance against local strongmen. Similarly, ‘scale jumping’ (see Smith 1992) to a regional or global scale is a strategy often used by weaker socio-political groups to advance political objectives undermined by powerful interests dominating another scale. Crucially, however, the politics of scale is relational: scales are always produced and reconfigured in relation to other scales, within a broader context structured by the uneven distribution of power and wealth. They are parts of a ‘single social whole’, not distinct levels of analysis (Brenner et al. 2003, p. 16). Hence, a politics of scale analysis is not about specifying scales, their properties and interests. It is about explaining changes in the interrelations between power relations and the scalar configuration. We see this very often in ISBIs where both interveners and intervened, or coalitions of thereof, attempt rescaling strategies to shift decision-making to the scale that best suits their interests. In sum, the two main theoretical foundations we build upon complement each other. Gramscian state theory allows us to identify the historically specific and ongoing struggles between coalitions in state and society that shape the strategic selectivity of the state and its institutions. The politics of scale allows us to explain how these struggles are often shaped by coalitions’ efforts to establish new scales, or shift the scale at which decisions are taken. The latter is crucial in the context of ISBIs, since these interventions blur the lines between domestic and international politics by attempting to transform how ostensibly domestic institutions function.

A FOUR-STEP METHOD FOR EXPLAINING INTERVENTION OUTCOMES The theoretical insights explained above represent the basis of our approach, which involves four interrelated steps that for the sake of clarity we introduce below separately. A Programme/Project Methodological Focus We diverge from conventional approaches that study interventions at the national or sectoral levels by focusing on outcomes at the project or programme level. This is a consequence of our grounding in Gramscian state theory, and its understanding that how institutions are designed and function, and in whose interests, is the dynamic outcome of social and political conflict,

International statebuilding interventions and the politics of scale  65 between coalitions rooted mainly in the political economy. Since donor programmes intervene into an already strategically selective environment, not all governance programmes or projects attempted will have similar social and political effects upon recipients. Instead, we find that different coalitions will come together or disband in relation to specific projects, depending on how given social forces and groups see the potential for particular programmes to affect their interests and agendas. Furthermore, forces in struggle will pursue different strategies and tactics depending on the challenges particular projects/programmes pose to their interests and/ or ideologies, and the balance of power emerging. For instance, a donor project promoting fiscal decentralisation will threaten some elites, especially those benefitting from domination over the national scale, while empowering others, but both groups could combine to resist a project to introduce stricter environmental regulations over extractive industries. Attention to struggles at the project and programme levels provides us with a fine-grained analysis that is well-suited for explaining uneven outcomes, which are common in ISBIs. The Forces in Contention Our second step is to identify the precise forces and coalitions in contention over given governance programmes/projects, as well as establish their relative power by reference to the broader political economy and its legacy in the use of state power and state–society relations. These coalitions involve both domestic and international actors and can only be adequately understood through historical–sociological analysis that locates the power relations relevant to struggles over particular governance projects within the specific historical processes of state formation and transformation pertaining to the state and society we are investigating, and the role that particular socio-political forces have played in this process. This entails undertaking an analysis of the structures of power prevailing in given states and societies in particular historical moments, focusing on uncovering the main lines of socio-political conflict, the strategic selectivity of state institutions and various societal interests’ access to state power. This analysis places particular attention on understanding how the formation of, and relations between, social forces, such as classes, class fractions, distributional coalitions or even ethnic or religious groups, which shapes the use of state power, relates to the changing political economy. Gramscian state theory’s historical–sociological conception of state power cautions us against expectations of quick and radical fixes via intervention. The environments into which interveners arrive are marked by existing and often deeply ingrained patterns of power and wealth inequalities, manifesting in highly strategically selective state institutions. Given that interveners are not seeking to govern the targeted states and their societies directly, their capacity to achieve desired outcomes is shaped by the strength of the coalitions that they can form to support them. Strategy and the Politics of Scale Our third, and crucial step, entails analysis of the scalar dimension of ISBIs. As noted, as ISBIs operate through state transformation and rescaling, responses to them also typically involve scalar strategies. We believe that three kinds of responses are especially apparent – (1) total rejection of international intervention; (2) selective adoption at the national scale; and (3) localisation. The first and second strategies are of the elites dominating the national govern-

66  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding ment, who have a privileged position when dealing with ISBIs. The second and third strategies often coincide, producing sharper interscalar conflict. 1. Total rejection of international intervention Outright rejection of foreign assistance is rare, because the resources offered by interveners are typically attractive to embattled governments in poor countries. However, since ISBIs do not suspend the formal sovereignty of the targeted states, intervention programmes typically require at least the tacit consent of the governments of those countries (Hameiri 2010). This means that recipient governments retain a key role as ‘scale managers’ (Peck 2002, p. 340), and perform much ‘boundary-work’ – the demarcation of the boundaries between territorial terrains and the groups included and excluded within these (Kyed and Albrecht 2015). They can, if so desired, prevent most forms of international intervention from coming in, thus maintaining a scalar configuration that they and their allies can dominate through their control over national institutions. In one of the case studies that we developed in our book, International Intervention and Local Politics (Hameiri et al. 2017), the Indonesian government allowed international interventions in Aceh after the tsunami, though the region had been sealed off to foreigners for several years prior due to the conflict between the government and a separatist movement. The Indonesian government, however, clearly defined the ‘humanitarian’ parameters within which interveners could operate, and the geographical sphere of intervention that initially only extended to the tsunami-affected coastal areas. 2. Selective adoption This is a particularly significant response to international intervention. It entails using the state’s ‘scale management’ capacity to selectively admit or constrain international programmes in ways that reinforce the power of the social forces dominating the national government, or, in some cases, governments at other scales that the intervention targets. Another manifestation of this approach involves efforts to shape how rescaled institutions function, or shift resources from more heavily rescaled parts of the bureaucracy to areas that have not been rescaled. It is a significant response because, as mentioned, the position of the elites dominating the national scale in many developing countries is often challenged. The resources deployed by interveners can thus make the difference between losing and maintaining power, both within the national scale and among existing elites. Solomon Islands is a good example. Although extensive international intervention made Solomon Islands one of the world’s most aid-dependent countries, the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, and its successors, have struggled to implement programmes and projects that truly challenge the power of elites dominating the national scale. In fact, their interventions have only served to strengthen these elites, providing them with more resources with which to defeat alternative political agendas and scalar strategies, especially the attempt to decentralise power through constitutional reform. A key factor determining this outcome is the cohesiveness of the interests of national elites in Solomon Islands, which meant that they have been able to use the state’s scale management capacities coherently to strengthen their collective hold over the national scale and the wider scalar configuration (Hameiri et al. 2017).

International statebuilding interventions and the politics of scale  67 3. Localisation This refers to attempts to construct a local scale of governance and shift important capacities and resources downwards onto it, especially from the national scale. This strategy is often attempted by marginalised groups seeking to wrest power and resources away from existing elites dominating the national scale. A ‘local’ scale could be organised around a subnational administrative unit of a state, or refer to a particular ethnic community, village or river system. What makes it ‘local’ is the claim that organising political life, economic relations and/or governance at that scale is preferable to their location at a ‘higher’ scale, especially that of the nation-state. Crucially, localisation is not necessarily always pursued by ‘local’ actors. Rather, the attempted construction and/or empowerment of local scales is a context-specific attempt to intervene in particular struggles over power and resources. A particularly obvious example is the ubiquitous decentralisation agenda of organisations like the World Bank. Decentralisation is sometimes promoted because it is seen to advance democratic accountability (Diamond 1999), but for development agencies, its main appeal is rooted in neo-institutionalist notions of ‘good governance’ that supposedly bring decision-making closer to those affected by it, thereby promoting greater governmental accountability to citizens in service delivery. Relatedly, it is also seen as a way of getting around existing forms of patronage and inefficiency entrenched in central states’ bureaucracies and political institutions (Grindle 2009). But as is always the case with the politics of scale, the actual outcomes of decentralisation processes are a reflection of dynamic socio-political conflict and may deviate considerably from the intentions of their architects. The case of Cambodia is instructive. Until the recent authoritarian turn, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) dominated Cambodian politics through a strategy of intensive control by local authorities stitched into long-standing networks of loyalty and patronage. This was fostered, and to a large extent still is, by the flow of resources gained from a highly centralised system of taking bribes and donations in return for awarding opportunities for the exploitation of Cambodia’s natural resource-base to foreign investors and rich Cambodian tycoons. In Cambodia, therefore, decentralisation policies warmly encouraged by donors in the 2000s did not lead to more local representation. To the contrary, they dovetailed neatly with CPP localisation strategies designed to undermine opposition parties whose popularity was mainly urban (Hameiri et al. 2017). Analysing Intervention Outcomes The final analytic step is to bring together the previous three steps into a coherent analysis of governance outcomes in given contexts. Our analysis focuses on struggles over whether rescaling of particular parts of the administration should occur at all and, if it does, over the extent to which it should occur, and, finally, over how rescaled institutions actually function in practice. The focus in our inquiry is not on whether outputs reflect the expectations of the architects of international intervention (though we also address this), but on explaining concretely in whose interests actual modes of governance operate. We also examine whether power and resources are displaced to non-rescaled parts of the administration in relation to the same struggles. These outcomes will depend on the balance of forces contesting the outcomes in given contexts, with particular significance being attached to the responses and strategies of elites dominating the national scale before and during the implementation of international programmes/projects.

68  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding

CONCLUSION The approach outlined in this chapter has emerged out of the wider shift over the last decade from focusing on interveners’ ideas and modalities towards interrogating how interventions interact with the targeted states and societies to produce different outcomes. We have been particularly sympathetic to the political economy approach that, drawing on Gramscian state theory, has foregrounded the contested nature of development and the relationship between struggles over development and state forms. We have also argued, however, that to understand ISBIs’ outcomes we need to pay attention to the politics of scale. This is because ISBIs seek to transform states by rescaling parts of their ostensibly domestic governance apparatuses, such that these become responsive to international agendas and objectives. This scalar strategy of internationalisation often invites contending scalar strategies. The outcomes of ISBIs are therefore shaped by struggles between coalitions straddling the domestic–international divide, in which a politics of scale is central. The relevance of our approach goes beyond academia and has potential policymaking implications. In particular, based on our findings in Solomon Islands, Cambodia and the Indonesian province of Aceh (Hameiri et al. 2017), we provide three recommendations to policymakers. 1. Wherever possible, seek tactical, instrumental alliances with elites to introduce limited and incremental reforms (Hutchison et al. 2014). Tactical alliances are with organisations or individuals that may not share donors’ values, objectives, outlook or modes of operation, but with whom it is possible to have a limited or temporary alignment of interests to facilitate some engagement around particular interventions and aims. Often partners for tactical alliances are in some ways objectionable – corrupt, illiberal and so on. But they are often powerful and therefore can meaningfully advance interveners’ objectives. Interveners need, however, to be selective and targeted in what they aim to achieve. The wide scope of most ISBIs means that the kind of strategic thinking required to actually get something properly implemented is often missing. 2. Understand better the structures underpinning power relations, not only in the target states and societies as a whole, but around given institutions or policy areas. This is not a one-off exercise. Donors must pay ongoing attention to shifting power relations and the dynamics that drive change in order to capitalise on the opportunities and avoid the pitfalls associated with different situations. 3. Pay attention to the scalar dimension of interventions. The latter means, first and foremost, acknowledging that interventions take place in contested social, political and economic territorial spaces and that each space – or scale – is organised in ways that reinforce or challenge a particular distribution of power and resources. Scales are thus not value-neutral, and hence rescaling is not value-neutral either and ISBIs are interventions in the power relations within and across scale. Scalar analyses, when combined with critical political economy, can thus help: identify the shape of the scalar configuration within a given context, including which scale dominant social forces command, and the power structures underpinning it; understand the degree of interscalar conflict, and the issues driving it; and investigate the composition, interests and ideologies of the elite groups at different scales, and how they relate to each other.

International statebuilding interventions and the politics of scale  69

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Dr Lee Jones for his considerable contribution to the development of our project. As always, responsibility for the final draft is our own. This chapter and the wider project of which it is part has been generously funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant DP130102273 ‘The Politics of Public Administration Reform: Capacity Development and Ideological Contestation in International State-building’.

REFERENCES Batley, R., W. McCourt and C. Mcloughlin (2012), ‘Editorial: The politics and governance of public services in developing countries’, Public Management Review, 14 (2), 131‒44. Belloni, R. (2012), ‘Hybrid peace governance: Its emergence and significance’, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 18 (1), 21‒38. Brenner, N. (2001), ‘The limits to scale? Methodological reflections on scalar structuration’, Progress in Human Geography, 25 (4), 591‒614. Brenner, N. and S. Elden (2009), ‘Henri Lefebvre on state, space, territory’, International Political Sociology, 3 (4), 353‒77. Brenner, N., B. Jessop, M. Jones and G. MacLeod (2003), ‘Introduction: State space in question’, in N. Brenner, B. Jessop, M. Jones and G. MacLeod (eds), State/Space: A Reader, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 1‒26. Carroll, T. (2010), Delusions of Development: The World Bank and the Post-Washington Consensus in Southeast Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Diamond, L. (1999), Developing Democracy: Towards Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fritz, V. and A. Rocha Menocal (2007), ‘Developmental states in the new millennium: Concepts and challenges for a new aid agenda’, Development Policy Review, 25 (5), 531‒52. Gibson, E. L. (2013), Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gough, J. (2004), ‘Changing scale as changing class relations: Variety and contradiction in the politics of scale’, Political Geography, 23 (2), 185‒211. Gramsci, A. (1971), Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Grindle, M. S. (2009), Going Local: Decentralization, Democratization, and the Promise of Good Governance, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hameiri, S. (2010), Regulating Statehood: State Building and the Transformation of the Global Order, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hameiri, S. and L. Jones (2015), Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hameiri, S. and L. Jones (2017), ‘Beyond hybridity to the politics of scale: International intervention and “local” politics’, Development and Change, 48 (1), 54‒77. Hameiri, S. and F. Scarpello (2018), ‘International development aid and the politics of scale’, Review of International Political Economy, 25 (2), 145‒68. Hameiri, S., C. Hughes and F. Scarpello (2017), International Intervention and Local Politics: Fragmented States and the Politics of Scale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, G. (2004), The World Bank and Africa: The Construction of Governance States, London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (2006), The Limits to Capital, London: Verso. Hewison, K., R. Robison and G. Rodan (1993), ‘Introduction: Changing forms of state power in Southeast Asia’, in K. Hewison, R. Robison and G. Rodan (eds), Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy and Capitalism, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, pp. 2‒8. Hutchison, J., W. Hout, C. Hughes and R. Robison (2014), Political Economy and the Aid Industry in Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jessop, B. (1990), State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jessop, B. (2002), The Future of the Capitalist State, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jessop, B. (2008), State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kwon, H.-J. and E. Kim (2014), ‘Poverty reduction and good governance: Examining the rationale of the millennium development goals’, Development and Change, 45 (2), 353‒75.

70  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Kyed, H. M. and P. Albrecht (2015), ‘Introduction: Policing and the politics of order-making on the urban margins’, in P. Albrecht and H. M. Kyed (eds), Policing and the Politics of Order-Making, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1‒23. Leftwich, A. (2012), ‘Coalitions in the politics of development: Findings, insights and guidance from the DLP coalitions workshop, 15‒16 February, Sydney’, Melbourne: Developmental Leadership Program, Research and Policy Workshop Report. Peck, J. (2002), ‘Political economies of scale: Fast policy, interscalar relations, and neoliberal workfare’, Economic Geography, 78 (3), 331‒60. Poulantzas, N. (1978), State, Power, Socialism, London and New York: Verso. Richmond, O. P. and A. Mitchell (2012), ‘Introduction: Towards a post-liberal peace: Exploring hybridity via everyday forms of resistance, agency and autonomy’, in O. P. Richmond and A. Mitchell (eds), Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-Liberalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1‒38. Smith, N. (1992), ‘Contours of a spatialized politics: Homeless vehicles and the production of geographical scale’, Social Text, 33, 55‒81. Swyngedouw, E. A. (1997), ‘Neither global nor local: “Glocalization” and the politics of scale’, in K. R. Cox (ed.), Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, New York: Guilford, pp. 137‒66. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) (2004), ‘Practice note on public administration reform’, New York: United Nations Development Programme. Wimmer, A. and N. Glick Schiller (2002), ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (4), 301‒34.

8. Intervening in a diverse world: revisiting the ‘problem’ of difference in international statebuilding Pol Bargués-Pedreny and Xavier Mathieu

INTRODUCTION How may international statebuilding work in a diverse world? How do differences impact on peace processes in fragile states? International statebuilding as a practice and academic field has always been embroiled in the ‘problem’ of difference. Since the late 1990s, socio-cultural differences have been identified both as the origin of conflicts and as essential to consolidate peace (Avruch 1998; Lederach 1997; Miall et al. 1999). International organisations have gradually paid attention to the informal settings of societies intervened upon as spheres where differences are reproduced and the seeds of war and peace can be found. Even statebuilding frameworks, which tend to focus on the creation of legitimate governmental institutions and market reforms from ‘the top-down’, have become more willing to adjust to the diversity of local contexts (Ingram 2010; OECD 2012). In the twenty-first century, it has become a platitude to admit that peace processes that are not led by local actors and respectful of their traditions and mores often go awry. Yet, policymakers express pessimism about the possibility to engage with difference successfully so that a context-sensitive peace can be attained. Sometimes cultural practices and societal codes seem difficult to comprehend to the external gaze, other times they seem incompatible with the aims of building peace. In the scholarly literature, particularly within critical circles, the consensus is that international interventions have mostly failed because of the very superficial attention given to the diverse needs, values and experiences found in post-conflict societies (Kappler 2015; Mac Ginty and Firchow 2016). Liberal programmes of conflict resolution and statebuilding have been met with resistance from local traditions, identities and cultures. Critical reappraisals have thus argued for interventions that are respectful of local contexts and histories and connected with ‘everyday’ practices. Yet the limits of this turn to the local – such as the tendency to reproduce simplistic binaries – have been widely recognised (Chandler 2010; Nadarajah and Rampton 2015; Randazzo 2016). As Meera Sabaratnam has it, even in critical frameworks of statebuilding cultural difference is often reduced to ‘the liberal/local distinction [that] appears to be the central ontological fulcrum upon which the rest of the political and ethical problems sit’ (Sabaratnam 2017, p. 29, emphasis in original). In sum, whereas practitioners and mainstream approaches worry about their inability to fully ‘capture’ difference or manage it in a way that is conducive to peace, critical scholars worry about the inability to ‘write’ difference without essentialising ‘it’ or reproducing and legitimising power structures. As difference seems fundamentally elusive, scholars and practitioners increasingly admit that the Other cannot be helped and that any statebuilding strategy that attempts to be sensitive to difference is doomed (Bargués-Pedreny 2017). 71

72  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding The problem of cultural difference can thus be considered as central in the field of statebuilding (see Brigg 2008; Behr 2014; Mathieu 2019). In this chapter, we argue that a sustained attention to the theorisation, emergence and ambiguities of difference can shed light on some of the problems faced by statebuilding research and practice. We propose to look at international interventions in war–peace transition states through the lens of difference to clarify and help solve some of the deadlocks faced by contemporary scholars and practitioners. Our aim is twofold: First, we argue that the miasma of despair regarding difference and statebuilding is the result of three successive errors that occur when dealing with difference in international interventions: silencing, problematising and stigmatising difference. We explain how statebuilding approaches have been (re)producing these three errors and thus limiting our ability to engage with difference productively. Second, we outline three analytical starting points to think about difference differently: multidimensionality, anti-essentialism, and a focus on difference as an expression of power relations. These three options open up new ways of approaching the issue of cultural difference; by putting ‘difference’ centre stage, our ambition is to reveal new analytical strategies that go beyond the impasse in which the field of statebuilding finds itself.

FROM UNDERVALUING TO OVERVALUING CULTURAL DIFFERENCE The work of Kevin Avruch is useful to frame the dilemma around difference that confronted international interventions throughout the 1990s and 2000s. As an anthropologist preoccupied with conflict resolution, Avruch (1998) criticised theories and practices that rendered culture and cultural differences trivial. For him, ‘undervaluing culture’ is the first type of error in traditional conflict resolution practices. These practices, he explained, tend to focus on rational negotiations between the representatives of disputing parties, as if context, values, traditions, or ethnic differences played no role for participants in a conflict. Initially, thus, Avruch could be read as pointing towards the championing of culture as an important element for understanding conflict and its resolution. However, Avruch does not suggest that we should talk about or emphasise culture unhesitatingly, with no holds barred, when addressing a cultural dispute. There is a second type of error which surfaces in the process of trying to correct the first: the tendency to ‘overvalue culture’ by ‘overestimating its impact on a conflict’ (Avruch 2003, p. 363). Overemphasising culture is essentially harmful to some parties in a conflict already saturated with cultural animosities because, Avruch contends (2003, p. 367), it homogenises, essentialises and reinforces particular forms of identity while neglecting or delegitimising others. We re-read the history of the field through Avruch’s two errors to argue that throughout much of the 1990s scholars and practitioners involved in post-conflict recovery erred because they generally undervalued culture, whereas in the 2000s the tendency was to recognise it but characterise it as an obstacle to consolidate peace. For heuristic reasons, this ‘history’ of statebuilding is presented in a linear fashion. In reality, however, the errors have co-existed and still do. The first error is most explicit in the early international peace support interventions. Indeed, in these interventions cultural differences were not considered as important since every society was seen as willing and capable of democratising in a similar way (Doyle 1986; Fukuyama 1992; Huntington 1991). Differences among societies did certainly exist, but they represented

Intervening in a diverse world  73 the different stages of a universal and linear progression towards liberal democracy. Universal logics – such as actors interacting rationally in a perfectly predictable world – drove international relations, providing a convincing explanation for the deviations or delays of some local cultures (Lapid and Kratochwil 1996; Valbjørn 2008, pp. 57–9). However, uncomfortable questions soared as peace proved difficult to consolidate in many non-Western states throughout the 1990s. If democracy and free markets were a source of peace and progress, why had some countries in transition to democracy failed to stabilise? Why had liberal multiculturalism been key to manage diversity and promote cultural rights to minorities in most Western states but failed as soon as it was exported elsewhere (Eller 1999; Kymlicka 2001)? Why was it so onerous to expand the liberal democratic zone of peace? In debates assessing the difficulties of democratisation, liberalisation and peacebuilding in the aftermath of civil wars in the non-West, the notion of difference appeared as a problem to be considered. The fact that democratisation and economic liberalisation were successful in the West but failed to stabilise countries emerging from armed conflict in the non-West led to the perception that non-Western societies possessed specific traits that hindered their progress. Crucially, difference between human beings was expressed by referring to the inward and unconscious attributes of societies – their ‘culture’ or psychosocial characteristics – and came to be a key explanatory variable for the failure of allegedly universal policy solutions (Pupavac 2001). International interventions had thus been guilty of the first type of error identified by Avruch: they had ignored the relevance of culture and assumed that all societies would transform into peaceful liberal democracies. The focus on cultural differences thus revealed a feeling of growing disenchantment with universal values and approaches with worldwide pretensions. Scholars increasingly recognised not only that psychosocial factors had decisive effects on conflicts, but also that these could not be overlooked in peace processes (Avruch 1998; Avruch and Black 1991; Lederach 1997; Miall et al. 1999). International interventions began to evolve from a concern with the formal and political sphere of societies to the regulation of the more informal settings where differences and inequalities among societies were reproduced over time (Chandler 2010). For example, at the end of the 1990s civil society became a key preoccupation of programmes of international intervention. It was understood as an informal space beyond the state which had to be technically assisted and empowered in order to achieve tolerance and sustainable peace (see Gabay and Death 2012). This emphasis on difference in intervention programmes was considered a step forward when compared to earlier operations that had worked from a one-size-fits-all peace model and ignored local histories, knowledge and mores. In moving from strictly military and security dimensions to the broader social and cultural contexts of conflict-affected societies, statebuilding processes (with an emphasis on a comprehensive institutional strengthening) appeared apt to address the root causes of conflicts and facilitate psychosocial healing and long-term reconciliation (Lederach 1997, pp. 24–35; Miall et al. 1999, pp. 206–15). Moreover, exhibiting cultural sensitivity in post-war scenarios was motivated by a normative commitment to respect diverse traditions at a time when Western countries were generally favouring multiculturalism, rather than assimilation, in domestic politics. Nevertheless, a new problem appeared in statebuilding processes: by emphasising the need to protect and cultivate identities and differences, international interventions were guilty of legitimising and replicating ethno-nationalist perspectives and war-antagonisms (Campbell 1998, pp. 88–93; Valbjørn 2008, p. 64; Vaughan-Williams 2006, pp. 517–18). Thus a second

74  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding type of error haunted peace interventions in the context of the ‘cultural turn’: as Avruch had warned, peace practitioners quickly realised that overvaluing culture brings as many problems as it solves. Through much of the 2000s, internationally led statebuilding missions sought to find a solution to avoid the two errors: on the one hand, external actors could not ignore the primacy of those psychosocial factors that had influenced the history and development of the countries intervened in; on the other hand, they could not concede too much to local actors and cultures and fuel the same identities and disagreements that had caused the turmoil. A tertium quid was required that took the form of a ‘pragmatic tolerance’ in which difference was valued insofar as it had a positive role for building peace. Thus peace missions adopted an unstable middle-ground position in which they would respect difference when seen as not obstructing the non-negotiable goals of stability, the rule of law and economic liberalism. Statebuilding frameworks, for example, can be said to be paradigmatic of a position that admitted the importance of culture in societies intervened in but considered it an obstacle that had to be managed, regulated and assimilated through a process of institution-building (Chesterman et al. 2005; Ghani and Lockhart 2008; Paris and Sisk 2009). In the field of policy practice, the emphasis on strengthening institutions was translated into a top-down strategy to transform the perceptions, beliefs and other socio-cultural pathologies of the people, so that they could learn to iron out their differences without resort to arms. The Weberian state became the fulcrum of all statebuilding projects, against which differences were censured if they deviated too much from universal norms (Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu 2014). Even Avruch, who carried the torch of cultural sensitivity during the 1990s, became cautious not to include (and overvalue) some cultural traits when these hindered the goal of solving a conflict (for a critique, see Brigg and Muller 2009). Statebuilding projects spread but they did not win the day, as they ended up privileging the position of international agencies and foregrounding external values and models for peace resolution. While they recognised the importance of difference in processes of statebuilding, they reduced most differences to obstacles to be managed, corrected and overcome so that the rule of law, state institutions and markets could be consolidated. In this sense, they reproduced what Antony Anghie (2005, p. 4) has called the ‘dynamic of difference’: ‘the endless process of creating a gap between two cultures, demarcating ones as “universal” and civilized and the other as “particular” and uncivilized, and seeking to bridge the gap by developing techniques to normalize the aberrant society’. If the first error had been to neglect those socio-cultural attributes that may affect the progress of peace consolidation, the second was to consider difference a barrier to the ends of external agencies.

A THIRD ERROR: STIGMATISING DIFFERENCE As liberal peace projects lost impetus (Campbell et al. 2011), however, demands for approaches more sensitive to difference bourgeoned. Over the last ten years scholars have started to explain the poor record of international interventions by highlighting their insufficient understanding of, and engagement with, local histories and cultures (Björkdahl and Gusic 2015; Lidén et al. 2009; Mac Ginty 2015; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016). This deficit, critics argue, is clear in strategies that promote ‘local ownership’; indeed, external actors have frequently transferred power to the national groups that seem to adjust to liberal norms while

Intervening in a diverse world  75 disregarding other actors that are less donor-darlings (Lee and Özerdem 2015). As a solution, scholars stress the need to engage more respectfully and genuinely with the culturally different local, involving minorities as well as rural and other marginalised actors (Paffenholz 2014). These critical approaches infer that peace needs to be fostered ‘from below’; they are thus necessarily more open to ‘local-local actors’, ‘infrapolitical’ dimensions and indigenous ‘resistance’ to foreign interventions (Richmond 2012, pp.  116‒27). Some scholars suggest replacing the technocratic and distant approach of the liberal peace with ‘ethnographic methods’ that attend to local experiences and perceptions of conflict and peace in order to give a better account of these perplexing dynamics (Millar 2018). Others suggest developing positive forms of ‘hybrid peace’ in which ‘international’ and ‘local’ actors shape and participate in a localised process of peacebuilding (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016). In these approaches, difference is not understood as culture, for culture is often tinged with reductionism and simplicity, but as the parapraxes, contingencies and twists that make the everyday life of a society unique. Critical statebuilding scholars have thus called for renewed attempts to engage with difference beyond the universalist assumptions characteristic of previous approaches. This implies a move beyond the second type of error outlined above: if difference was recognised, it was too quickly turned into a problem to be solved by assimilation. In contrast, critical scholars argue that difference has a role to play in building peace; whether this role is positive or negative depends on the circumstances and should not be judged a priori by external actors or measured against universal standards. These approaches therefore outline a third way to consider difference in the context of international interventions: beyond ignorance and problematisation (both leading to assimilation), difference is retrieved as indispensable for building peace. This third way, however, brings in a new type of error that can be explained by referring to the ‘dilemma of difference’ introduced by Martha Minow (1990). For Minow, when trying to correct the inequalities suffered by a different person, one can erase and ignore difference in an attempt to equalise all actors (a ‘solution’ that tends to reproduce the hierarchy it was designed to correct) or, conversely, one can try to adapt to the characteristics of the different person. This second option, seemingly more tolerant, necessitates the identification of what difference is. Yet, as Minow argues, difference never exists on its own: it becomes visible (and comes into being) only through specific normative frames and expectations. As feminists have argued, for instance, women are only different insofar as the reference point is and remains men. The different person is identified by opposition to what/who is identical (and thus equal). As a consequence, this attempt to respect and value difference necessitates its identification, which in turn can only be achieved by reproducing the normative structures through which the different person was – and therefore remains – inferior. Two consequences follow from this third error: difference is reified and essentialised and appears inescapable (for a critique, see Sabaratnam 2017; Nadarajah and Rampton 2015), but it is also stigmatised (as a deviance from the ‘normal’ that is reproduced by the frames used to identify it). For instance, difference is often associated with ‘informal institutions’ or ‘tradition’; yet these ‘characteristics’ only become salient through the use and acceptation of a specific normative frame influenced by Western perceptions of the ‘normal’. In this frame, difference is identified in relation to what the Self believes himself to be. As such, emphasising difference (even as something to be celebrated or as a space from where bottom-up peace initiatives can spring) does not remove the stigma attached to it insofar as what passes for ‘normal’ cannot be questioned nor made explicit.

76  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Despite the fact that critical scholars strive to treat difference on an equal footing and refuse to prejudge the value of difference, the stated goal of integrating difference for the purpose of peace- and statebuilding appears counterproductive. In fact, the possibility of capturing difference ‘on its own terms’ has been largely acknowledged as unsuccessful. Recent research on statebuilding has deplored this state of affairs (Sabaratnam 2017; Simons and Zanker 2014; Kappler 2015; Hirblinger and Simons 2015; Paffenholz 2015; Randazzo 2016), but their conclusions often seem to continue and give new lease of life to the line of investigation that characterises the critics of statebuilding. Indeed, they often urge – again – for more sensitivity towards the particularities and intricacies of societies intervened in. In sum, these three errors limit the capacity of statebuilding practitioners and scholars to engage with other societies on an equal footing, and miss the opportunity to understand the conditions under which difference emerges. The first error silenced difference as irrelevant due to the force of universalist convictions. With the second error, difference was considered an obstacle that external interventions needed to correct, manage and control. Trying to move away from these two errors, academics and practitioners have sought to reveal difference on its own terms and use it as a basis for peace consolidation. These attempts, however, are limited by the lack of reflection and understanding of the conditions that make difference exist in the first place. Despite their generous starting points, the result is the reproduction of the stigma attached to difference (see, further, Mathieu 2019).

RETHINKING DIFFERENCE AND THE CONDITIONS OF ITS EMERGENCE Facing these dilemmas and contradictions, how is one to approach difference? Instead of ignoring, problematising, or asking for more detailed explorations of what difference is, we suggest focusing on three dimensions that have so far remained underexplored: difference as a multidimensional reality performed in multiple ways and contexts, as a vital yet non-essentialisable feature of human cultures, and linked to power relations. While we do not claim to introduce a new comprehensive statebuilding framework, we maintain that focusing on these three dimensions can shed new light on the issue of difference and help addressing some of the dilemmas faced by scholars and practitioners. First, against the desire to reduce differences to objective realities existing ‘out there’, the feminist and queer literatures offer a useful corrective (Butler 1990, 1993; Parker and Sedgwick 1995). For them, actors perform their identity through discourses and practices. Subjects come into being (and enact their differences) through the reiterated performance of their identity. Expressed differently, it means that the foundations to which discourses and practices of identification refer to in statebuilding – ‘traditions’, ‘modernity’, ‘history’, ‘indigeneity’, ‘local authenticity’, ‘international (scientific) expertise’ – do not pre-exist their performance. This radical re-conceptualisation of identity and difference may change the goals of critical scholars: the objective is no longer to discover the ‘real’ identity of actors – in order to transform them or to adapt international interventions to their context – but to understand how actors react to, enact and exceed regimes of identity (Read 2018). Drawing attention to the performativity of difference also means recognising that differences are always situated, embodied, scaled, and imbued with meanings that depend on discourses and socio-economic structures (Hirblinger and Landau 2018; Martin de Almagro 2018).

Intervening in a diverse world  77 In fact, recognising the performative aspect of differences also means that identities are inherently multidimensional – even if often reduced to one form of ‘difference’ (ethnic, religious, gender…) to the exclusion of all others. Recognising these forgotten dimensions could help us cross the boundaries between self and other and cultivate the points of connection and overlap that exist between supposedly different actors – acknowledging the ‘others that always live within’ (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004, p. 44) – in order to make advances for peace. The idea of multidimensionality is useful in that regard, yet such recognition can be difficult to attain in a context where the act of othering helps people manage their fears about ‘glimpses of dependence and “difference” in themselves’ (Minow 1990, p. 378). Second, rather than seeking to represent or use differences to sustain peace, scholars may insist on the irreducible character of identities. This position dwells on deconstructive sensitivities that highlight the irresolvable paradoxes implicated in attempts to make justice to difference: on the one hand, there is a need for a decision or an action to assist the other; on the other hand, any effort to do so will be insufficient (Connolly 2002; Critchley 1992). The consequence of confronting these paradoxes is not stasis or utter impotence. Instead, deconstructive logics bring forward an unstable approach that affirms contradictory impulses while avoiding ultimate foundations. For instance, Paipais (2011, p. 140) embraces this instability in order to solve the problem of assimilating difference: What is, perhaps, more important than seeking a final overcoming or dismissal of the self/other opposition is to gain the insight that it is the perpetual striving to preserve the tension and ambivalence between self and other that rescues both critique’s authority and function.

If the task of defining and fixing difference becomes impossible, it is a never-ending process that is privileged over closure and conclusions. This is reminiscent of the argument made by David Campbell, who, writing against dominant understandings of international intervention in Bosnia, defends ‘an ongoing political process of critique and invention that is never satisfied that a lasting solution can or has been reached’ (Campbell 1998, p. 242). Campbell suggests practising a double task of attending indigenous needs, values and morals, while acknowledging the limits implicated in these undertakings. Other authors have similarly underlined the need for an engagement towards difference (and not with or of difference), holding an infinite predisposition to negotiate its constitution (Behr 2014, p. 140). In statebuilding contexts, this implies de-essentialising identity politics and narratives of ‘us’ and ‘them’, in parallel to cultivating non-essentialist understandings of peace and difference (Behr 2018). Yet this position can also be questioned, for not all that is processual and contingent is positive, and that which is discrete and entrenched is negative (for a critique, see Bargués-Pedreny 2018). It may be that the apparent refusal to identify difference in international interventions is not emancipatory, but instead reinforces or aligns with the powers that be. As Orjuela (2008, p. 248) explains, deconstructing identities is sometimes used as a weapon of domination if it serves to denounce as ‘fake’ or ‘inauthentic’ the identity of the marginalised. Moreover, deconstructive logics applied to identity are often restricted to an academic and privileged position constructed above (identity) politics. Indeed, when faced with the necessity of making advances for peace, doing away with identities and differences rarely seems a viable option (Lottholz 2018). Trying to ‘solve’ the problem of reifying differences by engaging in

78  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding a never-ending process of blurring them provokes disorientation to practitioners and a deep frustration to local people claiming peace here and now. A potential corrective to the limits of deconstruction in post-war settings could lie in a position that gives primacy to identities and differences in particularly situated contexts, both recognising their relevance and their ephemeral character. For example, Martin de Almagro (2018) develops the notion of ‘hybrid clubs’, where actors can perform their ‘membership’ to a variety of clubs without being essentially attached to them. Their difference is thus fluid and changing. Similarly, Brigg (2018) conceptualises difference as essential to life itself but not in a ‘substantialist’ way. This is not to deny that difference can appear (and be presented) in essentialist terms by the actors themselves. Such a process can happen through ‘strategic essentialism’ (see for instance Krishna 1993; Inayatullah 2016) where actors naturalise their identity and difference as existing ‘objectively’, that is, outside of the worldview that made them salient in the first place. Yet it remains for the scholar to adopt a sceptical perspective by showing how these differences remain politically constructed. Third, the ontological status of difference can be re-conceptualised. Indeed, most research is built on the assumption that difference is empirically discoverable, identifiable and thus ‘out there’. This common (mis)conception is shared by the three perspectives examined earlier, which assume that difference can be identified in post-conflict societies or that difference is attached to the actors themselves. Thus, and as Maynard (2001, p. 310) argues, using difference as an ‘organising concept’ can separate actors from one another and obscure the relationships in which they are engaged (and that make them different). As a response to this danger, scholars from a diversity of disciplines have shown how difference is a result of (power) relations. For instance, Minow discusses how differences lie between people and not within them. She argues that ‘difference expresses patterns of relationships, social perceptions, and the design of institutions made by some without others in mind’ (Minow 1990, p. 79) instead of essential and discrete characteristics of some people. Similarly, in anthropology, Abu-Lughod (1991, p. 147) explains that difference ‘tends to be a relationship of power’. This means that differences are always the result of political and historical processes emerging from a particular economy of power (Escobar 2008, p. 203), in each situation, and out of the almost infinity of traits that characterises every actor, only some are portrayed as differences. Recognising difference as an expression of power means paying attention to the worldview(s) that powerful actors promote. As Brigg (2008, p. 11) points out, ‘Much of what is at stake in the difference challenge relates, in other words, to different versions of truth and reality.’ Only through these worldviews does difference emerge (usually as deviance or anomaly). Ignoring or silencing power – as was done in the universalist as well as in some of the recent stigmatising approaches – is no longer viable. Similarly, identifying differences as problems to be corrected becomes illogical insofar as these differences are created by those seeking to solve them. Understanding difference as a relation of power linked to specific worldviews impacts frameworks and practices that seek to integrate difference or use it as a resource to consolidate peace. In particular, the central questions are transformed: one no longer asks who is different but rather how difference has been constructed in reference to a specific worldview sustained by a particular economy of power. Bernath (2018), for instance, explores the construction of victim identities in Cambodia with reference to the powerful frame of ‘genocide’ and how specific differences are entrenched in the process. Framings and inscriptions of identities and

Intervening in a diverse world  79 differences must be approached with caution, as they entrench some worldviews and erase alternatives; they can help solve conflict as much as reinforce it. Studies must reflect the specific socio-historical contexts and structures that give meaning to identity relations (Joseph 2018). In conclusion, the three paths detailed here represent an attempt to move beyond the three errors that characterise statebuilding research and practice: silencing difference, considering it an obstacle or stigmatising it. Instead, we suggest exploring difference as it is performed in multiple contexts, as that which cannot be arrested but remains essential to life, and as a reflection of broader inequalities of power. This invitation may enable renewed discussions about cultural difference and open the way for reversing the pessimism about international statebuilding. As such, it is also an invitation to have a conversation about how to engage with difference in a non-hierarchical way.

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Intervening in a diverse world  81 Minow, M. (1990), Making all the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nadarajah, S. and D. Rampton (2015), ‘The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace’, Review of International Studies, 41 (1), 49‒72. OECD (2012), International Support to Post-Conflict Transition: Rethinking Policy, Changing Practice, DAC Guidelines and Reference Series, Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Publishing. http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.1787/​9789264168336​-en. Orjuela, C. (2008), The Identity Politics of Peacebuilding: Civil Society in War-torn Sri Lanka, New Delhi: Sage. Paffenholz, T. (2014), ‘International peacebuilding goes local: Analysing Lederach's conflict transformation theory and its ambivalent encounter with 20 years of practice’, Peacebuilding, 2 (1), 11‒27. Paffenholz, T. (2015), ‘Unpacking the local turn in peacebuilding: A critical assessment towards an agenda for future research’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 857‒74. Paipais, V. (2011), ‘Self and other in critical international theory: Assimilation, incommensurability and the paradox of critique’, Review of International Studies, 37 (1), 121‒40. Paris, R. and T. D. Sisk (2009), The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations, London: Routledge. Parker, A. and E. K. Sedgwick (1995), ‘Introduction: Performativity and performance’, in A. Parker and E. K. Sedgwick (ed.), Performativity and Performance, London: Routledge, pp. 1‒18. Pupavac, V. (2001), ‘Therapeutic governance: Psycho-social intervention and trauma risk management’, Disasters, 25 (4), 358–72. Randazzo, E. (2016), ‘The paradoxes of the “everyday”: Scrutinising the local turn in peace building’, Third World Quarterly, 37 (8), 1351‒70. Read, R. (2018), ‘Embodying difference: Reading gender in women's memoirs of humanitarianism’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 12 (3), 300‒18. Richmond, O. P. (2012), ‘A pedagogy of peacebuilding: Infrapolitics, resistance, and liberation’, International Political Sociology, 6 (2), 115‒31. Sabaratnam, M. (2017), Decolonizing Intervention: International Intervention in Mozambique, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Simons, C. and F. Zanker (2014), ‘Questioning the local in peacebuilding’, Working paper 10, Leipzig and Halle: German Research Foundation. Valbjørn, M. (2008), ‘Before, during and after the cultural turn: A “Baedeker” to IR’s cultural journey’, International Review of Sociology, 18 (1), 55–82. Vaughan-Williams, N. (2006), ‘Towards a problematisation of the problematisations that reduce Northern Ireland to a “problem”’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 9 (4), 513–26.

9. Decolonial ‘interventions’? Potentials and challenges of decolonial perspectives Philipp Lottholz

INTRODUCTION This chapter surveys and assesses the nascent strand in the intervention and statebuilding literature that approaches the topic from a decolonial point of view. As in the case of various disciplines and approaches used in the study of intervention and statebuilding, specifically International Relations (IR), political science and peace and conflict studies, post-colonial angles have been received and applied in various analyses (for instance, Jabri 2013). These are useful in exhibiting and conceptually reflecting the forms of imperial or colonial domination underlying contemporary cases of intervention and statebuilding. However, similar to critical approaches in peace-/statebuilding and intervention research more generally, such post-colonial analysis is often limited to grasping, reflecting upon and rationalising such domination and its side effects in a descriptive mode. Questions on the implications for how to deal with the examined situations, both as scholars and as practitioners or policy-makers, often lie beyond the discussion or are addressed in insubstantial manner. Decolonial theory and the corresponding decolonial intellectual interventions in this debate, do not claim to hold the key or final solution to this impasse. They do, however, bring a new and productive angle in the following three, exemplary senses (see also discussion in final section). First, decolonial theory offers a more holistic perspective on the ramifications and corresponding practical (im-) possibilities of the presence and history of violence, dispossession and exploitation in the modern capitalist system. This is captured in the term of ‘modernity-coloniality’ (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2011), which expresses that while formally decolonised and having entered an era of electoral democracy and freedom, the modern capitalist system is built up on and continues to sustain a high level of violence and lethal conflicts. Furthermore, the term ‘coloniality of knowledge’ (Mignolo and Escobar 2013) helps to question or dismiss accounts of world order and politics that sustain the idea that the world has nevertheless made decisive progress towards peace and prosperity. Second, decolonial theory argues that, in order to heal the wounds and trauma which are still present as result of the erection of the modern-colonial global system and its institutions, most importantly the nation state and its military and policing apparatus, this system needs to be decolonised. Respectively, in light of the scope of the reparations, amendments and reconstructions that would have to be undertaken for such a decolonisation, as well as the system’s leaders’, elites’ and ordinary political subjects’ unwillingness and inability to do so, decolonial scholars call for the ‘delinking’ from the modern-colonial system on the level of the individual and larger communities (Mignolo and Escobar 2013, chapter 15). A third key point provided by decolonial theory is the activity of recovering, making visible and potentially giving voice to the people, histories and standpoints which have been silenced in the modern-colonial global system (Mignolo and Escobar 2013, p. 46). Importantly, this 82

Decolonial ‘interventions’?  83 also implies a critical reflection and re-conceptualisation of scholarly inquiry into peace, conflict, and intervention and statebuilding under the question, as to how different approaches to and practices of data gathering, analysis, writing and, finally, knowledge production and dissemination can serve to challenge the current dominance of techno-scientific and military knowledge in the sphere of statebuilding and intervention in post-conflict countries in the global periphery. As I will show, corresponding ideas of ‘decolonising methodology’ (Smith 2008) in the social sciences and in peace- and statebuilding intervention research more specifically also implies the giving up of the privilege of social scientists to be the experts who inform policies, and will thus to an extent be incommensurable with Western and global techno-scientifically conceived approaches to intervention and statebuilding. The chapter starts by briefly surveying potentialities for decolonial perspectives in critical peace, conflict, and security studies; as well as post-colonial approaches to IR and political science. Subsequently, based on a brief outline of decolonial theory as it emerged in the past three decades, I sketch out decolonial intellectual interventions in the intervention and statebuilding literature and show how these seek, although to differing extents, to transcend the boundaries of intervention and statebuilding policy, practice and research.

(SELF-)CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES IN PEACE, CONFLICT AND INTERVENTION STUDIES Although usually not explicitly linked to decolonial theory, it can be argued that a critical strand in study fields and disciplines pertaining to intervention and statebuilding inquiry has produced critical viewpoints that are of key importance for a decolonial perspective. These have been situated primarily in the third aspect set out above, which concerns the epistemic violence and exclusion produced by the modern-colonial system via contemporary forms of knowledge production. An early key work in this regard is Barkawi and Laffey’s (1999) analysis of the contradictions of democratic peace theory. They show how globalisation, rather than bringing the freedom and prosperity proclaimed by its advocates in the 1990s, has historically coincided with Western powers’ imperialism and military intervention, how aid (especially from the US) has led less to democratisation but is mostly directed at securing property rights of multinational corporations and local elites, and how the liberal international order has been sustained through the use of force for disciplining, if not exterminating, ‘unruly subjects that were pursuing competing political projects’ (Barkawi and Laffey 1999, pp. 407, 421‒2). This critical strand of inquiry into the imperial and violent underside of what many came to perceive as a liberal and benign world order has continued after 9/11 and amidst the rise of peace, conflict and security studies which were increasingly preoccupied with Western-centric visions of peace and security. Important to mention are critical works on the merging of security-related policies with development programming, the so-called ‘security-development nexus’ (e.g. Duffield 2001), and critiques of the emerging and soon predominant idea of ‘saving’, stabilising and ‘re-building’ ‘failed’ or ‘fragile states’ (e.g. Grimm et al. 2014). Similar as with the critiques of international peace- and statebuilding missions under the banner of the ‘liberal peace’ (see Sabaratnam 2017, p. 23 ff.), critics argued that these analyses only focus on the failure of intervention and assistance policies to deliver their proclaimed goals, but seem to be paradoxically caught up, even if implicitly, in the same logic of an

84  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding emancipatory liberal Enlightenment project (Sabaratnam 2017, p. 30, 2013). The more fundamental task, in this instance, is to not only exhibit the failures of peace- and statebuilding interventions, but also to challenge and overcome the ontology of the international and liberal interveners being distinct from the ‘local’ subjects of interventions. Denskus, for instance, has pointed out how the increasing reception and preoccupation of scholarship with results-based management methodologies and ‘effectiveness’ measurements has led to the depoliticisation of ‘critical questions about the causes of violent conflict and the future outlook of societies emerging from conflict’ (Denskus 2007, pp. 657‒8). This, and the sustained exclusion of the experiences of professionals on the ground as well as ‘people in (post-) conflict situations that should “benefit” from the projects and programmes’ (Denskus 2007, pp. 657‒8) means that ‘“peacebuilding” has lost any sense of context, and of the people in that context’ and that ‘[t]he sites of peacebuilding have become “non-places”’ (Denskus 2007, p. 656). In a similar vein, Jutila et al. (2008, p. 623 ff) argue that peace researchers have come to perceive themselves as ‘physicians of global society’ who engage in a ‘normal science’, conceived of as value-free, not reflecting on its role and implications for society and, therefore, liable to instrumentalisation for, or at least complicity with, regressive and imperial forms of global domination. As a solution, they propose, similar to Denskus, more engagement with communities affected by conflicts through participatory approaches, more reflection on the normalities surrounding peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction and, relatedly, ‘more dialogical and culturally sensitive forms of problem-solving’ (Jutila et al. 2008, pp. 635‒8). Thus, they conclude, critical peace research ‘can bring new content to the precept that research should start with experience and lead to action. The action should be taken together with those suffering from some form of violence’ (Jutila et al. 2008, pp. 635‒8). Although rather conceptual and put into action by peace and conflict scholarship in the following decade, these contributions arguably present a good illustration of the self-critical reflection of scholarship on its (im-) possibilities of affecting sustainable peace and social change. More recent work in statebuilding and intervention studies has pursued this thinking towards a more explicitly decolonial standpoint. Turner and Kühn’s sociological analysis of intervention aims to expose how intervention is often an act of ‘policing of (colonial) differences globally’; ‘an aggressive politics pursuing the preservation of the existing peace of the powerful’ and a ‘managing exercise that aims to protect the capitalist core from the non-liberal periphery’ (Turner and Kühn 2016, p. 8). In this light, Turner and Kühn (2016, pp. 5‒6) take ‘the role of colonial and imperial violence in the emergence of capitalist social forms… as [analytical] starting point’ and, in order to avoid the above-mentioned tendency of exclusion or marginalisation of people subject to interventions, embrace ‘an explicit decolonising approach’ which does ‘not merely focus on the interveners but also the intervened’. The collection challenges the idea that ‘capitalist social forms promote a pacific domestic and international polity’ and compellingly shows that the currently dominant version of the ‘liberal peace’ ‘seeks the extension, imposition and defence of capitalist social relations by necessity [and thus] excludes and oppresses, delegitimises and criminalises alternative ideas of order’ (Turner and Kühn 2016, p. 8). A similar attempt at epistemtically decolonising the study of the occupied Palestinian territory is made by Turner and Shweiki’s (2014) collection, which examines policies of de-development to demonstrate how Palestinians are ‘experiencing a colonial matrix of dispossession, disenfranchisement and destruction in a world-historical period regarded to be post-colonial’ (Turner and Shweiki 2014, p. 3). While these and earlier approaches in peace, conflict and intervention studies went to some length to attempt to decol-

Decolonial ‘interventions’?  85 onise research and critically inquire (quasi-) colonial relations of domination and violence, I show how post- and decolonial approaches present a further progression to such inquiry.

POST-COLONIAL APPROACHES Giving more conceptual clarity and empirical depth to the critical inclinations discussed above, post-colonial approaches in security studies and political science and IR more generally have presented concrete ways to exhibit and tackle imperial and colonial forms of domination in contemporary intervention and security policies. A substantive part of this literature has emerged in reaction to the proliferating military interventions following 9/11. Barkawi and Laffey, for instance, admonished that ‘security studies systematically understate and misrepresent the role of what we now call the Global South in security relations’ as they are underpinned by ‘taken-for-granted historical geographies’ that fail to acknowledge the ‘the mutual constitution of Europe and the non-European world’ – Global North and South; ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries – ‘and their joint role in making history’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, p. 330). Focusing mostly on the case of Al-Qaeda and the challenge it poses to US and Western foreign policy-making, they argued that security studies need to overcome the Eurocentric bias and primacy of great power politics and instead inquire the relational (re-)production of categories, spaces and actors, for instance through what Edward Said called contrapuntal studies ‘that analyse events, developments and processes in core and periphery together’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, pp. 348‒9). Among a number of critical works in security studies, Jana Hönke and Markus-Michael Müller’s (2012) special issue in Security Dialogue has most substantially heeded this call. According to the authors, security studies can only overcome its Western-centrism by embracing the concept of post-coloniality to ‘critically engage with the entangled histories of transnational security governance… with a “strategic exoticism” that does not deny difference but avoids essentialization by challenging exoticist representational codes through an uncovering of the underlying differential (epistemological, political, symbolic, etc.) power relations’ (Hönke and Müller 2012, p. 384). They further propose to move beyond the predominant abstract and macro-level thinking by also including ‘everyday social practices’ and methods from neighbouring disciplines in the analysis (Hönke and Müller 2012, p. 385). Hönke and Müller (2012, p. 387) provide a survey of post- and decolonial theorists including Mbembe, Coronil, Mignolo and Stuart Hall, and illustrate the entanglement of centre and periphery in the sphere of policing, where ‘“cross-fertilization” between colonial and domestic policing practices and knowledge continued to shape British policing ideas and practices throughout the 20th century’ as well as in the transformation of state structures, state security apparatuses and anti-terror practices globally. They further call to challenge the universal authority claims of Western theory and to the ‘worlding’ of African and other peripheral experiences – that is, showing how they are an integral part of the global part and should not be seen as an ‘exotic exception’ (Hönke and Müller 2012, p. 390) – and substantiate this agenda by offering three methodological steps for sensitising security studies to the post-colonial condition: 1. Changing the direction and logics of research and conceptual applications, e.g. by analysing, possibly comparatively, a given problem in Western centres as well;

86  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding 2. A practice-oriented approach that considers how policies and technologies are ‘locally understood, interpreted and transformed through practices of translation, appropriation and/or resistance’; and 3. The use of ethnographic method, not as a positivist data gathering tool but as a way to understand emic perspectives and understandings (Hönke and Müller 2012, pp. 392‒5). This special issue and the authors’ subsequent cooperative and individual works have further deepened critical post-colonial inquiry into security cooperation and also statebuilding interventions. Yet, they have also remained in the descriptive logic to which decolonial approaches can offer a productive extension. Further contributions in IR and political science have broadened and deepened the conceptual and empirical forays of the post-colonial approach to security studies. Persaud and Sajed’s (2018) collection, for instance, elucidates the important role of race, gender and culture in understanding the making of the contemporary world order and its (post-) colonial forms of exclusion and oppression. Focusing particularly on security studies, Persaud’s chapter (Persaud and Sajed 2018, chapter 9) demonstrates how the construction of countries and regions as requiring anti-terror or humanitarian intervention clearly subscribes to a racialising logic, as do the conduct of these policies and practices. In a similar way, Rutazibwa and Shilliam propose ‘postcolonial politics’ as a critical heuristic device that enables a ‘double re-engagement with global politics as both historically constituted through colonialism and presently delineated by struggles over colonial legacies’ (Rutazibwa and Shilliam 2018, p. 1). They also make important additional proposals for the engagement with perspectives at the fringe or outside of the Anglosphere (the English-speaking former British commonwealth countries), the need to acknowledge work and activism outside of academia and intellectual circles, which also serves the attempt to avoid the ‘silencing’ and ‘exclusion of voices’, and finally, the idea of moving beyond the deconstruction of Eurocentric theory and real-world politics towards [sic] ‘a creative (re) construction of alternatives’, which also points to the synergies with decolonial theory (Rutazibwa and Shilliam 2018, pp. 2‒10). While these works, as well as others in political science (see Ziai 2016, especially chapters 12 and 13; Rutazibwa 2014) provide important insights and entry points into, or at least overlaps with, a critical and decolonial inquiry into intervention and statebuilding processes, they only approximate the more focused and explicit decolonial perspectives that I discuss in the final section.

DECOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES: BETWEEN DECOLONISING AND REJECTING INTERVENTIONS The preceding sections have provided a sketch of critical and post-colonial approaches in fields of social inquiry pertaining to statebuilding and intervention and, specifically, showed how these approaches exhibited the continuing operation of colonial methods of domination and violence through contemporary technologies of intervention, whether direct or indirect, ranging from military combat and counterinsurgency to political and development assistance. Decolonial scholarship generally shares this sensibility but differs in its arguments on what is to be done in the light of the continued reproduction of global modern-colonial regimes of domination. The shared basic assumption is expressed in the conceptual unity of

Decolonial ‘interventions’?  87 modernity-coloniality put forward by decolonial theorists and initially proposed by Anibal Quijano: [T]he modern world-system that began to form with the colonization of [Latin] America, has in common three central elements that affect the quotidian life of the totality of the global population: the coloniality of power, capitalism, and Eurocentrism.… Its globality means that there is a basic level of common social practices and a central sphere of common value orientation for the entire world. (Quijano 2000, p. 545)

This thought is further developed by Walter Mignolo, who concludes that coloniality is the ‘darker side of modernity’ and that ‘[c]oloniality… is constitutive of modernity – there is no modernity without coloniality’ (Mignolo 2011, p. 3). The ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano) or ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Mignolo) operates, as Mignolo (2011, p. 9) further elaborates, in different domains in which they have been further discussed by other decolonial thinkers. Besides the economy and general policy and order-making, these include the global geo- and body-politics operating through race, gender and sexuality (with important works by Gloria Anzaldúa and Maria Lugones) and finally, knowledge, subjectivity and being (discussed in works of Sylvia Wynter and Nelson Maldonado-Torres). Decolonial theory differs perhaps most sharply in the implications of this analytical perspective that it puts forward. These are, broadly speaking, a delinking of life from the colonial matrix of power and, relatedly, the act of decolonising all spheres of life. In Mignolo’s words, ‘decolonial thinking and doing focus on the enunciation, engaging in epistemic disobedience and delinking from the colonial matrix in order to open up decolonial options – a vision of life and society that requires decolonial subjects, decolonial knowledges, and decolonial institutions’ (Mignolo 2011, p. 10). Concretely, this implies, on the level of knowledge production, the devising of more inclusive approaches that are specifically targeted at the uncovering and telling of stories of the people who have been marginalised, silenced and dehumanised in Western- and Eurocentric accounts of history (Mignolo 2011, p. xxx; Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 208). This has most significantly been accomplished in the work of the scholar and activist Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2008) and in cognate scholarly cooperation with indigenous resistance movements (see Rutazibwa and Shilliam 2018, pp.  8‒9). On the level of social practice and organisation, ‘delinking’ and ‘decolonising’ can imply, as indicated by Mignolo (2011, p. 5), ‘opening up global but noncapitalist horizons and delinking from the idea that there is a single and primary modernity surrounded by peripheral or alternative ones’. This anti-capitalist strand of decolonial theory, which is linked to Arturo Escobar’s work on post-development theory and presents possible synergy with Marxist theory and political movements (see Rutazibwa and Shilliam 2018, p. 6), is still underdeveloped but points towards a more fundamental critique of contemporary economic, foreign and development cooperation and policy-making in general, and the limits and pitfalls of statebuilding and intervention policies in particular. In the remainder of this section, I introduce the two scholars whose work presents the most substantial merging of decolonial theory and statebuilding and intervention approaches. The first one, Meera Sabaratnam has based her work on ‘decolonising intervention’ in Mozambique on a decolonial critique and re-consideration of what she argues is a Eurocentric critique of the ‘liberal peace’ model of international intervention and statebuilding (Sabaratnam 2017, chapter 2; 2013). This critique is particularly directed at the analytical ‘bypassing’ of the ‘targets of intervention’ in the above-mentioned work of Mark Duffield, and also David

88  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Chandler; an ‘ontology of otherness’ predicated on the distinctiveness of Western interveners and the non-modern and non-liberal character of ‘the local’; and critical scholars’ epistemic alignment with interveners because of which there is ‘little real difference’ between proposed alternative visions ‘and those that practitioners of interventions themselves hold’ (Sabaratnam 2017, pp.  23‒34, 34). Borrowing from twentieth-century decolonial thinkers, Sabaratnam develops three strategies to overcome these limitations and reconstruct the ‘political subjecthood’ of the targets of intervention (Sabaratnam 2017, pp. 41‒54): 1. Recovering Mozambique’s historical presence embedded in a series of ‘projects modern rule and social organization’, which foreground a better understanding of ‘continuity and change, of interpretive and practical significance which reframe many of the issues surrounding international intervention’; 2. Engaging with political consciousness in its multiplicity, relationality and mundaneness; and 3. Investigating the material realities and their production through ‘asymmetric relations of hierarchy, income and production’ from the colonial past to contemporary intervention regimes. Admitting to the limitation that proportionately much of her study ‘is drawn from elite material’, Sabaratnam maintains that it still has the potential to realise the ambition of reflecting the ‘polyphonic, plural and politicised’ nature of interventions (Sabaratnam 2017, p. 48). In her empirical chapters, Sabaratnam presents a substantive picture of the perspective of the ‘targets of intervention’ and how for them, interventions and conditionality regimes in Mozambique have not only failed their proclaimed goals, but in many ways, appear as having agendas and interests that countervail, contradict or are indifferent to the lifeworlds of ordinary Mozambicans. This becomes most obvious through Sabaratnam’s engagement with the peasantry, who, as she shows, have suffered most from agricultural development assistance programmes promoting the ‘production for the market’ but leaving farmers at loss when harvest or sales expectations were not met (Sabaratnam 2017, pp. 97‒9), and whose initiatives for food price stabilisation and input subsidisation are suppressed by donors who resort to the very same measures in their domestic economies (p. 107). It is also apparent in the economy of luxury consumption created by international intervention and aid industry, and the capitalist mode of accumulation and increasing trends of ‘greed’ and ‘bloodsucking’ that are associated with interveners, and in turn render their anti-corruption and good governance unviable (2017, chapter 6). This also fuels the ambition to reduce dependency on particular donors and re-gain control of policy agendas, if necessary through ‘donor shopping’ and playing different donors against each other (chapter 4). Sabaratnam’s final conclusion is, then, that decolonising intervention means, conceptually, ‘abandoning its central intellectual assumptions… in order to remake a terrain for solidaritsic engagement and… to make a case for a redistributive postcolonial ethical order, which recognises forms of collective historic responsibility’, including through ‘historically engaged reparations working on healing what Mignolo and others have called “the colonial wound”’ (Sabaratnam 2017, pp. 142‒3). Her suggestion, which may sound surprisingly non-radical to some, is that such a utopian order can, at least partly, be brought about by more consequentially avoiding duplication, repetition and tokenistic technical assistance, by better complying to the existing agreements on aid harmonisation and ownership and fighting against Western countries’ hypocritical stance on agricultural subsidies and offshore finance (p. 144). However, taken together with ideas of autonomy and self-determination and accepting the basic assump-

Decolonial ‘interventions’?  89 tion that economies will always somehow be linked, this points to a horizon of decoloniality within the existing international order and based on progressive initiatives therein. The challenge posed by the embeddedness of international intervention contexts in the international political economy also overshadows the second case of decolonial intervention and statebuilding research. Based on a number of previous works in decolonial and feminist peace and conflict studies, the German scholar and activist Mechthild Exo casts the contrariness of international intervention policies and grassroots organisations in Afghanistan in even more distinct terms than Sabaratnam does. Under the title Bypassed knowledge: A decolonial critique of liberal peacebuilding through grassroots organisations in Afghanistan, Exo seeks to present these organisations’ ‘visions for a different peace’ and ‘a different way of building up society’, with a clear commitment to women’s rights and equality (Exo 2017, p. 13).1 Similar to Sabaratnam, Exo aspires to decolonise existing accounts by ‘giving a presence to [her partners’] perspectives which have been treated as insignificant and non-rational, and therefore as non-existent’ as they contradict the orthodoxy of the liberal peace and capitalist modernity (p. 18): Not only the military intervention but also other elements of liberal peacebuilding are rejected. This concerns the approach to statebuilding, economic restructuring and transformation of numerous societal spheres. [Her partners] experience the international intervention as humanitarian disaster directed against the people. They call out as a lie the legitimation of external interference in the name of women’s liberation, human rights and democracy, and they analyse the practice of peacebuilding as destructive and colonial. (Exo 2017, p. 11)

This strong verdict is substantiated in the empirical chapters that present the work of four grassroots organisations in detail. Exo shows, for instance, how the Social Association of Afghan Justice Seekers makes crucial demands for more consequential justice without which there will be no governmental legitimacy and stability, or how the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan exposes perpetrators of violence in government, for which, as Exo argues, there is no tenable justification from a transitional justice point of view. While these would be important insights even from the perspective of supporters of the (neo-) liberal orthodoxy of intervention and statebuilding Afghanistan, Exo acknowledges that her epistemic and methodological approach does not subscribe to the scientific standards of mainstream peace and conflict research: With my research, I consciously depart from acknowledged methods of knowledge acquisition (epistemology). I did not do research from a distanced, neutral role but have become involved politically, socially and emotionally.… In so doing, I am guided by a relational epistemology (Smith 2008, …), in which knowledge is based on the building up of respectful, reciprocal, caring, social and emotional relations. (Exo 2017, p. 12)

This methodological approach, she continues, also requires a ‘political positioning’ for the ‘decolonisation of the global order’ and a readiness to give up the ‘authority of scientific writing’ and the ‘privilege to have the last word’ (Exo 2017, p. 12). This, in particular, includes the ‘right to interpret, categorise, evaluate and present the data gathered in so-called fieldwork without subsequent communicative cooperation and consensus with the researched’ (p. 12).



1

All translations from German are the author’s.

90  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding This self-understanding of the researcher as a ‘mouthpiece’ (Exo 2017, p. 76) who, based on a dialogical knowledge production process and activist involvement with partner organisations (see Lottholz 2018, p. 705), documents and ‘(re-) narrates’ the histories, positions and future visions of grassroots organisations serves to situate the researcher in the political landscape and the struggles around statebuilding and intervention domestically and in its embeddedness in the international political economy of intervention. Consequently, Exo’s positions are as political, partial and subjective as those of the organisations. As I have argued elsewhere, this is, however, the key point about activist research from a decolonial perspective: the idea is not to produce a ‘better’ account of reality but rather to ‘let go of the empiricist imagination that there is one “reality”, which can have an accurate reflection that foregrounds possible action’ (Lottholz 2018, p. 705). Relatedly, this also means that decolonial scholars and their partners in the field do not seek to impose decoloniality as a new paradigm that subsumes and replaces all other ways of thinking, as it could be conceived in a lifecycle model of scientific paradigms from a Kuhnian perspective. As Mignolo and Walsh posit: ‘Decoloniality… is not a new paradigm or mode of critical thought. It is a way, option, standpoint, analytic, project, practice, and praxis’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 5). This also means that suggestions for actions and practice are not detailed beyond the demanded corrections of existing policies and actions. This at least holds true for Exo’s research, which documents and re-affirms her partner organisations’ rejection of the international intervention as a project of neo-colonial domination and calls out its particular mistakes and failures in transitional justice or the forging of alliances with warlords. Exo also reviews the literature on the Afghanistan intervention and the liberal peace more generally and indicates the divide between those who, despite all failures and contradictions, advocate for continued attempts to improve and thus somehow save the liberal peace interventions, and those who decidedly reject it all along (Exo 2017, p. 391). Yet, what should replace the current liberal peace intervention in Afghanistan or what kind of policy should be administered in place of intervention in the next similar scenario is not answered in Exo’s account. This is understandable to the extent that, from a decolonial perspective, neither civil wars and conflicts that the world is currently facing, nor the modern ‘war states’ and other forces that have precipitated them, should be existing in the first place. They are the most concrete and brutal expression of ‘modernity-coloniality’ and the lethal violence of the capitalist system as it has been built up and reproduced for centuries. Decolonial theory and praxis, and analogous approaches in peace, conflict, statebuilding and intervention studies, are not interested in a type of ‘mainstreaming’ (Cárdenas 2016), through which they would help to right the wrongs of the ‘liberal peace’ or the illiberal, authoritarian and corporate regimes of oppression, exploitation and killing it has helped create. As I have shown above, decolonial scholarship is primarily concerned with the decolonising of knowledge and knowledge production through the development of analytical, methodological and epistemological approaches that help give voice to excluded perspectives. Showing the degree to which these perspectives and lifeworlds are remote and incommensurable with current standards and practices of research and policy in statebuilding and intervention, as well as exhibiting the level of violence – whether epistemic, structural or physical – the international system is built upon and reproduces, is the core contribution of decolonial approaches. This may be unsatisfactory for those who see in decolonial theory a potential source of innovation and improvement of international intervention and statebuilding. Although the conclusions in Sabaratnam’s work point to such a scenario, the overall conclusion is that a decolonial

Decolonial ‘interventions’?  91 approach to social inquiry and to understanding contemporary life as such rejects all forms of intervention and statebuilding that currently exist in the international system. In this sense, ‘decolonial intervention’ in the policy arena is a true oxymoron and the term is only thinkable in an intellectual sense. When it comes to practical applications of the decolonial ethos, these are most likely to be feasible in spaces and practices that are de-linked from the global capitalist order. In another work, Exo has indicated that the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, known as Rojava ‘is an example for the building of a new order, which defies supposedly universal patterns (statehood with electoral system and neoliberal market economy)’ – as well as ethnically discriminating and patriarchal practices – and ‘consequentially adopts direct democratic, gender-liberated and increasingly ecological approaches’ (Exo and Heine 2017, p. 12). Although the attempts of self-organisation in autonomous areas of Rojava and also Afrin were not without discontents and have unfortunately fallen victim to Turkish occupation, they point to the fact that the building up of ‘de-linked’ social orders indeed seems most feasible in sub-state autonomous territories or in the contexts of nations which manage to shield themselves from the agendas and interests of geopolitical and corporate actors.

CONCLUSION The aim of this chapter was to outline the intellectual challenge that decolonial approaches pose to statebuilding and intervention research, and, relatedly, the challenge that their rejection of international intervention – seen as part of the modern-colonial capitalist system – poses to policy and practice in this sphere. As I have indicated, this rejection, disengagement and opting for a ‘delinking’ from the system is not the overarching and not the only position within the broad spectrum of decolonial thinking. On the contrary, scholars have also developed ways in which contemporary practices of social ordering and specifically knowledge production can be decolonised. As illustrated by the two key works discussed in the final section, such a decolonising is possible through the devising of epistemological and methodological approaches that, akin to feminist standpoint theory and indigenous methodologies (as in Smith 2008), engages with the people subject to intervention – in Sabaratnam’s words, with the targets of intervention – to give voice to their perspectives, concerns and visions of alternative ways of building societal order and institutions. As I have shown, this can lead to the revelation of different degrees of disenfranchisement and, possibly, outright rejection of international intervention and statebuilding policies, as well as related aid and technical assistance programmes. I have further demonstrated that the concrete implications drawn from such challenges to and rejections of current policies vary between propositions for more coherent, solidaristic and reparative policies within the system (Sabaratnam) or potentially more extra- or para-systemically oriented measures (Exo). The impact of decolonial interventions in statebuilding and intervention studies, as well as the surveyed related fields and disciplines remains to be seen. Yet, it is not unlikely that some degree of reception will take place and lead to various forms of interpretation, (re) appropriation and, consequently, ‘mainstreaming’ (Cárdenas 2016) of decolonial theory. As I have indicated, this may not be entirely in the sense originally intended by decolonial theorists. However, as the survey of entry points and potentialities for decolonial inquiry in peace, conflict, security and peace- and statebuilding intervention studies, as well as political science and IR more generally, has shown, this would also serve to further advance the idea of decolonising social research and thereby create a basis

92  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding for the more inclusive, context-sensitive and sustainable approaches to building peace that much scholarship is aiming for.

REFERENCES Barkawi, T. and M. Laffey (1999), ‘The imperial peace: Democracy, force and globalization’, European Journal of International Relations, 5 (4), 403‒34. Barkawi, T. and M. Laffey (2006), ‘The postcolonial moment in security studies’, Review of International Studies, 32 (2), 329‒52. Cárdenas, M. (2016), ‘Mainstreaming decolonialism? Zum mehrwert einer dekolonialen FuK’ [Mainstreaming decolonialism? On the added value of a decolonial peace and conflict studies], Wissenschaft & Frieden [Science & Peace], 1, 20‒3. Denskus, T. (2007), ‘Peacebuilding does not build peace’, Development in Practice, 17 (4‒5), 656‒62. Duffield, M. (2001), Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Security and Development, London: Zed Books. Exo, M. (2017), Das übergangene Wissen Eine dekoloniale Kritik des liberalen Peacebuilding durch basispolitische Organisationen in Afghanistan [Bypassed Knowledge: A Decolonial Critique of Liberal Peacebuilding through Grassroots Organisations in Afghanistan], Bielefeld: Transcript. Exo, M. and Y. Heine (2017), ‘Geschlechter befreiende Friedensordnungen am Beispiel Afghanistan und Nordsyrien’ [Gender-liberating peace and conflict research at the example of Afghanistan and Northern Syria], frauen*solidarität [women’s*solidarity], 4, 9‒12. Grimm, S., N. Lemay-Hébert and O. Nay (eds) (2014), ‘Fragile states: A political concept’, Special Issue, Third World Quarterly, 35 (2), 197‒344. Hönke, J. and M. M. Müller (2012), ‘Governing (in) security in a postcolonial world: Transnational entanglements and the worldliness of “local” practice’, Security Dialogue, 43 (5), 383‒401. Jabri, V. (2013), ‘Peacebuilding, the local and the international: A colonial or a postcolonial rationality?’, Peacebuilding, 1 (1), 3‒16. Jutila, M., S. Pehkonen and T. Väyrynen (2008), ‘Resuscitating a discipline: An agenda for critical peace research’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 36 (3), 623‒40. Lottholz, P. (2018), ‘Critiquing anthropological imagination in peace and conflict studies: From empiricist positivism to a dialogical approach in ethnographic peace research’, International Peacekeeping, 25 (5), 695‒720. Mignolo, W. D. (2011), The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. D. and A. Escobar (2013), Globalization and the Decolonial Option, Abingdon: Routledge. Mignolo, W. D. and C. Walsh (2018), On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Durham: Duke University Press. Persaud, R. and A. Sajed (2018), Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives, Abingdon: Routledge. Quijano, A. (2000), ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South, 1 (3), 533‒80. Rutazibwa, O. U. (2014), ‘Studying Agaciro: Moving beyond Wilsonian interventionist knowledge production on Rwanda’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 8 (4), 291‒302. Rutazibwa, O. U. and R. Shilliam (ed.) (2018), Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, Abingdon: Routledge. Sabaratnam, M. (2013), ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’, Security Dialogue, 44 (3), 259‒78. Sabaratnam, M. (2017), Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Smith, L. T. (2008), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books. Turner, M. and F. P. Kühn (eds) (2016), The Politics of International Intervention: The Tyranny of Peace, Abingdon: Routledge. Turner, M. and O. Shweiki (eds) (2014), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-Development and Beyond, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ziai, A. (ed.) (2016), Postkoloniale Politikwissenschaft [Postcolonial Political Science], Bielefeld: Transcript.

10. Democracy promotion and statebuilding Sonja Grimm

INTRODUCTION Traditional statebuilding missions have focused on the (re)construction of effective autonomous governance structures in a state or territory where no such capacity exists or where it has been seriously eroded (Caplan 2005a, p. 3). Since the 1990s, a comprehensive approach to statebuilding also includes the development of widely supported, legitimate state institutions, the free and fair selection and legitimization of leading political elites, and the empowerment of lively democratic civil communities from above and below (Grimm 2010). In this vein, through democracy promotion, external actors seek to achieve various aims such as to balance conflicting interests of warring factions and make them share political power, to develop institutional solutions for peaceful political decision-making, to constrain elite behaviour through institutionalized political procedures, and to educate a broader public in human rights and civic values. Following a ‘liberal paradigm’ (Paris 2004; Chandler 2010), external actors complement statebuilding with the promotion of democracy. However, not all good things go – timely and conceptually – together. In most of the cases, democracy promotion is not as successful as originally assumed, in either scope or pace of implementing democratic institutions and supervising domestic elites playing according to the new democratic rules (Grimm and Leininger 2012). Furthermore, democratization can be challenged by equally important goals like security, stability, and economic liberalization (Grimm 2010). And finally, the universal ideas of self-administration and local responsibility may clash with the external actors’ wish for quick democratization by following the role models of Western consolidated democracies and thereby by-passing the right of local population’s self-administration (Carothers 1999; Chandler 2006). Thus, the main questions that peace, conflict and transition studies (Caplan 2005a; Chandler 2006, 2010; Grimm 2010; Gromes 2009; Kumar and de Zeeuw 2006; Paris 2004; Tansey 2009; Zürcher et al. 2013; among others) try to answer are the following: To which extent is democracy promotion an adequate tool to complement statebuilding in post-conflict societies? Are there any alternatives to democratic rule in these contexts? How and to which extent can democratization in a post-conflict society be successfully supported from the outside?1 1 The term ‘post-conflict society’ that is used here is in a way misleading: It does not mean that the conflict is solved and violence has completely ceased. By convention, ‘post-conflict’ usually denotes societies affected by armed conflicts, where parts of the conflict are dealt with when the warring parties agree upon a ceasefire or a peace-treaty. Nevertheless, the root causes of the conflict still need to be addressed, and some parties may even continue to use violence in order to push their interests through. To avoid the misnomer problem, some authors use the term ‘post-war society’ to refer to situations where the major warfare has ceased, but where incompatible issues may remain unsolved (Jarstad 2008, p. 20, footnote 3). However, the term ‘post-war’ only includes types of war with regular warfare like in the case of interstate or intrastate war, but excludes large-scale atrocities including genocide or one-sided violence against unarmed civilians, what is in many of the investigated societies the type of violent con-

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DEMOCRACY AND DEMOCRATIZATION IN POST-CONFLICT SOCIETIES When external actors are confronted with the task of assisting post-conflict recovery, besides building a strong and effective state through statebuilding and supporting socio-economic development through the supply of socio-economic assistance, they also seek to build a new and legitimate political system. This new system should be based on the will of the people, guarantee the people’s lives and integrity, and prevent the reoccurrence of violent conflict. Therefore, this new system cannot be authoritarian, but must be democratic (Burnell 2000, 2008; Newman and Rich 2004). To summarize the complex history of democracy theory (see for example Held’s seminal book, Models of Democracy (1996)) and link it to post-conflict recovery, one can state that democracy offers the means for legitimately regulating change (and thus hopefully addressing the root causes of conflict and preventing the reoccurrence of violence). ‘Legitimately regulating’ means the following: First, a democratic system provides rules for the selection of political representatives aiding the formation of a legitimate and representative government, thereby removing the need for costly armed fighting for access to political power. Second, it entails fixed procedures for non-violent decision-making supported by all parties. Consequently, undesired decision-making outcomes become acceptable – under the condition that the same party does not always lose (for the first two points see Dahl’s Polyarchy (1971)). Third, a liberal democratic political system is based on the protection of political rights and civil liberties. In the sense of negative rights, a democratic system protects life and property of each individual inhabitant who lives under a political regime. In the sense of positive freedoms, it allows for participation in preference-formation, interest-aggregation, decision-making, as well as for the selection of political representatives. It therefore acts as a channel for making different voices equally heard and considered (Berlin 2002; Holmes 1995). Finally, democratic rule allows the people to hold political representatives accountable. In a consolidated democracy, decision-makers are peacefully selected, but also deselected by means of democratic elections. Furthermore, in constitutional forms of democracy, horizontal (like the checks and balances system of tripartite executive, judicative and legislative power) and vertical (like the subdivision in federal, regional and communal administrative levels) linkages strengthen the mechanism of mutual control (Ratner 2000; Schmitter 2004; Schmitter and Karl 1991). Democratization can be defined as the process of, first, drafting and implementing democratic rules, or in other words ‘democratic institutions’, and, second, changing attitudes and behaviour of decision-makers and voters constrained by these rules (Huntington 1991; O’Donnell and Schmitter 1989; Whitehead 2002). Consequently, in a post-conflict context, democratization means to replace authoritarian, clientelistic, or solely rent-seeking behaviour through fair and transparent political decision-making on the basis of legitimate political institutions and to democratically empower political actors on all levels of the political system, nationally and locally. The structural and institutional challenges a post-conflict society faces are manifold, and post-conflict contexts are hardly conducive to democratization (Fortna 2008, p. 46). First,

flict to be observed. Thus, I prefer the term ‘post-conflict society’, keeping in mind that the root causes of violent conflict in these societies still have to be addressed in order to prevent renewed violence.

Democracy promotion and statebuilding  95 failed security and state structures need to be rebuilt after violent conflict and must include demobilization, disarmament and reintegration of former combatants and the training of a new military and police. Second, war economy structures need to be transformed into peace economy structures as a basis for socio-economic recovery. Third, corruption needs to be fought and a functioning rule of law system to be installed. Fourth, the political system needs to be reorganized and a basis for future cooperation and compromise needs to be found (here, democratization in a narrow sense takes place). Fifth, in societies where violent conflict has exacerbated political, ethnical, religious, or socio-economic cleavages inter-community trust must be built (Grimm 2008, pp. 538‒44). Constitutional reform and democratic founding elections form the nucleus of institutionalizing democracy. By drafting a new democratic constitution, representatives of the formerly warring factions negotiate a compromise on the design of the future political system, the protection of civil and political human rights, and on checks and balances for mutual control. Through democratic elections, new representatives are selected and government coalitions legitimately formed. In many post-conflict societies, however, it is challenging to guarantee fully free and fair elections immediately following war, as elections might overrule already threatened minorities and return to power the political elites who had plunged the country into a bloodbath (Kumar and de Zeeuw 2006, p. 4; Reilly 2004). Here, power-sharing trumps pure democratic selection by a consensually pre-arranged comprehensive representation of all conflict parties. Such power-sharing instruments include means for minority protection (e.g. political, social and cultural group rights and fixed participation ratios in parliament and government), the design of a consensus democracy instead of a majoritarian one (executive power-sharing, proportional representation, veto rights in legislature, and arbitral jurisdiction for the case of protracted interest conflict), and territorial solutions (like federalism, autonomy, or even state secession) (Hartzell and Hoddie 2015; Jarstad and Nilsson 2008; Lijphart 1999; Roeder and Rothchild 2005). Beyond this institutional core external actors also promote the actor-side of democratization. They support the empowerment of political actors, for example by promoting the development of political parties and the training of delegates to assemblies, and they invest in control organs. This includes the promotion of free media and civil society organizations at both local and national levels (Erdmann 2006; Gershman 2004; Kumar 2005, 2006). These programmes are accompanied by the hope for a spread of democratic thinking and behaviour to all the other areas requiring reform in post-conflict societies. Obviously, the success of democratization is closely linked to success in other reform areas; otherwise substantial problems remain and place the emerging democratic regime under stress. This concerns for example the challenge of building a political community. Linz and Stepan (1996) argue that – without clarifying (and certifying) who belongs to the political community and is therefore allowed to vote and to be elected – one cannot rule a country democratically. The representativeness of the government will always be questioned and those who were defeated in an election will never accept the decision. The unsolved question of citizenship will constantly be brought to the table and, as the examples of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Gromes 2009) and Kosovo (Tansey 2007, 2009) have already shown, this can even threaten state survival. Practitioners regularly argue that young democracies emerging from violent conflict are overwhelmed by the mere amount of reform tasks and challenges with which their ruling elites are confronted. Therefore, they ask for the prioritization of external efforts (Grimm and Leininger 2012). But what should come first: security, socio-economic development, the

96  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding building of a political community or democracy? In my mind, it is almost impossible to give one area priority at the expense of another. One risks unintended negative spill-over effects and in the worst case even the complete blockage of the process (Grimm 2008). These blockades occur in particular when important aspects are not clarified in one area that serves as a prerequisite for further development in another area. Take for example the case of the return and reintegration of refugees and displaced persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the 1991‒1995 Yugoslav secession wars that ended with the 1995 Dayton peace agreement. Without the guarantee of political and civil rights and the clarification of property rights most of the refugees and displaced persons could not and would not return to their home of origin. However, the incumbent parties delayed passing the necessary legal acts in the early post-conflict years. In turn, urgently needed workers did not return, which further retarded economic recovery. The emerging democracy failed to produce socio-economic success, which undermined its legitimacy and even challenged the survival of the federal state as a whole (for more details on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s difficult path to democracy see Divjak and Pugh 2008; Gromes 2009, among others).

POST-CONFLICT DEMOCRATIZATION THROUGH DEMOCRACY PROMOTION Insofar as reforming a post-conflict society is such a challenging task, all major conflict resolution enterprises after 1990 have been assisted from the outside (Grimm 2010; Zürcher et al. 2013). When external actors (such as international and regional organizations, Western consolidated democracies, their state agencies, and non-governmental organizations) support statebuilding as a means to conflict resolution, they combine their engagement mostly with a liberal democratic agenda as described above. However, their request to support – and in some cases even to impose democracy from the outside – is challenged by classical democratization theory. Building on the seminal work of Rustow (1970), renowned transition experts like Higley and Burton (1989), O’Donnell and Schmitter (1989), Przeworski (1991, 1992) and Merkel (2004) see democratization foremost as an endogenous process driven by internal elite settlements and based on a comprehensive elite consensus on democratic institutions. Higley and Burton (1989) argue that an elite consensus on decision-making procedures, basic values and the required reform programme is necessary for successful democratization. In the long run, such a consensus allows for cooperation, trust-building and the capacity to compromise what in turn guarantees the survival of democracy, or in other words, the permanent elites’ compliance with new democratic rules of the game. And because the political elites follow the rules, it is claimed that the people will also accept democracy as a legitimate political system. Furthermore, Merkel (2004) states that the larger the elite consensus, the more stable and the less vulnerable democracy becomes. Without such an internal elite consensus the country would risk falling back into authoritarianism or at best stabilize as a democracy with defects. Przeworski (1991, pp. 61‒4) perceives democratization as a result of permanently changing strategic situations where members of the old regime and their political opponents try to push through their interests. In this perspective, democratization is an outcome of rationally behaving actors who either consent to democracy or who misperceive their chances to maintain power or to obtain access to power and therefore accept democratic reforms. In the latter case,

Democracy promotion and statebuilding  97 democratization results when the hardliners of the old regime overestimate their power and accept reform demands because they believe themselves able to manage the transition from above without the political cost of losing elections. Regime and opposition elites also negotiate pacts in order to reduce the uncertainty about their future political influence. Whichever approach one prefers, Higley and Burton’s and Merkel’s empirical-descriptive or Przeworski’s deductive-analytical one, both strands agree that democratization must be an internally driven process. This opinion challenges the concept of successful democracy promotion on post-conflict societies. Therefore, recent analysis in peace, conflict and transition studies seeks to answer the question of whether external actors can alter internal elites’ interests and preferences in favour of democratization and if external actors can successfully support (or even impose) the development of democratic institutions. Empirical research about post-conflict democracy promotion suggests that formal institutions like democratic elections and constitutions can relatively easily be installed with external help (Bell 2017; Steinert and Grimm 2015; Wittke 2018). However, the consolidation of formal political institutions is much more difficult. Thus, the emerging democracy suffers from a constant risk of institutional failure that in turn could provoke relapse into war and violent conflict. Furthermore, the majority of countries in crisis remain dependent on external help even after the withdrawal of military troops. However, despite these donor dependencies, external actors seem hardly to be able to guarantee in the long run a stable peace on the basis of a consolidated democracy, no matter which type of external oversight has been used. Nor can external actors completely compensate for deficits caused by self-interested internal elites with nationalistic or economic agendas who profit more from an unstable insecure status of ongoing transition instead of a stable, rule-of-law-based consolidated democracy (Zürcher 2018; Zürcher et al. 2013).

CHALLENGES OF POST-CONFLICT DEMOCRACY PROMOTION The mixed results of post-conflict democracy promotion can be explained, on the one hand, through the challenging process of democratization itself and, on the other hand, through the performance of external actors. To begin with the challenging process of democratization itself, one has to bear in mind that first, democratization targets, according to Dahl and others, the introduction of competition in the political arena, clearly an antipode to stability and thus a challenge for an unstable post-conflict society. Przeworski et al. (1996, p. 51) characterize democratic contestation as a process of ex ante uncertainty and ex post irreversibility. They state thereby that only the procedural means like electoral suffrage and political decision-making are known, but not the ends. Thus, conflicting parties can never be sure if their interest will be respected in decision-making, and, once a decision is taken, they cannot reverse it. In post-conflict societies such open-endedness and insecurity can lead to the risk of renewing violent conflict. In this regard it is no wonder that experts in international relations show that countries in transition have a higher risk of violent conflict and that these countries can also become a source of destabilization for neighbouring countries. The combination of increasing mass political participation and weak political institutions may create the motive and the opportunity for both rising and declining elites to play the nationalist card in an attempt to rally popular support against domestic and foreign rivals (Collier et al. 2008; Mansfield and Snyder 2009; Snyder 2000).

98  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Second, democratic elections by definition legitimize the elected representatives, even when these representatives do not comply with a democratic agenda, but are, for example, nationalist, radical or authoritarian. They can even award factions preferring violent means of conflict resolution (Jarstad 2008, p. 22) or playing the double game of politics and violence (Höglund et al. 2009, p. 538). Electoral success of anti-democratic forces can thus reduce room for further democratic development; authoritarian backlashes and even the breakdown of democratic rule become both possible and realistic (Manning and Antić 2003; Reilly 2002). Third, power-sharing instruments may be good to begin the transition to democracy and peace. Mostly, such carefully balanced institutional arrangements are the only way out of conflict. According to Rothchild and Roeder (2005) the consensus of all warring factions becomes a powerful signal of committing to resolve future disputes peacefully. But the same power-sharing institutions may be unstable and produce incentives to escalate future ethnic conflicts to more destructive levels. Rothchild and Roeder (2005, p. 13) show that oversized all-party governments with mutual vetoes may erode the efficiency of government over the longer term and increase the likelihood of decision-making deadlock, while proportional representation rules in parliament may hinder interethnic cooperation, and autonomous regions may become states within the state with a potential to sabotage the central government. Even worse, in many cases domestic civil society organizations who might moderate the political process are excluded from power-sharing (Jarstad 2008, p. 23). Finally, as mentioned above, democracy needs a decision of who belongs to the citizenry. Failure to build a political community can provoke constant struggle over ‘belongingness’ and participation rights, and sometimes even the very existence of the state is questioned (Linz and Stepan 1996; Rustow 1970, p. 351). And when the survival of the state is substantially questioned, democratic rules can hardly unfold to their full potential to complement statebuilding. Beyond the challenges that are inherent to democratization, poor performance of external actors can also worsen the situation in a post-conflict society. First, most statebuilding missions lack accountability to the citizens in the target state. Democracy promotion as a form of external oversight and control often ignores the need for local ownership of institution-building. An intervention that is blind to local needs and fears, risks increasing support for extremism and problematic forms of ethno-nationalism (Caplan 2005b; Jarstad 2008, p. 24). Second, de Zeeuw (2005) argues convincingly that ‘projects do not create institutions’. Following de Zeeuw, post-conflict democracy programmes of international donors consist mainly of technical, material and financial assistance as well as short-term project aid. This aid may have spurred the growth of training activities and non-governmental organizations that excel in organizing workshops and seminars, but proves unsustainable and largely insignificant in the wider process of democratization, in particular in sustainable institution-building. Focusing on short-term stability, leadership may be legitimized during well-funded elections, but key issues of political control and regulation often remain unaddressed. Third, the general ‘democracy templates’ used by external actors are often ill-suited to local contexts. Mostly, external actors follow general aid agendas and blueprints without adapting them sensibly to the local context and respecting local traditions for conflict resolution. Finally – and most frequently cited in the literature – donor programmes and activities often lack coherence and coordination despite declarations to the contrary, numerous meetings, and basket funding arrangements. Too little is known about what the other donors do, and sometimes different donor agencies even support contradicting reforms and institutions (Caplan 2005a, pp. 230‒50; Paris 2004, pp. 228‒32).

Democracy promotion and statebuilding  99 To sum up, democracy promotion complementing statebuilding seems not to be a perfect solution for a post-conflict society, and the way it is implemented often does not meet the high expectations of external actors and target societies in a post-conflict context. Nevertheless, it is argued in the next section that despite its flaws democratization remains in the long run without a legitimate alternative in a post-conflict society.

DEBATING THE LEGITIMACY OF POST-CONFLICT DEMOCRATIZATION Is external interference in a transition and reform process after violent conflict legitimate considering the manifold challenges attending post-conflict democratization? Can people in a post-colonial world still be ‘forced to be free’ (Peceny 1999) as was the case for Germany and Japan (Montgomery 1957) after the Second World War? Many analysts today are sceptical. They regard post-conflict statebuilding and democracy promotion – in particular the more intrusive forms – as a new variant of colonialism. In Paris’ (2004, p. 151) eyes, international peace-builders have promulgated a particular vision of how states should organize themselves internally, based on the principles of liberal democracy and market-oriented economy. By reconstructing war-shattered states in accordance with this vision, peace-builders would have effectively transmitted standards of appropriate behaviour from the Western-liberal ‘core’ of the international system to the failed states of the ‘periphery’. Paris (2002, p. 637) states that this form of peace-building resembles an ‘updated (and more benign) version of the “mission civilisatrice”, of the colonial-era belief that the European imperial powers had a duty to “civilise” dependent populations and territories’. Others, like Chandler (2006) and Ignatieff (2003), assess post-conflict state- and democracy-building as new methods of exercising Western power, of the needs of the market, or of ‘empire’ (Chandler 2006) and ‘imperialism’ (Ignatieff 2003). With regard to for example Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan, both authors state that American military power, European money and humanitarian motives have combined to produce a form of imperial rule for a post-colonial age. Most critical here is that, according to both authors, these new forms of ‘empire’ would officially deny any direct political control, and would formally reinforce the legal status of sovereignty. Chandler (2006, p. 15) also argues that these practices might be much more interventionist than those based on contractual relations enforced by market dependency. Such critics have good arguments on their side; however, no one has yet proposed a convincing alternative to post-conflict democratization. Despite fears of foreign domination, there is implicitly a consensus on the fact that democratic rule is the only undisputedly legitimate form of government, appropriate to guarantee a comprehensive agenda of political rights and civil liberties, to allow participation in government and to control those who govern (Plattner 2005, p. 7). No international donor would dare to officially justify an intended building of an authoritarian regime instead of a democratic one – even if the former might be more stable in the short- or mid-term than the latter. And finally, empirical evidence presented by Carbone and Memoli (2015, p. 21) suggests that democratically elected leaders make better state consolidators than authoritarian ones. Thus, democracy should be applied to post-conflict socie-

100  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding ties as a set of legitimate rules for peaceful conflict resolution, but whilst remembering some lessons the international community has learnt from various post-conflict settings. Analysing the challenges and dependencies accompanying external democratization, some experts with experience in post-conflict field missions have proposed guidelines that external actors should follow in order to mitigate the colonialist tendencies of post-conflict statebuilding. First, external actors should integrate a system of checks and balances in their monitoring, supervision and trusteeship systems (Caplan 2005b; Carlowitz 2004). Second, they should strengthen the principle of local ownership and local responsibility for the transition process (Narten 2008). Third, they should share sovereignty by jointly managing offices of the state bureaucracy (Krasner 2004) and ‘partnering’-approaches in security matters. Finally, they should refer to the principle of ‘participatory intervention’ to integrate local communities (Chopra and Hohe 2004). Respecting particular traditions of consensus-building, statebuilding missions could for example integrate community forums that elect consultative boards to guide and provide advice on community affairs (Chopra and Hohe 2004, p. 294). But of course, external actors therefore need in-depth knowledge of the particular case, and they need to decide whom of the warring groups to work with and whom to exclude. This is in no way an easy task.

CONCLUSIONS Post-conflict democracy promotion complementing statebuilding is a challenging endeavour. Its supporters have to deal with awkward questions of legitimacy, effectiveness and efficacy of their democratization enterprise. Nevertheless, democratic rule seems to be in the long run the only legitimate option for the conflicting factions – as far as it offers an institutional solution to violent conflicts based on the participation of all relevant factions. Without such a comprehensive institutional solution, it is my conviction that deep-rooted conflicts that continuously disrupt societies will not be solved. Without political reorganization there remains a high risk for a renewed outburst of violence, with all its devastating consequences, including an intolerable scale of civilian deaths, structural poverty that can hardly be overcome in a war or near-war situation, a lack of prospects for the younger generation and even the risk of conflict spreading over territorial boarders and regional disintegration as a consequence.

REFERENCES Bell, C. (2017), ‘Introduction: Bargaining on constitutions – Political settlements and constitutional state-building’, Global Constitutionalism, 6 (1), 13‒32. Berlin, I. (2002), Liberty. Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnell, P. (ed.) (2000), Democracy Assistance. International Co-operation for Democratization, London: Frank Cass. Burnell, P. (2008), ‘From evaluating democracy assistance to appraising democracy promotion’, Political Studies, 56 (2), 414‒34. Caplan, R. (2005a), International Governance of War-Torn Territories. Rule and Reconstruction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caplan, R. (2005b), ‘Who guards the guardians? International accountability in Bosnia’, International Peacekeeping, 12 (3), 463‒76. Carbone, G. and V. Memoli (2015), ‘Does democratization foster state consolidation? Democratic rule, political order, and administrative capacity’, Governance, 28 (1), 5‒24.

Democracy promotion and statebuilding  101 Carlowitz, L. V. (2004), ‘Crossing the boundary from the international to the domestic legal realm: UNMIK lawmaking and property rights in Kosovo’, Global Governance, 10 (3), 307‒31. Carothers, T. (1999), Aiding Democracy Abroad. The Learning Curve, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Chandler, D. (2006), Empire in Denial. The Politics of State-Building, London: Pluto Press. Chandler, D. (2010), International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-liberal Governance, Abingdon: Routledge. Chopra, J. and T. Hohe (2004), ‘Participatory intervention’, Global Governance, 10 (3), 289‒305. Collier, P., A. Hoeffler and M. Söderbom (2008), ‘Post-conflict risks’, Journal of Peace Research, 45 (4), 461‒78. Dahl, R. A. (1971), Polyarchy. Participation and Opposition, New Haven: Yale University Press. de Zeeuw, J. (2005), ‘Projects do not create institutions: The record of democracy assistance in post-conflict societies’, Democratization, 12 (4), 481‒504. Divjak, B. and M. Pugh (2008), ‘The political economy of corruption in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, International Peacekeeping, 15 (3), 373‒86. Erdmann, G. (2006), ‘Hesitant bedfellows: The German stiftungen and party aid in Africa’, in P. Burnell (ed.), Globalising Democracy. Party Politics in Emerging Democracies, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 181‒99. Fortna, V. P. (2008), ‘Peacekeeping and democratization’, in A. K. Jarstad and T. D. Sisk (eds), From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39‒80. Gershman, C. (2004), ‘Democracy promotion: The relationship of political parties and civil society’, Democratization, 11 (3), 27‒35. Grimm, S. (2008), ‘External democratization after war: Success and failure’, Democratization, 15 (3), 525‒49. Grimm, S. (2010), Erzwungene Demokratie. Politische Neuordnung nach militärischer Intervention unter externer Aufsicht, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Grimm, S. and J. Leininger (2012), ‘Not all good things go together: Conflicting objectives in democracy promotion’, Democratization, 19 (3), 391‒414. Gromes, T. (2009), ‘A case study in “institutionalisation before liberalisation”: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 3 (1), 93‒114. Hartzell, C. A. and M. Hoddie (2015), ‘The art of the possible: Power sharing and post-civil war democracy’, World Politics, 67 (1), 37‒71. Held, D. (1996), Models of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Higley, J. and M. L. Burton (1989), ‘The elite variable in democratic transitions and breakdowns’, American Sociological Review, 54 (1), 17‒32. Höglund, K., A. K. Jarstad and M. Söderberg Kovacs (2009), ‘The predicament of elections in war-torn societies’, Democratization, 16 (3), 530‒57. Holmes, S. (1995), Passions and Constraint. On the Theory of Liberal Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huntington, S. P. (1991), The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Ignatieff, M. (2003), Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovoa and Afghanistan, London: Vintage-Random House. Jarstad, A. K. (2008), ‘Dilemmas of war-to-democracy transitions: Theories and concepts’, in A. K. Jarstad and T. D. Sisk (eds), From War to Democracy. Dilemmas of Peacebuilding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17‒36. Jarstad, A. K. and D. Nilsson (2008), ‘From words to deeds: The implementation of power-sharing pacts in peace accords’, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 25 (3), 206‒23. Krasner, S. D. (2004), ‘Sharing sovereignty: New institutions for collapsed and failing states’, International Security, 29 (2), 85‒120. Kumar, K. (2005), ‘Reflections on international political party assistance’, Democratization, 12 (4), 505‒27. Kumar, K. (2006), ‘International assistance to promote independent media in transition and post-conflict societies’, Democratization, 13 (4), 652‒67. Kumar, K. and J. de Zeeuw (2006), ‘Democracy assistance to postconflict societies’, in J. de Zeeuw amd K. Kumar (eds), Promoting Democracy in Postconflict Societies, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, pp. 1‒21. Lijphart, A. (1999), Patterns of Democracy. Government Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, New Haven: Yale University Press. Linz, J. J. and A. Stepan (1996), ‘“Stateness”, nationalism, and democratization’, in J. Linz and A. Stepan (eds), Problems of Democratic Transitions and Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 16‒37.

102  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Manning, C. and M. Antić (2003), ‘The limits of electoral engineering’, Journal of Democracy, 14 (3), 45‒59. Mansfield, E. D. and J. Snyder (2009), ‘Pathways to war in democratic transitions’, International Organization, 63 (2), 381‒90. Merkel, W. (2004), ‘Embedded and defective democracies’, Democratization, 11 (5), 33‒58. Montgomery, J. D. (1957), Forced to be Free. The Artificial Revolution in Germany and Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Narten, J. (2008), ‘Post-conflict peacebuilding and local ownership: Dynamics of external–local interaction in Kosovo under United Nations administration’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2 (3), 369‒90. Newman, E. and R. Rich (eds) (2004), The UN Role in Promoting Democracy: Between Ideals and Reality, Tokyo: United Nations University Press. O’Donnell, G. and P. C. Schmitter (eds) (1989), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Paris, R. (2002), ‘International peacebuilding and the “mission civilisatrice”’, Review of International Studies, 28 (4), 637‒56. Paris, R. (2004), At War’s End. Building Peace After Civil Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peceny, M. (1999), ‘Forcing them to be free’, Political Research Quarterly, 52 (3), 549‒82. Plattner, M. F. (2005), ‘Building democracy after conflict: Introduction’, Journal of Democracy, 16 (1), 5‒8. Przeworski, A. (1991), Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Przeworski, A. (1992), ‘The games of transition’, in S. Mainwaring, G. O’Donnell and J. S. Valenzuela (eds), Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, pp. 105‒52. Przeworski, A., M. Alvarez, J. A. Cheibub and F. Limongi (1996), ‘What makes democracy endure?’, Journal of Democracy, 7 (1), 39‒55. Ratner, S. R. (2000), ‘Democracy and accountability: The criss-crossing paths of two emerging norms’, in G. H. Fox and B. R. Roth (eds), Democratic Governance and International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 449‒90. Reilly, B. (2002), ‘Elections in post-conflict scenarios: Constraints and dangers’, International Peacekeeping, 9 (2), 118‒39. Reilly, B. (2004), ‘Elections in post-conflict societies’, in E. Newman and R. Rich (eds), The UN Role in Promoting Democracy: Between Ideals and Reality, Tokyo: United Nations University Press, pp. 113‒34. Roeder, P. G. and D. Rothchild (2005), Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars, Cornell: Cornell University Press. Rothchild, D. and P. G. Roeder (2005), ‘Dilemmas of state-building in divided societies’, in P. G. Roeder and D. Rothchild (eds), Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy After Civil Wars, Cornell: Cornell University Press, pp. 1‒25. Rustow, D. A. (1970), ‘Transitions to democracy: Toward a dynamic model’, Comparative Politics, 2 (3), 337‒63. Schmitter, P. C. (2004), ‘The quality of democracy: III: The ambiguous virtues of accountability’, Journal of Democracy, 15 (4), 47‒60. Schmitter, P. C. and T. L. Karl (1991), ‘What democracy is… and is not’, Journal of Democracy, 2 (3), 75‒88. Snyder, J. (2000), From Voting to Violence. Democratization and Nationalist Conflict, New York: W. W. Norton. Steinert, J. I. and S. Grimm (2015), ‘Too good to be true? UN peacebuilding and the democratization of war-torn states’, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 32 (5), 513‒35. Tansey, O. (2007), ‘Democratization without a state: Democratic regime-building in Kosovo’, Democratization, 14 (1), 129‒50. Tansey, O. (2009), Regime-Building: Democratization and International Administration, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, L. (2002), Democratization. Theory and Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittke, C. (2018), Law in the Twilight: International Courts and Tribunals, the Security Council, and the Internationalisation of Peace Agreements between State and Non-State Parties, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zürcher, C. (2018), ‘A theory of democratization through peace-building’, Conflict, Security & Development, 18 (4), 283‒99.

Democracy promotion and statebuilding  103 Zürcher, C., C. Manning, K. Evenson, R. Hayman, S. Riese and N. Röhner (2013), Costly Democracy: Peacebuilding and Democratization after War, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

11. Post-conflict statebuilding as contentious politics Outi Donovan

Much ink has been spilled over the ‘local turn’ in the study of post-conflict peacebuilding and statebuilding (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Jabri 2013; Paffenholz 2015; Hughes et al. 2015; Leonardsson and Rudd 2015). This has come as a welcome corrective on the scholarship that focused mainly on the international dimension of the so-called ‘liberal peace’ (e.g. Chandler 2007; Taylor 2010; Cunliffe 2012). Agency of domestic actors played a limited role in such accounts that viewed internationally led statebuilding missions as all-powerful projects capable of remoulding war-torn societies in the Western image. The local turn in the research agenda has cast doubt on these assumptions by highlighting the ways in which liberal peace is negotiated and reshaped in the interactions between various statebuilding agencies and projects. The critical insight from this line of research is that statebuilding in war-torn societies is not a process that commences with the arrival of the international statebuilding agencies but rather one that is rooted in the country’s history and inter-communal relations. Statebuilding contexts are, then, more accurately understood to comprise of a range of statebuilding agents and projects; asking questions only about the internationally led statebuilding agenda results in a narrow understanding of statebuilding. While the above insight has motivated my earlier research on the domestic, parallel statebuilding processes in post-conflict societies (Keranen 2013, 2017), this chapter builds on the related observation that contemporary statebuilding processes in societies emerging from conflicts have characteristics that are similar to the historic statebuilding processes described by Charles Tilly (1985, 2006) and others. The formation of the nation-state and development of democracy in Europe and elsewhere was a long, complicated and invariably messy process (Tilly 1985, p. 169). Importantly, this process was characterised by highly contentious political action as different societal groups sought to protect their interests. Although it is not the case that the statebuilding experience of post-conflict states today follows the same pattern of evolution as those of the first nation-states, my central argument is that similar dynamics of contention are likely to be at play as societal groups representing different statebuilding visions encounter those of the international statebuilders. Statebuilding in societies affected by conflict can thus be understood as a form of contentious politics, understood as ‘the use of disruptive, episodic, public and collective political strategies that seek to counter aspects of international statebuilding’ (Keranen 2017, p. 27). The value of this approach is that it captures not only the public forms of resistance that the accounts of ‘everyday’ resistance (Richmond 2009; Mitchell 2011; Iniguez de Heredia 2012; Kappler 2013) have overlooked but also the negotiatory nature of statebuilding whereby the shape and form of statebuilding is mediated by the various statebuilding actors, both domestic and international. To capture such dynamics and interactions, the chapter introduces a set of conceptual tools developed by scholars of contentious politics: international political opportunity structures, mobilising structures and framing. 104

Post-conflict statebuilding as contentious politics  105

EXISTING RESEARCH ON THE ‘LOCAL’ Before outlining the framework, it is useful to say a couple of words on the existing research on local agency and the dynamics between domestic and international statebuilding actors. What began as a focus on ‘local ownership’ (Donais 2009; Narten 2008; Sending 2009) in the scholarship on post-conflict statebuilding, has evolved through concepts such as everyday resistance (Richmond 2009; Mitchell 2011; Iniguez de Heredia 2012), hybridity (Mac Ginty 2011; Belloni 2012; Brown and Gusmao 2009) and friction (Björkdahl et al. 2016) into a more nuanced understanding of domestic agency in such processes. Accounts of everyday peace have focused on the emancipatory potential of the grassroots in war-torn societies and highlighted the way in which the more authentic, everyday forms of peace have resisted the formal, elite-led statebuilding models (Richmond 2009). From this perspective, more ethical and sustainable peace can only be generated from the grassroots. The focus of the research on the everyday has largely taken the Scottian approach to ‘hidden transcripts’, that is, the mundane practices that challenge elite forms of peace and state (e.g. Iniguez de Heredia 2012). While this has generated important insights into the statebuilding process, it has provided a rather limited view of statebuilding. Looking solely at the ‘hidden transcripts’ neglects a set of important dynamics operating ‘on stage’ and through ‘public transcripts’ (Keranen 2017, p. 22). These include public forms of contestation through which domestic actors seek to renegotiate the statebuilding process; boycotts, protests, sit-ins and framing strategies, among others, that shape the process. Understanding such actions simply as ‘spoiler’ activity (Stedman 1997; Newman and Richmond 2006) tends to shift the analytical attention away from the ways in which domestic and international actors negotiate the shape and the course of the statebuilding process to a discussion of how to manage spoilers. This, in turn, takes us back to the earlier ‘top-down’ approaches to statebuilding that have yielded less satisfactory interpretations of the complexities of post-conflict statebuilding processes. Another theoretical lens for understanding domestic agency and interactions between domestic and international actors has been hybridity. Hybridity can be defined as the existence of multiple actors, agendas and practices and interaction between them (Belloni 2012, pp. 22, 23). Research deploying the framework has highlighted different dimensions and outcomes of hybridity. Some see it as a political order (Boege, Chapter 12 in this volume) while others foreground hybridity as a form of peace (Mac Ginty 2011). Critics of the concept have pointed to its essentialising nature, arguing that hybridity as a theoretical lens serves to reify the ‘local’ and ‘global’ (Paffenholz 2015; Iniguez de Heredia 2014). Yet, as Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver Richmond (2015) have suggested, this critique is unfounded as hybridity invites us to explore the categories of local and global – neither of which is a monolith or uniform – and how they interact. Indeed, the value-added of hybridity is that it directs attention to the multiplicity of agendas, actors and practices in post-conflict spaces. Herein lies the complementarity between the concept of hybridity and the contentious politics framework; the latter can redirect attention away from the outcome, characteristic of much of the existing work on hybridity in statebuilding contexts, towards the actual process of negotiating statebuilding. In doing so, the contentious politics framework can help us to better understand the practices and dynamics through which domestic statebuilding actors seek to shape the statebuilding process. A final strand of literature that merits attention foregrounds the notion of ‘friction’. Scholars deploying friction as their analytical lens have done so on the grounds that hybridity has lost its emancipatory potential as it has become incorporated into the formal statebuilding agenda

106  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding (Björkdahl et al. 2016, p. 8). The notion of friction is based on Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s (2005) work on the encounters between local and global in the context of globalisation. Friction refers to Lowenhaupt Tsing’s central insight that when global ideas travel from one society to the next, contact with ‘differently socialised and acculturated individuals’ (Millar 2013, p. 197) and their reactions to such ideas often resulted in unpredictable consequences. The concept of friction, it is argued (Björkdahl and Hoglund 2013, p. 292), can help us to understand how the assumptions underwriting statebuilding can change when confronted with different statebuilding contexts. The unexpected consequences of statebuilding practices is one of the central insights of this line of analysis; while research on hybridity conceives of predictable outcomes, friction underscores the ‘unplannable’, as different ‘actors, ideas and practices rub against each other… and create new power relations, agencies and ideas…’ (Björkdahl and Hoglund 2013, p. 292). Although friction as an analytical lens is useful in highlighting the unintended consequences and the ‘unplannable’ in statebuilding contexts, there have been few attempts to systematically trace and capture that different practices result in friction. While hybridity and friction might result from interactions between the global and the local, how do the different agents seek to engage with one another? To translate this question into the conceptual language of this chapter, how are the contentious politics that shape many post-conflict spaces manifested? My argument is that the existing literature has not adequately answered this question as much of it has focused on theorising. Concepts borrowed from the contentious politics literature can fill this gap by providing tools for understanding the ways in which domestic statebuilding actors seek to negotiate the statebuilding process.

INSIGHTS FROM CONTENTIOUS POLITICS RESEARCH Contentious politics begin when individuals or groups make claims on others outside the agreed institutional channels of decision-making (McAdam et al. 1996, p. 17). At the heart of contentious politics is the interaction between the claim-makers and the authorities; the latter endeavour, through extra-institutional means such as protests, demonstrations and sit-ins, to challenge the status quo and make their voices heard. The authorities, in turn, define what type of contentious politics is appropriate and legitimate in a given society and accordingly counter prohibited acts of contention through coercive and other means (Tilly 2008, p. 7). Responses by authorities often spur further acts of contention by the claim-makers or their supporters. Whereas contentious politics scholars have traditionally studied social movements, uprisings and revolutions, some of the contentious politics concepts lend themselves readily to the analysis of statebuilding strategies and practices. Post-conflict statebuilding is a political process whereby different societal groups seek to protect and advance their interests. In order to do so, they resort to a range of practices, at different domains. In post-Dayton Peace Accord Bosnia, for example, these practices are evident in institutional, discursive and symbolic domains (Keranen 2017). At the institutional domain, domestic statebuilding actors have used governance institutions to further their respective statebuilding agendas, while at the discursive domain, they have deployed various framing strategies to the same effect. At the symbolic domain, Bosnian statebuilding actors have harnessed national symbols and symbolic practices to contest aspects of the internationally led statebuilding process. While in other contexts these acts may be considered as a part of routine rather than contentious politics, in post-conflict societies they represent disruptive strategies of contention directed often against

Post-conflict statebuilding as contentious politics  107 international statebuilders. This is so as in ‘heavy footprint’ statebuilding missions where international actors wield considerable power, domestic statebuilding actors often have few other means to affect the process. Under such circumstances, contentious actions, such as blocking decision-making, serve as techniques through which the externally led statebuilding process is negotiated on the ground. Indeed, many of the statebuilding strategies deployed by domestic statebuilding actors bear resemblance to the repertoire of actions identified by contentious politics scholars. The contentious politics framework can, therefore, help us to understand the ways in which actors who have fewer resources at their disposal and less political power can shape and renegotiate the process. Moreover, the concepts introduced in this chapter – international political opportunity structures, mobilising structures and framing – address both the strategic and cultural aspects of the statebuilding process. Political opportunity structures and mobilising structures direct our attention to the strategic element in the statebuilding interactions and dynamics; the way in which opportunity structures and mobilisation enable or limit the practices deployed by different statebuilding actors (Keranen 2017, p. 29). Framing, on the other hand, sheds light into the discursive dimension. The contentious politics scholarship sensitive to the cultural aspects of contentious politics (McAdam and Aminzade 2002; Aminzade et al. 2001; Steinberg 1995) is well-suited for capturing the discursive contention that often characterises the dynamics between the internal and external statebuilding actors. Political Opportunity Structures Political opportunity structures refers to the political context or the environment within which contestation takes place. For Sidney Tarrow (1994, p. 189) they are ‘consistent – but necessarily formal or permanent – dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations for success or failure’. In the standard social movements scholarship, the key dimensions of the political environment consist of formal structures and institutions of the government, authorities’ responses to contentious claim-making and the presence of allies or rivals (McAdam et al. 1996). The presence of multilateral, international statebuilding agencies in most post-conflict statebuilding processes, however, necessitates attention to international political opportunity structures. Building on the existing theorising on the mechanism (Tarrow 1994; Eisinger 1973), international political opportunity structures in post-conflict societies can be conceived to consist of the institutional structures of governance, unity or division among the external statebuilding actors and diplomats, allies within the international community and the responses by the international statebuilding actors to the domestic acts of contention (Keranen 2017, p. 28). It also necessary to account for discursive opportunity structures (Steinberg 1995) as discourses and narratives about the statebuilding process may affect actors’ perceptions of the political environment. It is particularly important to think about the ways in which the hegemonic discourse of statebuilding – the so-called liberal peace – can limit or enable contentious activities (Keranen 2017, p. 16). How do international political opportunity structures affect contentious politics in post-conflict statebuilding contexts? A number of examples from the Bosnian case and others can be used to illustrate the importance of such structures. First, certain types of institutional structures can provide opportunities for contestation. This has been evident in Kosovo and Bosnia. The use of veto-power, an important element in power-sharing agreements, to block

108  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding statebuilding initiatives deemed harmful for one’s statebuilding objectives has been a frequent feature in the repertoire of contentious actions. Second, lack of unity among international statebuilding actors can similarly facilitate contestation. The term ‘international community’ often obscures the different priorities and approaches of external governments when it comes to assisting post-conflict statebuilding. In Libya, in the wake of the Gaddafi regime’s fall, Western and regional governments have professed their commitment to helping Libyans in the statebuilding process but their contradicting priorities have resulted in rivalry (El-Gamaty 2018). This has opened opportunities for Libyan groups to ally with foreign governments whose interests align with their own. Similar, if less pronounced, dynamics have been at play in the Balkans (Keranen 2017, p. 38). Division and rivalries within the ‘international community’ have opened up opportunities for domestic statebuilding actors to create tacit alliances with powerful external backers (Keranen 2017, p. 15). Finally, the ways in which international statebuilding actors respond to domestic acts of contestation has implications for further contestation. In certain statebuilding contexts, international officials have considerable authority and can thus discipline domestic actors who contest the statebuilding process or particular initiatives. A case in point here is the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia; through the so-called ‘Bonn powers’, the OHR has the authority to dismiss elected Bosnian officials and impose legislation. This authority has been used in instances where Bosnian actors are seen to ‘spoil’ the statebuilding process. From the perspective of international political opportunity structures, the use of the Bonn powers made the participation in contestation potentially costly and in doing, reduced the incentives for contestation. Yet, the use of the Bonn powers by the OHR also had the unintended consequence of serving as a mobilising tool for domestic statebuilding actors targeted by the OHR. The use of the executive authority by the OHR has reinforced the narrative that OHR is violating Bosnia’s sovereignty and political rights of its citizens (Keranen 2017, pp. 117‒21). Mobilising Structures In addition to international political opportunity structure, the ability of statebuilding actors to mobilise support for their vision of the state is crucial. McAdam et al. (2001, p. 13) define mobilising structures as formal organisational frameworks and informal social networks used by actors engaged in contentious activities. These structures enable the efficient organisation of activities such as protests or boycotts. In the western Balkans, civil society, political and religious organisations have been central; in Kosovo the student movement Vetevendosje has played a key role in mobilising the action against the UN mission in the country (International Crisis Group 2012), while in Bosnia the organisational structures of political parties have enabled the effective communication on issues at hand and organisation of tangible protests (Keranen 2017, pp. 29, 138). In the latter case, religious organisations have also played an important role in mobilising support for domestic statebuilding projects. Members of the Catholic clergy in Bosnia have, for example, articulated concerns regarding the perceived lack of Croat political rights in the country and in doing so, have supported calls by Croat statebuilding actors for redesigning the country’s governance (Associated Press 2009). Alongside political and religious groups, organisations such as victims’ groups or war veterans’ associations can also serve as mobilising structures for contentious practices by domestic statebuilding actors.

Post-conflict statebuilding as contentious politics  109 Framing The concept of framing helps us to understand one of the key functions of statebuilding agents, the construction of meaning. Framing, following Robert Entman (1993, p. 52), refers to the act of ‘selecting some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient’. This is done in order to define certain issues, experiences, events or practices as problematic and proposing ways to resolve the problem at hand. In other words, framing serves to give meaning to the world out there and in doing so, ‘organise experience and guide action’, to borrow Benford and Snow (2000, p. 614). While framing is generally used to challenge prevailing interpretations of reality, successful framing is premised on cultural resonance; it builds on existing ideas, ideologies, myths and worldviews. Resonant frames are also those where actions and rhetoric coincide and reflect tangible events (Benford and Snow 2000, p. 619). Agents, according to Benford and Snow (2000), undertake two central framing tasks; diagnostic and prognostic framing. Diagnostic framing is used to identify problems and ascribe blame or responsibility. In post-conflict statebuilding contexts, this type of framing most commonly takes the form of what William Gamson has called an ‘injustice frame’ (cited in Benford and Snow 2000, p. 614). Such injustice frames generally allude to the victimhood of the group in question. In the post-Dayton Peace Accord statebuilding process in Bosnia, for example, injustice frames have been used by all the constituent groups (Keranen 2017). Whereas the injustice frame deployed by the Bosnian Serb statebuilding agents has centred on Serb suffering in the Second World War concentration camps, their Bosniak counterparts have foregrounded the genocidal acts perpetrated by the Bosnian Serb army during the dissolution of Yugoslavia (Keranen 2013, pp. 356‒7). The Bosnian Croat injustice frames, on the other hand, have emphasised the lack of representation and influence in the Bosnian political life (Keranen 2017, p. 115). While injustice frames often serve as techniques to legitimise various statebuilding aims, other types of diagnostic framing are also evident in post-conflict or conflict-affected societies. This entails highlighting the practices of the external statebuilding actors as problematic. Arising from the clash between the aims of the domestic statebuilding actors and practices of the international statebuilding agencies, the former often frame the latter as biased and/or arrogant. This framing of the international statebuilding agencies can be found in most statebuilding contexts, even where the international presence has been ‘light touch’. In post-Gaddafi Libya, for example, where the international statebuilding presence has been minimal, many Libyans regard the UN presence as partisan and its statebuilding and mediation assistance as reflecting the interests of the regional powers rather than those of Libya (BBC Monitoring Middle East 2015a, 2015b; Pargeter 2017, p. 22). If diagnostic framing is about defining a problem, prognostic framing serves to suggest solutions to the problem at hand. In the Bosnian case, the aforementioned injustice frames have resulted in various claims for reorganisation of Bosnian governance. The majority of Bosniaks have called for a further centralisation of the state that they could effectively dominate as the numerically largest constituent group, while Bosnian Serbs frame federalism as the guarantee for their rights (Keranen 2013, p. 356). Bosnian Croats have similarly framed their statebuilding project as a quest for a Croat-dominated entity (Keranen 2013, p. 357). Statebuilding actors seeking to use framing often face counter-framings both within and without their group and find themselves in frame contests (Benford and Snow 2000, p. 625). Such contests exist between the parallel, domestic, statebuilding projects as well as between the domestic and external statebuilding actors. In Bosnia, for example, the contentious actions

110  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding by the domestic statebuilding agents have been framed by the international statebuilding agents as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘backward’ (Keranen 2017, p. 126). Similar frame contests are evident in East Timor where the Timorese framing of the UN-led statebuilding process as deeply undemocratic resulted in a counter-framing of certain Timorese leaders as ‘authoritarian’ by UN officials (Chesterman 2002, p. 68). These contests over meaning are noteworthy as it is through them that actions, actors and agendas are defined as illegitimate or legitimate and ultimately, the shape of the statebuilding process is negotiated.

RESPONDING TO CONTESTATION While contentious politics concepts help us to better understand how domestic statebuilding actors seek to advance their statebuilding agendas when faced with externally led statebuilding initiatives, they can also facilitate the analysis of how international actors tend often to respond. Charles Tilly’s (2006, p. 75) work on how authorities respond to contentious politics is a useful guide here. He argues that states generally respond to contentious claim-making through coercion, capital or discursive decertification. Coercion simply refers to the use of force to supress contentious activities. In post-conflict contexts, the ability of the international statebuilding agents to coerce domestic actors generally depends upon the presence of peacekeeping or other forces. Perhaps a more commonly used technique to counter contestation is, however, capital; it denotes the ‘buying off’ (Tilly 2006, p. 74) of those engaged in contentious politics. In other words, aid or another type of financial incentive is used to address contentious practices or alternatively, aid is withdrawn as a response to resistance to the internationally led statebuilding effort. This was the strategy used frequently by the United States in the western Balkans. For example, when Bosnian Muslims refused to accept the Bosnian state insignia chosen by the High Representative in the absence of domestic consensus, Washington suspended its ‘train and equip’ programme that was designed to build the capacity of the Bosniak-dominated Bosnian army (Agence France Presse 1998). Finally, decertification means the discursive de-legitimisation of the actors engaged in contentious practices, as noted previously. International statebuilding actors have framed those deploying contentious practices as anti-democratic forces, corrupt elites or nationalists hopelessly out of date with modern politics. This strategy enables the refusal by international statebuilding actors to formally engage with domestic actors whose agendas do not align with their own, as they purportedly do not represent the people.

CONCLUSION Rather than taking place in a political vacuum, statebuilding of war-torn societies is deeply affected by the domestic statebuilding projects and agendas that interact with those of multilateral, international statebuilding agencies. Strategies and techniques that can be considered contentious politics are often used by domestic statebuilding actors to negotiate the shape and form of the process. The conceptual tools introduced in this chapter can help us to better understand this exercise of domestic agency and the ensuing dynamics. This fills a gap in the existing research; while a range of theoretical lenses have been developed, what has been missing is a conceptual framework that enables a more systematic tracing of domestic agency.

Post-conflict statebuilding as contentious politics  111 Moreover, thinking about the domestic agency this way allows us to move beyond the ideal notions of the ‘liberal peace’ as an omnipotent project capable of imposing an unmediated version of statehood.

REFERENCES Agence France Presse (1998), ‘US suspends military training in Bosnia over flag dispute’, 4 June (accessed through Nexis UK). Aminzade, R., J. A. Goldstone, D. McAdam, E. J. Perry, W. H. Sewell, S. Tarrow and C. Tilly (2001), Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Associated Press (2009), ‘Bosnian cardinal complains to the pope that Catholics are silenced, marginalized after Dayton’, 24 February (accessed through Nexis UK). BBC Monitoring Middle East (2015a), ‘Libya’s rival parties attend Berlin talks in support of dialogue’, 11 June (accessed through Nexis UK). BBC Monitoring Middle East (2015b), ‘Libyans protest against UN mediation in Libya peace talks’, 7 November (accessed through Nexis UK). Belloni, R. (2012), ‘Hybrid peace governance: Its emergence and significance’, Global Governance, 18 (1), 21‒38. Benford, R. and D. Snow (2000), ‘Framing processes and social movement: An overview and assessment’, Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (1), 611‒39. Björkdahl, A. and K. Hoglund (2013), ‘Precarious peacebuilding: Friction in global–local encounters’, Peacebuilding, 1 (3), 289‒99. Björkdahl, A., K. Hoglund, G. Millar and J. Van der Lijn (2016), Peacebuilding and Friction: Global and Local Encounters in Post-Conflict Societies, Abingdon: Routledge. Brown, M. A. and A. F. Gusmao (2009), ‘Peacebuilding and political hybridity in East Timor’, Peace Review, 21 (1), 61‒69. Chandler, D. (2007), ‘EU statebuilding: Securing the liberal peace through EU enlargement’, Global Society, 21 (4), 593‒607. Chesterman, S. (2002), ‘East Timor in transition: Self-determination, state-building and the United Nations’, International Peacekeeping, 9 (1), 45‒76. Cunliffe, P. (2012), ‘Still the spectre at the feast: Comparisons between peacekeeping and imperialism in peacekeeping studies today’, International Peacekeeping, 19 (4), 426‒42. Donais, T. (2009), ‘Empowerment or imposition? Dilemmas of local ownership in post-conflict peacebuilding processes’, Peace & Change, 34 (1), 3‒26. Eisinger, P. K. (1973), ‘The conditions of protest behavior in American cities’, American Political Science Review, 67 (1), 11‒28. El-Gamaty, G. (2018), ‘Regional interference is threatening Libya’s future as one state’, Al-Jazeera, 7 March, https://​www​.aljazeera​.com/​indepth/​opinion/​regional​-interference​-threatening​-libya​-future​ -state​-180307133334067​.html (accessed 4 July 2019). Entman, R. (1993), ‘Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm’, Journal of Communication, 43 (4), 51‒58. Hughes, C., J. Öjendal and I. Schierenbeck (2015), ‘The struggle versus the song: The local turn in peacebuilding: An introduction’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 817‒24. Iniguez de Heredia, M. (2012), ‘Escaping statebuilding: Resistance and civil society in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 6 (1), 75‒89. Iniguez de Heredia, M. (2014), ‘Resistances and challenges to liberal peace processes’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 42 (2), 515‒25. International Crisis Group (2012), ‘Setting Kosovo free: Remaining challenges’, report no. 218, 10 September, https://​www​.crisisgroup​.org/​europe​-central​-asia/​balkans/​kosovo/​setting​-kosovo​-free​ -remaining​-challenges (accessed 27 August 2018). Jabri, V. (2013), ‘Peacebuilding, the local and the international: A colonial or a postcolonial rationality?’, Peacebuilding, 1 (1), 3‒16. Kappler, S. (2013), ‘Everyday legitimacy in post-conflict spaces: The creation of social legitimacy in Bosnia-Herzegovina's cultural arenas’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 7 (1), 11‒28. Keranen, O. (2013), ‘International statebuilding as contentious politics: The case of post conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Nationalities Papers, 41 (3), 354‒70. Keranen, O. (2017), The Contentious Politics of Statebuilding: Strategies and Dynamics, Abingdon: Routledge.

112  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Leonardsson, H. and G. Rudd (2015), ‘The “local turn” in peacebuilding: A literature review of effective and emancipatory local peacebuilding’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 825‒39. Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2005), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mac Ginty, R. (2011), International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mac Ginty, R. and O. P. Richmond (2013), ‘The local turn in peace building: A critical agenda for peace’, Third World Quarterly, 34 (5), 763‒83. Mac Ginty, R. and O. P. Richmond (2015), ‘Where now for the critique of the liberal peace?’, Cooperation and Conflict, 50 (2), 171‒89. McAdam, D. and R. Aminzade (2002), ‘Emotions and contentious politics’, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 7 (2), 107‒9. McAdam, D., S. Tarrow and C. Tilly (1996), ‘To map contentious politics’, Mobilization: An International Journal, 1 (1), 17‒34. McAdam, D., S. Tarrow and C. Tilly (2001), Dynamics of Contention, New York: Cambridge University Press. Millar, G. (2013), ‘Expectations and experiences of peacebuilding in Sierra Leone: Parallel peacebuilding processes and compound friction’, International Peacekeeping, 20 (2), 189‒203. Mitchell, A. (2011), ‘Quality/control: International peace interventions and “the everyday”’, Review of International Studies, 37 (4), 1623‒45. Narten, J. (2008), ‘Post-conflict peacebuilding and local ownership: Dynamics of external–local interaction in Kosovo under United Nations administration’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2 (3), 369‒90. Newman, E. and O. Richmond (eds) (2006), Challenges to Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers During Conflict Resolution, Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Paffenholz, T. (2015), ‘Unpacking the local turn in peacebuilding: A critical assessment towards an agenda for future research’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 857‒74. Pargeter, A. (2017), ‘After the fall: Views from the ground of international military intervention in post-Gadhafi Libya’, London: Remote Control Project, Oxford Research Group, https://​ www​.oxfordresearchgroup​.org​.uk/​after​-the​-fall​-views​-from​-the​-ground​-of​-international​-military​ -intervention​-in​-post​-gadhafi​-libya (accessed 9 August 2018). Richmond, O. P. (2009), ‘Becoming liberal, unbecoming liberalism: Liberal-local hybridity via the everyday as a response to the paradoxes of liberal peacebuilding’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 3 (3), 324‒44. Sending, O. J. (2009), ‘Why peacebuilders fail to secure ownership and be sensitive to context’, NUPI Working Paper 755, Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, https://​brage​.bibsys​.no/​xmlui/​ bitstream/​handle/​11250/​277766/​SIP​-1​-WP​-755​-Sending​.pdf​?sequence​=​3 (accessed 5 August 2018). Stedman, J. (1997), ‘Spoiler problems in peace processes’, International Security, 22 (2), 5‒53. Steinberg, M. (1995), ‘The road of the crowd: Repertoires of discourses and collective action among the Spitalfields silk weavers in nineteenth-century London’, in M. Traugott (ed.), Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action, Durham; Duke University Press, pp. 57‒88. Tarrow, S. (1994), Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, I. (2010), ‘Liberal peace, liberal imperialism: A Gramscian critique’, in O. P. Richmond (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding: Critical Developments and Approaches, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 154‒74. Tilly, C. (1985), ‘War making and state making as organised crime’, in P. B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169‒81. Tilly, C. (2006), Regimes and Repertoires, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Tilly, C. (2008), Contentious Performances, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12. State formation in the context of hybrid political orders Volker Boege

INTRODUCTION It has become conventional wisdom in the post-Cold War era that poor state performance – generally referred to using terms such as ‘weak’, ‘failing’ or ‘fragile’ states – and internal as well as transnational violent conflicts are closely linked. State fragility is seen to engender violent conflict, which in turn can lead to state failure or even collapse. Regions of state fragility are perceived as providing breeding grounds and safe havens for transnational terrorism, weapons proliferation and organized crime. Hence they are seen as threats not only to the internal stability of the countries in question, but also to international security, affecting neighbouring states and the international community at large. The issue of fragile states is thus presented as being at the core of a variety of today’s most pressing security problems. Accordingly, (the need for) statebuilding is presented within a securitization framework (Bonacker et al. 2017), and it was posited that fragile states “present one of the most important foreign policy challenges of the contemporary era” (Krasner and Pascual 2005, p. 153), and flowing from this assessment, it was declared that “learning to do state-building better is thus central to the future of world order” (Fukuyama 2004, p. 120). Moreover, fragile states are presented not only as a challenge to foreign and security policy, but the fragile states discourse also heavily frames the development policies and development assistance of major donor countries and multilateral donor organizations. Statebuilding is seen as a central dimension of development assistance, and functioning and effective state institutions and procedures as a prerequisite for sustainable development. The particular appeal of the statebuilding discourse thus seems to lie in the possibility to integrate development, security and peacebuilding policies (Grimm et al. 2014; Bonacker et al. 2017; Woodward 2017). Over the last years, the mainstream fragile states discourse has become the object of comprehensive criticism, and so has its corollary, the promotion of standardized statebuilding along the lines of the Western state model as the adequate avenue for controlling violence, for achieving sustainable development and peace within societies. The concept of hybridity – of security governance, of political order, of peace – was introduced into the scholarly debate as providing an alternative explanation for the current condition of statehood and governance arrangements in post-colonial societies of the Global South. This concept entices us to look and to think beyond the model of the Western state.

HYBRIDITY OF POLITICAL ORDER Dominant statebuilding policies are oriented towards the Western-style Weberian/Westphalian ideal-type of the state – the state as the seat of sovereign centralized power, separated from, 113

114  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding and sitting ‘above’, society, claiming the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force, both as the guarantor of domestic peace and order and of national security in the international system of states.1 This idea of the state lays claim to universal, de-contextualized applicability. The realities of actually existing states, however, in particular in the post-colonial Global South, are largely divorced from this ideal-type (Bhuta 2008). Accordingly, the proclaimed aim of international statebuilding interventions is to close “the gap between the idea of the state and its reality” (Bonacker et al. 2017, p. 14). The import or imposition of state structures in the course of colonization and decolonization did not lead to the establishment of the model modern state – as might have been expected by the former colonial powers and the indigenous political elites who steered their countries through ‘national liberation’ and into independence. In many cases, at the time of independence the post-colonial state was nothing more than an empty shell. Consolidation of the formally established statehood met with manifold obstacles. The new states lacked roots in their societies, and the delivery of state institutions was not accompanied by the development of the homogenous economic, political, social, and cultural structures that had provided the basis and framework for an efficiently functioning and legitimate political order in the course of the emergence of the European state.2 The idea of the state was adopted in theory, but the pre-existing heterogeneous forms of social order and governance were not in practice replaced by institutions of the homogenous model state. Moreover, under the ruthless pressure of neoliberal globalization of the past decades, there has often even been a regression from levels of statehood achieved post-independence. A decline in the capacity, effectiveness and legitimacy of state institutions translated into heightened state fragility, often leading to the escalation of violent internal conflicts. The vicious circle of fragility and violence gave rise to the discourse of fragile, failing and failed states which over the past two decades or more has informed the politics and strategies of major Western donor countries and international organizations, with liberal peacebuilding and securitized statebuilding at its core. The so-called fragile or conflict-affected states of the Global South have become the object of externally driven peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions, or rather peacebuilding-as-statebuilding (Richmond 2011), which in a sense seeks to compensate for the neoliberal neglect of state institutions. Although post-colonial state institutions claim authority within the boundaries of a given ‘state territory’, in large parts of that territory only outposts of ‘the state’ can be found. State institutions have not permeated society, and the state has not extended its control to the whole of society, unable to project its authority from a central seat of power uniformly over its territory and population. The state “continues, especially in rural areas in many countries, to be seen as an external imposition” (Eriksen 2017, p. 781). Such ‘statelessness’, however, does not imply the complete absence of institutions of governance. In many places, customary institutions, originating in the pre-colonial past, still play an important role in the everyday governance of people and communities. They have, of course, been subject to considerable change and have had to adapt to new circumstances. However, despite the efforts of colonial

1 Lemay-Hébert and Lottholz (2016) make clear that this neo-Weberian institutionalist approach to statebuilding builds on a very narrow and shortsighted selective reading and interpretation of Max Weber’s work. 2 Eriksen (2017, p. 777) makes the point that statebuilding also “requires the creation of state-centred societies”, and this requires respective processes of homogenization of highly heterogeneous societies.

State formation in the context of hybrid political orders  115 administrations and newly independent post-colonial states to impose state-based modes of governance on communities, these customary institutions have shown considerable resilience and adaptive capacity. There remains a gulf between – introduced, imposed – centralized state institutions and dispersed heterogeneous local forms of socio-political organization and governance. Moreover, state institutions are to a certain extent ‘infiltrated’ and overwhelmed by indigenous societal institutions and social networks, which function according to their own interests, rules and logic within the state structures. This leads to state institutions departing from the ‘Weberian’ ideal-type, becoming entangled in local networks of governance. On the other hand, the only way to make state institutions work is often through the utilization of such kin-based and other networks (Kyed and Buur 2006). But it is not only local societal forces infiltrating state structures; the process also works the other way round: the intrusion of state agencies impacts on local orders too. Customary institutions and authorities do not remain unchanged; they respond to and are influenced by the mechanisms of the state apparatus. Sometimes they are even incorporated into central state structures and processes, and thus subjected to deconstruction and re-formation. As a result, they adopt an ambiguous position with regard to the state, appropriating state functions and ‘state talk’, but at the same time pursuing their own agendas under the guise of the state form, utilizing the state’s resources and authority (Kyed and Buur 2006; Buur and Kyed 2006; Kyed 2017). This complex nature of governance is further complicated by the emergence and growing importance of movements and formations whose origins lie in the effects of and reactions to globalization, including warlords and their militias in outlying regions, gang leaders in townships and squatter settlements, vigilante-type organizations, ethnically based protection rackets, millenarian religious movements, transnational networks of organized crime or terrorism, and new forms of tribalism. Their emergence is not least a result of poor state performance, and their activities can contribute to the further weakening of state structures. Where state agencies are unable or unwilling to deliver security and other public goods, people will turn to other social entities for support. Sometimes such new formations manage to seize power in certain regions of a given state (be it a remote mountainous region or a squatter settlement in the capital). They are often linked to traditional societal entities and attempt to instrumentalize them for their own interests. The protagonists of such traditional societal entities, on the other hand, try to do the same. Thus traditional actors and institutions blend with new ‘private’ formations. Clan leaders might become warlords (or warlords might strive for a position of authority in the customary context), or tribal warriors might become private militias. Again, as in the case of the relationship between introduced state institutions and indigenous customary societal institutions, a situation of coexistence, overlap, mutual permeation and blending emerges. The hybridity concept was put forward to grasp such complex features of governance, widening the perspective beyond the idea of the state as well as beyond state institutions. It challenges the state fragility and statebuilding discourse which evaluates states against a ‘Weberian’ ideal-type (Lemay-Hébert and Lottholz 2016). It instead encourages a change of perspective: not to focus on deficiencies, on what is lacking, ‘not yet properly built’ or ‘already failed again’ (namely statehood in the Western sense) – but on what is actually there (Dinnen and Kent 2015; Brown and Aning 2018a).

116  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding The hybridity approach argues that the lack of capacity, effectiveness and legitimacy of state institutions co-exists with the relative strength of local customary and other non-state institutions of governance. The relations, interactions, mutual permeation of this broad variety of actors and institutions let governance arrangements emerge which can be called hybrid political orders. In such hybrid political orders, diverse and competing authority structures, sets of rules and logics of order co-exist, compete, overlap, interact, intertwine and blend, combining elements of introduced Western models and elements stemming from local indigenous traditions of governance and politics, with further influences exerted by the forces of globalization and associated societal fragmentation (in various forms: ethnic, tribal, religious…). Hybrid political orders are rooted in genuinely different societal spheres – spheres, however, which do not exist in isolation from each other, but permeate each other. Consequently, these orders are shaped by the closely interwoven texture of their separate sources of origin, that is: they are hybrid (Brown et al. 2010; Boege et al. 2009). The hybridity concept foregrounds processes, relationships and interactions (instead of distinct entities and structures) – and, accordingly, hybridization as an ongoing process of mixing, reconverting, leaching, blending (instead of a hybrid end state). It allows “the messy, awkward and dynamic realities of hybridity … to be brought into full view” (Kent et al. 2018, p. 17). The term hybridization might be even more appropriate to capture the fluid, dynamic, emergent and relational quality of the reality it is meant to grasp: hybridization as “a process, rather than an outcome” (Albrecht 2018, p. 217). Talking about the process of hybridization allows to shift attention from fixed entities to relations and hence to overcome thinking in static binaries (Albrecht and Wiuff Moe 2014; Hunt 2018a; Albrecht 2018). In fact, one major critique of the hybridity approach was and is that it reifies binaries (Laffey and Nadarajah 2012; Brigg 2016; Dinnen and Kent 2015; Hunt 2017; Hameiri and Jones 2017, 2018; Kent et al. 2018). This critique points to a dilemma: in order to overcome the state-centricity of the mainstream statebuilding discourse, hybridity as an alternative approach had to build a case for the focus on the ‘non-state’, and in doing so, it was in danger of reification of binaries. On the other hand, however, the shift away from monolithic entities and from binaries (such as traditional and modern, formal and informal, state and non-state) is exactly the work that the concept of hybridity is supposed to do: capturing fluidity, relations, interactions, entanglements, mutual permeation and enmeshment. The concept in fact allows to do both: draw attention to the realm of governance beyond the state, overcoming the state-centricity of liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding scholarship and practice, bringing the non-state dimension in, at the same time addressing the transgressions of the state/ non-state boundary, focusing on relations, interactions and enmeshment (Albrecht and Wiuff Moe 2014). The concept of hybridization thus allows to acknowledge distinct ways of being and of ordering, it alerts us to fundamental difference, and at the same time allows “to move away from the rigid categories and binaries that are commonly used to explain peace and conflict, (encouraging) a concentration on fluidity and leaching of identities, institutions and ideas” (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016, p. 224). This shift away from binaries is indeed “the primary appeal of hybridity and hybridisation” (Peterson 2012, p. 12). Such an understanding of hybridity can be integrated into the current ‘relational turn’ in peace studies, which foregrounds relations rather than entities.3 3 For the new perspectives and insights for peace studies gained from an ‘ontology of relationships’ see Hunt (2017, 2018a, 2018b); Albrecht and Wiuff Moe (2014); Thelen et al. (2014); Brigg (2014,

State formation in the context of hybrid political orders  117

PEACE AND SECURITY IN HYBRID POLITICAL ORDERS Hybrid political orders differ from the Western model state and the way it operates, not least in the core governance domain of security and order. In hybrid political orders, states’ claims to guarantee the security of their citizens is aspirational rather than a reality; states cannot deliver in this core field of service provision. This field is not based on the state monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force, but on the relations and interactions of a plethora of state and non-state (traditional, civil society and private) actors and institutions. Everyday peace is maintained not so much by state institutions, but by village chiefs and clan elders, healers, male and female community leaders, or religious leaders whose strength is rooted in closely knit communities, with kinship-based networks underpinning social order and well-being and regulating the management of everyday life (Aning et al. 2018). By contrast, police, courts and other institutions bestowed with maintaining domestic peace according to the idea of the state lack the capacities to make their presence felt in large parts of the state territory, and, more often than not, they do not even assume that peace and order is primarily their responsibility – they are happy to leave it to local authorities (at least tacitly), and their effectiveness and legitimacy very much depends on good – more or less formal or informal – working relationships with these authorities (Boege 2018). There is a certain irony in this: while in reality the state apparatus is reliant on non-state systems of governance in order to maintain peace and order, the idea of the state demands to strive for the state becoming the dominant (or even the only) provider of peace and order, with other providers eliminated or at least marginalized. But it is not just the coexistence of state and non-state security providers and the significance of the latter which characterize ‘hybrid security governance’ (Schroeder et al. 2014; Bagayoko et al. 2016). Rather, actors and institutions straddle the state/non-state boundary, and the state/non-state dichotomy is thus put in question. While there are some entities which can be at first sight be seen as ‘state’ (the police, the army, the courts) and some as ‘non-state’ (priests, vigilantes, chiefs), a closer look more often than not reveals blurred boundaries and intersections, with intense interactions and relationships: chiefs who are both ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ (the ‘double embeddedness’ of chiefs in different relational logics) (Thelen et al. 2014; Kyed 2017), community police that are more ‘state’ in some contexts and on some occasions and more ‘non-state’ in others, overlap of vigilantes and police, or police and community watch groups, intersection between the formal state justice system and customary law (Aning et al. 2018). In short: The state/non-state boundaries are porous and blurred, and actors and institutions are often in-between or doubly embedded.4 The hybridization of security governance renders obsolete the idea of the state as the central overarching entity holding the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force. Governments might claim or pretend (and statebuilding interveners might wish, or pretend to believe) that such a monopoly does exist, but in reality there is no central dominance over and control of the broad variety of providers of peace and security, nor over their relationships and interactions,

2016). Lemay-Hébert and Lottholz (2016) make a plea for a relational approach to statebuilding beyond the neo-Weberian institutionalist approach. 4 At the same time, however, re-enacting new boundaries in order to maintain and reaffirm authority, is an integral aspect of hybridization. “It is the productive tension between hybridity and boundary-making that underscores the political dynamics of hybridization” (Kyed 2017, p. 475).

118  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding which are complex, fluid, constantly changing (Bagayoko et al. 2016).5 Continuous hybridization is thus the main feature of the provision of peace and security, rather than the centrally orchestrated and controlled ‘building’ of a uniform state system of peace and order. The endeavours of governments and their international supporters – security sector reform, state capacity-building, justice sector reform and so on – are only elements in a much broader mix of processes of state formation (Eriksen 2017). They are enmeshed in these processes which let states emerge – albeit states which do not necessarily fit the Western ‘Weberian’ type. Hence statebuilding has to be differentiated from state formation (Richmond 2013; Bonacker et al. 2017). While statebuilding suggests a mechanistic, planned, technical, linear and predictable endeavour, aimed at the reproduction of de-contextualized reductive models of the Western state (Bhuta 2008; Lemay-Hébert and Lottholz 2016), “based on the globally institutionalized idea of the state” (Bonacker et al. 2017, p. 13), state formation by contrast is a messy, contradictory, non-linear and complex long-term process which involves a wide and diverse range of actors and institutions, be they state, para-state or ‘non-state’/‘customary’/‘traditional’. Technocratic, externally supported, statebuilding which is geared towards building the capacity of state institutions is, and can only be, part of such complex state formation.6 Accordingly, “outcomes of intervention in complex, fragile contexts are the emergent result of dynamic interaction and improvisation on the part of both intervening and local actors” (Verkoren and van Leeuwen 2013, p. 167). It is an illusion to believe that these processes of state formation will finally culminate in a Western liberal state based on the monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force; even more: it is counterproductive to strive for such an outcome, as this might do more harm than good, becoming the cause for new violence in the course of competition over access to the centre of state power. In other words: the idea of the state (as propagated by the international protagonists of statebuilding interventions), and statebuilding geared towards this idea, is more of a problem than the solution; it has become an obstacle to engaging with the actually existing forms of political order in intervened-upon societies.

STATE FORMATION IN THE CONTEXT OF HYBRID POLITICAL ORDERS AND INTERVENTION From the perspective of the mainstream Western policy and academic discourse, hybridity of political order and hybridization of security have for a long time been perceived (if at all) as a negative factor, impeding liberal statebuilding; more recently, however, attempts are made to appropriate ‘hybridity’ so as to better design and manage statebuilding strategies (Millar 2014; Björkdahl et al. 2016). In both cases actors and institutions that do not fit into the Western liberal format are deemed as being ‘anachronistic’, ‘illiberal’, ‘undemocratic’, 5 Eriksen calls this the ‘politics of pretending’ “assuming in practice that all states actually have the properties associated with modern statehood… State leaders know that they must ‘simulate sovereignty’ or statehood to uphold their international recognition and to get access to the resources that follow from it (aid, loans, political and military support)” (Eriksen 2017, p. 780). And he continues: “The fact that states and other actors simulate statehood, although it is known that many states differ significantly from this idea, shows how fundamental this idea of the state is” (Eriksen 2017, p. 780). 6 Not only is this technocratic approach too narrow and shortsighted, oftentimes it is also poorly executed in reality, with inadequate planning, too little or too much money, too many military advisers, too short-term, lacking accountability, over-bureaucratized.

State formation in the context of hybrid political orders  119 or ‘just cultural’, at best worth only to be instrumentalized for the purposes of statebuilding, but in principle impediments that have to be overcome (Belloni 2012). But under conditions of hybridity of political order and security such ‘unconventional’ actors have to be reckoned with. It has to be acknowledged that hybridity of order and security governance is not just a transitional phenomenon (with ‘non-state’ actors and institutions merely filling ‘gaps’ until the time when state actors will be ready to take over full control), but here to stay. This means one has to work with hybridity, not against it, and, consequently, pursue “link-building as opposed to state-building” (Baker 2010, p. 613). The aim of such an approach, however, would not be to get rid of ‘bad’ states in favour of ‘good’ hybrid political orders. Nor does it provide an alternative plan, to be applied in interventions in order to do statebuilding better, with hybrid outcomes “as plannable and predictable… as one more element of project implementation” (Millar et al. 2013, p. 139). It would be misleading to think of the concept of hybrid political orders in such prescriptive and normative ways, suggesting that hybrid political orders are ‘better’ than states, and that interventions now have to pursue the ‘building’ of hybrid political orders instead of statebuilding, thus coming to the rescue of the liberal peace approach (Millar 2014). Such a way of thinking about hybridity is in danger of instrumentalization of the hybridity approach for purposes of reasserting and intensifying outsiders’ control, incorporating selected elements of ‘local’ culture and governance into standardized formats, in the interest of international interveners, not the intervened-upon locals (Brown 2017; Björkdahl et al. 2016). Against such prescriptive or instrumental readings of hybridity it has to be stressed that hybrid governance and security arrangements are not and cannot be the outcomes of pre-planned interventions. Rather, they emerge in the context of interactions of a host of actors and institutions, in non-linear, contingent, unpredictable and unexpected ways, beyond central planning and control (Millar et al. 2013). Furthermore, they are not per se benign – they are imbued with power disparities and structures of dominance, they can be oppressive and can marginalize certain societal groups along the lines of age, gender, class, religion or ethnicity (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016; Bagayoko et al. 2016). But hybridization is what is the case on the ground in so-called fragile states and situations and hence what has to be engaged with. Only with regard to this plea to take account of and work with hybridity is the concept normative, not in the sense of declaring hybrid political orders to be the political aim of interventions (Hunt 2017). In other words: hybridity first of all is an “analytical device… a way of seeing the world and capturing change and lack of fixity between categories” (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016, p. 223); furthermore, it is a plea to take hybrid orders and security governance arrangements seriously.7 Taking them seriously is not just about ‘respecting culture’, ‘local ownership’ and ‘context sensitivity’, but it means to accept fundamentally different ways of generating political order, and, flowing from such acceptance, to engage in genuine dialogue with the people in

7 Anne Brown makes a useful distinction between “three different ways of using notions of hybridity as a theoretical tool” (Brown 2018, p. 29), (a) as an analytical or descriptive category (the approach taken here); (b) as normative and prescriptive, with hybridity “as something to be aimed at”, with the emphasis on “an imagined outcome – a newly constructed hybridity”, hence hybridity as “a solution” (Brown 2018, p. 32); (c) as instrumental, focused on management and control, “reminiscent of colonial mechanisms of ‘indirect rule’” (Brown 2018, p. 32). See also Brown (2017); Forsyth et al. (2017); Dinnen and Kent (2015); Millar (2014); Mac Ginty and Richmond (2016).

120  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding intervened-upon societies as agents of their own praxes of peace and political community. These ‘end-users’ (Denney 2014) of statebuilding and security provision show formidable pragmatism and adaptability when it comes to combining the indigenous and the exogenous, exploring what works for their circumstances and incorporating it into their culture and customs – which are far from static ‘traditional’, but fluid and inter-culturally adaptive, hybridizing all the time. People are engaged in constantly negotiating the emergence of forms of peace, security, and political order which best suit their needs, history, culture, aims, and aspirations, and which can provide the framework for the peaceful conduct of conflicts – beyond the Western ideal-type of the state with its monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force. This is not to say that states are not and will not remain important building blocks of global society – contemporary societies will have to be organized in state forms so as to be reliable and recognized members of the international system of states and its international organizations, adhering to and protected by international norms and rules (which is why de facto or quasi-state entities like Somaliland strive for international recognition as states). The current international system does not allow for ‘stateless’ spaces. Territories inhabited by people have to belong to one state or another.8 But actual state forms can divert significantly from the – Western, ‘Weberian’ – idea of the state.

CONCLUSION The idea of the state, which is informed by an institutionalist neo-Weberian focus on state entities divorced from society, is still the internationally hegemonic, fixed, taken-for-granted, non-negotiable, concept of statehood. It “has penetrated deeply into society, even in countries where state practices are widely divergent from this idea. It defines the limits of what can be legitimately said or done, and is reaffirmed even as political practice undermines it” (Eriksen 2017, p. 781).9 It persists as a powerful idea – and it has significant effects and consequences, albeit not the effects and consequences interventionist statebuilders intend to achieve (or posit to intend to achieve) (Eriksen 2017; Lemay-Hébert 2011). Attempts to implement this hegemonic model in so-called fragile states and situations are met by a conglomerate of adoption, adaptation, mimicry, subversion, resistance and avoidance, based on the social, cultural and political-economic specifics of the place which is subjected to those attempts. Narrow technocratic statebuilding interventions are confronted with the messy realities of governance in the intervened-upon societies. Hence what is actually taking place in internationally supported statebuilding is the collision, interaction and entanglement of profoundly different understandings of socio-political order, and this leads to hybridization of order and security arrangements. Statebuilding interventions are nothing but elements in complex processes of state formation. Their protagonists have to take into account the hybridity of order, peace and security; instead of working against hybridity or instrumentalizing it for statebuilding purposes, they should explore ways of working with hybridity – ways that can contribute to

8 This is why the most common types of contemporary large-scale violent conflicts are state-focused: secessionist (or irredentist) movements of people(s) who want to secede from the state they are currently part of have to establish their own state (or join another state), and anti-regime insurgencies that fight to overthrow a government in power have to take over the state themselves. 9 On the divide between ‘state images’ and ‘state practices’ see Thelen et al. (2014).

State formation in the context of hybrid political orders  121 stable security and sustainable peace, grounded in home-grown forms of statehood emerging from state formation, beyond the Western model of the state and of statebuilding, “mediating but not eradicating alterity” (Wallis and Richmond 2017, p. 436). A prerequisite for future research on statebuilding and intervention thus is to leave behind the taken-for-granted idea of the state, conceptualized around standardization, centralization and de-contextualized homogenization along the lines of the Western ‘Weberian’ model that is based on a narrow “concept of the state as a set of institutions that provide security” (Bonacker et al. 2017, p. 13). What is needed is an exploration of alternatives to this state idea, with a focus on difference and heterogeneity (Brown and Aning 2018b; Richmond 2019) – heterogeneity as a source of resilience, of political community beyond the standardized, unified, homogenous state, as enabling more dispersed, networked forms of governance. In other words: future research should explore the potential of heterogeneity for a new paradigm of statehood and, accordingly, explore what it means to work with and to work across difference in the interest of peace and state formation, with different forms of political authority and agency, in dialogic, rather than instrumental ways (Wallis and Richmond 2017). Such a dialogic approach is a radical alternative to the currently prevalent statebuilding philosophy, which operates based on the conviction that ‘we’ (the Western enlightened interveners) are in the possession of the ‘truth’ – of what peace and a state have to look like – and ‘they’ (the intervened-upon people in so-called fragile states and situations) have to learn from ‘us’ and adopt ‘our’ model, which is presented as universally applicable (Belloni 2012). Instead, what is needed is an ongoing open-ended exchange across difference, grounded in diverse experiences, life-worlds and worldviews. This means that interveners have to give up their aspirations to exert control over such exchange, they have to be aware of and reflect on their own positionality, accepting their own epistemological and ontological limitations, and accepting uncertainty rather than seeking certainty (Bhuta 2008; Grenfell 2018). A final word: since the concept of hybrid political orders was introduced into the peacebuilding and statebuilding discourse more than a decade ago, it has been taken into diverse directions (descriptive, analytical, prescriptive, normative, instrumental), it has become more and more sophisticated, elaborated and diversified, and it has become the object of significant critical scrutiny. Most importantly, it has crossed into the policy world – trendy, shallow, tokenistic and intrumentalized as one might argue (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016). This once more confirms the truism that research findings can be used – misused from the researcher’s perspective – for purposes and by actors that one does not agree with and is opposed against; this to a certain extent has happened to the hybridity approach (Millar 2014). In fact, in the world of realpolitik the concept is open in both directions: it potentially can lead to more emancipatory peacebuilding and statebuilding practices beyond the liberal peace approach (as the best case) – and/or to a refinement of counterinsurgency strategies (as the worst case). Although the latter trend gives reason for concern, the good news is that hybrid political orders, hybrid security governance, hybrid peace cannot be instrumentally designed, engineered, crafted or constructed entirely. Any endeavours of international interveners will always be nothing but – more or less benign or malign – elements in a complex and fluid web of relationships and interactions in a much broader mix of processes of peace and state formation.

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REFERENCES Albrecht, P. (2018), ‘The interplay of interventions and hybridisation in Puntland’s security sector’, Cooperation and Conflict, 53 (2), 216‒36. Albrecht, P. and L. Wiuff Moe (2014), ‘The simultaneity of authority in hybrid orders’, Peacebuilding, 3 (1), 1‒16. Aning, K., V. Boege, M. A. Brown and C. T. Hunt (eds) (2018), Exploring Peace Formation: Security and Justice in Post-Colonial States, London: Routledge. Bagayoko, N., E. Hutchful and R. Luckham (2016), ‘Hybrid security governance in Africa: Rethinking the foundations of security, justice and legitimate public authority’, Conflict, Security & Development, 16 (1), 1‒32. Baker, B. (2010), ‘Linking state and non-state security and justice’, Development Policy Review, 28 (5), 597–616. Belloni, R. (2012), ‘Hybrid peace governance: Its emergence and significance’, Global Governance, 18 (2012), 21‒38. Bhuta, N. (2008), ‘Against state-building’, Constellations, 15 (4), 517‒42. Björkdahl, A., K. Höglund, G. Millar, J. van der Lijn and W. Verkoren (2016), ‘Introduction: Peacebuilding through the lens of friction’, in A. Björkdahl, K. Höglund, G. Millar, J. van der Lijn and W. Verkoren (eds), Peacebuilding and Friction. Global and Local Encounters in Post-Conflict Societies, London: Routledge, pp. 1‒14. Boege, V. (2018), ‘The hybridisation of peace, security and justice: Cases from West Africa and Oceania’, in K. Aning, V. Boege, M. A. Brown and C. T. Hunt (eds), Exploring Peace Formation: Security and Justice in Post-Colonial States, London: Routledge, pp. 207‒25. Boege, V. et al. (2009), ‘On hybrid political orders and emerging states: What is failing – States in the global south or research and politics in the west?’, in M. Fischer and B. Schmelzle (eds), Building Peace in the Absence of States: Challenging the Discourse on State Failure, Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series 8, Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, pp. 15‒35. Bonacker, T., W. Distler and M. Ketzmerick (2017), ‘Introduction: Securitization in statebuilding and intervention’, in T. Bonacker, W. Distler and M. Ketzmerick (eds), Securitization in Statebuilding and Intervention, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 9‒27. Brigg, M. (2014), ‘Culture, “relationality”, and global cooperation’, Global Cooperation Research Papers 6, Duisburg: Centre for Global Cooperation Research. Brigg, M. (2016), ‘Relational peacebuilding: Promise beyond crisis’, in T. Debiel, T. Held and U. Schneckener (eds), Peacebuilding in Crisis. Rethinking Paradigms and Practices of Transnational Cooperation, London: Routledge, pp. 56‒69. Brown, M. A. (2017), ‘Hybridity and dialogue: Approaches to the hybrid turn’, Third World Thematics, 2 (4), 446‒63. Brown, M. A. (2018), ‘The “hybrid turn”: Approaches and potentials’, in J. Wallis, L. Kent, M. Forsyth, S. Dinnen and S. Bose (eds), Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations, Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 21‒36. Brown, M. A. and K. Aning (2018a), ‘Introduction: Seeking peace in West Africa and the Pacific island region – New directions’, in K. Aning, V. Boege, M. A. Brown and C. T. Hunt (eds) (2018), Exploring Peace Formation: Security and Justice in Post-Colonial States, London: Routledge, pp. 3‒23. Brown, M. A. and K. Aning (2018b), ‘Peace formation in heterogenous states: Concluding thoughts’, in K. Aning, V. Boege, M. A. Brown and C. T. Hunt (eds), Exploring Peace Formation: Security and Justice in Post-Colonial States, London: Routledge, pp. 226‒36. Brown, M. A., V. Boege, K. P. Clements and A. Nolan (2010), ‘Challenging statebuilding as peacebuilding: Working with hybrid political orders to build peace’, in O. P. Richmond (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding: Critical Developments and Approaches, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–115. Buur, L. and H. M. Kyed (2006) ‘Contested sources of authority: Re-claiming state sovereignty by formalizing traditional authority in Mozambique’, Development and Change, 37 (4), 847‒69. Denney, L. (2014), ‘Overcoming the state/non-state divide: An end user approach to security and justice reform’, International Peacekeeping, 21 (2), 251‒68. Dinnen, S. and L. Kent (2015), Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development: A Critical Interrogation, SSGM In Brief 2015/50, Canberra: Australian National University. Eriksen, S. S. (2017), ‘State effects and the effects of state building: Institution building and the formation of state-centred societies’, Third World Quarterly, 38 (4), 771‒86. Forsyth, M., L. Kent, S. Dinnen, J. Wallis and S. Bose (2017), ‘Hybridity in peacebuilding and development: A critical approach’, Third World Thematics, 2 (4), 407‒21.

State formation in the context of hybrid political orders  123 Fukuyama, F. (2004), State-Building. Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Grenfell, D. (2018), ‘Inside and out: Violence against women and spatiality in Timor-Leste’, in J. Wallis, L. Kent, M. Forsyth, S. Dinnen and S. Bose (eds), Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations, Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 237‒52. Grimm, S., N. Lemay-Hébert and O. Nay (2014), ‘“Fragile states”: Introducing a political concept’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (2), 197‒209. Hameiri, S. and L. Jones (2017), ‘Beyond hybridity to the politics of scale: International intervention and “local” politics’, Development and Change, 48 (1), 54‒77. Hameiri, S. and L. Jones (2018), ‘Against hybridity in the study of peacebuilding and statebuilding’, in J. Wallis, L. Kent, M. Forsyth, S. Dinnen and S. Bose (eds), Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations, Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 99‒112. Hunt, C. T. (2017), ‘Beyond the binaries: Towards a relational approach to peacebuilding’, Global Change, Peace & Security, 29 (3), 209‒27. Hunt, C. T. (2018a), ‘Relational perspectives on peace formation: Symbiosis and the provision of security and justice’, in K. Aning, V. Boege, M. A. Brown and C. T. Hunt (eds), Exploring Peace Formation: Security and Justice in Post-Colonial States, London: Routledge, pp. 78‒99. Hunt, C. T. (2018b), ‘Hybridity revisited: Relational approaches to peacebuilding in complex sociopolitical orders’, in J. Wallis, L. Kent, M. Forsyth, S. Dinnen and S. Bose (eds), Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations, Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 51‒65. Kent, L., S. Bose, J. Wallis, S. Dinnen and M. Forsyth (2018), ‘Introduction’, in J. Wallis, L. Kent, M. Forsyth, S. Dinnen and S. Bose (eds), Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations, Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 1‒17. Krasner, S. D. and C. Pascual (2005), ‘Addressing state failure’, Foreign Affairs, 84 (4), 153‒63. Kyed, H. M. (2017), ‘Hybridity and boundary-making: Exploring the politics of hybridization’, Third World Thematics, 2 (4), 464‒80. Kyed, H. M. and L. Buur (2006), ‘Recognition and democratisation: New roles for traditional leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa’, DIIS Working Paper No. 2006/11, Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies. Laffey, M. and S. Nadarajah (2012), ‘The hybridity of liberal peace: States, diasporas and insecurity’, Security Dialogue, 43 (5), 403‒20. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2011), ‘The bifurcation of the two worlds: Assessing the gap between internationals and locals in state-building processes’, Third World Quarterly, 32 (10), 1823‒41. Lemay-Hébert, N. and P. Lottholz (2016), ‘Re-reading Weber, reconceptualising state-building: From neo-Weberian to post-Weberian approaches to state, legitimacy and state-building’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 29 (4), 1467‒85. Mac Ginty, R. and O. Richmond (2016), ‘The fallacy of constructing hybrid political orders: A reappraisal of the hybrid turn in peacebuilding’, International Peacekeeping, 23 (2), 219‒39. Millar, G. (2014), ‘Disaggregating hybridity: Why hybrid institutions do not produce predictable experiences of peace’, Journal of Peace Research, 51 (4), 501‒14. Millar, G., J. van der Lijn and W. Verkoren (2013), ‘Peacebuilding plans and local reconfigurations: Frictions between imported processes and indigenous practices’, International Peacekeeping, 20 (2), 137‒43. Peterson, J. H. (2012), ‘A conceptual unpacking of hybridity: Accounting for notions of power, politics and progress in analyses of aid-driven interfaces’, Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 7 (2), 9–22. Richmond, O. P. (2011), A Post-Liberal Peace, London: Routledge. Richmond, O. P. (2013), ‘Failed statebuilding versus peace formation’, in D. Chandler and T. D. Sisk (eds), Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding, London: Routledge, pp. 130‒40. Richmond, O. P. (2019), ‘Peace and the formation of political order’, International Peacekeeping, 26 (1), 85‒110. Schroeder, U., F. Chappuis and D. Kocak (2014), ‘Security sector reform and the emergence of hybrid security governance’, International Peacekeeping, 21 (2), 214–30. Thelen, T., L. Vetters and K. von Benda-Beckmann (2014), ‘Introduction to stategraphy: Toward a relational anthropology of the state’, Social Analysis, 58 (3), 1‒19. Verkoren, W. and M. van Leeuwen (2013), ‘Civil society in peacebuilding: Global discourse, local reality’, International Peacekeeping, 20 (2), 159‒72. Wallis, J. and O. Richmond (2017), ‘From constructivist to critical engagements with peacebuilding: Implications for hybrid peace’, Third World Thematics, 2 (3), 422‒45. Woodward, S. L. (2017), The Ideology of Failed States: Why Intervention Fails, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

13. The everyday politics of international intervention Janosch Neil Kullenberg

International interventions1 such as peacekeeping, emergency relief or development aid, are deeply political. They reflect power relations of the international system and engage crucial aspects of governance, such as security, health and economy. For instance, robust UN Security Council mandates can alternate the balance of power in on-going conflicts as observed in Mali, the Central African Republic or the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Humanitarian and development organisations frequently take over a large part of health service delivery in various contexts from Afghanistan to Zambia (Van de Maele et al. 2013). Apart from international efforts to purposefully stimulate growth, the mere presence of international entities, particularly peacekeeping missions, tends to distort the local economy in a number of ways (Bove and Elia 2018). Through these influences, interventions impact the sovereignty of receiving countries, changing the relationship between the international community and the ‘host’ state as well as the responsibilities and authority of the government towards its population. The more obvious political aspects of interventions take place through central processes such as negotiations at the UN Security Council, support for organising elections or the development of macro-policies. However, policies, including those not ostensibly focused on governance, are often not implemented as intended. Implementers have considerable leeway and decision-making power when translating abstract policies into practice indicating a rather subtle but perhaps more pervasive type of intervention politics (see Betts and Orchard 2014). Many events also develop unwittingly, through automatic behaviour and bureaucratic routines rather than from deliberate choices (Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Lipsky 2010). Others have challenged the assumption that intervention practices are actually driven by policies altogether (Mosse 2005). In short, major decisions are without doubt important, but it is through everyday practices that things take place. The everyday politics of international interventions can be defined as the practices, habits and social frames that structure and reproduce international interventions. They are political because they fundamentally engage questions of interest and power. They manifest international priorities and shape the outcomes of intervention policies from the bottom up. Studying them helps to explain the ‘failures’ or inefficiencies of interventions. It reveals that not all practices of interveners are geared towards addressing their stated goals and that the cultural world of intervention has a number of dimensions that are unconnected to the efficient implementation of the mandate.

1 Although many understand interventions and even ‘humanitarian interventions’ as pertaining to military operations (e.g. Finnemore 2003, p. 53; Stewart and Knaus 2012, pp. x–xv), this chapter refers to the Latin roots of the term (intervenire = to come between) and takes a much broader understanding that encompasses all forms of international engagement in a Peace- and Statebuilding context, which frequently is distinctively civilian.

124

The everyday politics of international intervention  125 Such detailed focus on the international self is still relatively rare. Although a considerable amount of research on interventions has been published over the last two decades, much of it could be described with the trite term ‘armchair science’ – written without fieldwork or after ten days of expert interviews in one of the usual capitals. Many focus on the application and confirmation of concepts or criticise on the basis of convictions. Inductive and in-depth research is still relatively recent and also has its shortcomings. For instance, many ethnographic, micro-sociological accounts have not yet been combined to yield systematic comparisons, so that their insights remain context-specific and overly focused on the micro-level. Therefore, this chapter explores and compiles such practices, their constitutive elements and their consequences to then make the re-connection to larger structures of interests and power in the domain of international relations. The empirical examples are neither described in full detail nor representative of an exhaustive list. To the contrary, the descriptions point out that practices, habits, social frames and artefacts require further research.

A TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE The field of international intervention appears quite fragmented. First, there exist a number of functional domains with their own specific history, approaches and culture, such as humanitarian aid, development assistance, human rights work and peacekeeping. Second, each of these domains is inhabited by a multitude of organisations that actively seek to distinguish themselves from each other (Krause 2014). Finally, interveners themselves come from different nations, cultures and backgrounds (Roth 2015, p. 142). Despite these differences, international interveners inhabit a shared social space that is based on common understandings and a shared practical logic (Krause 2014, pp. 4–6). Anthropologists have come to call this place ‘Aidland’ (Apthorpe 2005; Mosse 2005) and ‘Peaceland’, in the case of conflict zones (Autesserre 2014).2 The inhabitants of these ‘lands’ share similar understandings (for instance that interventions are necessary and beneficial), engage in the same professional practices (e.g. security clearance, yearly budget and work plan, reporting obligations), and participate in common social habits (e.g. after hour drinks and going away parties). It is through their shared, patterned experiences as expatriates in a foreign country that diverging groups of interveners, such as Swiss UN careerists, Italian NGO workers and Indian peacekeepers become a “transnational community of practice” (Autesserre 2014, p. 47; see also Adler and Pouliot 2011, pp. 29‒30).

PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES Practices have been defined as “socially meaningful patterns of action, which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world” (Adler and Pouliot 2011, p. 6). Simply put, focusing on practices is to study what people do and why they do it (Brown 2012). Those that apply the practice lens share an appreciation for getting “closer to everyday



2

For a review of Autesserre’s book ‘Peaceland’ see Kullenberg (2016a).

126  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding activities of those speaking, writing and doing politics” (Bueger 2014, p. 384). Given this conceptual openness, the recent ‘practice turn’ in the discipline of International Relations is reflected by heterogeneous theoretical roots and correspondingly diverse foci (Rouse 2007; Bueger and Gadinger 2008). Within the anthropology of aid, a number of theorists are widely referred to, including Pierre Bourdieu (Autesserre 2014; Goetze 2017; Krause 2014; Roth 2015; Smirl 2015), Michel de Certeau (Smirl 2015), Michel Foucault (Smirl 2015) and Bruno Latour (Hindman and Fechter 2011; Smirl 2015). Despite theoretical differences, the authors converge around the study of Aidland’s organisations, communities or professions as fields of practice. The concept is appealing because it bypasses the territorial agency-structure discussions within academia and focuses on how interventions really work (see Rouse 2007, p. 644). Having been pulled to this research topic by personal interest and real world experience, aid anthropologists appreciate that the approach develops an analysis that resonates with audiences beyond academia (Bueger 2014, p. 384).3 International intervention consists of a large number of practices that make them less effective, inefficient and often even harmful. Ironically, many of these practices were first developed in an effort to professionalise the sector and make it more accountable (Roth 2015, p. 73). Autesserre (2014) explains that the focus of professional skills and formal training have contributed to an overemphasis on technical expertise. Intervention discourses have framed “issues of war and poverty as ‘a set of technical problems to be solved by experts’” (p. 77; cf. Mosse 2011). As international intervention is based on the belief in universal, technical solutions for local problems, such expertise is essential for legitimising the whole operation. Subsequently, this has led to a hierarchical relationship between international (universal, technical) knowledge and local expertise (Autesserre 2014, p. 72). The incentive system in Aidland encourages interveners to develop technical expertise over local knowledge. To gain experience and eventually a promotion, interveners are encouraged to frequently hop from one country to the next. Missions in different countries are seen as ‘notches on the belt’, however, as a result of the frequent rotations, interveners hardly have the time to integrate and often become detached from the various places they live and work in (see more below). Although local expertise and language skills are rhetorically appreciated, they hardly increase the chances of being hired. Rather than important requirements, they are seen as a bonus for already qualified, possibly pre-selected, candidates. This also reflects the broader expectations according to which international actors are supposed to manage and direct without getting too involved in the local contexts. In fact, a prolonged stay in one country might jeopardise a career as the individual risks the perception of being corrupted by the local context. The expression ‘going native’ epitomises such thinking and expresses concern that staff members might lose their sober mind and professional distance. In addition to these prejudiced perceptions, knowledge about the local context can pose a more practical challenge as it might contradict designs and approaches. During my doctoral research, a human resource staff member for a peace organisation once explained that “knowing about a country can make your work more complicated”. Roth explains that the “familiarity of the political, social and cultural context in which aid organisations are operating also challenges standardised approaches which are more easily implemented if aid staff have little knowledge about any particular 3 It should be pointed out that other theoretical approaches to studying international interventions, such as sociological figurations (Veit 2010), spatiality (Smirl 2015) and critical theory (Duffield 2007), also lead to valuable insights.

The everyday politics of international intervention  127 place” (Roth 2015, p. 134). Put differently, neoliberal policies and blueprint solutions to some degree require that local conditions be ignored (Roth 2015, p. 134). Consequently, even recognised experts on particular countries often face difficulties to find employment in their countries of specialisation (Autesserre 2014, p. 73). An increased professionalisation of the field has also led to a stronger orientation towards the donors and away from the outcomes for beneficiaries. Aid organisations need to constantly prove that their approach is valuable and that they are competent in implementing it. It is only through such demonstrations that intervening organisations can hope to ensure continued support and resources from donors. The introduction of management and assessment tools, such as result-based planning and impact evaluation, was an important step to increase accountability for the money spent (Krause 2014). These tools have, however, further bureaucratised aid work and increased the need for justification. They resulted in an increased focus on quantifiable results, turning away from the much harder to grasp (and prove) multidimensional and qualitative changes in the lived realities of local populations. Many authors (and interveners themselves), therefore, speak of a focus on outputs – such as how much aid was delivered – as opposed to a focus on impact of this aid.4 A related practice is the obligation of interveners across institutions to constantly write reports as opposed to engaging in the more practical aspects of their work. There are two types of reports: (a) direct justifications for spent resources through descriptions of implemented activities, and (b) more indirect legitimation as entities demonstrate their value and competence through informing headquarters and signalling that they are aware of and addressing an issue. The latter is particularly important for entities such as human rights organisations or the different sections of a peacekeeping mission whose mandate goes beyond implementing a certain number of fixed activities. Although most organisations are spending much of their time on reporting, often in parallel to each other, it is not clear to what degree these reports are read and if they result in any specific action or change. Reports appear to be quite unrelated to achieving results and predominantly serve to signal that something was done. They therefore manifest and maintain the sector’s output orientation and focus on justification and legitimacy. While reports are mainly directed inwards and up the hierarchy, organisations also signal activity and competence to the wider field. They increase their visibility through flags, signs and widespread logos. Apart from identification and justification this branding has little function and is thus almost entirely oriented towards the donors and the other organisations. The need for visibility often leads to an ‘overcrowding’ of certain areas at the neglect of others5 and can actually have detrimental effects on local ownership (Autesserre 2014).

4 Proper evaluation can cause tensions in two regards: It is rarely done as most organisations do not develop result frameworks, lack baselines and merely produce rough estimates based on some provision of service. Not uncommon is, for instance, estimating results, such as arguing to have increased food security for over 20,000 rural households (up to 160,000 individuals) because of the provision of training and seeds to 130 agricultural associations, which each have up to a hundred members but also act as multipliers to neighbouring communities. Even organisations that invest in rigorous impact evaluations, such as the International Rescue Committee (IRC), can meet resistance from the implementation level. First, because implementers think the exercise draws time and resources from implementation, and subsequently, because evaluation results can be difficult to reconcile with what is perceived as tangible results on the ground. 5 Most aid organisations are active in the Kivu region but have long neglected the Kasai provinces despite larger humanitarian need (this has changed somewhat in 2017 with the Kamuina Nsapu rebellion).

128  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Bureaucratic security procedures also figure among widespread practices that are largely unreflected but have real consequences for interventions. These practices vary across organisations but tend to be exaggerated and divorced from local realities. Security measures often represent large-scale management techniques to minimise risks and control personnel. Unfortunately, they might curtail exactly the kind of engagement and relationship building that would keep interveners safe. Curfews are a case in point. As blanket limitations to individuals’ movement, they can appear quite arbitrary and curtail people’s ability to integrate and build relationships. Expatriates are also often not allowed to walk in the host country and instead have to travel in cars, further insulating them from local realities. The same cars are generally forbidden to give locals a ride as to minimise risks and avoid being liable in the case of accidents. In areas with limited transport where sharing such resources is common, people that have to walk long distances under tough circumstances might have difficulties comprehending why half-empty cars pass them. This might, in return, lead to resentment (Lemay-Hébert 2011, pp.  1823‒41). Furthermore, security procedures are often overly bureaucratic and lengthy, complicating timely deployments in an emergency. They have also pushed interveners to be active where it is safe and easy to reach. This leads to a preponderance of intervening organisations in the accessible areas and a neglect of the more unstable places where needs are likely the greatest (Healy and Tiller 2014). Instead, interveners conduct short trips in the more volatile areas and implement remotely through local partners. Both practices lead to a loss of touch with reality and often increase corruption. Autesserre describes how an increasing standardisation of security procedures, particularly after the attack of aid workers in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, has resulted in a shift from the traditional approach of negotiating access to moving only with armed escorts or not responding at all. She concludes that these practices have further contributed to insecurity. Security guidelines often warn against engaging with locals. Some of my UN colleagues have even come to believe that having any type of personal contact or relationship with locals is forbidden. Recently this unfortunate tendency has been further exacerbated by the scandals around sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA). While failing to adequately address the problem of SEA (Westendorf and Searle 2017), the UN ‘Zero tolerance’ policy makes staff wary of engaging with locals. Of course, striking the optimal balance between reputational risks for the UN and individual liberties is challenging. While avoiding all risks together is a safer bet, it also curtails possibilities for personal engagement and integration, which in return can be important for reducing perceptions of threats and increasing acceptance by local communities. For example in DRC, Tanzanian troops have been severely restricted so as to ward against the possibility of peacekeepers exploiting local populations. This containment of soldiers is understandable but forgoes the opportunity to make use of their Swahili skills, bond with locals and better understand the context – arguably all operationally relevant activities.6

SOCIAL FRAMES As ‘competent performances’, practices require background knowledge. In that way, they can be compared to a language that both the speaker and the audience need to master in order for 6 While some might argue that the ban on fraternisation has historical reasons, this does not preclude possible adaptions as other contingents demonstrate.

The everyday politics of international intervention  129 practices of speaking to make sense (Rouse 2007, pp. 649–51). This background knowledge provides the necessary ‘interpretative frames’ to understand a situation or problem ‘correctly’ and to be able to respond adequately. Individual frames are combined into narratives and eventually form a sense-making logic that is specific to international interventions (see Schlichte and Veit 2007). Barnett and Finnemore (2004, 1999, p. 719) describe how the “rules, rituals and beliefs” shape the way that staff in international organisations make sense of the world. Smirl calls the sense-making system the ‘humanitarian imaginary’ and argues that it provides “idealized assumptions regarding social organization and community” (Smirl 2015, p. 2; cf. Malkki 2015, p. 201).7 She draws on Taylor’s concept of ‘social imaginaries’, defined as “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor 2002, p. 106). The way we make sense of the world and our actions within it are mutually constitutive. Social frames and narratives authorise, enable and justify specific practices and policies, just as they exclude others. In turn, our actions reproduce practices and reinforce the meaning of the dominant frames and narratives on which they were based (Autesserre 2012). Autesserre gives striking examples of how dominant narratives about the causes, consequences and solutions of violent conflicts lead to overly simplistic, ultimately ineffective and often harmful interventions (Autesserre 2010, 2012, 2014). For instance in the DRC, the international community’s logic of reinforcing the state has led the EU and the UN to support security forces, which regularly commit over 60 per cent of human rights abuses. While Autesserre’s examples appear to be mere coincidences – unfortunate misunderstandings based on bad knowledge collection practices – others have stressed the role of narratives in justifying intervention (Bliesemann de Guevara 2014, 2016).8 Kai Koddenbrock argues that the narratives of intervention are often reproducing power relations, pathologising places like the DRC and inherently prescribing recipes for interventions (Koddenbrock 2012, 2014, 2015, chapter 2).

EVERYDAY HABITS The fact that practices are defined as ‘social performances’ does not mean that they are necessarily performed deliberately. To emphasise the “profoundly unthought and automatic nature” of such practices, Autesserre refers to them as ‘habits’ (Autesserre 2014, pp. 32‒33). According to cognitive neuroscience, habits are ‘physiological features of the brain’ – established neural pathways – that emerged through regular repetition. They subsequently function as “unreflective reactions we have to the world around us: our perceptions, attitudes, emotions and practices” (Hopf 2010, p. 544). For Hopf, habits attest to the structured aspects of behaviour, which is often still underestimated in the ‘practice turn’. He sees habits on the level of individual actions, contrary to Bourdieu’s understanding of Habitus, which is a more far-reaching system of internalised structures (see pp. 544‒7).9

For a short review of Smirl’s book, see Kullenberg (2016b). A special issue on knowledge production in the International Crisis Group can be found here: https://​www​.tandfonline​.com/​toc/​ctwq20/​35/​4 (accessed 5 July 2019). 9 For more on the application of Bourdieu’s core concepts see Adler-Nissen (2012). 7 8

130  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Interveners arguably live in a (social) world that exists in parallel to local realities (Lemay-Hébert 2011). This is often referred to as a ‘bubble’ in order to highlight its insulated (and fragile) nature. Although expatriates and local populations are geographically in the same place, they could be described as living on different planets. The former can often enjoy a number of comforts that facilitate productivity and relaxation, such as electricity, running water, personal computer, Internet, and house staff that take care of their daily needs. The majority of the latter often lack such luxuries and are much more burdened by the realities of living in a crisis country such as violent crime, predatory governance structures and shouldering heavy responsibilities towards family members and friends. This difference is maintained and reinforced by the social habits of interveners. After a full workday in a challenging context, many expatriates want to relax and not make any further efforts and/or concessions. This means that they predominantly meet with other aid expatriates for happy hours, dinners and parties where they can talk openly about their frustrations and be themselves (Roth 2015, pp. 136‒37). Consider this rather typical statement of a European woman: I found the job quite stressful and quite draining and I didn’t always find it easy to manage African staff… I guess because of that I did not necessarily want to see them over the weekends [laughs] as well. (cited in Roth 2015, p. 136)

Interveners tend to socialise with each other in ways that (often unwittingly) discriminate against the culture and means of the local population. Much of the free time is spent in exclusive bars and restaurants, whose price range is off limits to regular people. In a context where scarce jobs in the local economy might pay an average of $50‒300 a month, aid workers can easily spend $8 for one drink and equally high prices for imported culinary specialities, such as pizza, burgers or pasta (see also Lemay-Hébert 2011, pp. 1827‒33). To relax, expats do weekend trips that easily equal several months of local salary. These differences in means might be further engraved by exercising a western lifestyle that diverges from the local culture in choices regarding partying, clothing, alcohol consumption and sexual relationships (Roth 2015, p. 133). While locals in the same age group are generally bound by professional and personal responsibilities, expatriates often find themselves separated from their family and social relations. For many, this leads to a ‘work hard/play hard’ lifestyle where they work long hours and spend their little free time in bars and partying. This lifestyle can be exciting and allows ‘letting off steam’ but it partially explains why expatriates might not find the time or energy to engage with locals and correspondingly why locals might be uninterested in doing so. Locals might be appalled by such a lifestyle or simply think that interveners are not serious and just come to their country to be well-paid and have fun. Frequently used phrases like “tourists” or “les criseurs”10 would suggest as much (see Autesserre 2014, p. 161). The choice of interveners’ social activities is thus not a coincidence but rather a more or less deliberate strategy of decompression. Interveners do reflect on it and some feel guilty for spending ‘too much time’ with other expats and not making a bigger effort to integrate (Roth 2015, p. 137). However, such reflections tend to fall short of recognising that the shared social

10 A word play with miner (creuser), suggesting that expatriates are making a living of the world’s crises.

The everyday politics of international intervention  131 habits of aid workers are not only building distance from the locals but ‘othering’ the host population. What tends to be forgotten in such reflections are larger power configurations and structurally engrained relationships. Smirl speaks of a “structured cycle of interaction” that occurs between expatriates and host country population (Smirl 2015, p. 23). These interactions are logically a two-way street. Just as the aid worker is bound to be disappointed and frustrated by much of the interaction with locals, she is herself acting along pre-designed patterns. Therefore, locals also have their stereotypes about expatriates that they re-experience through patterned interactions with every new batch of frequently rotating expatriates. The categories of ‘expatriates’, ‘local staff’ or ‘beneficiaries’ are thus not neutral but filled with meaning, before the individual ever enters the stage of the particular social context. Roth goes as far as calling them “racialised terms which are rarely questioned and which signify the unequal relationship between international and national staff members, beneficiaries and local population” (Roth 2015, p. 128; see Krause 2014 for the construction of the ‘beneficiary’). The examples also show that expatriates’ social habits are often neither rooted in the host country nor in their social environment of origin. Expats live, as Lisa Smirl argues, in a liminal place between worlds not really bound by either social system (Smirl 2015, chapter 1). This facilitates extraordinary behaviour (positive and negative) and can have long-term consequences for the health and well-being of interveners. It can, for instance, reinforce their sense of uprootedness.11 The ‘R&R’ (rest and recuperation) regulation in crisis contexts ironically reinforces the constant emergency state of the international self. It is meant for individual staff to relax after an intense 6‒8 week deployment. However, it actually makes staff work harder to subsequently leave the country and cool-off for a couple of days in a liminal space that is neither connected to the host country nor to their origins. While beaches in Zanzibar undoubtedly have their charm, this regulation further alienates interveners from more meaningful realities and forgoes the opportunity to integrate and relax in everyday contexts that the host country would have to offer, such as going to church or playing soccer.

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT OF INTERVENTION Professional practices and social habits are both mediated by and manifest in material artefacts (Adler and Pouliot 2011, p. 7; Bueger and Gadinger 2008, pp. 285‒89; Rouse 2007, p. 639). As Bueger (2014, p. 387) highlights, “often a certain way of doing is inscribed into artefacts and they hence can equally be considered as carriers of practice”. Of the anthropologists of aid, Smirl particularly focuses on the material elements and ‘built environment’ of the aid world and how these shape interaction within it. She argues that while historically compounds, SUVs and hotels have been seen as nothing more than an inherent, functional backdrop to the delivery of projects and programmes, they are making certain options more or less efficient, desirable, noticeable or palatable (Smirl 2015, p. 8). Urban planners have long known that “the layout of buildings will influence all manner of human behaviour, from the efficiency of a daily routine; to the types and frequencies of interaction with other people and things; to the scenes and landscapes that are observed” (Smirl 2015, p. 83). They shape how interveners perceive the ‘outside world’ and, in return, shape how others perceive them. Aid compounds are, 11 For more information on the psychological issues of expatriates see Kristina Schellinski’s work. She is a psychologist that treats expatriates based in Geneva.

132  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding for instance, increasingly built like fortresses (Duffield 2010; Smirl 2015). They are difficult to enter and thus exclude meaningful interaction with ordinary people by design. Through their exclusionary character, they also contribute to a natural perception of privilege and power, separating those that deserve attention, that is, certain elites and power holders, from those for whom decisions can be made, such as the majority of beneficiaries and the wider population. As such, the material signs of privilege and exclusion can become targets for those that contest the established ways of power. On the other hand, the ‘siege mentality’ contributes to the complete insulation of the internationals and might function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Smirl draws parallels to gated communities in the West, which ironically tend to increase inhabitants’ perception of insecurity (Smirl 2015, chapter 3). Similarly, the omnipresent white Land Cruisers or SUVs of Aidland, change how interveners experience their host country. “Instead of being exposed to heat, rain, dust, the aid worker can ride along in a climate-controlled environment” and is enclosed in a “sonic envelope” (Smirl 2015, p. 104). Smirl argues that in Aceh (Indonesia), despite the rhetoric of a holistic and integrated approach, interveners’ differential experience of mobility – shaped by driving through and flying over – contributed to the creation of a series of insulated projects in single communities across a 300-kilometre coastline (Smirl 2015, p. 123).12 Another constitutive artefact of intervention management tools. In her book The Good Project, Monika Krause traces the development and function of the logical framework matrix, better known as ‘logframe’, which does not determine what people do, but shapes what they look at, come to know and perceive as required action (Krause 2014, p. 76).13 She argues that the logframe established the project as the unit for humanitarian and development work. In the process, it has contributed to the above-mentioned shift from values, practical expertise and service to those in need, to numbers, paperwork and managerialism (Krause 2014, p. 88).

LOCAL RESPONSES In addition to their implications for the effectiveness and efficiency of interventions, everyday practices of expatriates also provoke reactions from the local population, including adaptation, contestation and resistance. National staff that realise that their expertise is not appreciated, that their arguments are not considered and that their career opportunities are limited, often stop trying. During the interviews for my dissertation project, expatriates repeatedly described how capable national colleagues were not listened to in meetings and as a result became disengaged. Similarly, the frequent rotation of interveners and their detachment from local realities effectively curtails the idealism of many national colleagues. Disenchantment with the noble idea of intervention leads to different forms of adaptation. Frequently observed is increased corruption, which is enabled by the absence of international staff in the field manifesting in questionable practices such as short project visits, implementation through partners and remote programming:

For more on the ‘white car syndrome’ see Lemay-Hébert (2011), pp. 1833–6. A review of Krause’s book can be found at https://​janoschkullenberg​.com/​2018/​10/​17/​review​ -of​-monica​-krauses​-book​-the​-good​-project​-humanitarian​-relief​-and​-the​-fragmentation​-of​-reason/​ (accessed 5 July 2019). 12 13

The everyday politics of international intervention  133 The buy-in for the international programs can be so low that local stakeholders will care mostly about their material benefits that they can get for themselves – the funds they can gain or steal, the bribes they can exact, the jobs they can provide to friends and relatives – and little about the actual impact of the program for the broader population. (Autesserre 2014, p. 111)

In addition to embezzlement, aid is often redirected. During the post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh, communities that had little say in the focus of aid projects, would go ‘shopping around’ for better deals. As reconstruction efforts were focused on housing and communities could not choose what type of aid they would receive, they tried to play different aid organisations against each other in order to receive larger, higher quality and better designed houses (Smirl 2015, p. 134). Local communities that realise that policies and projects are neither based on their needs nor considerably improve their suffering, can become resentful and contest the legitimacy of interventions. In Timor-Leste, as in many places, the population quickly became disgruntled with the disconnected UN lifestyle. During the first demonstrations in January 2000, protesters held signs stating “East Timorese need food and medicine, not hotels and discotheques” (Lemay-Hébert 2011, p. 1830). In Aceh, after the massive influx of international aid, some political parties deliberately appealed to anti-foreigner sentiments. For instance, the local Chairman of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) declared that “Aceh is not Kosovo” and called for authorities to check the documentation of internationals (Smirl 2015, p. 120). This is not an exception. Governments from Chad to Sudan have considerably inhibited the work of international interveners through deliberate bureaucratic hurdles, such as excessive visa requirements. Evidently, negative perceptions can not only impact local ownership and cooperation but also severely affect security conditions for international staff (Pouligny 2006). Local elites and power holders might generally come to believe that prolonging violence is in their interest and ensures continuous flow of resources (Autesserre 2014, p. 108). But expatriates can also be deliberately targeted by violence. Therefore, the increase of crime against interveners needs to be contextualised appropriately. For instance, SUVs symbolic embodiment of international wealth and power has led to increasing carjackings. Smirl argues that such perceptions have contributed to rendering car travel an unusable means of transport in many violence-affected contexts (Smirl 2015, pp. 101‒6).

THE PERSISTENCE OF INEFFICIENT PRACTICES AND THE POSSIBILITY OF REFORM Why then would smart, educated and well-intended interveners continue professional practices and ways of socialising that they themselves widely view as ineffective and often frustrating? Autesserre (2014, pp. 42‒5) provides a number of potential explanations: First, dominant frames let people interpret new information in ways that confirm existing beliefs. Even when contradictions become obvious, the need for cognitive consistency and stabilising organisational routines creates a certain path dependence. Second, the habitual nature of many practices, explains why they are so persistent. Most interveners are simply not fully cognisant that they have such harmful impact. As psychological features of the brain, habits also hinder change as they “remain neutral pathways until they erode with time, through disuse”. In other words, “habits may continue to control what we do even while we explicitly express a con-

134  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding trary attitude” (Hopf 2010, p. 543). Third, interveners personally benefit from the status quo through high salaries, extraordinary power and prestige. Resistance, on the other hand, would mean that they risk becoming socially excluded and professionally side-lined. Autesserre (2014, p. 6) insists, however, that “although they are pervasive, there is nothing innate or unchangeable about these everyday modes of operations”. She is convinced that “rather than stopping international interventions altogether, we need to reduce their negative impact, while preserving their positive outcomes” (Autesserre 2014, p. 16). To support such a reform process, she provides a number of constructive recommendations. However, what this perspective misses is that harmful practices of intervention are not merely unfortunate coincidence; rather they manifest and reproduce fundamental characteristics of the aid world and the larger international system that would be difficult to address through partial reform. Monika Krause highlights that existing practices and institutions mediate the impact of well-intended reform processes. She found that the two attempts to reform humanitarian aid – the Sphere Project and the Humanitarian Accountability Project – “have become incorporated into the process of producing projects, and with their respective standards shape specific products and add to the infrastructure of the market for Projects” (Krause 2014, p. 128). In that sense, the call for reform can seem ‘ritualistic’ and the belief in technical solutions might itself constitute one of the dominant frames of intervention. The danger of focusing predominantly on the micro perspective is then that it “reduces the notion of practice to daily routines and seeks to find their social sense in the reality of these practices themselves” (Goetze 2017, p. 26). Instead, a more systemic analysis of practices always requires exploring their genesis and larger underlying power structures. If we are idealistic enough to make policy recommendations, they have to be based on a careful consideration of how practices come into being and why they are perpetuated.

REFERENCES Adler, E. and V. Pouliot (2011), ‘International practices’, International Theory, 3 (1), 1–36. Adler-Nissen, R. (2012), Bourdieu in International Relations: Rethinking Key Concepts in IR, Abingdon: Routledge. Apthorpe, R. (2005), ‘Postcards from Aidland’, Paper presented at the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, United Kingdom. Autesserre, S. (2010), The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Autesserre, S. (2012), ‘Dangerous tales: Dominant narratives on the Congo and their Unintended Consequences’, African Affairs, 443, 202–22. Autesserre, S. (2014), Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, New York: Cambridge University Press. Barnett, M. N. and M. Finnemore (1999), ‘The politics, power, and pathologies of international organizations’, International Organization, 53 (4), 699–732. Barnett, M. and M. Finnemore (2004), Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Betts, A. and P. Orchard (eds) (2014), Implementation and World Politics: How International Norms Change Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. (2014), ‘Studying the International Crisis Group’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4), 545–62. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. (ed.) (2016), Myth and Narrative in International Politics: Interpretive Approaches to the Study of IR, London: Springer. Bove, V. and L. Elia (2018), ‘Economic development in peacekeeping host countries’, CESifo Economic Studies, 64 (4), 712–28.

The everyday politics of international intervention  135 Brown, C. (2012), ‘The “practice turn”, phronesis and classical realism: Towards a phronetic international political theory?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40 (3), 439–56. Bueger, C. (2014), ‘Pathways to practice: Praxiography and international politics’, European Political Science Review, 6 (3), 383–406. Bueger, C. and F. Gadinger (2008), ‘Praktisch gedacht! Praxistheoretischer konstruktivismus in den internationalen beziehungen’, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, 273‒302. Duffield, M. (2007), Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, Cambridge: Polity. Duffield, M. (2010), ‘Risk-management and the fortified aid compound: Everyday life in post-interventionary society’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4 (4), 453–74. Finnemore, M. (2003), The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Goetze, C. (2017), The Distinction of Peace, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Healy, S. and S. Tiller (2014), ‘Where is everyone? Responding to emergencies in the most difficult places’, London: Médecins San Frontières. Hindman, H. and A.-M. Fechter (2011), Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland, Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Hopf, T. (2010), ‘The logic of habit in international relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 16 (4), 539–61. Koddenbrock, K. (2012), ‘Recipes for intervention: Western policy papers imagine the Congo’, International Peacekeeping, 19 (5), 549–64. Koddenbrock, K. (2014), ‘Malevolent politics: ICG reporting on government action and the dilemmas of rule in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4), 669–85. Koddenbrock, K. (2015), The Practice of Humanitarian Intervention: Aid Workers, Agencies and Institutions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Abingdon: Routledge. Krause, M. (2014), The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kullenberg, J. N. (2016a), ‘Book review: Peaceland: Conflict resolution and the everyday politics of international intervention by Séverine Autesserre’, Political Studies Review, 14 (1), 80–81. Kullenberg, J. (2016b), ‘Book review: Spaces of aid: How cars, compounds and hotels shape humanitarianism by Lisa Smirl’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 10 (1), 133–35. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2011), ‘The bifurcation of the two worlds: Assessing the gap between internationals and locals in state-building processes’, Third World Quarterly, 32 (10), 1823–41. Lipsky, M. (2010), Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, 30th anniversary edition, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Malkki, L. H. (2015), The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism, Durham: Duke University Press. Mosse, D. (2005), Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice, London: Pluto Press. Mosse, D. (2011), Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development, New York: Berghahn Books. Pouligny, B. (2006), Peace Operations Seen From Below: UN Missions and Local People, London: Hurst. Roth, S. (2015), The Paradoxes of Aid Work: Passionate Professionals, Abingdon: Routledge. Rouse, J. (2007), ‘Practice theory’, Division I Faculty Publications, 43 (15), 639‒81. Schlichte, K. and A. Veit (2007), Coupled Arenas: Why State-building is So Difficult, Institute for Social Science, https://​www​​.google​​.com/​url​​?sa​​=​​t​​&​​rct​​=​​j​​&​​q​​=​​​&​​esrc​​=​​s​​​&​​source​​=​​​web​​&​​​​cd​​=​​ 2​​&​​ved​​=​​​​2ahUKEwjAtL2p0ZnjAhWKqaQKHWMVBHIQFjABegQIBRAC​​&​​url​​=​​https​​%3A​​ %2F​​%2Fwww​​.iniis​​.uni​​-bremen​​.de​​%2Flib​​%2Fdownload​​.php​​%3Ffile​​%3Da1335f2cbf​​.pdf​​ %26filename​​%3DSchlichte​​%2520​​%26​​%2520Veit​​%25202007​​.​​​%2520Coupled​​_Arenas​​.pdf​​&​​usg​​=​​ AOvVaw0upiCb7RCfrxaRbv5YPvSr (accessed 11 July 2019). Smirl, L. (2015), Spaces of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism, London: Zed Books. Stewart, R. and G. Knaus (2012), Can Intervention Work?, 1st edn, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Taylor, C. (2002), ‘Modern social imaginaries’, Public Culture, 14 (1), 91–124. Van de Maele, N., D. B. Evans and T. Tan-Torres (2013), ‘Development assistance for health in Africa: Are we telling the right story?’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 91, 483‒90, https://​www​​ .who​​.int/​bulletin/​volumes/​91/​7/​12​​-115410/​en/​ (accessed 5 April 2019). Veit, A. (2010), Intervention as Indirect Rule: Civil War and Statebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo.... Frankfurt am Main: Campus.

136  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Westendorf, J-K. and L. Searle (2017), ‘Sexual exploitation and abuse in peace operations: Trends, policy responses and future directions’, International Affairs, 93 (2, 1 March), 365–87.

14. Non-state actors, service delivery and statebuilding Claire Mcloughlin

INTRODUCTION The state’s capacity to ensure the delivery of vital public goods and services in line with people’s expectations is considered ‘central to the existence of the state’ and necessary to strengthen its ‘legitimacy, effectiveness and responsiveness’ (OECD 2010, p. 34). Against this institutionalist, state-centric position, the provision of vital public services by other actors is widely portrayed as a potential threat to the statebuilding process. Yet across the world, a wide variety of commercial, voluntary, traditional and private actors engage in delivering basic health, education, water and sanitation. In practitioner and academic literature, this is viewed as at best a distraction, at worst actively disruptive, to the formation of a social contract between citizens and the state. Particularly in fragile and conflict-affected situations, the concern is that non-state provision fractures the social contract by reducing the state’s visibility to citizens, replacing or sometimes directly undermining its authority (OECD 2010; Bellina et al. 2009). At the heart of this debate is the question of when providing public services boosts the legitimacy of any (would-be) authority – whether state or non-state. Over the past decade, the received wisdom has been that service delivery is a central source of so-called ‘output’ legitimacy ‒ an instrumental form of legitimacy derived solely from the provision of material goods and rewards (Mcloughlin 2015). In the aid narrative, services matter for legitimacy because they bring tangible benefits to citizens. In theory, they improve people’s daily lives, extend the state’s physical presence into territories they claim to govern, and signal its willingness and capacity to respond to expectations and needs (Whaites 2008). For these reasons, highly coveted services are portrayed as an everyday expression of the social contract – a visible link between what citizens give the state (compliance with rules, resources, support) and what they expect in return (security and wellbeing) (OECD 2010). Based on a review of recent empirical evidence from a range of contexts where forms of non-state provision are prevalent, this chapter interrogates the received wisdom that non-state services disrupt the social contract and undermine state legitimacy. It questions two central assumptions embedded within this wisdom. First, that where non-state actors provide welfare, this automatically enhances their moral approval and legitimacy, because citizens confer legitimacy based on the material goods and services they receive. Second, when non-state actors visibly supply services, citizens transfer their moral approval from the state to the non-state actor. This assumes a direct trade-off between state and non-state legitimacy; in effect, the legitimising effects of service provision accrue either to the state or non-state, in binary fashion. The chapter argues that neither assumption holds well under empirical scrutiny. The limited available evidence shows no straightforward relationship between non-state provision and the 137

138  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding accrual or loss of legitimacy, either to state or non-state providers. The received wisdom that an authority gains legitimacy from providing services in a purely material transaction is increasingly discredited (Mcloughlin 2014). Research has shown that the services–legitimation relationship is much more than an instrumental equation; rather, it is conditioned by the political environment in which services are received and judged, and ultimately depends on the normative criteria by which citizens’ evaluate that delivery – in particular, whether services are perceived to be procedurally or distributionally fair. The idea that non-state provision displaces the state likewise requires careful contextualisation. Non-state services are not monolithic, and neither are their effects on state-building. Key differentials are whether the provider is actively seeking to ‘perform’ the state, whether they do so collaboratively or competitively, and their political motives. Crucially, any trade-offs between state and non-state legitimacy depend on who local populations expect to deliver services in the first instance, and who in practice they attribute those services to, which may not always be who is actually delivering them. The sum of these findings is that the concern with non-state provision undermining state legitimacy, while anchored in dominant institutional theory, lacks a solid foundation of evidence. A more informed understanding requires further research that disaggregates within the ‘non-state’ category, and examines how political motivations, forms of provision, visibility and attribution affect when non-state services support or undermine the state-building process.

‘PERFORMING THE STATE’ THROUGH SERVICE PROVISION Scepticism about the role of non-state actors in state-building stems partly from a concern that when non-state actors provide public goods, they are essentially ‘performing’ the state – that is, performing what should rightly be a core state function and responsibility. In this debate, ‘non-state’ is typically treated as a monolithic category of everything but the state. In practice, however, services are provided formally or informally by a diverse set of actors; from non-state armed groups, to international aid agencies, local and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), customary authorities, churches and private sector organisations. Each actor has its own motivations, adopts different forms of provision, and engages with the state to different degrees – from passive non-engagement, to outright hostility. From the perspective of state-building, two important distinctions can be made within the non-state category. First, the history and evolution of non-state provision, which affects people’s experience and expectations of the state, and form a baseline for whether non-state services are viewed as displacing or performing the state. Second, the degree to which non-state actors are seeking to collaborate with or actively contest the state matters for people’s interpretation of their political motives for providing services. The context for non-state provision – that is, why services are provided by actors other than the state – varies greatly across the world. In the aid debate, non-state services are often considered a direct result of state fragility, which is assumed to lead to state retreat/neglect of responsibility to particular groups or regions not considered a core constituency by the state. In this reading, non-state service providers are portrayed as a temporary, reactionary phenomenon, entering the service delivery landscape to ‘fill a gap’ in either weak state capacity or political will (OECD 2008). The starkest examples arise in the aftermath of conflict or disaster, where the state is incapable of maintaining services, and an influx of international NGOs assume responsibility. At the other end of the spectrum, however, there is ample evi-

Non-state actors, service delivery and statebuilding  139 dence across the developing world that non-state provision is a long-standing, large-scale and ‘normal’ phenomenon (Batley and Mcloughlin 2010). In some contexts, local, community or faith-based organisations have historically been the sole provider of goods and services to a significant portion of the population. In Ghana, for example, the colonial state’s weak capacity to provide access to health care outside of the major cities accounts for the proliferation of church-based health providers in villages and communities (Yeboah and Buckle 2017). Across other parts of Africa, a long history of missionary schooling has left a similar legacy of faith-based education; contemporary schooling maps onto decades of faith schools in Madagascar, for example (Wietzke 2014). In other cases, most notably the proliferation of private schooling across much of the developing world (Day Ashley et al. 2014), non-state provision is less a question of gap filling than of citizen’s preference and choice. Collectively, these examples illustrate that non-state service provision is not a special feature of ‘weak’ statehood (Lee et al. 2014) or an automatic sign that state-building is failing. Logically, where non-state actors have historically been the sole provider, they cannot be cast as performing in opposition to, or deliberately displacing, a state that has never been present. A further, related key distinction is the degree to which non-state providers work in collaboration or competition with the state. As argued by Cammett and MacLean (2011, p. 8) ‘the impact of non-state providers on state institutions is ultimately contingent on the type of relationships established between the state and relevant non-state actors’. The vast majority of non-state service provision is not politically oppositional to the state, but rather, operates in a parallel or sometimes complimentary system of linked governance. In its most aligned form, state–non-state collaboration may entail formalised partnerships to deliver government-led strategies (Yeboah and Buckle 2017). In other cases, non-state provision substitutes for state capacity, but in a complimentary rather than directly challenging role (Johnson 2014). Overall, the extent to which non-state providers work in collaboration with or in competition to the state is likely to be contingent on a range of political factors, including the history of the state– non-state relationship. This relationship can be highly competitive in authoritarian environments with closed civil society space, or openly combative where the state lacks territorial or social control over regions where non-state actors operate. These factors set the wider context for the potential for alignment of motivations and values between non-state organisations and the state, and the potential for trust-based collaboration (Mcloughlin 2011). Much of the concern with non-state provision undermining the state arises out of a handful of high-profile cases where armed non-state providers are more actively seeking to ‘perform’ the state through oppositional gap filling. Around the world, several rebel groups, terrorist organisations, drug cartels and organised crime groups provide services with precisely these motives (Flanigan and O’Brien 2015). Among them, the most discussed cases in the literature are Hizbollah and Hamas. Hizbollah, for example, provide an extensive range of services, from hospitals and education, to food and water. Hamas has a long history of providing services in Palestine, beginning in the 1970s (Szekely 2015). Several other violent non-state groups provide welfare services directly; from employment, to establishing schools and medical services, to dispute adjudication. During the 30-year civil war in Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) exerted significant control over the service delivery landscape in the North of the Island, performing state-like functions in the territory it sought to separate from the state (Kubota 2017). In cases where violent non-state actors are performing the social welfare functions of the state, the concern is that they rob the state of legitimacy and erode its power through the creation of an alternative social contract (Grynkewich 2008). In such cases,

140  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding it is assumed that non-state actors are primarily delivering services as a legitimation strategy; that is, they are providing services to augment their moral approval and claim the right to rule over the populations they seek to govern.

SERVICE PROVISION AS LEGITIMATION STRATEGY Why might service provision be perceived as an effective legitimation strategy? It is instructive here to consider how the provision of vital public goods and services was historically an important commodity in political processes of state-building. European states provided services to establish a presence and visibility in ungoverned spaces, standardise rules and quash alternative power sources (Van de Walle and Scott 2011). The necessary infrastructure of services – hospitals, schools, curricular, post boxes, even – not only supported territorial consolidation and boundary building, but crucially, socialisation into the values of the state (Migdal 2001). Services are emblematic of the state, representing not only its responsiveness, but its operative rules, and values around needs, rights, or entitlements (Beetham 1991). Through this combined symbolism and material value for people’s everyday lives, services can in theory extend the state’s authority, and in turn, induce compliance with its rules. These benefits have historically been intuitively understood by would-be states. In Tilly’s (1992) seminal ‘coercion and capital’ thesis, early European states were incentivised to deliver basic services not through an altruistic quest for citizens’ wellbeing, but by the more pressing need to pacify populations, and extract from them sufficient tax and recruits to fund war. Turning to the contemporary non-state terrain, similar dynamics of using services to enable coercion and control can be observed. In an environment of competition, where non-state groups are competing with the state to control the same territories and gain support from the same constituencies, the power to include/exclude individuals from services (e.g. register students) is a valuable commodity for extracting compliance from potentially dissenting populations (Wagstaff and Jung 2017). These state-like motivations can be observed among non-state armed groups that provide services primarily as compliance and control mechanisms. Like states, rebel groups also need to extract resources from local populations to continue violent struggle. From a purely rational, interest-based perspective, the motivations for non-state armed groups in supplying public goods is to boost their authority and territorial control (Idler and Forest 2015). This in turn reduces the costs of ruling because ruling through consent is less resource intensive than ruling through coercion. But crucially, it can also aid recruitment to their ideological or political agenda (Keister and Slantchev 2014). The logic for such groups to provide services, according to Grynkewich (2008), is threefold; highlight state failure to fulfil the social contract, offer the population an alternative locus of legitimacy, and in turn, accrue more resources – including financial support, recruits, food supplies – to build a network of social relations, and political platforms to continue to wage war against the state. More than an instrumental calculation, however, non-state groups may also provide services to increase their ideological appeal, particularly by using welfare as a vehicle to demonstrate their commitment to protecting repressed or marginalised groups neglected by the state. Whether the motivations are interest-based or ideological, the consistent logic is that ‘the people will be beholden to those that take care of them’ (Flanigan 2008, p. 504). In these ways, services provided by non-state armed groups can be viewed as purposeful legitimation strategy.

Non-state actors, service delivery and statebuilding  141 Such groups are strategic about which particular goods and services they deploy as legitimation strategy, however. Research has illustrated that the services non-state armed actors choose to deliver is carefully adapted to highlight the perceived failings of the state and therefore deliver maximum return on investment. In their longitudinal study, Wagstaff and Jung (2017) found that terrorist organisations – including Islamic State in Syria, and the Taliban in Afghanistan – tend to prefer less capital-intensive services, such as building schools, over complex, capital-intensive services such as health care. In some cases, the failings of the state to deliver certain services or goods that have historically been core to the social contract, makes these services naturally more politically salient than others. Providing them can therefore offer special opportunities for non-state actors to seek legitimacy capital, and to demonstrate their state-like properties. In Sri Lanka, for example, free education at all levels is a highly politically salient service because it was core to the post-colonial social contract. The political value of this service is that it symbolises social justice for the majority, as an antidote to colonial rule, making it an important political legitimacy commodity (Mcloughlin 2018). In this context, the would-be LTTE state was keen to visibly provide education to fulfil the social contract when the state could not. In this way, the deployment of services as legitimation strategy can be strategically tailored to the political context in which non-state actors operate, and designed to cater to people’s historical expectations of the state.

THE LEGITIMISING EFFECTS OF NON-STATE SERVICE PROVISION Whatever the motivation for non-state provision – be it performing the state in collaborative or competitive form, or for political, instrumental or ideological rewards – a key question for the state-building debate is what effect does this have on the legitimacy of the actors? Does service provision improve the legitimacy of non-state actors? And if so, how does this affect, or displace, the legitimacy of the state? Though the dominant narrative is that non-state services undermine legitimacy, in practice, surprisingly little research has addressed these questions. The closest studies have more generally explored the effects of non-state service provision by armed groups across a ‘continuum of community acceptance’ – from non-acceptance to active resistance – but this does not directly address the question of legitimacy perceptions (Flanigan 2008). Still, a common claim is that rebel service provision ‘makes rule more palatable and increases rebels’ authority and compliance with their rule’ (Keister and Slantchev 2014). As Grynkewich argues (2008, p. 355), ‘social welfare can create lasting loyalties not easily supplanted by reassertions of state control’. Idler and Forest (2015, p. 11) similarly argue that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia‒People’s Army contribution to building roads and health centres ‘helps people tolerate negative aspects, such as extreme punishment for non-compliance with the imposed rules’. A few studies have identified more tangible benefits, from supplying valuable information about the areas in which armed groups operate (Wagstaff and Jung 2017), to political returns where goods and services can be traded through patronage networks in exchange for votes (Flanigan and O’Brien 2015). Other studies, however, find no clear relationship between the size of the service user population and political support or political gains for non-state groups (Szekely 2015).

142  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding There is less evidence of how the receipt of non-state services affects perceptions of the normative approval of the state; which is key to the assumption that there is a legitimacy trade-off between the state and non-state actor. Flanigan and O’Brien (2015) study whether and how the receipt of services by armed non-state actors (Hamas and Fatah) influences people’s loyalty to them, their acceptance and approval of the group’s activities, and the likelihood of joining them in violent activities. Based on a survey of 1,000 low income households in Palestine, they identify a correlation between seeking services from Hamas, and ‘the opinion that the Palestinian Authority cares “very little” about the community’, therefore suggesting that services do play into political loyalties (Flanigan and O’Brien 2015, p. 644). Similarly, research in Zambia found that where citizens (rightly or wrongly) credited non-state providers with service provision, they were significantly less likely to have confidence in their government, or to comply with taxes and regulations (Sacks 2011). Within these studies, however, it is difficult to disentangle the direction of causality; specifically, whether citizens use non-state services because they are disengaged with the state, or whether they disengage with the state because of (i.e. after) their uptake of non-state services. In this way, the particular role of service provision in changing perceptions cannot be easily disentangled from prior perceptions of authorities or political allegiances. More significantly, such studies have rarely directly tested the effects of non-state service provision on perceptions of state or non-state legitimacy. In part, this is due to the methodological complexity of studying legitimacy, and of differentiating it analytically from other aspects of public support. Legitimacy is not popular approval of an authority’s actions, or trust in that authority, but a deeper acceptance of the underlying system of rules and norms on which that authority operates (Mcloughlin 2015). For these reasons, reported satisfaction with an authority’s performance, including in service provision, is not equivalent to its legitimacy. Citizens may view an authority as legitimate, and voluntarily comply with its laws, even when they are dissatisfied with a specific aspect of its performance. In conflict-affected contexts where people are often in most desperate need of services, populations are likely to be less concerned with the values promoted by that organisation than with everyday survival (Flanigan and O’Brien 2015). Under such circumstances, uptake alone of services cannot be read as an indicator of moral approval of that organisation, or people’s perceptions of its values. Particularly in a context where the state is absent and people have no alternative, people are likely to use non-state services even where they disagree with the ideological orientation or motivation of those groups. The implication is that examining any potential legitimising returns to service provision requires disentangling service use from how people judge the moral authority of non-state actors. Methodological challenges aside, recent evidence on the effects of service provision on the legitimacy of the provider sounds a strong note of caution to the dominant narrative that non-state services legitimise those actors. Research has begun to qualify the dominant instrumental framing of the link between effective service provision and legitimacy, showing that the relationship between service provision and legitimacy perceptions is neither automatic nor straightforward (Schmelzle and Stollenwerk 2018; Mcloughlin 2015). Crude measures of access to services do not strongly correlate with people’s perceptions of the state’s rightfulness (Nixon and Mallet 2017). Satisfaction with government performance alone may not necessarily produce greater legitimacy (Sacks 2011). While much of this research has been conducted in relation to the state, it calls for a deeper reading of the social construction of legitimacy that engages with the moral and normative criteria by which citizens’ individually and collectively

Non-state actors, service delivery and statebuilding  143 judge service delivery institutions (Mcloughlin 2015). Two key variables are emerging in this equation; the visibility of the state or non-state as a service provider, and to whom people actually attribute the services they use.

SEEING THE NON-STATE: VISIBILITY AND ATTRIBUTION Services are a visible manifestation of the social contract, and a primary space where citizens are likely to encounter, and therefore subjectively judge an authority (Corbridge 2005). It follows that whether or not non-state services undermine the state’s legitimacy hinges partly on the visibility of non-state services to the population. In theory, visible service provision may be an important source of advertising for would-be authorities, allowing them to demonstrate their state-like properties. Specifically, a working system of provision may highlight the capacity of non-state groups to ‘get things done’ (Flanigan and O’Brien 2015). But service provision advertises more than capacity. As Szekely (2015) argues in relation to Hamas, this group’s service provision helped them win the 2006 election because it also advertised the values of the would-be state – specifically, it enabled them to articulate a narrative of not only competency but honesty. Service provision, in this case, helped ‘convince the public that despite being a military organisation, they can do more than fight, and that despite having advocated a particular ideological or communal agenda in the past, they will also serve the needs of the broader public’ (Szekely 2015, p. 276). In this way, we might deduce that services may only become important legitimacy capital where they come wrapped in justificatory narratives that are critical of or oppositional to the state. Services may have to be ‘narrated’ in the public sphere, in order to be deployed deliberately in the political process of legitimation (Beetham 1991). Though service provision may prove to be effective political legitimacy capital when it is actively politicised in this way, it is important to stress that this is not always the case. While Hamas may represent the extreme, there are many alternative, neutral cases of non-politicised provision where services are not actively deployed discursively or instrumentally in state contestation. The alternative is illustrated starkly in Johnson’s (2014) study of the provision of health care by NGOs in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In this region, non-state health care NGOs view themselves as complimentary to the state, and accordingly, cultivate a ‘civic’ identity of cooperation to improve wellbeing. Here, non-state provision has adapted to a political environment where citizens expect the state to provide services as part of the legacy of a welfare-based social contract. These contrasting cases illustrate the difference between non-state provision that is seeking to be visible and politicised, to push and change people’s perceptions of the state, and that which is aligning with expectations and reinforcing the institutional landscape. Whether competitive or collaborative, the visibility of the provider matters because without it, services may be less likely to be attributed to either the state or non-state actor. Processes of attribution – how people credit or blame the state or non-state actor for the provision of services – play an important role in any legitimising effects. Using the case of the International Security Assistance Force in northeast Afghanistan, Stollenwerk (2018) argues effective service provision can improve the legitimacy of intervention only if services are attributed to those actors; in other words ‘no attribution, no legitimacy’. Even where non-state actors are visible to users, however, they may not always be correctly credited for their efforts. Perceptions of who is delivering a service may be inaccurate. Evidence from a panel survey in

144  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Nepal found that while there was little change over time in the services being used by respondents – in practice, physical service infrastructure remained unaltered – perceptions of who was running the service did change over time. In health and education, perceptions flipped between private providers and government, for example (Sturge et al. 2017). Sacks (2011) likewise found that citizens were incorrectly attributing government services to non-state actors where multiple other actors (NGOs, churches, and donors) were also providing services in the local area. In this instance, non-state actors were more effective at branding themselves than government (Sacks 2011). Collectively, these findings reinforce the point that while visibility is related to attribution (credit/sanction), it cannot account for it entirely. Attribution is fluid because the lines between state and non-state provision are often blurred, particularly in conflict zones. Neat categories of ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ may not exist in the minds of local populations, particularly in contexts where history and tradition generate hybrid systems of governance (Podder 2014), or in projects where both state and non-state actors are involved (Krampe and Gignoux 2018). In northern Sri Lanka, for example, services were co-produced by the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, particularly during the humanitarian crisis that ensued in the aftermath of the Tsunami in 2004. Under this dual system of governance, local people’s perceptions of which organisations were delivering the services were not always accurate. Research found that in practice, many locals, including local officials, perceived services to be delivered by the LTTE (Shanmugaratnam and Stokke 2008). A later survey in the same region examined the links between people’s perceptions of rebel services and their values, including their affinities with their locality and ethnicity (Kubota 2017). It found no direct link between receipt of services and perceptions of rebel statehood, on the basis that even if people received public services ‘it is possible they may not correctly remember the service provider or may have banished the fact from memory’ (Kubota 2017, p. 209). Moreover, where group identities are blurred, as in the borderland of the Andean region, the likelihood of pinning loyalty to one group diminishes (Idler and Forest 2015). Blurred boundaries between state and non-state undermine the assumption that there is a neat trade-off between the legitimising effects of non-state provision. In areas where there are historically low expectations of the state, a weakness of state services may not negatively affect people’s perceptions of it. In South Sudan – a context where there is a long history of weak state provision and substitution by international aid actors as well as rebel groups (the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army) – researchers found many people had sympathy with weak government capacity and funding. While certain services were expected (particularly better infrastructure and roads), who delivered them was less important that the actual delivery itself for shifting perceptions of authorities. Likewise, even where the state is not the frontline provider of services, citizens are rarely blind to the less visible, indirect roles (oversight, regulation, facilitation) it may be playing in the background. In Ethiopia, for example, even where citizens attributed service provision to non-state actors, they also understood that government agencies were likely to be involved in the service design process and, moreover, they could differentiate between the quality of the service being provided and the degree to which the state was fulfilling its indirect, regulatory responsibilities (Mandefro et al. 2012). In-depth ethnography of community-based health provision in conflict-affected the Democratic Republic of Congo similarly concluded that people credit both the state and non-state actors when services are ‘networked’ – that is, provided through an institutional framework that involves state oversight (Bwimana 2016). Even services provided by international or local community organisations can result in some credit to the state, for facilitating

Non-state actors, service delivery and statebuilding  145 intervention (Maxwell et al. 2016). Together, these findings strongly suggest that the credit for – and therefore potential legitimising effects of – service provision is unlikely to involve a neat either/or equation between state and non-state actors.

FROM MATERIAL REWARDS TO FAIRNESS Another key factor determining whether and how service provision influences the process of state legitimation, or indeed de-legitimation, is the degree to which populations perceive services as ‘fair’ (Mcloughlin 2018). In an important sense, this injects a core principle of legitimacy theory back into the debate. For an institution to be considered legitimate, it has to deliver not only what is personally beneficial, but what people think is right (Tyler 2000, 2011). For either the state or non-state actors, perceived fairness in the distribution or process through which they deliver services may be more important for any legitimising returns than the material rewards they supply. In a recent clear illustration of this, Fisk and Cherney (2017) find that in post-conflict Nepal people primarily evaluate the legitimacy of an authority on the basis of the fairness of decision-making and the quality of treatment, as opposed to outcome favourability.1 Being seen to provide services fairly then, may matter for the perceived authority and legitimacy of non-state actors. Moreover, there is (albeit limited) evidence of a relationship between how fairly people evaluate the state and how likely they are to support non-state groups. In the Palestinian territories, while receipt of services from an armed group, or having a positive view of the group, does not increase the likelihood of joining it, perceived unfairness in government decision-making does increase recruitment (Flanigan and O’Brien 2015). In a similar pattern, people who seek services from Fatah are more likely to view Hamas and the Palestinian authority as unfair, even when they do not view Fatah itself as just and impartial. In some cases then, perceived unfairness of one authority can nudge people towards supporting an alternative authority. Nevertheless, here as above, the direction of causality is difficult to disentangle. The question remains whether service users are more likely to support a non-state group’s ideology after using services, or whether this alignment already exists and affects their preference and service uptake in the first instance. What is perhaps clearer is that in the same way that material rewards alone are not sufficient to generate legitimacy for a state, the technical effectiveness of rebel service provision is by itself unlikely to generate legitimacy. Legitimacy is a moral and normative evaluation that cannot be disentangled from the groups’ ideological appeal. Material rewards alone may not affect legitimacy if there is no ideological alignment between non-state groups and local populations. An example of this is international counterinsurgency, which typically deploys service provision as part of an effort to ‘win hearts and minds’. Even when counterinsurgents provide the same level of service as rebel groups, they may fail to accrue legitimacy if they are promoting ideologies that are far removed from local values and norms (Keister and Slantchev 2014). Using the example of radical Islamist ideology in Syria, Keister and Slantchev (2014) argue that where rebel groups are cognisant of this misalignment, they may seek to reign in 1 Fisk and Cherney (2017) measure procedural fairness through survey questions about respectful treatment, voice and neutrality. Distributive justice was measured through questions about whether certain castes or income groups received better services than others.

146  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding unpopular coercive tactics and promote the local moral appeal of their own service provision. To the degree that service provision matters for local perceptions then, the moral code through which those services are provided, and the norms and values they convey, are likely to be important in determining any legitimising effects.

DILEMMAS FOR AID These findings collectively raise a number of dilemmas for international aid. With the rise of the state-building agenda, the international mission is often to encourage the state to (re-)claim its responsibility for vital public service delivery, in order to reap the purported benefits of stronger state–society relations, improved accountability and stability. International aid pours billions into supporting basic services, seeking to plug gaps in state absence.2 The majority of overseas development assistance (ODA) to fragile and conflict-affected countries is not allocated to directly addressing problems of peace and insecurity. Rather, the largest share of ODA remains tied to traditional service sectors such as health and education (OECD 2014).3 From the perspective of the state-building agenda then, the stakes are high. Yet for external actors, seeking to build states via service provision is fraught with dilemmas and potential unintended consequences. The question, not only but particularly for fragile states, is what sorts of engagement by government with non-state providers can simultaneously address basic needs and contribute to, or at least not harm, the state-building process (Batley and Mcloughlin 2010). The institutionalist perspective is that state must reassert its authority by displacing non-state actors as soon as practicable (Idler and Forest 2015). At least in the short term, faced with weak state systems and low capacity, international agencies may find it necessary to further bypass the state by funding urgent services through international NGOs to generate quick and visible improvements in living conditions (Rocha Menocal 2009, p. 3). For these reasons, they may contract-out government functions to local NGOs or the state. Where these actors themselves have legitimacy, and the support of local political elites and the population, they may be able to create ‘islands of excellence’ whereby public services are delivered more effectively and transparently which, in the best case scenario, can have positive spillover effects by becoming a model for local institutions (Ciorciari and Krasner 2018). Mindful of the potential for misattribution discussed above, policymakers have also called for measures to increase the visibility of the state’s role at the point of provision by reducing donor and NGO branding (Teskey et al. 2012). But emerging evidence does not provide overwhelming support for this proposition. In Bangladesh, researchers found little evidence that visible advertising of foreign aid on health clinics undermines domestic government legitimacy. On the contrary, they found that it sometimes improved attitudes towards government. The researchers con-

2 In 2016, 43 per cent of bilateral ODA was allocated to social infrastructure and services, representing US$984.6 million, https://​www​.oecd​-ilibrary​.org/​docserver/​dcr​-2018​-en​.pdf​?expires​=​ 1542813503andid​=​idandaccname​=​guestandchecksum​​=​4176E1EB26D3803E8DB6F36C44F6E02C (p. 14, accessed 6 July 2019). 3 This OECD (2014, p. 30) review found that ‘in short, there is no evidence that ODA is moving away from traditional development areas towards security-related expenditure in fragile states’.

Non-state actors, service delivery and statebuilding  147 cluded this was because Bangladeshis were crediting their government for securing foreign aid funding (Dietrich et al. 2018). Moreover, attempting to reassert the state while ignoring the local history and dynamics of non-state provision is perilous. Hard-line pursuit of state provision may in some cases backfire. In cases of gap filling, simply shutting down urgently needed service delivery organisations could be counterproductive if it removes a vital lifeline and risks further humanitarian crisis (Grynkewich 2008, p. 350). In situations where counterinsurgency efforts deliver services, rebel groups have sometimes responded by increasing their coercive methods to maintain support (Keister and Slantchev 2014). At the same time, inserting services governed by state values (e.g. schools staffed by pro-government teachers, or teaching government curriculum) may be ineffective at displacing loyalty where these values are fundamentally misaligned with those of the local population. Where the state has previously been repressive, citizens may not trust the state to deliver services, let alone expect it to (Brinkerhoff et al. 2012). After the civil war in Nepal, marginalised rural communities experienced significant improvements in electricity following the building of hydropower stations (Krampe 2016). Yet these communities remained distrusting of the state in the face of these improvements. In such a context of long-term state neglect, incursions by the state into neglected or contested territories through the provision of services can be actively resisted, and may inadvertently strengthen existing, alternative authority structures that are oppositional to the state. In Myanmar’s contested regions, researchers found that sudden increases in government services were received as attempts at domination and incursion, especially where these regions held long-term aspirations for greater local autonomy (Joliffe 2014). Collectively, these cases point to the potential for resistance to, or backlash against, the insertion of state services to displace non-state services, with the effect of exacerbating existing divisions. Perhaps most fundamentally, the findings around the centrality of fairness for the relationship between service delivery and legitimacy cannot be overlooked. Yet they raise significant dilemmas for aid to service delivery in fragile and conflict-affected states. That is, as some agencies have begun to grapple with, different groups within society can have different criteria of fairness. Crucially, an equal distribution of service allocation may not always be perceived as fair (Alexandre et al. 2012). State-building has sought to counter perceptions of state neglect and exclusion by pursuing a participatory approach to service provision (Maxwell et al. 2016). The difficulty is that fairness embodies a set of values – around equity, merit, rights – that are by nature context-dependent, and for which there can be no universal criteria.

CONCLUSION Based on a review of recent empirical evidence, this chapter argues that the received wisdom that non-state services disrupt the social contract and undermine state legitimacy derives from state-centric institutionalist theory rather than evidence. The provision of services by non-state actors does not automatically enhance their moral approval. In part, this is because people do not evaluate the legitimacy of an actor based solely on the material rewards they receive from it, but against normative criteria of fairness. Likewise, citizens do not automatically transfer their moral approval from the state to non-state actors when they begin receiving services from them. Non-state actors cannot logically displace the state’s legitimacy where the state was never legitimate, or where it was never expected to deliver services in the first instance.

148  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding The blurred lines between state and non-state service provision mean that in practice, there is unlikely to be a direct trade-off between these actors in terms of any legitimacy gains or losses. While much of the concern with non-state provision undermining legitimacy stems from a few extreme cases, this chapter calls for a more disaggregated view of the role of non-state service provision in supporting or undermining state-building processes. There is no universally applicable rule that non-state provision undermines state legitimacy. Rather, this relationship is likely to depend on the political motivations of the group, the forms of provision they adopt, their visibility, and local processes of attribution. The provision of social services is not sufficient for the accrual of legitimacy because satisfying material interests is not equivalent to normative acceptance of the right to rule. Overall, there is a need for a more fine-grained analysis of people’s expectations for state/non-state service provision, to whom they are crediting services, and how this is influencing their perceptions of the rightfulness of either state or non-state actors.

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(2015), ‘Researching state legitimacy: A political approach to a political problem’, DLP Research Paper 36, Birmingham: Developmental Leadership Program, University of Birmingham. Mcloughlin, C. (2018), ‘When the virtuous circle unravels: Unfair service provision and state de-legitimation in divided societies’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 12 (4), 527‒44, doi:​ 10​​.1080/​17502977​​.2018​​.1482126. Migdal, J. (2001), State in Society: Studying how States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nixon, H. and R. Mallet (2017), Service Delivery, Public Perceptions and State Legitimacy: Findings from the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, London: Overseas Development Institute. OECD (2008), State-building in Situations of Fragility: Initial Findings, Paris: OECD. OECD (2010), The State’s Legitimacy in Fragile Situations: Unpacking Complexity, Paris: OECD. OECD (2014), Fragile States 2014 Domestic Revenue Mobilisation in Fragile States, Paris: OECD. Podder, S. (2014), ‘State building and the non-state: Debating key dilemmas’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (9), 1615‒35, doi:​10​​.1080/​01436597​​.2014​​.970864. Rocha Menocal, A. (2009), State-Building for Peace – A New Paradigm for International Engagement in Post-Conflict Fragile States, London: ODI. Sacks, A. (2011), The Antecedents of Approval, Trust and Legitimating Beliefs in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and six Arab Countries, Washington: World Bank Institute. Schmelzle, C. and E. Stollenwerk (2018), ‘Virtuous or vicious circle? Governance effectiveness and legitimacy in areas of limited statehood’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 12 (4), 449‒67, doi=10.1080%2F17502977.2018.1531649. Shanmugaratnam, N. and K. Stokke (2008), ‘Development as a precursor to conflict resolution: A critical review of the fifth peace process in Sri Lanka’, in N. Shanmugaratnam (ed.), Between War and Peace in Sudan Sri Lanka: Deprivation and Livelihood Revival, Oxford: James Currey, pp. 93‒116. Stollenwerk, E. (2018), ‘Securing legitimacy? Perceptions of security and ISAF’s legitimacy in northeast Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 12 (4), 506‒26, doi:​10​​.1080/​17502977​​.2018​​ .1504855. Sturge, G., J. Hagen-Zanker, G. Acharya, S. B. Paudel, A. Tandukar, B. Upreti and R. Mallett (2017), ‘Tracking change in livelihoods, service delivery and governance: Evidence from a 2012‒2015 panel survey in Nepal’, Working Paper 53, London: Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium.

150  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Szekely, O. (2015), ‘Doing well by doing good: Understanding Hamas’s social services as political advertising’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 38 (4), 275‒92, doi:​10​​.1080/​1057610X​​.2014​​.995565. Teskey, G., S. Schnell and A. Poole (2012), ‘Getting beyond capacity – Addressing authority and legitimacy in fragile states’, unpublished paper. Tilly, C. (1992), Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990‒1992, Oxford: Blackwell. Tyler, T. (2000), ‘Social justice: Outcome and procedure’, International Journal of Psychology, 35 (2), 117‒25. Tyler, T. (2011), Why People Cooperate: The Role of Social Motivations, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Van de Walle, S. and Z. Scott (2011), ‘The political role of service delivery in state-building: Exploring the relevance of European history for developing countries’, Development Policy Review, 29 (1), 5‒21, doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-7679.2011.00511.x. Wagstaff, W. A. and D. F. Jung (2017), ‘Competing for constituents: Trends in terrorist service provision’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 1‒32, doi:​10​​.1080/​09546553​​.2017​​.1368494. Whaites, A. (2008), States in Development: Understanding State-building, London: Department for International Development. Wietzke, F.-B. (2014), ‘Historical origins of uneven service supply in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of non-state providers’, Journal of Development Studies, 50 (12), 1614‒30, doi:​10​​.1080/​00220388​​.2014​​ .936398. Yeboah, P. and G. Buckle (2017), ‘The evolving partnership between the government of Ghana and national faith-based health providers: Leadership perspective and experiences from the Christian Health Association of Ghana’, Development in Practice, 27 (5), 766‒74, doi:​10​​.1080/​09614524​​.2017​​ .1332163.

15. Clear, hold, build … a ‘local’ state: counterinsurgency and territorial orders in Somalia Louise Wiuff Moe

INTRODUCTION1 In late September 2012, al Shabaab lost one of its significant strongholds, the port city of Kismayo in the southern lower Juba province of Somalia. The forces that ousted al Shabaab from Kismayo comprised a complex alliance of national and regional militaries supporting local militias. Approximately a year later, in August 2013, Ahmed Madobe, the leader of one of these militias, the Ras Kamboni, which had fought on the frontline during the operation, announced the establishment of a new local administration under his presidency. The cabinet of Madobe was formally inaugurated in January 2014. On this occasion, then United Nations (UN) Representative of the Secretary-General for Somalia, Nicholas Kay, recognized Madobe’s ‘great experience’ including experiences of ‘fighting and war’, while complimenting him for now ‘choosing to do something that is much harder than fighting’. ‘Building peace and building a state are truly hard tasks’ Kay noted, ‘and he [Madobe] has chosen those tasks and I congratulate him’ (Kay 2014). With international support the administration has since then developed its own framework of government, and has become a key ally in the ongoing international campaign against al Shabaab. This scenario, in which a counterinsurgency operation – executed by externally supported local forces – translates into the making of a new ‘local state’, illustratively conveys the profound but ambiguous interaction between processes of counterinsurgent warfare and efforts of statebuilding in contemporary Somalia. More widely, post-9/11 securitization has revitalized sovereigntist agendas in global governance (Brysk and Stohl 2018), and recent analysis has pointed out how in the specific context of intervention and global security governance, this offers new opportunities for rulers of weak and contested states to strengthen their sovereignty claims and beef up coercive capacity to consolidate their power, especially through counterterrorism rents (de Waal 2015; Soares de Oliveira and Verhoeven 2018; Moe and Geis 2019). Recent military missions in Africa are particularly illustrative in this regard; from Congo to Mali and Somalia, UN and African Union-led missions have been launched with the aim of helping governments fight against, and regaining territory from, designated armed non-state enemies/competitors. The underlying rationale of this approach reflects a (re)turn to a logic of reinforcing host nation states to combat terrorist or insurgents and thereby allegedly secure the population. In brief, and as argued by Soares de Oliveira and Verhoeven (2018, p. 17), it would seem that today’s security interventions in Africa basically are ‘about state enhancement by external

1

Portions of this chapter draw on Moe (2017, 2018) with permission from the publishers.

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152  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding actors who provide support of various kinds to the formal holders of state power, with military assistance being the most crucial’. However, while capturing important contemporary trends concerning intervention, this conception of stabilization interventions as straightforward ‘state enhancement’ tends to omit the ambiguity and contradictions that shape the ‘on the ground’ interactions between security-driven interventions, on the one hand, and sovereignty and the state, on the other. For one thing, the government elites who have come to serve as allies for international stabilization interventions do often not have an actual interest in building up strong state institutions, nor in fully defeating the ‘state enemy’, as this would cut off a key source of revenue (de Waal 2015). Moreover, and of particular importance for the analysis of this chapter, post-9/11 global security governance itself has vastly expanded and diversified, to include a range of approaches – with related diverse effects – coalescing around agendas of stabilization and countering terrorism and insurgencies. In conjunction with large-scale stabilization and counterterrorism missions, so-called ‘small footprint’ interventions have proliferated across Global South conflict settings (from the Middle East, to Latin America and Africa, see Moe and Müller 2017), especially in the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The latter made the limitations of large Western-led stabilization-cum-nation building approaches apparent, which in turn paved the way for a revival of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency as it re-emerged during the 2000s offered a more flexible low cost approach, geared towards engaging not just governments and conventional militaries, but also ‘tribal’, ‘clan’ and other existing local authority structures, in the fight against insurgencies and terrorism (Moe 2016).2 In fact, in its discussion of what constitutes ‘governance’, the 2013 doctrinal Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, implicitly elevates local authority structures, including ‘provincial, local, tribal, or otherwise autonomous government’ (US Joint Chiefs of Staff 2013, pp. 1‒5) to the same level as states (see also Moe and Müller 2017, p. 9). Such ‘denaturali[zation]’ of the state ‘as an accepted monopoly of power’ (Carter 2013, p. 16) has in turn allowed interveners to adopt strategic relations to various local sources of powers associated with ‘real governance’ and the ‘local state’ (Kilcullen 2010, p. 12). One of the key contexts for testing such flexible approaches, incorporating localized actors and institutions, has been Somalia. While the country is commonly associated with global threats and insecurity (including the al Shabaab insurgency and persisting state fragility) and while conventional state-centric stabilization remains a dominant official policy paradigm in regard to Somalia, the country, during the late 2000s, also became known as an illustrative case of successful international support to African counterinsurgency capacities (Freear and de Coning 2013). In particular, Somalia has increasingly been perceived as a place offering possibilities for bottom-up security and reconstruction that counterinsurgents can tap into (Mills et al. 2013; Kilcullen 2010, p. 156). The present chapter seeks to unpack the practices and outcomes that have accompanied this ‘local turn’ in security governance in Somalia (Moe 2015). It does so by zooming in on the

2 Central to the rise of this new approach was the apparent successes achieved through the alliances that eventually formed between US forces and various localized sub-state structures in Iraq. Especially the collaboration between American troops and local Sunni elites in the Anbar province aimed at ousting al Qaeda, has been cast as a key ‘success story’ indicating the potential of ‘bottom-up’ stabilization (see for example Ucko 2013).

Clear, hold, build … a ‘local’ state  153 case of Jubaland – briefly introduced in the entry paragraph above. This case illustrates how, in a context where state actors have remained ineffective partners in security governance, a logic of what I term ‘decentering sovereignty’ (see Moe 2017) has emerged as an alternative. This unfolds as mutually reinforcing processes, with practical, discursive, and performative dimensions: First, sovereignty is rescaled in practice as non-state actors are enlisted in counterinsurgent warfare whereby they are empowered with coercive resources and means to inflict lethal violence. Second, this feeds into and requires legitimizing discursive redefinitions of sovereignty, which emphasize ‘“not objective” measures of legality and rationality’ (Egnell 2013, p. 221) but ‘bottom-up government’ adapted to ‘the decentralized nature of Somali society’ (Pham 2013, p. 54; see also Freear 2012) as the most suited and legitimate entry point for counterinsurgency. Third, this, in turn, is matched by symbolic performances and mimicry of ‘stateness’ and sovereignty on sub-national levels by local elites seeking influence and international acknowledgement. These processes move well beyond ‘stabilization as state enhancement’ and reveal how contemporary security interventions also contribute to profound re-makings of sovereignty and ‘the state’ (as a territorial space).

FROM STATE ENHANCEMENT TO BOTTOM-UP POST-AL SHABAAB GOVERNANCE? Since 2001 international engagements in the eastern Horn of Africa, and Somalia specifically, have been profoundly securitized with an increasing focus on building up capacities for responding to security threats considered to emanate from al Qaeda and related extremist movements, in particular al Shabaab (Hammond and Vaughan-Lee 2012). As a result, the range of intervening actors has expanded to include several external militaries, peacekeepers as well as various private security contractors (Menkhaus 2014). On the face of it, interventions in Somalia do follow the logic of stabilization and counterterrorism as ‘state enhancement’. Specifically, in the wider context of the international community’s efforts of undermining al Shabaab, a key focus of the former has been to seek to protect and beef up the Somali state and its institutions (from security, defence and rule of law to social services). It also follows that these institutions are profoundly dependent on, and shaped by, external funds and powers. As de Waal crudely but correctly has put it: ‘Without counter-terror rents, the Somali Federal Government would not exist. Its National Intelligence Security Agency is largely controlled by the US, and its army is subordinate to AMISOM [African Union Mission in Somalia], which in turn is a product of African and international counter-terror strategy’ (de Waal 2015, p. 183). However, as conventional state-centric stabilization has not yielded the desired results – and as effective security collaboration with the different Somali governments has generally been undercut by corruption, political infighting and very limited government capacity to exercise any meaningful territorial control – international actors have in fact started to adapt. Specifically, while the official statebuilding narrative still dominates the international policy paradigm on Somalia, the 2000s witnessed a growing international interest in more systematically engaging and incorporating the localized authorities and polities, that have multiplied across Somalia, into intervention approaches. While such engagements have been framed as part of a ‘parallel sphere of recognition’ (Reno 2015) alongside ongoing official statebuilding schemes, these logics have actually increasingly been integrated into – rather than working ‘in

154  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding parallel’ with – the intervention approaches of key official intervention actors (Moe 2016). In 2010, efforts to reconcile the state-based stabilization narrative, with agendas of more piecemeal localized stabilization and counterinsurgency, resulted in the US launching a ‘dual track’ policy for Somalia. While ‘track one’ maintained the support for statebuilding and the official ‘big players’ – including AMISOM, the Transitional Federal Government and its 2012 successor, the Federal Government of Somalia – ‘track two’ formulated a policy allegedly ‘more flexible and adaptive to local needs’ (Carson 2010), and aimed at building ‘bottom-up post-al Shabaab governance’ (Freear 2012).3 Specifically – and dovetailing with key doctrinal developments of counterinsurgency (see the introduction of this chapter) – the latter opened up for supporting non-state actors and institutions, including, clans, elders, and militia groups ‘as well as local and regional administrative units, throughout south central Somalia, who are opposed to al Shabaab’ (Carson 2010). Such ‘low footprint’ security policy, targeting decentral, quasi-sovereign structures and institutions has in the context of intervention policies for Somalia, been represented as a ‘brave acknowledgement’ of the evident limitations of a narrow prioritization of Western top-down stabilization approaches, and as a recognition of the resilience and security achievements led by local authorities ‘of a country culturally adapted to diffuse power’ (Freear 2012; see also Pham 2013). With the related expansion of interventions, beyond the purview of the state, practically every polity within Somalia has ‘benefited’ from internationally promoted post-9/11 security-driven institution-building to beef up counterterrorism capacities (Menkhaus 2014, p. 7). The following section zooms in on one such polity, Jubaland, in the south of Somalia, which has been cast as a test-case for dual track engagement, involving small-footprint external support for African-led counterinsurgency efforts that combine kinetic action with local reconstruction. Along these lines, the creation of Jubaland was seen to present a key opportunity for supporting an alternative to al Shabaab through ‘local style’ order based on ‘Somali trends’ (Freear 2012). Yet, as will be shown, far from simply providing an example of counterinsurgency support to existing locally grounded ‘trends’, the case of Jubaland illustrates the role counterinsurgency interventions play in re-territorializing particular forms of power, thereby spurring new processes of ‘mini-state’ formation within Somalia (Hoehne 2016).

THE TEST-CASE OF JUBALAND The 2012 ousting of al Shabaab from the port city of Kismayo in the southern lower Juba region is seen as one of the major advances against the movement because the city is an economic hub in southern Somalia and was one of the key sources of income for al Shabaab. The operation was shaped by an intricate alliance joining up international ‘low footprint’ policies, regional geopolitics, and local struggles over order making and access to coercive resources. Somalia’s neighbour Kenya initially took a lead role in mobilizing forces against al Shabaab in the Somali Juba regions, which border Kenya. Kenya had been known to mostly pursue a non-interventionist low-risk approach to promoting regional security and peace (Mc Evoy 3 The ‘Dual Track’ policy was proclaimed by the US Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson in October 2010, and remained in place as an official policy until the recognition of the Federal Government of Somalia in 2012. However, it remains ‘cotemporary’, in the sense that its key tenets continue to strongly resonate with interventions; specifically the continuous expansion of counterinsurgency.

Clear, hold, build … a ‘local’ state  155 2013). However, as Kenya emerged as an increasingly influential East African power, aspirations of gaining regional combat experience grew, as did international pressures to demonstrate ‘action’ against regional insurgency and terrorism threats (Prestholdt 2011), while the rise of al Shabaab in Somalia also had direct (in)security implications for Kenya itself. Already in 2009, the Kenyan Defense Forces (KDF) trained Somali militias from the Kenyan-Somali Juba border regions, to curb incursions by al Shabaab into Kenya. The immediate incentives of weakening al Shabaab’s presence in the border regions, and in the Somali regional capital Kismayo, became coupled with long-term prospects of establishing borderland authorities with good relations to Kenya (ICG 2013). Despite initial apprehension on the part of other key allies against al Shabaab – including the Somali government, Ethiopia, the US and other Western powers – the empowerment of local militias as a means of combatting al Shabaab in the Juba regions gradually gained support as it promised an ‘optimal counterterrorism outcome’ (Menkhaus 2012), namely the ‘liberation’ of Kismayo, while it was also ‘a good fit with the US government’s “Dual Track” policy’ (ICG 2013). Aligning with ‘track two’, Kenya strengthened its on-the-ground alliances with local forces in Juba, selecting the militia leader and former al Shabaab member Ahmed Mohamed Islam (known as Madobe), and his Ogaden-clan militia the Muaskar Ras Kamboni, as the key local ally. In addition to this indirect engagement in Somaliland, Kenya also deployed directly in 2011. One year later, the KDF deployed in Somalia were ‘rehatted’ as AMISOM contributors (Menkhaus 2012, p. 6), and with this provision the counterinsurgency campaign officially became part of a wider UN-mandated international stabilization mission. This allowed the intervention to benefit from financial support from the international community (especially the European Union, but also the UK and US). The latter, in turn, could avoid official ‘boots on the ground’ and instead pursue an approach of ‘empowering indigenous local and regional forces’ (Bruton and Williams 2014, p. 4). Sharing the goal to oust al Shabaab, and buying into the counterinsurgent tactic of ‘locally anchored’ approaches, while also wanting to counterbalance the power of Kenya and the Ogaden-clan militia Ras Kamboni,4 the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) and Ethiopia opted for supporting the Marehan-clan militias led by warlord Barre Adan Shire ‘Hiiraale’. In the autumn of 2012, al Shabaab was ousted from Kismayo by this alliance of convenience – comprising two main fronts of local clan militias, supported by different regional actors, funded by the West – whereby international discourse of low footprint counterinsurgency had become interlinked with regional geopolitics and local struggles over control of territory and access to coercive resources. This complex interplay between international, regional and local politics extended into a subsequent phase revolving around the mimicry of local state-building. In the spirit of celebrating support to indigenous forces and self-government as the best and most legitimate means of strengthening counterinsurgent governance and peace, US strategic communication suggested that with the ousting of al Shabaab the space had opened up for driving forward a bottom-up ‘post-al Shabaab order’ and ‘government’ (Freear 2012). Yet, once al Shabaab retreated, the issue of who should govern Jubaland became a source of violent contestation. Confrontations between competing militias constituted only one layer of the struggle, however, while local elites simultaneously adopted strategies of mimicking statebuilding practice – such as launching ‘elections’, declaring ‘presidency’ and forming 4 Ethiopia, in particular, was cautious of supporting Ogaden-clan forces, due to fears that they could be sympathetic to the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).

156  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding governing ‘cabinets’ – to attain recognition from the international audience as legitimate local enablers of the internationally anticipated ‘bottom-up post-al Shabaab government’. It was soon clear that Madobe had the most success in this struggle, both in making himself legible as a local ‘statesman’ as well as in asserting military dominance. The latter not least because of the support he continuously received from the KDF, which managed to stay involved after the ousting of al Shabaab and through the alliance with Madobe tap into the distribution of rents from the Kismayo port. After establishing armed control over Kismayo, Madobe, on 15 May 2013, declared himself the elected president of Jubaland at an assembly of local clans. This was contested with a counter-declaration to ‘presidency’ by Hiiraale later the same day. The FGS, increasingly concerned with the growing power of Madobe, and keen to assert its authority, declared both ‘election processes’ unconstitutional.5 Notwithstanding this rejection of Madobe’s ‘presidency’ by the Somali government, he subsequently came to occupy a prominent position in a series of internationally supported, regionally brokered meetings aimed to stabilize the conflict. These meetings were cast in official diplomatic language of state- and peacebuilding, thus adding substantial representational power and legitimacy to Madobe’s de facto rule. New agreements were laid out, defining ‘the modalities of administration and governance’ (United Nations 2013), including the creation of a Jubaland ‘regional assembly’, an ‘executive council’, ‘governor’ and ‘deputies’ all under the administration of Madobe. The creation of new governance accords was understood to be a necessary means to mitigate the risk of Madobe pursuing a separatist scheme for Jubaland. This, on the flipside, implied the approval of his claims to ‘local state’ authority: ‘Following the legitimacy granted to Madobe… it became clear that regional elites should convene state formation conferences–if nothing else–to legitimize or protect claims on regions amid an ad hoc federalism process constituted more by power politics than by constitutional measures’ (Thomas 2014). In keeping up the momentum, Madobe, in early December 2013, appointed a ‘new cabinet’ (ICG 2014) which reflected a degree of elite alliance-building in terms of inclusion of selected sub-clans while it also was a key step in consolidating his power. The ‘cabinet’ was formally inaugurated in January 2014. Thereby a new administration – with its own president and substantial coercive resources – was born, through a process of local–international co-mimicry of bottom-up statebuilding operating in the service of counterinsurgency. Then UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Somalia, Nicholas Kay’s endorsement of the process as a step towards ‘restoring peace in Somalia, building a strong Federal Somalia and contributing to regional and international security’ (Kay quoted by United Nations News Center 2013), and subsequent compliments to Madobe – congratulating him for contributing to peace and statebuilding efforts (see the introduction of this chapter) – provide a good illustration of the ‘untidy discursive production of international recognition’ (McConnell et al. 2012, p. 811) in the context of ‘diplomatic counterinsurgency’ (Leroux-Martin 2015), with the related restyling of Madobe from local warlord and one of the ‘most radical’ militants during his time with al Shabaab (McCormick 2015), to state-builder and international ally. Such symbolic backing has been matched by technical support, such as UN advisory in building up the parliamentary administration and support in drafting the constitution (UNDP 2015). While these activities belong to the usual state and peacebuilding 5 The withdrawal of FGS support from the ‘Jubaland initiative’, in turn, caused accusations that the government was returning to attempts of centralizing power.

Clear, hold, build … a ‘local’ state  157 toolbox, the Jubaland case illustrates their subjugation as means for ex post facto stabilizing governance arrangements produced by counterinsurgency. As such, the 2011–2013 process of Jubaland’s establishment illustrates the profound ambiguity in regards to interpreting and defining security and political order in a context like Somalia. It additionally demonstrates how exactly this ambiguity – allowing for the invocation of elusive yet symbolically powerful signifiers such as ‘federalism’ and ‘bottom-up’ governance and statebuilding – offers legitimizing reframings of counterinsurgent warfare (Moe 2017). When understood through this prism it should be of little surprise that the order produced is profoundly militarized. In the context of the ongoing war against al Shabaab, the US prioritized the military side of the Janus-faced grey zone engagement, whereby the new ‘local state’ in Jubaland has come to serve as a key outpost for US Special Operation Forces, thus profoundly cementing its coercive powers. As noted by Jubaland ‘state minister for the presidency’ Abdighani Abdi Jama in an interview with Foreign Policy: ‘They have high tech; they have drones; they have so many things… We are really benefiting’ (McCormick 2015). Humanitarian agencies have been less enthusiastic about the powers of the local counterinsurgent polity and its attempts to assert ‘state authority’ (often in disregard of both national state policies and ‘legitimately appointed local authorities’, see UN Monitoring Group 2016, p. 176). Such assertions of authority include for example the establishment of a new Office of Monitoring Humanitarian Agencies, within the Intelligence and Security Service, and, related interference, also involving the use of force, of the administration’s militias in humanitarian operations (UN Monitoring Group 2016). This is part of a wider pattern of regulatory fragmentation, the UN Monitoring Group (2016, p. 133) notes, whereby ‘[i]n the absence of a clear federal framework uncoordinated regional approaches to regulation continue… to complicate and raise the costs of humanitarian action, facilitating manipulation and obstruction of inputs and programs and the imposition of arbitrary taxation’. In addition, and illustrating a trend across governments and polities in the region (Menkhaus 2014, p. 7), the apparent commitment to anti-al Shabaab government in Jubaland has come at the expense of human and civil rights. While Jubaland forces are allies for international counterinsurgents, these forces are also known perpetrators of significant human rights violations in Kismayo –  involving killings, injuries and detentions of civilians, including of minors allegedly suspected of affiliation with al Shabaab. While ‘local track’ counterinsurgency interventions have been said to reflect new and more locally attuned approaches to stabilization and reconstruction, the above analysis instead indicates how such approaches are in fact more alike a reinvention of the age-old strategy of collaboration and incorporation of local proxies in counterinsurgent warfare. Echoing the political language used for framing the ‘local track’ counterinsurgency approach discussed above, this kind of politique des races6 has been translated by contemporary counterinsurgents into terms such as ‘genuine alliances’ and ‘local partnerships’ (Kilcullen 2009, p. 15; Ucko 2013, p. 531). Yet, as shown, upon closer examination, such interventions, instead of supporting existing and locally legitimate institutions, actually tend to bring about ‘opportunistic creations’ empowered because of their (relative) compliance with external agendas. This sig-

6 The term originates from French Colonial policy, and describes a strategy of creating local elite proxies through which local populations could be ruled and pacified by the colonizer.

158  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding nifies a ‘deliberate deception’ of indirect rule theorists which continues to ‘reverberate in the contemporary celebration of COIN [counterinsurgency operations]’ (Porch 2013, pp. 59‒60).

POSTSCRIPT: INTERACTIVE EFFECTS BETWEEN WARFIGHTING AND LOCAL STATEBUILDING? This chapter has shown how the post-9/11 re-emergence of counterinsurgency in Somalia, has allowed interveners to adapt to, and start to move beyond, the limits of conventional state centric stabilization, and instead target local actors and institutions. In zooming in on the case of Jubaland, the chapter traced the productive effects of ‘local track counterinsurgency’ interventions, in terms of re-making and decentring sovereignty, and thereby contributing to new localized processes of self-styled ‘state formation’. Thereby the analysis served to illustrate the profoundly ambiguous, indeed contradictory, effects of post-9/11 security interventions on sovereignty and on efforts of state-making. Contemporary counterinsurgency proponents themselves in fact explicitly point to the interactive effects between warfighting and local statebuilding, and, referencing Charles Tilly, note that ‘counterinsurgency’s theory of reconstruction seeks to harness these effects to reconstruct social and political order’ (Sitaraman 2012, p. 159). Recall, however, that Tilly also expressed ‘worries about the increasing destructiveness of war’ in the context of ‘the expanding role of great powers as suppliers of arms and military organization to poor countries’ (Tilly 1985, p. 169). Affirming such worries, developments in the Somali context, analysed in this chapter, point to the risk that post-9/11 counterinsurgency will all but enable, and in fact rather complicate further, if not outright undermine, prospects for building up locally credible and legitimate institutions (see also Leander 2004). First, the creation and proliferation of externally equipped security actors operating beyond legal frameworks, causes a local fragmentation of violence, and has an unravelling effect on existing local administrative structures (thus running counter to key criterion in Tilly’s thesis about local state formation). Second, the incentives for want-to-be-statesmen to negotiate with civilians (another central element in Tilly’s thesis) are decreasing. The 1990s and early 2000s in fact did espouse certain patterns of bottom-up governance arrangements, emerging out of local conflicts and related processes of settlement and bargaining in the Somali context (Menkhaus 2007). Perhaps most prominently, the way in which the civil war in the 1980s played out in the north – in Somaliland – and the ensuing intra-Somaliland conflicts in the 1990s, generated strong incentives for bargaining and consultative processes among various local constituencies, elites and civilians. These processes in fact eventually produced the most stable polity – Somaliland – within the Somali territories. In contrast, and as shown in the above analysis, the current global renaissance of counterinsurgency and related counterterrorism efforts, which now significantly shape East Africa (and indeed many other places), is a context in which the need for local bargaining is dwindling as small and fragmented sections of selected local elite instead can strike deals with externals to expand their coercive power. And these lessons are not only contemporary. Counterinsurgency has in fact never been a successful recipe for creating stable and legitimate states (Porch 2013) nor responsible local self-government, but instead ‘frequently end[s] up exacerbating the very irresponsible and illiberal types of governance that lead to instability in the first place’ (Kienscherf 2016, p. 5).

Clear, hold, build … a ‘local’ state  159

REFERENCES Bruton, B. E. and P. D. Williams (2014), Counterinsurgency in Somalia: Lessons Learned from the African Union Mission in Somalia, 2007–2013, Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Technical Information Center. Brysk, A. and M. Stohl (2018), Contracting Human Rights. Crisis, Accountability and Opportunity, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Carson, J. (2010), ‘State Department: A dual-track approach to Somalia’, Talk presented at Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, podcast, https://​www​​.csis​​.org/​events/​state​​ -department​​-dual​​-track​​-approach​​-somalia (accessed July 2018). Carter, R. (2013), ‘War, peace and stabilisation: Critically reconceptualising stability in southern Afghanistan’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 2 (1), 1–20. de Waal, A. (2015), The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa. Money, War and the Business of Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. Egnell, R. (2013), ‘Winning legitimacy? Counterinsurgency as the military approach to statebuilding’, in R. Egnell and P. Haldén (eds), New Agendas in Statebuilding, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 201–232. Freear, M. (2012), ‘America’s dual track for Somalia and the case of Kismayo’, American Security Project, Flashpoint Blog, 15 November, http://​americansecurityproject. org/blog/2012/special-featur e-americas-dual-track-for-somalia-and-the-case- of-kismayo/ (accessed July 2018). Freear, M. and C. de Coning (2013), ‘Lessons from the African Union Mission for Somalia (AMISOM) for peace operations in Mali’, Stability, 2 (2) 23, 1‒11. Hammond, L. and H. Vaughan-Lee (2012), ‘Humanitarian space in Somalia: A scarce commodity’, HPG Working Paper, London: Overseas Development Institute. Hoehne, M. V. (2016), ‘The rupture of territoriality and the diminishing relevance of cross-cutting ties in Somalia after 1990’, Development and Change, 47 (6), 1379–411. ICG (International Crisis Group) (2013), ‘Jubaland in jeopardy: The uneasy path to state-building in Somalia’, ICG Commentary, 21 May. ICG (International Crisis Group) (2014), ‘Crisis watch database Somalia’, 2 January. Kay, N. (2014), ‘SRSG Kay’s speech on the occasion of the formal inauguration of the interim Jubba administration’, United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia, 21 January, http://​unsom​​.unmissions​​ .org/​Default.aspx?ctl=Detailsandtabid=6262andmid=9770andItemID=17190 (accessed July 2018). Kienscherf, M. (2016), ‘Producing “responsible” self-governance: Counterinsurgency and the violence of neoliberal rule’, Critical Military Studies, 2 (3), 1–20. Kilcullen, D. (2009), The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Middle of a Big One, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kilcullen, D. (2010), Counterinsurgency, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leander, A. (2004), ‘Wars and the un-making of states: Taking Tilly seriously in the contemporary world’, in S. Guzzini and D. Jung (eds), Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research, London: Routledge, pp. 69‒80. Leroux-Martin, P. (2015), Diplomatic Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina, London: Routledge. McConnell, F., T. Moreau and J. Dittmer (2012), ‘Mimicking state diplomacy: The legitimizing strategies of unofficial diplomacies’, Geoforum, 43 (4), 808‒14. McCormick, T. (2015), ‘Exclusive: US operates drones from secret bases in Somalia’, Foreign Policy, 2 July, http://​foreignpolicy​​.com/​2015/​07/​02/​exclusive​​-u​​-s​​-operates​​-drones​​-from​​-secret-​​ bases​​-in​​ -somalia​​-special​​-operations​​-jsoc​​-black​​-hawk​​-down/​ (accessed July 2018). Mc Evoy, C. (2013), ‘Shifting priorities: Kenya’s changing approach to peacebuilding and peacemaking’, Norweigian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (NOREF) Report, Oslo: NOREF, May, https://​www​​ .files​​.ethz.​​ ch/​isn/​165125/​bca199817​c66f0d0f91212128181c024​​.pdf (accessed July 2018). Menkhaus, K. (2007), ‘Governance without government in Somalia: Spoilers, state building, and the politics of coping’, International Security, 31 (3), 74‒106. Menkhaus, K. (2012), ‘After the Kenyan intervention in Somalia’, Report, Washington, DC: Enough Project, January, https://​enoughproject.​​ org/​reports/​after​​-kenyan​​-intervention​​-somalia (accessed 6 March 2019). Menkhaus, K. (2014), ‘Old and new tensions in statebuilding and institution-building in Somalia’, Paper presented at the 55th Annual Convention of the International Studies Convention, Toronto, 26‒29 March. Mills, G., J. P. Pham and D. Kilcullen (2013), Somalia: Fixing Africa’s Most Failed State, Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers.

160  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Moe, L. W. (2015), ‘The “turn to the local”: Hybridity, local ordering and the new governing rationalities of peace and security interventions in Somalia’, PhD Thesis, School of Political and International Studies, The University of Queensland. Moe, L. W. (2016), ‘The strange wars of liberal peace: Hybridity, complexity and the governing rationalities of counterinsurgency in Somalia’, Peacebuilding, 4 (1), 99‒117. Moe, L. W. (2017), ‘Counterinsurgent warfare and the decentering of sovereignty in Somalia’, in L. W. Moe and M.-M. Müller (eds), Reconfiguring Intervention: Complexity, Resilience and the ‘Local Turn’ in Counterinsurgent Warfare, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 119‒40. Moe, L. W. (2018), ‘Counterinsurgency in the Somali territories: The “grey zone” between peace and pacification’, International Affairs, 94 (2), 319‒41. Moe, L. W. and A. Geis (2019), ‘From Liberal Interventionism to Stabilization: Towards a New Consensus on Norm-Downsizing in Interventions in Africa’, under revision for Global Constitutionalism. Moe, L. W. and M.-M. Müller (2017), ‘Introduction: Complexity, resilience and the “local turn” in counterinsurgency’, in L. W. Moe and M.-M. Müller (eds), Reconfiguring Intervention: Complexity, Resilience and the ‘Local Turn’ in Counterinsurgent Warfare, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1‒27. Pham, J. P. (2013), ‘State collapse, insurgency, and counterinsurgency: Lessons from Somalia’, Report, Carlisle, PA: United States Army War College Press. Porch, D. (2013), Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prestholdt, J. (2011), ‘Kenya, the United States, and counterterrorism’, Africa Today, 57 (4), 2‒27. Reno, W. (2015), ‘Military clientelism and statebuilding in the Horn of Africa’, Paper presented at Transnationalizing Clientelism: External Governance and Informality in Areas of Limited Statehood Workshop, Collaborative Research Center (SFB) Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood, Freie Universität Berlin, 19–20 June. Sitaraman, G. (2012), The Counterinsurgent’s Constitution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soares de Oliveira, R. and H. Verhoeven (2018), ‘Taming intervention: Sovereignty, statehood and political order in Africa’, Survival, 60 (2), 7‒32, DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2018.1448558. Thomas, T. (2014), ‘Somalia’s federalism woes challenge stability amid military offensive’, Somalia Newsroom, 19 March, https://​somalianewsroom​​.com/​2014/​03/​19/​somalias​​-federalism​​-woes​​ -challenge​​-stability-​​ amid​​-military​​-offensive/​ (accessed 6 March 2019). Tilly, C. (1985), ‘War making and state making as organized crime’, in P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169‒91. Ucko, D. H. (2013), ‘Beyond clear–hold–build: Rethinking local-level counterinsurgency after Afghanistan’, Contemporary Security Policy, 34 (3), 526–51. UN Monitoring Group (2016), ‘Letter dated 28 September from the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea addressed to the Chair of the Security Council Committee pursuant to Resolutions 751 (1992) and 1907 (2009) concerning Somalia and Eritrea, S/2016/919’, https://​www​​.securitycouncilreport​​ .org/​atf/​cf/​​%7B65BFCF9B​​-6D27​​-4E9C​​-8CD3​​-CF6E4FF96FF9​​%7D/​s​​_2016​​_919​​.pdf (accessed July 2018). UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) (2015), ‘Parliamentary support project’, http://​www​​ .so​​.undp​​.org/​content/​somalia/​en/​home/​operations/​projects/​poverty​​_reduction/​parliament​​-support​​ -project​​.html (accessed 6 March 2019). United Nations (2013), ‘Special Representative tells Security Council: “Behind the twists and turns, the crisis and the standoffs, Somalia has the foundations for progress”’, SC/11120, 12 September, http://​ www​​.un​​.org/​press/​en/​2013/​sc11120​​.doc​​.htm (accessed July 2018). United Nations News Center (2013), ‘Somalia: UN envoy welcomes agreement between Government, southern region’s leaders’, 28 August, https://​news​​.un​​.org/​en/​story/​2013/​08/​447712​​-somalia-​​ un​​ -envoy​​-welcomes​​-agreement​​-between​​-government​​-southern​​-regions​​-leaders (accessed July 2019). US Joint Chiefs of Staff (2013), Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, Washington, DC, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 22 November.

16. International political sociology of interventions Médéric Martin-Mazé

What does international political sociology bring to the study of interventionist practices (Harrison 2010; Olsson 2015)? In a nutshell, international political sociology looks at practices of intervention transversally, that is, without reproducing “antagonisms at the heart of disciplinary divides and modern modes of organizing worlds” (Huysmans and Nogueira 2012, p. 1; Bigo and Walker 2007; Bigo 2016a). One such antagonism that informs the scholarship on intervention casually opposes interveners to recipients, international to local staff, global experts to local brokers (Bachmann 2012; Hensell 2015; Kohl 2015; Krogstad 2014). This dualism obfuscates interstitial sites that are inhabited both by outward-looking locals and locally minded internationals, and which are instrumental to the reproduction of interventionist practices. In this chapter, I draw on Bourdieu’s concept of bureaucratic field to foreground one of those sites and explore its inner logic and positional structure. This concept also highlights the role of international organisations (IOs) in carrying out current interventionist practices. My theoretical framework locates them at the crossroads of multiple state-based bureaucratic fields that are undergoing an uneven process of transnationalisation. Through the projects that they implement, IOs bring national bureaucracies directly into contact with one another. They transfer material (money, supplies, equipment, etc.) and symbolic (expertise, norms, know-how, etc.) resources from one bureaucracy to another, simultaneously accumulating power of their own. This process of transnationalisation gives birth to highly contested and hierarchised socio-bureaucratic settings that sit at the core of contemporary interventions. The crux of the matter is to chart the structure of these transnational universes. To this end, my argument goes beyond pondering the merits of one concept. Indeed, the notion of bureaucratic field lends itself to an original method of data visualisation, namely Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). MCA represents any large-n population as a cloud of points in a bi-dimensional plane. It pinpoints key oppositions between actors, MCA reveals which interveners have the most power, where this power comes from and what they use it for. For this inquiry, I build a dataset of 236 projects that IOs implement in Central Asia with a view to bolstering border security. I focus on this region because it represents an important site of interventions targeting borders in the Global South (Andrijasevic and Walters 2010). In MCA, the “model follows the data” (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010, p. 2). Consequently, data construction espouses the specific features of the case under examination. The next section introduces the concept of bureaucratic field by setting it apart from the neighbouring idea of a field of power. The second section explains the statistical procedure of MCA. Finally, I illustrate the heuristic pay-offs of this framework by charting the social structures of border interventions in Central Asia. In this region of the world, international bureaucrats work across borders so as to change the way borders work. Some want to use inter-state boundaries as separators, in order to keep threats at bay. Others want to turn them into connectors, so as to unleash the flows of globalisation across states. Those who can 161

162  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding combine both agendas, such as EU bureaucrats, wield the most influence in the day-to-day practices of intervention in the field of border security.

THE TRANSNATIONALISATION OF BUREAUCRATIC FIELDS The concept of bureaucratic field enables mid-range enquiries into the bureaucratic settings that span multiple IOs and sit at the core of contemporary interventions. It allows to trace what resources shore up power positions in those settings, how these assets are distributed amongst interveners, and how they use them to build the capacities of targeted states. The generic concept of field brings into focus microcosms that have something specific at stake, work according to their own rules, and display singular hierarchies of power (Bourdieu 1994, pp. 54–5, 70, 1992, pp. 94–115). However, Bourdieu never studied international relations per se. Consequently, international political sociology scholars extrapolated his thinking in order to elucidate international practices. Most of them resorted to the more specific notion of field of power, which is a peculiar social space. Only the incumbents of each field can pay its entry costs. Different fields must first generate their own elites before these can compete with one another within the field of power. They struggle over the “dominant principle of domination” and the “legitimate principle of legitimation” (Bourdieu 1989, p. 376). In other words, what is at stake is the power to determine the relations between other fields (Bourdieu 1994, p. 56, 1989, pp. 277–8). This concept has ignited the imagination of most post-Bourdieusian scholars in international political sociology. For instance, Dezalay and Garth track the transnational circulation of elites across post-colonial fields of power, as they export and import modes of domination and legitimation (Dezalay and Garth 2011). In a similar perspective, Madsen and Kauppi shed light on “transnational power elites evolving in and around Brussels” (Madsen and Kauppi 2013, p. 1; see also Kauppi and Madsen 2014). Some, such as Adler-Nissen, see the emergence of a global field of power in summit diplomacy (Adler-Nissen 2011). Others, such as Bigo, ferret out the work of transnational guilds of professionals across national fields of power (Bigo 2016b). The twin hypothesis of the transnationalisation/globalisation of fields of power thus opens fascinating perspectives for IR. This fascination has however partially obfuscated the notion of bureaucratic field that, I contend, represents a fertile theoretical terrain for students of intervention. In so doing, I follow in the path traced by Georgakakis who has coined the field of Eurocracy to unearth the social structures of EU governance (Georgakakis and Rowell 2013). The bureaucratic field corresponds to a social space where what is at stake is the monopoly over the legitimate manipulation of public instruments (Bourdieu 1997, pp. 55, 67–8). Within this space, a host of proxy holders struggle to engineer the public codes that regulate other fields (Bourdieu 2000, pp. 148–9). Although bureaucratic fields display a strong autonomy, they are at the same time embedded in a broader social structure with which multiple transactions occur. Indeed, national bureaucrats forge alliances with outsiders, including bureaucrats from other states who do a similar job (Avant et al. 2010; Keohane and Nye 1974; Slaughter 2004). This observation raises interesting questions. To put it in Bigo’s terms: [T]o speak of a bureaucratic field, a field of professionals of politics, a field of power without specifying how they are articulated and what their boundaries are is not much of a problem as long as the

International political sociology of interventions  163 belief in a territorial management aligning all the boundaries along the territorial border of the state is assumed. But once the idea that the state is acting as the meta-field of power is refused, the ‘fix’ for identifying boundaries of the field in order to select data disappears, and the transnational reappears. (Bigo 2011, pp. 248–9)

Hence, international interveners are located at the crossroad of multiple state-based bureaucratic fields whose boundaries are out of alignment with inter-state borders. The bureaucratic field helps fashion a richer understanding of the international interventions. It enables thinking structurally a network of bureaucratic power positions that span institutional boundaries, national borders and issue-areas. It thereby calls attention onto the singular hierarchies of power that constrain how international interventions are carried out. In paying attention to the differentiation at play, it invites researchers to bring out the social contexts where interveners actually operate.

MAPPING FIELDS WITH MULTIPLE CORRESPONDENCE ANALYSIS Methodologically, the crux of the matter is to describe the system of relevant relations between capitals, struggles and positions (Bourdieu 1989, p. 374). To this end, Bourdieu often relied upon Multiple Correspondence Analysis (for a general introduction, cf. Le Roux and Rouanet 2010). The choice for MCA also provides methodological coherence to the overall research design of the present inquiry. Indeed, this method has an elective affinity with the concept of field to the extent that both rely on a relational mode of reasoning (Bourdieu and de Saint Martin 1978, pp. 3–4). MCA visualises a statistical population in a Euclidian space. Any statistical matrix can be represented in an abstract multidimensional cloud, where individuals described by similar modalities would be closer to one another, and inversely. MCA calculates the cross-section on which to orthogonally project the multidimensional cloud so as to retain most of the original distance between the points of this cloud. The orthogonal projection on the bi-dimensional plane simultaneously plots the distribution of this population according to these dimensions. The two dimensions of the factorial plane thus provide insights into which variables contribute the most to structuring the population. These geometric and statistical properties dovetail neatly with the relational features of fields. The dimensions of the factorial plane shed light on which resources work as capitals insofar as they reveal which variables bear the most on structuring the social space under study. At the same time, dimensions lay bare the relations of power between the actors that are located in that space, showing exactly how these capitals are distributed amongst them. In other words, not only do dimensions unearth the fault lines of the field, they also reveal on which side of the divide actors stand. In that regard, the dimensions calculated by MCA give precious information about the struggles that constitute the field. At the extremities of each axis, one finds actors that are relatively marginal in relation to the bulk of the population, but remain in full opposition with regards to the capitals that the dimensions capture. Thus, dimensions and marginal individuals provide insights into the conflictual dynamic unravelling within the field. As the case study shows, MCA brings out what actors struggle for, as well as who has the upper hand in the fight, and why.

164  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Its unique statistical and geometric properties perform well in capturing the relations between capitals, struggles and positions that underpin bureaucratic fields. They synthesise multiple categorical variables for a large number of individuals and turn them into dimensions that bring the structures of the game to light. One can then pinpoint who stands on what side of which issues. MCA provides for a robust procedure of data visualisation capable of catering to the complexity of the socio-bureaucratic settings of international interventions. Importantly, MCA yields statistics keen to inductive reasoning (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010, p. 2). In introducing my case study, I therefore strive to underscore those empirical asperities where to plug MCA.

STATES, BORDERS AND INTERVENTIONS IN CENTRAL ASIA I focus on border interventions in Central Asia for numerous reasons. This region has undergone a deep territorial transformation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over the past twenty-five years, internal borders were turned into international ones as newly independent Central Asian states consolidated their “monopoly over the legitimate means of movement” for humans, goods and capital (Torpey 2000). What had now become cross-border mobility was to be sorted out, controlled and, more often than not, prohibited (Megoran et al. 2005; Reeves 2009; Thorez 2011). Multiple IOs have consequently targeted Central Asian borders for intervention. In the early 1990s, they started helping Central Asian states better manage their boundaries (Czerniecka and Heathershaw 2011). Their purpose ranged from mitigating the effects of excessively brutal border controls, to deterring the transborder trafficking of drugs (Jackson 2005). Thus, Central Asia represents an important site of the global governance of borders. This “crowded, heterogeneous, and sometimes disputed field of expertise and intervention” (Andrijasevic and Walters 2010, p. 979) revolves around a regime of practices which one observes in other locations such as Western Africa (Sandor 2016), Central and Eastern Europe (Jeandesboz 2015), and the Mediterranean (Fine 2017). International bureaucrats feature prominently across all these cases. They provide information technology equipment, refurbish border posts, arrange study trips for high-ranking officials, organise seminars for middle-management, send international experts on assessment missions, build training centres or promote reforms of the border security sector. They are usually entangled in a complex web of delegation, competition and cooperation spanning headquarters, field offices and departments for international cooperation of host institutions. In Central Asia, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the EU-funded Border Management in Central Asia (BOMCA) play the most prominent role. Crucially, those IOs deliver their assistance through projects. Cooley observes that projects make the bureaucratic fabric of global governance much more complex to map out (Cooley 2010). Indeed, IOs often delegate parts of their projects to other IOs. Thus, the European Commission allots the implementation of BOMCA to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Furthermore, some IOs implement sub-activities that fit in larger programmes steered by other players. For instance, the UNDP further outsources the reform of the border security sector to one small IO based in Vienna: The International Center for the Migration Policy Development.

International political sociology of interventions  165 Actors set up coordination mechanisms to navigate this bureaucratic maze. The Austrian Ministry of Interior launched the Central Asian Border Security Initiative in the early 2000s. In 2007, the regional office of the UNODC brought online the Automated Donor Assistance Mechanism.1 These mechanisms aim at avoiding duplication of donors’ efforts. One may be tempted to take such claims at face value. According to Gavrilis “the border management programs in the Central Asian region have become well-coordinated, rarely engaging in redundant efforts and operating with relatively modest budgets” (Gavrilis 2012). However, the very fact that actors duplicate coordination mechanisms aimed at avoiding duplication gives away the agonistic logic that drives the global governance of borders in Central Asia. Through this convoluted bureaucratic mess, one discerns a more singular battlefield where, on a daily basis, international bureaucrats negotiate with their national counterparts the conditions under which aid is delivered. This social space is differentiated from two neighbouring universes. On the one hand, it maintains a rather neat separation from headquarters, where the assistance is framed. On the other hand, the “world of implementers” also stands apart from the universe of officers who are directly in charge of managing border posts and controlling the green border (Wunderlich 2013, p. 406). Thus, the boundaries of this social space cut through the institutional fabric of international bureaucracies, as well as through that of national administrations. In this differentiated social space, bureaucrats try to fund as many projects as possible aimed at reforming inter-state boundaries in post-soviet Central Asia. Civil servants working in IO field offices jockey to raise funds from their colleagues who are based in HQs. Simultaneously, they seek to establish the best working relationships with their opposite numbers in local administrations. Indeed, good local connections increase chances to convert this social capital into financial means. At the same time national bureaucrats who specialise in international cooperation also compete with one another to channel these international goods (financial subsidies, material donations, training trips, etc.) towards their own administrations. These manifold sources of conflict ignite a powerful agonistic dynamic, that actors readily mention in interviews. I conducted 55 of those with experts of the UNODC, IOM, BOMCA and the OSCE. I also met with employees of EU Delegations, American and European embassies, as well as Central Asian security professionals in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Most of those actors were keen to underline the competitive nature of their professional environment. As one EU border adviser puts it: “everyone draws their swords and wants a share of the spoils”.2 One EU diplomat agrees: “A sort of competition kicks in, where everyone fights over market shares, partners and special relationships with beneficiaries.”3 These answers offer a glimpse into a hierarchical social space. The trick is that nobody agrees on the pecking order (Pouliot 2016). The contrast between the following two excerpts illustrates this point vividly. According to one OSCE officer, BOMCA “is the Platzhirschen (top-dog)”. For one employee of the European Commission however, the Americans “are

1 https://​www​.paris​-pact​.net/​index​.php​?action​=​cms​_render​&​section​=​60​&​menu​_loc​=​main​&​mm​=​ mm3 (accessed 6 July 2019). 2 Author’s interview with BOMCA’s Chief Technical Adviser in Uzbekistan, Tashkent, September 2008. 3 Author’s interview with a political adviser to the EU special representative for Central Asia, Almaty, November 2008.

166  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding ‘number one’ regionally. They have 5 to 10 times our budget.”4 Such dissonant answers make it hard to disentangle the relations of power underpinning this conflict-laden bureaucratic setting. Whilst they reach their own limits, interviews nonetheless yield information that is vital to overcoming these obstacles. First, as they provide a quick scan of their professional environment, interviewees actually draw the boundaries of the field. They certainly do not mention all the players involved, but they tell us who the most important of them are. Furthermore, actors are keen to say why they are better than their competitors. In contesting one another as legitimate experts of border security, they oppose technical to political, short-term to long-term and development-oriented to security-driven projects. Together with such categories of perception, this mode of bureaucratisation works as signposts towards the underlying structure of the field. They pave the way towards more quantitative data generation and variable design, which I expose in the next segment.

CODING PROJECTS INTO DATA: A QUALI-QUANTITATIVE DESIGN Projects represent a pervasive bureaucratic procedure in the international interventions targeting Central Asian borders. That is why, in order to map the social structures of border interventions in Central Asia, I apply MCA to a database of international projects. This section explains the rationale for such a methodological design and lays out the data in more details. Boltanski and Chiapello analyse projects as “temporary pockets of accumulation whereby wealth can be created” (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999, p. 157). As such, projects encapsulate the capitals that structure this bureaucratic field. Consequently, an examination of projects enables one to trace the capitals that differentiate this field from other social spaces and shape its internal structuration. Methodologically, an accurate description of projects’ attributes will lay bare the distribution of capitals amongst interveners. Such an approach aims at locating IOs in a relational structure made up of projects. To this end, I first reconstructed the project portfolio of the four most important IOs involved in this field as revealed by the interviews. For UNODC, I cross-referenced project evaluations with the Situation Reports annually drafted by the Mini-Dublin Group in charge of Central Asia. UNODC implemented 64 projects on border security in Central Asia. As for the IOM, Budgets and programs and Financial Reports enabled me to identify the 71 projects. BOMCA implemented 75 projects.5 Archives that I collected during fieldwork allowed me to identify 26 projects implemented by OSCE. Thus the database comprises a statistical population of 236 international projects of border security implemented between 1992 and 2012. Based on a preliminary and inductive analysis of the cognitive categories surfacing from the interviews, I constructed six classes of variables, containing 30 variables for a total of 100 modalities.

4 Author’s interview with an employee of the Delegation of the European Union in Tajikistan, Dushanbe, September 2010. 5 It should be noted that six projects implemented by another EU-funded programme (ECOTRAFFICKING) were added to BOMCA’s portfolio because they fit its practical logic. However, they only feature in the analysis as supplementary individuals, because they represent too marginal a population and would therefore skew the results.

International political sociology of interventions  167 The first class of variables describes the four implementing agencies. The second class of variables (specialisation) describes the kind of assistance that projects deliver. The first variable corresponds to sectors of intervention (trafficking in human beings, migratory development, preventive development, diplomacy, borders, migration, health, natural risk, human security and drug trafficking). The second and third variables measure how intensive the projects are in terms of development (transfer of material resources) and security (threats mitigation). Both variables contain five modalities graduated from 0 to 4. Interestingly they may at times co-vary, which testifies to the varying strength of the security–development nexus (Duffield and Waddell 2006; Reid-Henry 2011; Stern and Öjendal 2011). The third class of variables describes funding arrangements, which, as Cooley reminds us, are a key feature of project contracts (Cooley 2010, pp. 242–3). The variable ‘cycle’ describes projects’ longevity and has six modalities: very short (1 year), short (2 years), average (3‒4 years) long (5‒8 years) and very long (longer than 8 years). It varies independently from the variable ‘stability’ whose two modalities (stable, unstable) describe how frequently project managers are compelled to come back to the market for aid in order to raise funds for their activities. Indeed, projects with unstable funding might nonetheless achieve high longevity. The variable ‘self-funding’ (zero, ten, hundred) describes the financial contribution of the implementing IOs to the project. The variable ‘level’ describes whether the project is funded on a standalone basis, or as part of a larger scheme (project or programme). The fourth variable corresponds to budgets. It has five modalities: less than $40,000, less than $300,000, less than $1.1 million, less than $15.4 million, and finally Non-Acquired for missing data.6 Finally the sixth and last variable of this class corresponds to funding instruments – the EU Rapid Reaction Mechanism and Instrument for Stability, the EU Technical Assistance to the Community of Independent States and Development and Cooperation Instrument of the European Commission, and the Unified Budget and Extra-Budgetary procedure of the OSCE, OPS and ADM for operational and administrative budgets of the IOM. In the next two classes, variables receive binary modalities (yes/no). The first class describes which countries benefit from the assistance delivered by the projects. It has five variables: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. By the same token, the next class of variables describes which organisations benefit from the aid. It has ten variables: border guards, customs, narcotics, police, social, non-governmental organisation (NGO), justice and law, executive branches, IO (when other IOs receive funding as part of a sub-contracting scheme). The last class of variables traces the origins of funding back to donors. The first variable corresponds to the European Commission. It has four modalities (no funding, less than $90,000, less than $900,000, less $2.1 million). The second variable corresponds to EU Member States. It has four modalities (no funding, less than $125,000, less than $800,000, less than $1.84 million). The third variable corresponds to the USA. It has four variables (none, unknown, less than $300,000, less than $6 million). The fourth variable corresponds to cases where implementing IOs contribute to funding, thereby complementing the variable ‘self-funding’ in the above. It has five modalities (none, unknown, less than $50,000, less than $90,000, less than $7 million). Finally, the fifth variable corresponds to cases where other states, such as

6 I turn numerical data into categorical variables by creating classes that best reflect the overall distribution of the population.

168  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding China, Turkey and Russia fund projects. It comprises three modalities (none, unknown, less than $20 million). Finally, the first class of variables describes the implementing IOs. It has one variable (implementer) and four modalities (OSCE, IOM, UNODC and BOMCA). The default configuration of the MCA sets this variable as supplementary. Contrary to active variables, supplementary variables do not contribute to calculating the dimensions and, therefore, shaping the space. In what follows, I display the graphical and statistical results of the MCA.

THE FAULT LINES OF BORDER INTERVENTIONS MCA synthesises the abovementioned set of variables into dimensions that form the axes of two types of planes. The cloud of individuals showcases the statistical population (projects), whereas the cloud of modalities features their properties (modalities). A third representation visualises both individual and modalities at the same time by locating individuals at the barycentre of the cloud of their modalities, and conversely. To analyse these results, one needs both to account for the spatial distributions of individuals and properties, and to make sense of the dimensions unearthed by the MCA. Figure 16.1 spotlights the individual projects as well as their implementing IOs. At first glance, it reveals a double opposition. With regard to the y-axis, BOMCA sits on top, whereas UNODC and IOM stand in the lower region. The OSCE is located in the centre. Furthermore, BOMCA and the OSCE are close to the x-axis, whereas the UNODC and the IOM stand on each side of it. The y-axis corresponds to the first dimension of the MCA. It has a modified rate of 57.2 per cent.7 Figure 16.2 features only the modalities that contribute most to its formation as well as the projects near its extremities. Those modalities pertain to variables describing the types of financing (stability, self-funding, type, and level) and tracing the origins of the funding (European Commission, EU Member States, and implementing agencies). In the upper part of the graph, one finds long-lasting projects. They benefit from the slow temporality that underpins the financial instruments of the EC’s external action (Buchet de Neuilly 2005, pp. 125–30). The large cluster of projects sitting in the middle fits this profile neatly. Funded under the Technical Aid to the Commonwealth of Independent States instrument, their implementation lasts from 2003 to 2005. The pluri-annual tempo of these projects turns them into particularly stable pockets where a lot of capital accumulates over time. The bureaucrats of BOMCA do not have to regularly go back onto the market in order to raise funds. They are in it for the long haul. The managers of project #67, in the bottom of the graph, find themselves in the exact reverse situation. Based in the IOM field office in Astana (Kazakhstan), they depend upon voluntary contributions of IOM Participating states. Every now and then, they send a request for funding to HQ, which forwards it to the delegations in Geneva. That is why the modalities describing

7 The modified rate measures the difference between a perfect virtual sphere and the original multidimensional cloud derived from the matrix. They are commonly used in MCA to interpret axes (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010, p. 10). In this case, it means that the first dimension captures 57.2 per cent of the deformation, which is fairly high. For comparison, the axis one in the taste example used by Le Roux and Rouanet is 47.6 per cent.

International political sociology of interventions  169

Figure 16.1

Projects and organisations of border interventions in Central Asia (1992‒2012)

donations from the USA and EU Member States pop up in this region of the graph, near project #67. Such a bureaucratic procedure keeps the actors of the IOM on their feet. At any moment, their jobs risk termination. This first dimension captures quite accurately the implementers’ autonomy with regards to their centres of command. It opposes projects where they wrest a lot of leeway from the centres of decision to activities where the future hinges closely on HQ’s support. This first axis also tracks how the internal set-up of each IO plays out at the level of the field. As international bureaucrats interact with their opposite numbers in host institutions, what they can and cannot do depends on rules that are set up elsewhere, between HQ and permanent representations. Some of those rules give a lot of time and leeway to officers in the field, others much less so. The x-axis corresponds to the second dimension that the MCA lays bare. It has a modified rate of 17 per cent. Figure 16.3 displays the projects located near the extremities of this

170  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding

Figure 16.2

Axis 1: autonomy versus heteronomy

dimension, as well as the modalities that contribute most to its calculation. Those modalities mostly belong to the variables measuring the area of intervention (specialisation and security), funding cycles, types and budgets, anti-drug services as aid recipient, and donors (European Commission, European Member States, and USA). In the bottom-left dial of the graph, one finds a cluster of projects benefiting NGOs that deal with migratory issues in a developmental perspective. Project #15, for instance, promotes a better coordination for labour migration in Tajikistan. With respect to this second dimension, these activities contrast with projects in the bottom-right dial, targeting anti-narcotic services and dealing with drug trafficking issues. Projects #44 and #91 last from the mid-1990s to 2003 and lead to the creation of the Drug Control Agency of Tajikistan. Implemented by the UNODC, both receive most of their funding from voluntary contributions of the USA. These are delivered in a series of short-term funding packages. Zooming out slightly from this zone

International political sociology of interventions  171

Figure 16.3

Axis 2: development versus security

provides a broader vantage point that confirms how development and mobility issues in the left dial oppose security and police problems in the right one. Thus, two oppositions structure border interventions in Central Asia. The first one contrasts autonomous to heteronomous interveners. In the upper part of the graph, one finds field offices that successfully gain autonomy as HQ delegates to them the business of reforming border security in this region. By contrast, the lower region features actors who remain highly dependent on the instructions that they receive from the centres. BOMCA belongs to the first category of dominant players, whereas UNODC and IOM belong to the later one. OSCE sits somewhere in between. In the uneven playing field of international interventions, not all bureaucrats are equally powerful. Some accumulate more capital, operate in more stable environments and, therefore, have better chances to prevail in the competition for funding and local connections.

172  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding The second axis opposes development-driven assistance in the left dial to security-oriented aid in the right one. Furthermore, it measures the degree of specialisation that interveners achieve. By far, BOMCA appears as the most generalist operator, whose projects span the full spectrum of activities, from left to right. Then comes the OSCE, whose competencies are well balanced between security and development. By contrast, IOM and UNODC keep close to their respective mandates. IOM remains specialised in the management of human movement. Nonetheless, some of the projects that it implements are located in the security-oriented dial of the graph. For instance, project #41 provides technical assistance to international border posts in Kyrgyzstan. In that regard UNODC seems to display an even higher degree of specialisation, given that very few of its activities pop up near the development pole of the graph. This second opposition is compounded by the distribution of time and money. Security-oriented projects tend to last longer and benefit from more funding, whereas developmental activities remain poorly funded and desperately short-term. The second dimension therefore relates to the first one. Both trace how resources that are encapsulated inside projects circulate across global donors, international organisations and host administrations. But the second axis sheds light on this process from a slightly different angle. It brings into focus what happens where aid is delivered. It shows that the interventions targeting borders benefit primarily agencies of security, such as anti-narcotic services, over services in charge of facilitating the cross-border circulation of people and goods, such as the State Committees of Labour. The institutions that symbolise the sovereignty of those post-Soviet states draw a considerable quantity of their material and symbolic resources from international interventions. To borrow a metaphor from Bourdieu, border interventions perform better at building the right hand of the state, in charge of coercion, than the left one, which provides welfare (Bourdieu 2011, p. 582).

CONCLUSION This chapter highlights some of the benefits that international political sociology might bring to the study of interventionist practices. Instead of reproducing yet another form of the external/internal divide under the familiar traits of the global expert versus the local broker, international political sociology approaches interventions transversally. In the present case, the borders of Central Asia have been constructed as the target of interventions that are driven by the transnationalisation of multiple bureaucratic fields. Long chains of delegations unfold across the organisational fabric of implementing agencies, global donors and national beneficiaries, thereby giving birth to a differentiated, transnational and bureaucratic space, equally inhabited by local and global staff. What is at stake here is the day-to-day implementation of projects aimed at transforming inter-state boundaries in Central Asia. In practice, field officers have more in common with one another and their national counterparts than with their fellow bureaucrats who sit in the headquarters based in Brussels, Vienna or Geneva. They nonetheless disagree with one another. Some of them want to use borders as connectors in order to speed up the economic development of Central Asia. Others want to turn them into separators in order to keep threats at bay. Crucially, not all of them have the same power to implement their agendas, in particular as regards their autonomy from HQs and member states. Those who draw their means from the external action of the European Commission occupy the highest positions in this social space.

International political sociology of interventions  173 A further resource of power stems from the degree of specialisation interveners. The most generalist actors, which are able to implement both development-oriented and security-driven activities, are, at the same time, the most powerful. Those who play across the board have better chances of success. Consequently, and to put it in one of my interviewee’s terms: BOMCA is indeed the “top dog” of border governance in Central Asia.

REFERENCES Adler-Nissen, R. (2011), ‘On a field trip with Bourdieu’, International Political Sociology, 5 (3), 327–30, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1111/​j​​.1749​​-5687​​.2011​​.00137​​_1​​.x. Andrijasevic, R. and W. Walters (2010), ‘The International Organization for Migration and the international government of borders’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 977–99, https://​ doi​​.org/​10​​.1068/​d1509. Avant, D. D., M. Finnemore and S. K. Sell (eds) (2010), Who Governs the Globe?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bachmann, J. (2012), ‘Kenya and international security: Enabling globalisation, stabilising “stateness”, and deploying enforcement’, Globalizations, 9 (1), 125–43, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​14747731​​.2012​​ .627722. Bigo, D. (2011), ‘Pierre Bourdieu and international relations: Power of practices, practices of power’, International Political Sociology, 5 (3), 225–58, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1111/​j​​.1749​​-5687​​.2011​​.00132​​.x. Bigo, D. (2016a), ‘International political sociology: Rethinking the international through dynamics of power’, in T. Basaran, D. Bigo, E.-P. Guittet and R. B. J. Walker (eds), International Political Sociology: Transversal Lines, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 24‒48. Bigo, D. (2016b), ‘Sociology of transnational guilds’, International Political Sociology, 10 (4), 398–416, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1093/​ips/​olw022. Bigo, D. and R. B. J. Walker (2007), ‘Political sociology and the problem of the international’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35 (3), 725–39, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1177/​03058298070350030401. Boltanski, L. and È. Chiapello (1999), Le nouvel esprit du capitalism, Paris: Gallimard. Bourdieu, P. (1989), La noblesse d’Etat: grandes écoles et esprit de corps, Paris: Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (1992), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P. (1994), Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l’action, Paris: Seuil. Bourdieu, P. (1997), ‘De la maison du roi à la raison d’État’, Actes de la Recherche En Sciences Sociales, 118, 55–68, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.3406/​arss​​.1997​​.3222. Bourdieu, P. (2000), Les structures sociales de l’économie, Paris: Points. Bourdieu, P. (2011), Sur l’État: cours au Collège de France, 1989–1992, Paris: Raisons d’agir & Seuil. Bourdieu, P. and M. de Saint Martin (1978), ‘Le patronat’, Actes de la Recherche En Sciences Sociales, 20–21, 3–82. Buchet de Neuilly, Y. (2005), L’Europe de la politique étrangère, Paris: Économica. Cooley, A. (2010), ‘Outsourcing authority: How project contracts transform global governance networks’, in D. D. Avant, M. Finnemore and S. K. Sell (eds), Who Governs the Globe?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 238–65. Czerniecka, K. and J. Heathershaw (2011), ‘Security assistance and border management’, in A. Warkotsch (ed.), The European Union and Central Asia, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 77–101. Dezalay, Y. and B. G. Garth (2011), ‘Hegemonic battles, professional rivalries, and the international division of labor in the market for the import and export of state-governing expertise’, International Political Sociology, 5 (3), 276–93, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1111/​j​​.1749​​-5687​​.2011​​.00134​​.x. Duffield, M. and N. Waddell (2006), ‘Securing humans in a dangerous world’, International Politics, 43 (1), 1–23, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1057/​palgrave.​​ ip​​.8800129. Fine, S. (2017), Borders and Mobility in Turkey: Governing Souls and States, London: Springer. Gavrilis, G. (2012), ‘Central Asia’s border woes and the impact of international assistance’, Occasional Paper Series No. 6, New York: Open Society Foundations. Georgakakis, D. and J. Rowell (eds) (2013), The Field of Eurocracy: Mapping EU Actors and Professionals, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrison, G. (2010), ‘Practices of intervention: Repertoires, habits, and conduct in neoliberal Africa’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4 (4), 433–52, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​17502971003700969.

174  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Hensell, S. (2015), ‘Coordinating intervention: International actors and local “partners” between ritual and decoupling’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (1), 89–111, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​ 17502977​​.2014​​.976359. Huysmans, J. and J. P. Nogueira (2012), ‘International political sociology: Opening spaces, stretching lines’, International Political Sociology, 6 (1), 1–3, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1111/​j​.1749​​-5687​​.2011​​.00147​​.x. Jackson, N. J. (2005), ‘The trafficking of narcotics, arms and humans in post-Soviet Central Asia: (Mis) perceptions, policies and realities’, Central Asian Survey, 24 (1), 39–52, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​ 02634930500050040. Jeandesboz, J. (2015), ‘Intervention and subversion: The EU border assistance mission to Moldova and Ukraine’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (4), 442–70, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​17502977​​ .2015​​.1087194. Kauppi, N. and M. R. Madsen (2014), ‘Fields of global governance: How transnational power elites can make global governance intelligible’, International Political Sociology, 8 (3), 324–30, https://​doi​​.org/​ 10​​.1111/​ips​​.12060. Keohane, R. O. and J. S. Nye (1974), ‘Transgovernmental relations and international organizations’, World Politics, 27 (1), 39–62, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.2307/​2009925. Kohl, C. (2015), ‘Diverging expectations and perceptions of peacebuilding? Local owners’ and external actors’ interactions in Guinea-Bissau’s security sector reforms’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (3), 334–52, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​17502977​​.2015​​.1070023. Krogstad, E. G. (2014), ‘Local ownership as dependence management: Inviting the coloniser back’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 8 (2‒3), 105–25, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​17502977​​.2014​​ .901030. Le Roux, B. and H. Rouanet (2010), Multiple Correspondence Analysis, Los Angeles: Sage. Madsen, M. R. and N. Kauppi (2013), ‘Transnational power elites: The new professionals of governance, law and security’, in N. Kauppi and M. R. Madsen (eds), Transnational Power Elites: The New Professionals of Governance, Law and Security, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–15. Megoran, N., G. Raballand and J. Bouyjou (2005), ‘Performance, representation and the economics of border control in Uzbekistan’, Geopolitics, 10 (4), 712–40, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​ 14650040500318498. Olsson, C. (2015), ‘Interventionism as practice: On “ordinary transgressions” and their routinization’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (4), 425–41, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​17502977​​.2015​​ .1089664. Pouliot, V. (2016), International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reeves, M. (2009), ‘Materialising state space: “Creeping migration” and territorial integrity in southern Kyrgyzstan’, Europe-Asia Studies, 61 (7), 1277–313, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​09668130903068814. Reid-Henry, S. (2011), ‘Spaces of security and development: An alternative mapping of the security– development nexus’, Security Dialogue, 42 (1), 97–104, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1177/​0967010610393552. Sandor, A. (2016), ‘Border security and drug trafficking in Senegal: AIRCOP and global security assemblages’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (4), 490–512, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1080/​17502977​​ .2016​​.1240425. Slaughter, A.-M. (2004), A New World Order, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stern, M. and J. Öjendal (2011), ‘Mapping security-development: A question of methodology?’, Security Dialogue, 42 (1), 105–10, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1177/​0967010610393776. Thorez, J. (2011), ‘Les nouvelles frontières de l’Asie centrale: États, nations et régions en recomposition’, Cybergeo European Journal of Geography, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.4000/​cybergeo​​.23707. Torpey, J. (2000), ‘States and the regulation of migration in the twentieth-century north Atlantic world’, in P. Andreas and T. Snyder (eds), The Wall around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 31–52. Wunderlich, D. (2013), ‘Implementing EU external migration policy: Security-driven by default?’, Comparative European Politics, 11 (4), 406–27, https://​doi​​.org/​10​​.1057/​cep​​.2012​​.22.

17. From international justice and statebuilding to international justice as statebuilding Sara Dezalay

INTRODUCTION ‘International law is so primitive, that for us (lawyers) it is law, but for others it is just one option among others.’1 This lapidary comment by Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) encapsulates the state of the debate on the relationship between international justice and statebuilding. Scholarship on global justice, and the literature on intervention and statebuilding ignored each other until recently. However, these two strands are still engaged in a war of translation. “Post-conflict” justice is now integrated as part of the normative framework and the practical toolkit of liberal interventionism. Yet, justice and peace are still largely seen as partly irreconcilable goals. This chapter seeks to move beyond the terms of this debate. It builds on the recent turn towards the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to study the international (see Bigo and Madsen 2011) and towards a focus on practices to trace organizational and structural change in international relations (see Bueger and Gadinger 2018). Based on the new paths opened by this research, it argues that interrogating the relationship between international justice and statebuilding provides an entry-point for a debunking exercise. Empirically, building a political sociology of international justice has proven relevant to trace the emergence and import of international norms and international justice institutions in global and domestic governance (see Dezalay 2016; Dezalay and Dezalay 2017). Theoretically, this approach can also help to move beyond the current impasse in the intervention and statebuilding literature, including apparently intractable oppositions in policy practices and forms of knowledge about intervention – be it the limits of the “local turn” or bottom-up versus top-down intervention approaches (see Chandler, Chapter 2 in this volume). This chapter starts by tracing some of the arguments that seek to reconcile justice and statebuilding in current debates which notably foster a dialogue beyond disciplinary cleavages across legal studies and political sciences. Yet, interdisciplinarity is not enough: part of the impasse relates to a mis-recognition of the relationship between law and politics and its effects in shaping power at the domestic and global levels. It therefore suggests two interrelated propositions to build a political sociology of international justice. A first step is the need to unveil how the relationship between international justice and statebuilding reflects the impact of ‘policy pulls’ (Sarat and Silbey 1988) and global politics on external practices of intervention. The second step is an invitation to build a political sociology focused on agents, specifically lawyers, their trajectories and their professional strategies as an entry-point to trace developments that are otherwise left invisible in external intervention practices, notably the structuration, over time, of state power and the tra

1

Author’s interview (with R. Levi) with Luis Moreno Ocampo, Toronto, 8 November 2012.

175

176  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding jectory of globalization. To unpack this two-pronged proposal, this chapter builds on empirical research developed by the author on different sites of global justice and legal globalization, including on the genesis of international justice institutions from the turn of the twentieth century (Dezalay and Dezalay 2017), on the ICC and the structure of the field of global justice (Levi et al. 2016; Dezalay 2016), and on the relationship between the ICC and Africa (Dezalay 2017, 2018).

SHOULD JUSTICE AND STATEBUILDING BE (IN)COMPATIBLE? REVISITING THE TERMS OF THE DEBATE The global justice scholarship and the state/peacebuilding literature have developed very much as separate strands of scholarship and practice since the 1990s. It is therefore all the more surprising that these two bodies of scholarship tend to adopt common frames about the relationship between international justice and statebuilding. Indeed: both strands focus on state-centric responses to post-conflict contexts and are underwritten by a normative drive towards “peace” and “justice”. The growth of global justice institutions since the 1990s has generally been underwritten by a narrative – in legal studies and political science alike – about the “return of the spirit of Nuremberg” that is: the recovery of a normative “legalization” of global governance that was seen as emerging following the Second World War (see Bass 2000). However, mainstream approaches in law and politics continue to adopt a narrow focus that explains the legalization of global politics as a result of rational choice (see Abbott et al. 2000). But this only explains partially developments beyond the mere creation of institutions of global justice. For example, in recent years global justice studies have turned most of their focus on the ICC due to its prominence as the first permanent world court dealing with international crimes.2 Yet, sixteen years after the ICC became operational, this Court remains constrained by a ‘logic of the constant coup’ (Dezalay 2016, pp. 281–301). It still needs to adapt to and deflect continuous political, economic and other external shocks, from waning state support to outright shunning. Commentators increasingly wonder whether the 1990s represented a high-water mark for the broad institutionalization of global justice that is unlikely to be sustained, pointing for instance to resistance from the African Union (AU) to perceived bias in prosecutions, and to the failure to deal with the protracted conflict in Syria. Indeed, the limited and contested record of the ICC continues to underscore that international criminal justice is still struggling with its ultimate goals, a tension capped most vocally in the “peace versus justice” trade-off (see Vinjamuri 2010). The very mandate of the ICC, which enables it to perform “real time” justice, that is, not only ex post, but also ex ante, with prosecutions in the context of ongoing conflicts, has renewed the debate towards studying justice in conflict (see Kersten 2016). Indeed: the field of global justice has had its own “local turn”. Recent studies have called for the necessity to ‘do justice to the political’, so as to trace how the judicial interventions of the ICC play into domestic politics in recipient states – notably by contributing to re-apportioning ethnic and political lines along a dichotomy between “friends” and “foes” of the Court (Nouwen and Werner 2 Genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and since 2010 crime of aggression. See Table 17.1.

From international justice and statebuilding to international justice as statebuilding  177 2011). But this has also exacerbated the perceived cleavage between justice and politics as two contradictory goals of global justice. The weakness of the ICC is thus often seen as a mere sign of incompletion of a field that is still at a nascent stage. Most often than not this perception is coupled with a functionalist perspective on interna­tional criminal tribunals, and specifically the ICC, in that they are perceived as legal institutions that should be shielded from politics. Characteristically, the at once distant and proximate relationship between the Security Council of the UN and the ICC is viewed as a lightning rod for contestation against the Court. For its part, it is only recently that the literature on state/peacebuilding has turned to the issue of justice. The 1980s transitions from dictatorships in the Latin American cone had revolved around the normative premise that justice would follow peace, making accountability a goal that could only be pursued once there had been a political transition (see Arthurs 2009). The ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia reversed this assumption. Thus, ‘transitional justice emerged out of the peripheries of international politics and became mainstream’ building up an ‘underlying logic of external intervention’ according to which peace would follow justice ‘even though it is not always clear how the two practices ought to shape each other’ (Baker and Obradovic-Wochnik 2016, p. 282; see also Baker and Obradovic-Wochnik, Chapter 18 in this volume). Despite this turn, indeed, the relationship between peace and justice has remained for the most part a black box. Recent research has endeavoured to “map the nexus” between transitional justice and peacebuilding so as to foster a dialogue between fields of studies and practice that had hitherto mutually ignored each other (Baker and Obradovic-Wochnik 2016, p. 282; see also Baker and Obradovic-Wochnik, Chapter 18 in this volume). However, while this has underscored that the articulation between peace and justice is far from linear and non-contentious, there have been limits to this call for a dialogue across disciplines. Indeed, a forceful criticism of liberal peacebuilding has developed in recent years, but there has not been such an aggiornamento in the transitional justice literature (see Lekha Sriram 2007; Nagy 2008). For the most part, the transitional justice field continues to build on the ‘prevailing assumption that transitional justice is fundamentally shaped by the liberal principles that underpin peacebuilding’ even when empirical studies have amply documented ‘how external blueprints for peace and justice are seldom realized, how the interventionary practices of external actors privilege accountability for physical violence or bodily integrity abuses over redress of structural inequalities, and how the short-term management of violence trumps structural change’ (McAuliffe 2017, p. 245). Part of the difficulty certainly relates to a problem of translation across epistemological divides. The problem goes beyond. While pushing the boundaries of each discipline, these calls for a trans-disciplinary dialogue have not led to revisiting the terms of each strand’s epistemological foundation. This segmentation of disciplinary discourses is in part a result of the relative infancy of the fields of practice they have contributed to shaping. Some of the prominent legal scholars in international criminal justice have also been the architects of global justice institutions, while scholars engaged in alternative visions of global justice are also invested in competing institutionalization dynamics, such as transitional justice processes. The lack of dialogue between disciplines is therefore also the result of a competition between scholarly discourses that are part and parcel of boundaries of practice. Indeed, the corollary of the opposition between law and politics is the entrenched segmentation of scholarly accounts in law and political science. Arguably, be it the “peace versus justice” debate, as much as the irreconcilable opposition between the risk of a politicization of global justice on the one hand and the horizon, on the other hand – whether decried or

178  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding advocated – of a legalization of global politics: each and all echo a wider opposition between “pure” law and “pure” politics that reflects disciplinary, as much as practical, divides. For example, criticisms of the monopolistic claims made by the ICC as a first response to war, and with them of the “tribunalization” (see Kamari Clarke 2009) of political conflict, deemed to come at the cost of competing alternative forms of justice, if not peace, also reflect turf battles between different groups of experts. Beyond a war of translation, this also reflects a wider difficulty. Both strands of scholarship tend to restrict their focus to the narrow set of actors and issues and the understanding of violence seen to be determined by the relationship of “intervention” between external actors and recipient states and societies. The result is a perceived clash between law and politics as if these were antithetic goals and means of external intervention. It also leads to a protracted difficulty in accounting for the fraught relationship between the “international” and the “national” in the interaction between agents and institutions seen as “external” and recipient states and societies. Both the global justice literature and the state/peacebuilding scholarship thus tend to constantly introduce new paradigms to go beyond the failure of external intervention endeavours. Yet even when they are hailed as “alternatives” – be it the “local turn” of liberal interventionism or the “hybridity” between international and national dynamics of intervention – these continue to build on the same normative blocks, and therefore multiply the points of impasse.

BEYOND THE NEXUS BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE AND STATEBUILDING: THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL POLITICS AND POLICY PULLS ON INTERVENTION PRACTICES To go beyond this impasse a first step would be a call for an epistemological inventory to uncover the articulation between knowledge and practices of external interventions. The example of the ICC illustrates this proposition. Interrogating, precisely, the perceived clash between law and politics as two antithetic goals in the global justice field, recent scholarship has highlighted how the ICC, just like other international criminal tribunals, needs to stave off constraints that are born out of the specific features of the ‘atypical political environments’ in which they are embedded, that is: ‘highly contentious environments in which surrounding political conditions lead to a departure from routinized criminal justice, so that courts must develop organizational models to cope with, mobilize, and at times deflect, the political landscape in which they operate’ (Levi et al. 2016, p. 289). This wider geopolitical context matters to trace the paths of institutionalization of global justice. Taking it into account is also critical to understand the structuration of the field of global justice, and its relationship with competing practices and forms of knowledge about external intervention. Indeed, adopting a socio-historical perspective on the growth of the global justice field since the 1990s helps understand the specific juncture that led to the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998, and the geopolitical context in which the Court is now operating. A number of studies have underlined how the revival of the “Nuremberg legacy” from the 1980s was prompted by the aligned interests of great power politics in the immediate post-Cold War context, combined with the international human rights movement that had gained prominence since the 1980s (e.g. Dezalay 2016).

From international justice and statebuilding to international justice as statebuilding  179 The dis-alignment of these coalitions following the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 (see Dezalay and Garth 2006) and foremost the 9/11 attacks and the US-led coalition in Iraq explain, in turn, the less than favourable early years of development of the ICC (see Bosco 2014). This changing geopolitical context helps account for the structure of the field of global justice itself as a “weak field” as a space that is at once permeable to external shocks and dependent on adjacent fields for its survival, in particular competing fields of practices of external intervention, such as transitional justice, peacebuilding or conflict resolution (see Dezalay 2016). While the early interest of the ICC in African situations could be construed in part as a default strategy due to the early shunning of the Court by the US and one that was aligned in the early 2000s with African states’ interests, it was thus also embedded in wider transformations in scholarship and policy on external interventions in conflict and post-conflict settings from the early 1990s. The focus of these policy-pulls on the “failures” of the state and political elites in the Global South, and on underdevelopment as a “cause” of conflict have prompted a wider restructuring of the political economy of intervention, specifically in Africa – with militaries now intervening alongside a multiplicity of public and private actors, from development institutions to non-governmental organizations. These changes have also enabled and justified the growth of criminalization as a legitimate form of external intervention into the African continent. Transforming weakness into a strategy, the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC has heavily relied on these competing epistemic and professional networks of intervention to gather the evidence necessary to channel cases into the Court – even in the absence of on-site investigations by the Prosecutor (see Dezalay 2016).

TOWARDS A POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE AS STATEBUILDING: LAWYERS AS STATEBUILDERS AND INTERMEDIARIES OF GLOBALIZATION A second step would be to feed back the articulation between law and politics itself into the debate on the relationship between international justice and statebuilding. The stake indeed is to uncover law’s role as a core driver in the constitution and legitimation of national state power – as traced by Bourdieu in his posthumous Sur l’État (2012) – but also in the structure of the “international” as an arena of projection of knowledge, institutionalization and policy practices of intervention. This proposition follows the path opened by a political sociology that underscores the specific role played by lawyers as power brokers in the formation of the state and in globalization. This approach emphasizes the position of lawyers as “intermediary elites” or “double agents” due to their capacity to juggle contradictory social, political, and economic interests (see Dezalay and Garth 2002). Thus, far from anecdotal evidence, details of lawyers’ trajectories help uncover their continuous strategies of double games. Ernst Kantorowicz (2016) and others in his wake have shown that while at the service of power holders – and thus playing a central role of legitimation of state power – lawyers also need to distance themselves from politics, as a condition to protect the autonomy of the law, and with it their professional practices. Moreover, the trajectory and professional strategies of lawyers are also an entry-point to trace the nexus between agency and structural change in contemporary patterns of legalization of global politics. This means going a step further than the International Relations scholarship

180  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding that takes into account the role of agents in legalization processes. Indeed, in this literature, there is a tendency to oppose legal professions to the state, and to ignore structural patterns. For example, Sikkink’s notion of “agentic constructivism” (2011) tends to isolate the individual strategies of norm entrepreneurs from their background and position in relation to national fields of state power by construing their role in terms of “exceptional” agency, as heroic figures, rather than connecting it with wider structural transformations in the articulation between law and politics in the construction of state power. Yet, the focus on the individual trajectories and strategies of lawyers across national divides can contribute to explaining structural transformations of state power and patterns of globalization (see Dezalay and Garth 2002). In particular, looking at the social and professional characteristics of the lawyers involved in international justice mechanisms provides keys to understand the position of international justice in global politics. Recent studies on the genesis of international justice institutions at the turn of the twentieth century – be it the Permanent Court of International Justice, the ancestor of the International Court of Justice, the Court of the UN focused on inter-state disputes, or international commercial arbitration, which deals with disputes between corporations and states – have demonstrated the fruitful avenues that such a focus could open. Characteristically, they have underscored that the multi-positioning of the lawyers invested in these early endeavours – across scholarly positions, legal practice, service to state diplomacy and at times political positions at the national level – was a key condition for the inception of international justice precisely because these lawyers could at once reflect national political and economic interests and deflect them by constructing the doctrine of international law as universal (Sacriste and Vauchez 2007). These studies have also uncovered the key role played by legal elites from the Global South in these early institutionalization processes: dubbed “gentlemen politicians of law” these agents played a crucial role of legitimation of international institutions, both because they were co-opted into a belief of the universal crafted in core scholarly centres in Europe and the US, but also because they could convert new generations of lawyers to the efficiency of international justice – that is, in other words, build national markets of users of international justice (Dezalay and Dezalay 2017). Moreover, this entry-point opens up paths to move beyond the protracted clash between the “international” and the “national” in judicial intervention practices, and beyond, in external interventionism. Here again, the example of the ICC illustrates this point. Most of the debate about the protracted fragility of the ICC now hinges on the perceived bias of the Court against African states. The balance sheet of the Court certainly lends credence to this perception. The Court’s decision to acquit former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo and his Youth minister Charles Blé Goudé in January 2019 came at the tail-end of a series of failed cases. This failure rate stands unprecedented in the global justice landscape. In seventeen years, the Court has pronounced only three convictions. The indictment of two sitting heads of state – the Sudanese Omar Al-Bashir in 2009, and the Kenyan Uhuru Kenyatta in 2011 – has exacerbated what commentators widely staged as a “divorce” between Africa and the Court (see Allison 2016). Much of the scholarly response to this clash has focused on the relationship between the ICC’s judicial interventions and domestic politics in the states concerned by ICC prosecutions. Commentators have been quick to assert that the demurely termed “fraught” relationship between the AU and the ICC was nurtured by misperceptions and misunderstandings: not so much a “withdrawal” strategy thus, as a call for “reforming” the ICC, starting with the

From international justice and statebuilding to international justice as statebuilding  181 role played by permanent members of the Security Council (see Kersten 2017). Others have pinpointed that there is no working alternative for an “African” version of global justice as the 2014 Malabo Protocol instituting a criminal chamber within the African Court of Justice and Human Rights is still unlikely to enter into force.3 However, while downplaying the rift between Africa and global justice, these responses tend to reproduce the lines of an ideological war of position between a neo-colonial form of global justice, and the wheels (albeit rusty) of universalism. Yet, there is still a need to investigate how international justice institutions reflect the uneven and unequal connection between Africa and the world. A vocal part of the criticism against the ICC certainly hinges on the representativeness of international institutions – the Security Council itself, but also the Court and other international tribunals. But the stake goes much further: it is to foster a research agenda amenable to document over time the structure of the “weak field” of global justice and its articulations, not with “Africa”, but with differentiated national and regional dynamics across the continent (see Dezalay 2018). In other words, this would help move the debate away from the nexus between the “international” and the “national” in external interventions, towards an understanding of intervention as a moment of encounter between agents, institutions and sites that have been mutually shaped by successive phases of globalization. A condition to this end is to document the internationalization of African legal elites. This is a way to understand not only the resources necessary for them to gain access to international positions, but also how the “international” impacts on domestic politics and the structure of national legal markets across the African continent. However, there is an exceptional dearth of knowledge – contrary to other regions of the world – on the roles played by lawyers in African contexts, both as builders of the state and as intermediaries of globalization. That this should be a needed – and powerful – avenue for research has been emphasized by myself, along with others (Dezalay 2015; Dawuni and Kuenyehia 2018). Indeed: looking to the past – including to the very differentiated colonial legal strategies across the African continent – can help make sense of current patterns of legal globalization in Africa, and with them, more broadly, practices of external intervention and their effect in the African South. But this overwhelming silence on African lawyers, their roles – and with it, their agency – in shaping domestic politics as much as the “international” – also begs the question of the pervasive lenses used – and that we, as scholars contribute to reinforcing – in the study of law, politics and external intervention in the Global South. Senegal Justice Minister, Sidiki Kaba’s comment that ‘when we think of African justice, we think of justice on the cheap’ (Châtelot 2015) encapsulates the overwhelming tendency, in scholarship and policy circles alike, to think of domestic institutions across the African continent as both a solution to the failure of political elites – and a problem shaped by the legacy of colonialism, with intervention and its constant reinvention therefore built as a palliative. In other words: it is time to de-colonize knowledge about the relationship between politics, law and intervention in the Global South.

3 Fifteen member states need to ratify the protocol, but to date (as of June 2019) only fifteen states have signed it and not one has ratified it.

182  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Table 17.1

Chronological typologya of international justice institutions since the twentieth century Inter-state justice

International commercial

International criminal justice

arbitration Type of justice

Public international justice;

Private international justice;

Known as “post-conflict” justice;

Disputes between states (e.g.

International disputes between

Deals with large-scale crimes;

frontier disputes);

corporations; Disputes between

Focused on individual criminal

Focused on state responsibility

states and corporations

responsibility

Focused on contractual responsibility Which crimes?

Violations of public international Violations of contractual

Violations of international

law (e.g. international treaties

obligations and bilateral/

criminal law (genocide, war

and conventions and customs)

international investment treaties

crimes, crimes against humanity,

International judges nominated

Arbitrators nominated by parties to International judges nominated

by state parties to the United

each individual contract

crime of aggression) Who are the judges?

by the Assembly of State parties

Nations Charter for a mandate of Not permanent: arbitrators change establishing each international

Main institutions

criminal tribunal for a mandate of

3‒9 years

for each dispute

Permanent Court of

3‒9 years Permanent Court of Arbitration International Criminal

International Justice (created

(created in 1899, not a court in an

in 1922, court of the League of

institutional sense,but a framework Yugoslavia (created in 1993, ad

Nations);

for arbitration);

hoc tribunal focused on the war in

International Court of Justice

International Court of

the former Yugoslavia, dissolved

(created in 1946, court of the

Arbitration of the International

in 2017);

United Nations)

Chamber of Commerce

International Tribunal for

(created in 1923, not a court

Rwanda (created in 1994, ad hoc

in an institutional sense, but

tribunal focused on the genocide

a framework for arbitration)

in Rwanda, dissolved in 2015);

Tribunal for the former

International Criminal Court (created in 1998, operational since 2002, focused on international criminal crimes since 2002) a Note: This table is indicative and not intended to be exhaustive. In particular, it does not include regional courts and does not list all international criminal tribunals.

REFERENCES Abbott, K. W., R. O. Keohane, A. Moravcsik, A.-M. Slaughter and D. Snidal (2000), ‘The concept of legalization’, International Organization, 54 (3), 401‒19. Allison, S. (2016), ‘African revolt threatens International Criminal Court’s legitimacy’, The Guardian, 27 October. Arthurs, P. (2009), ‘How “transitions” reshaped human rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, 31 (2), 321‒67. Baker, C. and J. Obradovic-Wochnik (2016), ‘Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 281‒301. Bass, G. (2000), Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bigo, D. and M. R. Madsen (2011), ‘Introduction to symposium “A different reading of the international: Pierre Bourdieu and international studies”’, International Political Sociology, 5 (3), 219‒24. Bosco, D. (2014), Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2012), Sur l’État: Cours au Collège de France (1989‒1992), Paris: Le Seuil.

From international justice and statebuilding to international justice as statebuilding  183 Bueger, C. and F. Gadinger (2018), International Practice Theory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edn. Châtelot, C. (2015), ‘Quand on pense justice africaine, on pense justice au rabais’, Le Monde, 6 November. Dawuni, J. and A. Kuenyehia (2018), African Women Judges on International Courts: Untold Stories, Abingdon: Routledge. Dezalay, S. (2015), ‘Les juristes en Afrique: entre trajectoires d’État, sillons d’Empire et mondialisation’, Politique africaine, 138, 5‒23. Dezalay, S. (2016), ‘Weakness as routine in the operations of the International Criminal Court’, International Criminal Law Review, 17, 281‒301. Dezalay, S. (2017), ‘L’Afrique contre la Cour pénale internationale? Éléments de sociognèse sur les possibles de la justice internationale’, Politique africaine, 146 (2), 165‒82. Dezalay, S. (2018), ‘Fatoumata Dembélé Diarra: Trajectory of a Malian magistrate and civil society advocate to the International Criminal Court’, in A. Kuenyehia and J. Dawuni (eds), African Women Judges on African Courts: Untold Stories, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 77‒97. Dezalay, S. with Y. Dezalay (2017), ‘Professionals of international justice: From the shadow of state diplomacy to the pull of the market of arbitration’, in J. d’Aspremont, T. Gazzini, A. Nollkaemper and W. Werner (eds), International Law as a Profession, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 311‒37. Dezalay, Y. and B. G. Garth (2002), The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists and the Contest to Transform Latin American States, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dezalay, Y. and B. G. Garth (2006), ‘From the Cold War to Kosovo: The rise and renewal of the field of international human rights’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2, 231‒55. Kamari Clarke, M. (2009), Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kantorowicz, E. H. (2016), The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kersten, M. (2016), Justice in Conflict. The Effects of the International Criminal Court’s Interventions on Ending Wars and Building Peace, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kersten, M. (2017), ‘How three words could change the ICC–Africa relationship’, Justice in Conflict, 9 May, https://​justiceinconflict.​​ org/​2017/​05/​09/​how​​-three​​-words​​-could​​-change-​​ the​​-icc​​-africa​​ -relationship/#​​ more​​-7344 (accessed 11 August 2018). Lekha Sriram, C. (2007), ‘Justice as peace? Liberal peacebuilding and strategies of transitional justice’, Global Society, 21 (4), 579‒91. Levi, R., J. Hagan and S. Dezalay (2016), ‘International courts in atypical political environments: The interplay of prosecutorial strategy, evidence, and court authority in international criminal law’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 78 (4), 289‒314. McAuliffe, P. (2017), ‘Reflections on the nexus between justice and peacebuilding’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (2), 245‒60. Nagy, R. (2008), ‘Transitional justice as global project: Critical reflections’, Third World Quarterly, 29 (2), 275‒89. Nouwen, S. M. H. and W. G. Werner (2011), ‘Doing justice to the political: The International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan’, European Journal of International Law, 21 (4), 941‒65. Sacriste, G. and A. Vauchez (2007), ‘The force of international law: Lawyers’ diplomacy on the international scene in the 1920s’, Law & Social Inquiry, 32 (1), 83‒107. Sarat, A. and S. Silbey (1988), ‘The pull of the policy audience’, Law and Policy, 10 (2‒3), 97‒166. Sikkink, K. (2011), The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, New York: Norton Series in World Politics. Vinjamuri, L. (2010), ‘Deterrence, democracy and the pursuit of international justice during conflict’, Ethics and International Affairs, 24 (2), 191‒211.

18. Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding Catherine Baker and Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik

INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the relationship between transitional justice and peacebuilding, and locates and illustrates the nexus between these practices and literatures. Both transitional justice and peacebuilding are discourses and practices of intervention aimed at (post)violent societies: transitional justice is intended as a set of mechanisms aimed at confronting and dealing with human rights abuses and atrocities, whilst peacebuilding is more wide-ranging but often aimed at strengthening institutions as a means of preventing further violence. Both inform and are bound up with each other, particularly through intervention practices of external donors. Some of the practical and conceptual challenges of the peacebuilding–transitional justice convergence are illustrated by an early example of a landmark transitional justice mechanism – the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). When the ICTY was set up in 1993, it worked to a mandate of ‘bring[ing] to justice those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law’ and ‘thus contribut[ing] to the restoration and maintenance of peace in the region’ (ICTY n.d.). The ICTY was thus envisaged both as a tool of transitional justice and peacebuilding. The court’s mandate raised key debates which form a significant proportion of transitional justice literature: what is the relationship between post-conflict justice and peace? Further, what is the relationship between transitional justice and peacebuilding? The idea that one will lead to the other is often the underlying logic of external intervention, even though it is not always clear how the two practices ought to shape each other. As Sharp (2013b) notes, transitional justice emerged out of the peripheries of international politics and became mainstream. The hope amongst international actors intervening in post-conflict spaces, was that transitional justice would help remove perpetrators from the political life and that the recognition of victims would lead to less grievance in the future, thus preventing another cycle of conflict. However, as this chapter discusses, the relationship between transitional justice and peacebuilding is not only contentious and non-linear, but often also neglected by scholars of both fields – even though Rama Mani called attention to ‘the nexus between rebuilding peace and restoring justice’ as early as 2002 (Mani 2002, p. 4). Furthermore, as Sharp (2013a, p. 195) notes, ‘remarkably’ similar critiques have been raised against both transitional justice and peacebuilding, even though these fields have ‘historically proceeded on separate tracks’.

184

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding  185

WHERE IS PEACE IN TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE? ‘Peacebuilding’ and ‘transitional justice’ exist because institutions and scholars have constructed them as objects that can be known about. Both are analytical categories imposed on the complexity of post-conflict societies and interventions, socially constructed through labelling and citation (see Berger and Luckmann 1966; Hart 1998). The work that citation does in not just reflecting but producing understandings of what knowledge is seen as authoritative within a discipline is illustrated both by reviews of individual fields – such as Christine Bell’s argument that the ‘narration of the field of transitional justice as interdisciplinary’ represents a specific move in the struggle over what the goals of transitional justice should be (Bell 2009, p. 24). Comparing and combining the insights of peacebuilding and transitional justice research thus begins with understanding what questions have been emphasised and why in either field. Chandra Lekha Sriram, for instance, begins her foundational article on transitional justice and critiques of liberal peacebuilding by observing that critical peacebuilding research had problematised the notions of ‘marketisation and democratisation’ on which liberal peacebuilding depends but had not extended into ‘the unexamined assumptions and potential unintended consequences that transitional justice shares with peacebuilding’, which then became the focus of her argument (Sriram 2007, p. 582). Dustin Sharp, building on Sriram by synthesising peacebuilding and transitional justice critiques, similarly urged scholars to ‘call into question the reasons for the historic privileging of certain items over others’ and ‘examine what this emphasis might say about transitional justice as a political project’ (Sharp 2013b, p. 157). Thus, while a few scholars such as Sriram, Sharp, or Wendy Lambourne (2009) build their interpretive framework by drawing together both fields, the concepts are otherwise joined less often than their simultaneous mobilisation in post-conflict interventions suggests that they might be. There is, as Gearoid Millar and Jesse Lecy (2016) suggest, a shortage of publications that actively seek to build bridges between the two fields, which scholars through their citational practices have produced as separate literatures, or that (going beyond drawing on one field to refresh another) aim to exchange theories, findings and practices holistically between the fields. Within transitional justice literature, however, the concepts of peacebuilding and transitional justice have been brought together for some time in weighing up the ‘peace versus justice debate’. This question of how far investigating, prosecuting and punishing war crimes might frustrate efforts to obtain a peace settlement or make a return to violence more likely originated in 1994–95 as the United Nations began setting up the ICTY while the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) was still ongoing (D’Amato 1994; Akhavan 1996, 1998; Anonymous 1996; Gaer 1997). Articles testing this proposition once the Dayton Peace Agreement for BiH had started to be implemented argued for the UN to prioritise ‘peace over justice’ (Bratt 1997), framed it as a question of ‘peace versus justice?’ (Schuett 1997), or argued that the European Union had followed a route to ‘peace through justice’ (Kerr 2007) in expecting post-Yugoslav accession candidates to cooperate with the ICTY. Notions of peace and justice continue to provide framing juxtapositions in transitional justice research: there was scope (perhaps) for ‘achieving peace with justice’ in Uganda (Keller 2008); ‘balancing peace and justice’ was the dilemma in demobilising Colombia’s paramilitaries (Arvelo 2006); ‘peace versus justice?’ was the problem that Sriram and Suren Pillay posed readers of their edited volume on transitional justice in Africa (Sriram and Pillay 2011).

186  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding The peace versus justice debate, however, placed transitional justice and peacebuilding less into a nexus and more as competing meteorological fronts which, through their conflicting objectives and likely outcomes, threatened to tear the overall goal of post-conflict transformation apart. For authors such as Payam Akhavan, writing on ‘the so-called “peace versus justice” debate’ (Akhavan 2009, p. 625), or David Tolbert (2009), the peace versus justice problem primarily concerned political and military leaders who might be disincentivised from making peace if they were indicted for war crimes or who might demand impunity from prosecution before they would agree to make peace. What had been an ad hoc problem when the ICTY was set up during an ongoing military conflict in the mid-1990s became a permanent feature of the international judicial and diplomatic system after 2002 when the statute establishing the International Criminal Court came into force. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC’s) investigations in Uganda and Darfur offered examples where the pursuit of cases against leaders who would still need to be involved in an effective peace settlement, such as the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, supposedly made indicted leaders less likely to seek peace (see Oette 2010). The potential clashes between creating accountability for crimes and violence through transitional justice processes and laying solid foundations for peace did not, moreover, occur solely on the level of leadership, but resonated throughout civil society and the public sphere as societal obstacles to post-conflict transformation – indeed could even be matters for ‘global civil society’ (Glasius 2009, p. 497, our emphasis), on which the international legitimacy of transitional justice institutions would depend. Research on the public reception of the ICTY in post-Yugoslav states – a social context which must be acknowledged to extend into post-Yugoslav diasporas around the world (Halilovich 2013) – depicts discursive fields in which the politicisation of international criminal justice appears to exacerbate, rather than reconcile, clashes of collective narratives about guilt and victimhood during the Yugoslav wars. From a starting point that views reconciliation as ‘the restoration and repair of relationships and as the acknowledgement of war crimes and responsibility’, for instance, Janine Natalya Clark (2009, p. 360) concluded that the ICTY’s findings were much more likely to be instrumentalised in support of narratives that hardened inter-ethnic boundaries – especially in support of denials of responsibility for mass violence and genocide – to contribute to members of the public transforming their understanding of what had taken place, and they would therefore work against rather than encourage the reconciliation that would need to occur in order for there to be anything other than a ‘negative peace’. Public reactions to the ICTY illustrated how deeply, and quickly, it became embedded into the politics of competing ethnicised collective narratives about guilt and victimhood during (and before) the Yugoslav wars (see e.g. Bieber 2014; Nielsen 2014). The approaches to conceptualising justice that emerge from studies of the post-Yugoslav cases start to demonstrate both the diversity of how justice may be understood (as Lai 2016, Hronesova 2016; O’Reilly 2016) and the shift from ‘peace versus justice’ to a concept that ‘there can be no peace without justice’ that Clark (2011, p. 539) suggests came to characterise peacebuilding interventions through and after the establishment of conflict resolution mechanisms for Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding  187

WHERE IS TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN PEACEBUILDING? Recognising justice as an inherently contested concept in itself offers a pathway for connecting transitional justice to peacebuilding: the struggles over meanings, hierarchies and resources that could be revealed by identifying competing visions of justice in the post-Yugoslav cases or any other are among the very struggles with which peacebuilding practitioners and researchers also contend in understanding how peace might be reached after conflict and why peacebuilding initiatives so often fail. In making their case for ‘the value of participation and local agency’ in transitional justice processes – bringing to bear interpretive frameworks from development studies – Patricia Lundy and Mark McGovern (2008, pp. 265–6) asked ‘Whose justice?’. Lundy and McGovern’s answer was that it should be justice as viewed by local communities, not however justice might have been perceived by a post-conflict government, foreign donors or the UN. They suggested that unofficial ‘bottom-up “truth-telling” process[es]’ like their own object of study, the Ardoyne Commemoration Project in Northern Ireland, were the most effective, since, here, local people’s participation in all stages of the project brought them into direct contact with other community members in a space where they had to resolve troublesome issues of how to remember the conflict (Lundy and McGovern 2008, pp. 290–1). Rosemary Nagy (2008, pp. 279–80), similarly questions ‘the categories of when, to whom and for what transitional justice applies’, arguing that tribunals and truth commissions conceive of responsibility in ways that leave pre/post-conflict ‘continuities of violence and exclusion’, structural forms of violence, and external actors out of the accounts they produce. The marginalisation of gendered injustice that feminist scholars of transitional justice have perceived in most judicial and non-judicial justice mechanisms is a fundamental illustration of ‘who’ and ‘what’ is often missing (Bell and O’Rourke 2007; Ní Aoláin 2009, 2012). Even when justice mechanisms have taken sufficient account of gender politics to recognise that, for instance, sexual violence should be tried as a war crime (an international legislative innovation in the ICTY statute), they could not be said to have met survivors’ wider need for justice if, as Katherine Franke suggests, witnesses require ‘the public telling of their stories and a sense that they are being heard’ before they can feel that they have justice but ‘this kind of truth-telling is not within the jurisdiction of formal legal fora’ (Franke 2006, p. 818). Acknowledgement of multiple forms of justice has become the hinge for several transitional justice scholars to engage directly with the precepts of peacebuilding. Clark, for instance, seeks to resolve the peace and justice debate by emphasising that ‘justice entails far more than retribution’ (Clark 2011, p. 521) and that restorative justice, the aim of civil-society-led participatory public education projects she praises in Rwanda and Serbia, has greater potential in post-conflict reconciliation (Clark 2008) – yet if restoration entails ‘a return to a set of relationships that… may have been fundamentally unjust’, as Bell and O’Rourke (2007, p. 41) argue would frequently be the case for women, even restorative justice would not be sufficient. One peacebuilding/justice nexus that does not depend on ‘dualistic’ oppositions of ‘peace versus human rights’ or ‘retributive versus restorative justice’ (Lambourne 2009, p. 48) emerges in the work of Wendy Lambourne, who uses ‘the multiple meanings of justice and reconciliation’ (2004, p. 9) as her analytical lens for critiquing peacebuilding initiatives that in her view had not been designed around recognition and redress of survivors’ psychosocial needs – which would themselves vary according to context. Lambourne instead proposed a model of ‘transformative justice’ comprising ‘accountability, or legal justice; “truth”, or

188  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding knowledge and acknowledgement; socioeconomic justice; and political justice’ (Lambourne 2009, p. 37). Ensuring justice ‘in the present and future’ through meeting this goals would produce ‘sustainable peacebuilding’ for the long term (Lambourne 2009, p. 45). Equivalent arguments that take a multidimensional approach to justice, identify injustices that flow from each dimension, and use these as the basis for proposing transformative models of peacebuilding can be found inside and outside the field-specific literature. Rama Mani, who called attention to ‘the nexus between rebuilding peace and restoring justice’ as early as 2002 (Mani 2002, p. 4), argues that ‘legal’, ‘rectificatory’ (that is, setting right the ‘direct human consequences of conflict’) and ‘distributive’ forms of justice all need to be achieved in order to prevent conflict, and that when peacebuilding fails it is often because the more structural injustices have not been addressed (Mani 2002, pp. 5–6). Her own vision for post-conflict peacebuilding would be based on a ‘reparative justice’ as the precondition for creating an ‘“inclusive” political and civic community’, no longer categorised by collective ‘divisions of winners versus losers, victims versus perpetrators, “us” and “them”’ (Mani 2005, p. 512). Kora Andrieu (2010, pp. 543–4) uses Mani’s re-envisioning of transitional justice as reparative justice as the basis for critiquing the teleological logic of peacebuilding and democratisation. Nancy Fraser’s formulation of ‘redistribution, recognition and representation’ (Fraser 2008, p. 6) as three dimensions of justice, with corresponding injustices that can be identified and named as a result, is the basis for a contribution to a much wider field of social and cultural theory but creates a similar analytic to Lambourne’s or Mani’s that scholars of transitional justice and peacebuilding have been able to apply (see Lai 2016; Hronesova 2016; O’Reilly 2016). The nexus between peacebuilding and transitional justice emerges, however, not only from the ‘justice’ but also the ‘transition’. Transition is a contested concept itself, both in certain post-conflict societies and in the field as a whole. The term has had specific connotations in various settings, such as the discourses of ‘transition to democracy’ in post-authoritarian Chile and Argentina (Arthur 2009, p. 336), or the post-socialist as well as post-conflict meanings of the term ‘transition’ in post-Yugoslav societies, where the framework of ‘transition’ from state socialism to democracy and the free market became a discourse explaining the narrowing-down of life chances that economic liberalisation on the back of wartime destruction had brought about (Jansen 2006; Majstorović 2007). Beyond the resonances of ‘transition’ in an individual context, moreover, discourses of transition in any setting imply assumptions about ‘what the transition is “from” and “to”’ which often go unvoiced but need to be critically examined (Bell and O’Rourke 2007, p. 35): the ‘to’ and ‘from’ themselves are likely to be matters of political contestation over how the post-conflict system will be structured and where power will lie. Nevertheless, as a project of reshaping political, social and economic institutions to produce the conditions for peace – however that peace may be understood – peacebuilding presupposes the alteration of what had existed before and, thus, transition; even if this linear script is appropriate, it is so commonly deployed that it becomes part of what there is to analyse. Indeed, one criticism of transitional justice theorising from a peacebuilding perspective in Cillian McGrattan’s polemic with Kris Brown over transitional justice in Northern Ireland was that it fails to ‘examine the political framework of the “transition”’ (McGrattan 2009, p. 168; see also Brown 2010; McGrattan 2010). Justice for peacebuilding scholars would be one aspect, but one aspect only, of the transformations with which they are concerned. The ‘peace via justice’ premise, key to the UN’s rationale for establishing war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (Clark 2011, p. 539), would fit justice squarely under the umbrella of

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding  189 ‘any and all elements identified by local and international stakeholders as attempts to create, strengthen and solidify peace’ (Autesserre 2014, p. 21) which, together, constitute the framework of peacebuilding. With such an institutional linkage, which was being produced at the very time that peacebuilding and transitional justice were emerging as fields of research, one might wonder why they should even have ended up as separate fields rather than distinct but interlinked topics of inquiry within a unified field of studying post-conflict reconstruction. As it is, however, locating the nexus between transitional justice and peacebuilding often requires reading two fields in parallel and extracting what can materialise, within the two communities of practice, as strikingly similar lenses and debates. Peacebuilding’s ‘Local Turn’ and Consequences for Transitional Justice The literatures on peacebuilding and transitional justice tend to resemble ‘parallel’ tracks rather than one integrated field (Sharp 2013a, p. 165), with scholars who position themselves in either field still being unlikely to draw in the literature that has constituted the other field on equal terms with the literature that has constituted their own (see also Millar and Lecy 2016). Nevertheless, as Dustin Sharp noted when mapping a direction for linking both fields in 2013 (Sharp 2013a, 2013b), the critical study of peacebuilding deals with similar problems to those raised by transitional justice researchers who have sought to question what ‘justice’ might consist of, whose interests it meets, and who is or should be responsible for bringing it about. The significance of ‘the local’ and ‘the international’, the power relationships in which these scales of activity are embedded, and the deconstruction of both these domains are key concepts in peacebuilding research, which shows peacebuilding as well as transitional justice to be embedded into international structures in comparable ways. The ‘turns’ through which peacebuilding studies have gone in the 2000s and 2010s as peacebuilding practices have themselves evolved share a concern with scale, asymmetry and power which is also visible in critical studies of ‘top-down’ transitional justice. Critiques of the ‘liberal peace’ as an ineffective, inappropriate or outright neo-imperialist form of Western power projection in the name of peacebuilding (Pugh 2005; Chandler 2006; Cooper 2007; Jabri 2012) echo the reaction against ‘top-down’ transitional justice mechanisms that characterises much critical literature on the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the ICC. Alternative models that are intended to be more participatory and accountable and that centre the local level as a site of capacity and agency in peacebuilding – whatever ‘the local’ actually consists of (Mac Ginty 2015) – are argued for along the same lines as the ‘bottom-up’ models of transitional justice recommended by authors such as Lundy and McGovern. Indeed, one recent literature review of the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding included Lundy and McGovern’s research on transitional justice within a set of studies examining local agency in peacebuilding (others in this section were on youth masculinities, local peace committees and local zones of peace) (Leonardsson and Rudd 2015, p. 832); transitional justice is here just one of the many dimensions that peacebuilding involves. So well-established in peacebuilding studies is the ‘local turn’ that it now has its own critical literature interrogating how the local is constituted, stratified, mobilised and (de)politicised in theory and policy (Richmond 2009b; Heathershaw 2013; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Hughes et al. 2015; Paffenholz 2015). Transitional justice recognises one aspect of the recent debates on the ‘hybrid forms of peace’ (Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond and Mitchell 2012), through the institution of the ‘mixed tribunal’ or ‘hybrid court’, which (as in Timor Leste or Kosovo) hears war crimes cases with

190  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding a combination of local and foreign judges (Martin-Ortega and Herman 2012). Dustin Sharp (2013a, p. 170), indeed, notes the emergence of ‘more hybridized forms of peacebuilding and transitional justice’, using ‘a mixture of conventional and local practices and models’, in his work bridging the two fields (though whose conventions are these, why would the local automatically be seen as unconventional, and what if some people within ‘the local’ want a more ‘conventional’ peace than some foreign interveners?). One analytic for understanding hybridity in peacebuilding and for conceptualising a so-called post-liberal peace, the focus on ‘the everyday’ as a means of making local agency visible and meaningful (Richmond 2009a; Mitchell 2011; Mac Ginty 2013, 2014), has opened another seam of research that parallels, and shares the normative assumptions of, critical transitional justice studies that emphasise the bottom-up. Extending this agenda into the everyday practices of peacebuilding itself through ethnographic research has enabled peacebuilding researchers to highlight the micropolitics of power, space and knowledge that are constitutive, in this perspective, of how interventions operate and how peace might (not) be built (Pouligny 2006; Higate and Henry 2009; Autesserre 2014; Baker 2014). This lens has not been turned on transitional justice mechanisms to the same extent but is one of several ways in which drawing together the fields of transitional justice and peacebuilding may create new possibilities for understanding the aftermath of conflict.

OBSERVING THE NEXUS OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE AND PEACEBUILDING Although the study of transitional justice and peacebuilding has followed parallel yet often detached tracks, in the practice of conflict management and conflict resolution the division between them is not always so clear. Peacebuilding practice may often involve activities usually labelled transitional justice, such as support for or the funding of criminal tribunals or truth commissions. For instance, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) often funds peacebuilding projects such as those aimed at strengthening institutions in post-conflict countries, and is also supporting ‘peacebuilding through “people to people” reconciliation programs’ (USAID 2016). Reconciliation projects have taken place in Colombia, Guatemala, Côte D’Ivoire, and Cambodia, and encourage ‘truth seeking’ as well as national dialogue and criminal prosecution (Solomon 2015). The Colombian peace and transitional justice process is also supported by ‘traditional’ peacebuilding agencies, the UN and World Bank, as well as Germany (ICTJ 2015). The EU, with its commitment to peacebuilding through its Common Security and Defence Policy, integration and other policies, sees transitional justice as integral to many of its peacebuilding efforts, and has thus supported (financially and politically) initiatives such as the ICC (Davis 2010). Perceptions of justice, and contestation over how justice should be understood, are among the factors that condition how a peacebuilding intervention develops (Hyden 2015). Moreover, the doctrines, narratives and practices of certain key peacebuilding actors that have committed themselves to post-conflict reconstruction in the image of the ‘liberal peace’ often view transitional justice as the very path to building the long-term peace they seek. The UN Secretary-General’s 2004 report on ‘Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Post-Conflict Societies’, for instance, exemplified for Sriram (2007, p. 585) the integration of transitional justice and peacebuilding that had been forged in international post-conflict reconstruction

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding  191 practice in the early 2000s. Rachel Kerr perceived a ‘symbiotic relationship between peace and justice’ (Kerr 2007, p. 373) in the EU’s attitude to post-Yugoslav states in the 2000s, when it made milestones in their stabilisation and accession negotiations conditional on co-operation with the ICTY. Simultaneously, however, ‘difficult choices’ about post-conflict governance that might fix the parameters of how the ‘transition’ to be achieved through justice might unfold – for instance decisions about the national judicial system or security-sector reform – may have been taken, in a de facto way, by ‘international peacekeeping and peacebuilding actors, ranging from the United Nations to bilateral donors’ at quite an early stage of intervention (Sriram 2004, p. 3). The legacies of ad hoc initial decisions and competing agencies’ priorities in peacebuilding show that the process is by no means linear nor straightforward. Often evident, however, are top-down practices through which the narratives and strategies of international actors (such as those of a powerful donor government or the EU) filter down to peacebuilding on the ground through donations and funding for specific projects (see e.g. Obradovic-Wochnik 2017). The empirically discernible overlaps and relationships between transitional justice and peacebuilding are indeed starting to become the subject of an emergent literature, with connections drawn through the work of scholars such as Sriram, Lambourne, Mani and Sharp. Chandra Lekha Sriram’s work is central to the nexus here in applying critiques of liberal peacebuilding to transitional justice and arguing that both mechanisms when externally imposed are likely to have destabilising effects (Sriram 2007). Kris Brown (2010, p. 123) maps out a number of themes, from norm diffusion to national identity formation and (again) the critique of the liberal peace, that peacebuilding and International Relations scholars might use transitional justice to explore. Karin Aggestam and Annika Björkdahl, examining the Western Balkans and the Middle East, ask what achieving a ‘just peace’ might involve (Aggestam and Björkdahl 2013). Dustin Sharp (2013b, p. 151), like Sriram, notes that transitional justice is ‘increasingly associated’ with ‘narrow transitions to democracy’ and peacebuilding and is often ‘yet another box to tick on the “post-conflict checklist”’. He goes on to identify a socioeconomic dimension to the liberal peace, so closely associated with ‘transitions to liberal market democracy’ as well as top-down institutional capacity-building (Sharp 2013b, p. 152), leading to questions of socioeconomic (in)justice in liberal market transitions which the peacebuilding and transitional justice literatures have often, though not always (Mani 2002; Pugh 2005; Miller 2008; Pugh et al. 2008; Jennings and Bøås 2015), ignored. The erasure of ‘structural colonial violence’ from and through transitional justice – which Sarah Maddison and Laura Shepherd (2014) make visible by applying insights from critical peacebuilding studies – runs even deeper. The Production and Circulation of Knowledge in Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice A key set of questions informing the recognition of this nexus is therefore how knowledge of transitional justice or peacebuilding is circulated and how discourses about what these concepts and institutions should mean or do are reproduced, contested and reconfigured as the processes of peacebuilding and transitional justice take effect. How and why, for instance, have the values and goals of ‘peace’, ‘justice’ and ‘reconciliation’ (as opposed to any other sets of values) been attached to and made the key aims of what is generally understood as ‘transitional justice’? Stef Jansen (2013), explaining contested notions of justice in Bosnia-Herzegovina, asks ‘If reconciliation is the answer, are we asking the right questions?’ in arguing that peace-

192  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding builders’ quest for ‘reconciliation’ has depoliticised Bosnian society. These questions can be asked for any transitional justice/peacebuilding intervention. For instance, critical peacebuilding debates about agency, local knowledge and the everyday make it possible to perceive the structural implications that occur when local justice practices which may have had similar goals to ‘transitional justice’ projects but pre-dated the arrival of international peacebuilding efforts have been overlooked or dismissed as strategies for achieving ‘transitional justice’, in favour of other imported mechanisms, once internationally driven processes of peacebuilding take hold (see Lamont 2016; Martin 2016). Indeed, even the nature of what may become known as transitional justice or as peace being built is often the result of what individual groups and actors are able to negotiate, either with local governments or external funders (see O’Reilly 2016; Hronesova 2016). Care must, as a result, be taken to disaggregate the normative goals of transitional justice – peace, reconciliation, justice, truth. These are concepts with an intellectual history and a developmental trajectory; that is, it must be remembered that they are not ‘natural’ nor a given, and that their interpretation not only varies between socio-cultural contexts but their meanings will always be contested even amongst seemingly coherent groups, such as survivors (Lambourne 2009, p. 46; Ní Aoláin 2012, p. 206). Indeed, the very act of framing a contestation as a struggle between abstract concepts may itself be a political move, as Kimberley Armstrong argues in a study of the ICC’s investigation of the conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army: in Armstrong’s view, the discursive constructions of ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ used by Ugandan political and media actors were in fact mobilised to legitimise their own particular claims to authority over the process of conflict resolution in northern Uganda (Armstrong 2014, p. 592). Yet the concepts of truth, justice, peace and reconciliation are often de facto starting-points, rather than constructs for analysis, in transitional justice analyses asking why these have not yet been achieved. The Question of Capital in Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding Socioeconomic issues are a crucial injustice felt by the people who constitute ‘the local’ in transitional justice contexts (see Lai 2016). As mechanisms and processes, however, both transitional justice and peacebuilding tend to ignore the question of capital – economic, social, and political – while transitional justice’s focus on truth and justice often leaves no room to examine the less tangible ways in which populations and communities feel affected by conflicts (Miller 2008; Lambourne 2009, p. 34). As Sharp (2013b, p. 149) notes, the ‘historically dominant liberal’ paradigm of transitional justice has narrowed responses to violence to such an extent that it has marginalised questions of ‘economic violence and economic justice’. Transitional justice often creates mechanisms that seek to help only those directly affected by violence: individuals and families of the killed and disappeared; survivors of sexualised violence during war; refugees; and the most obviously and directly involved perpetrators. Peacebuilding practice, meanwhile, has placed a much stronger focus on rebuilding democratic institutions (as a route to peace) than on individuals, as critiques of the liberal peace emphasise. Both approaches to post-conflict reconstruction have thus neglected more subtle forms of dispossession and victimhood. And yet, while income inequality, socioeconomic marginalisation and unemployment linked to the effects of conflict often affect even greater proportions of post-conflict societies (see Lai 2016), most mainstream international intervention approaches are almost completely un-equipped to deal with them, even though dynamics

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding  193 of inequality present the potential for conflict of all kinds. Resistance to dominant approaches of peacebuilding and transitional justice is seen clearly in episodes such as the Bosnian popular protests of 2014 (Lai 2016) which not only surprised the international community but also highlighted the inadequacy of transitional justice and peacebuilding mechanisms (Hromadžić 2015). Another form of inequality, the stratification of survivor/victim groups based on their unequal access to social and political capital, also influences how transitional justice and peacebuilding processes are shaped (Hronesova 2016; Lai 2016; O’Reilly 2016). International intervention and peacebuilding practices can inadvertently set up political systems in which victim and survivor groups must become efficient lobbyists and pander to local power games in order to achieve transitional justice goals such as reparations or specific laws (e.g. Hronesova 2016). Transitional justice here reveals itself as not just subject to competing interpretations but as wholly dependent on a number of dynamics not originally envisaged as part of its normative aims, such as bargaining, negotiating, accessing capital, and engaging with local politics which are often – despite the frequent ‘romanticisation’ of the local in peacebuilding practice (Richmond 2009b) – a site of illiberality or oppression (see Arnould 2016; Lai 2016; Hronesova 2016). ‘Truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ thus do not occur largely as a result of international pressure or local goodwill, but within a complex political economy of transitional justice and peacebuilding. Indeed, what becomes known or implemented as transitional justice or the building of peace is deeply affected by capital; the flow of capital from donors (such as the EU and USAID) to conflict-affected regions can be traced, and with it the flow of discourse and frameworks for what kinds of knowledge are even valid (Sampson 1996; Autesserre 2014). Competitive bidding between local non-governmental organisations for external funding means that what transitional justice initiatives become implemented are dependent on who gets which grant; in turn, the funded initiatives become visible and leaders of these projects become spokespersons for ‘local transitional justice’, obscuring less tangible local engagement with the past (Martin 2016). Moreover, many of these, sometimes invisible, local processes of facing the past have their roots in religious practice (see Martin 2016; Lamont 2016). Yet the global narrative or ‘global project’ (Nagy 2008) which drives transitional justice practice and peacebuilding, and which is deeply underscored by ideas of the liberal peace, often overlooks the religious as a possible site of confronting the past (not least since religious ideologies are often seen as the cause of many post-Cold War conflicts) (Clark 2010). Locating the nexus between peacebuilding and transitional justice thus involves, first, seeking out empirical and conceptual ways in which they have overlapped. How for instance are they conceived as distinct, how not, and how did the empirically observable nexus between them come about? Second, and equally importantly, it involves building a common critical agenda from the questions each field of research has sought to ask. Whom, for instance, are each of these sets of institutions and practices for, and whom could they be for outside the understandings of peace, justice and reconstruction that are currently hegemonic? What notions of peace and justice are in play in any post-conflict setting, and how is the power to determine and implement their meaning an object of struggle in a given case? What knowledges would not fit even into this compartmentalisation of the aftermath of conflict? What inequalities are or might be strengthened, created or undone as the peacebuilding–transitional justice nexus is pursued? Continuing the work of connecting these two fields can, this issue suggests, offer more effective means of envisaging not just transition but even transformation.

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ILLUSTRATING THE NEXUS: WHAT CAN BE DONE NOW? This chapter and the special issue it is based on (Baker and Obradović-Wochnik 2016) go some way to addressing the ‘deeper politics of transitional justice’, but also peacebuilding, and interrogating their ‘lingering peripheries’ (Sharp 2013b, p. 157). This challenge does not involve ‘suddenly privileging’ the previously marginalised issues, but ‘call into question the reasons for the historic privileging of certain items over others’, and to ‘examine what this emphasis might say about transitional justice as a political project’ (Sharp 2013b, p. 157). We suggest this can be done by interrogating the peripheries, many of which are the result or an unintended consequence of peacebuilding projects and interventions: socioeconomic justice, local projects ignored or dismissed as ‘transitional justice’, such as bids for socioeconomic rights in the aftermath of conflict (Hronesova 2016). We suggest that trying to locate the nexus in the first place draws attention to where peace and justice have actually got to be produced in order for there not to be conflict and violence. This in turn demonstrates that locally, ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ do not always look like the ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ drawn up by international donors and peacebuilders; and, despite the ‘turn to the local’ in international relations, it is surprising just how many local and everyday dynamics are (dis)missed as sources of peace and justice, or potential avenues of addressing the past.

REFERENCES Aggestam, K. and A. Björkdahl (eds) (2013), Rethinking Peacebuilding: The Quest for Just Peace in the Middle East and Western Balkans, London: Routledge. Akhavan, P. (1996), ‘The Yugoslav tribunal at a crossroads: The Dayton peace agreement and beyond’, Human Rights Quarterly, 18 (2), 259–85. Akhavan, P. (1998), ‘Justice in The Hague, peace in the former Yugoslavia? A commentary on the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal’, Human Rights Quarterly, 4 (4), 737–816. Akhavan, P. (2009), ‘Are international criminal tribunals a disincentive to peace? Reconciling judicial romanticism with political realism’, Human Rights Quarterly, 31 (3), 624–54. Andrieu, K. (2010), ‘Civilizing peacebuilding: Transitional justice, civil society and the liberal paradigm’, Security Dialogue, 41 (5), 537–58. Anonymous (1996), ‘Human rights in peace negotiations’, Human Rights Quarterly, 18 (2), 249–58. Armstrong, K. (2014), ‘Justice without peace? International justice and conflict resolution in northern Uganda’, Development and Change, 45 (3), 589–607. Arnould, V. (2016), ‘Transitional justice in peacebuilding: Dynamics of contestation in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 321–38. Arthur, P. (2009), ‘How “transitions” reshaped human rights: A conceptual history of transitional justice’, Human Rights Quarterly, 31 (2), 321–67. Arvelo, J. E. (2006), ‘International law and conflict resolution in Colombia: Balancing peace and justice in the paramilitary demobilization process’, Georgetown Journal of International Law, 37, 411–76. Autesserre, S. (2014), Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, C. (2014), ‘The view from the back of the warrior: Mobility, privilege and power during the international intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in K. Burrell and K. Hörschelmann (eds), Mobilities in Socialist and Post-Socialist States: Societies on the Move, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 148–72. Baker, C. and J. Obradović-Wochnik (eds) (2016), ‘Mapping the nexus of transitional justice’, Special Issue of Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 281‒301. Bell, C. (2009), ‘Transitional justice, interdisciplinarity and the state of the “field” or “non-field”’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 3 (1), 5–27. Bell, C. and C. O’Rourke (2007), ‘Does feminism need a theory of transitional justice? An introductory essay’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 1 (1), 23–44.

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding  195 Berger, P. and T. Luckmann (1966), The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Penguin. Bieber, F. (2014), ‘Do historians need a verdict?’, in T. W. Waters (ed.), The Milošević Trial: An Autopsy, London: Routledge, pp. 349–55. Bratt, D. (1997), ‘Peace over justice: Developing a framework for UN peacekeeping operations in internal conflicts’, Global Governance, 5, 63–81. Brown, K. (2010), ‘Transitional justice, rigour and politics: A reply to McGrattan’, Politics, 30 (2), 119–24. Chandler, D. (2006), Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building, London: Pluto. Clark, J. N. (2008), ‘The three Rs: Retributive justice, restorative justice, and reconciliation’, Contemporary Justice Review, 11 (4), 331–50. Clark, J. N. (2009), ‘From negative to positive peace: The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Journal of Human Rights, 8 (4), 360–84. Clark, J. N. (2010), ‘Religion and reconciliation in Bosnia & Herzegovina: Are religious actors doing enough?’, Europe–Asia Studies, 62 (4), 671–94. Clark, J. N. (2011), ‘Peace, justice and the International Criminal Court: Limitations and possibilities’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 9 (3), 521–45. Cooper, N. (2007), ‘On the crisis of the liberal peace’, Conflict, Security and Development, 7 (4), 605–16. D’Amato, A. (1994), ‘Peace vs. accountability in Bosnia’, American Journal of International Law, 88 (3), 500–6. Davis, L. (2010), ‘The European Union and transitional justice’, Brussels: Initiative for Peacebuilding. Franke, K. M. (2006), ‘Gendered subjects of transitional justice’, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 15 (2006), 813–28. Fraser, N. (2008), Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, New York: Columbia University Press. Gaer, F. D. (1997), ‘UN-anonymous: Reflections on human rights in peace negotiations’, Human Rights Quarterly, 19 (1), 1–8. Glasius, M. (2009), ‘What is global justice and who decides? Civil society and victim responses to the International Criminal Court’s first investigations’, Human Rights Quarterly, 31 (2), 496–520. Halilovich, H. (2013), Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-Local Identities in Bosnian War-Torn Communities, Oxford: Berghahn. Hart, C. (1998), Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination, London: Sage. Heathershaw, J. (2013), ‘Towards better theories of peacebuilding: Beyond the liberal peace debate’, Peacebuilding, 1 (2), 275–82. Higate, P. and M. Henry (2009), Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia, London: Zed. Hromadžić, A. (2015), Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hronesova, J. (2016), ‘Might makes right: Compensatory war-related payments in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 339–60. Hughes, C., J. Öjendal and I. Schierenbeck (2015), ‘The struggle versus the song – The local turn in peacebuilding: An introduction’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 817–24. Hyden, G. (2015), ‘Rethinking justice and institutions in African peacebuilding’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 1007–22. International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) (2015), ‘UN, World Bank and Germany step up aid for post-conflict Colombia’, 17 February, https://​www​.ictj​.org/​news/​un​-world​-bank​-and​-germany​ -step​-aid​-post​-conflict​-colombia (accessed 2 July 2019). International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) (n.d.), ‘Mandate and crimes under ICTY jurisdiction’, http://​www​.icty​.org/​en/​about/​tribunal/​mandate​-and​-crimes​-under​-icty​ -jurisdiction (accessed 2 July 2019). Jabri, V. (2012), The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity, London: Routledge. Jansen, S. (2006), ‘The privatisation of home and hope: Return, reforms and the foreign intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Dialectical Anthropology, 30 (3–4), 177–99. Jansen, S. (2013), ‘If reconciliation is the answer, are we asking the right questions?’, Studies in Social Justice, 7 (2), 229–43. Jennings, K. M. and M. Bøås (2015), ‘Transactions and interactions: Everyday life in the peacekeeping economy’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (3), 281–95. Keller, L. M. (2008), ‘Achieving peace with justice: The International Criminal Court and Ugandan alternative justice mechanisms’, Connecticut Journal of International Law, 23, 209–80.

196  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Kerr, R. (2007), ‘Peace through justice? The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 7 (3), 373–85. Lai, D. (2016), ‘Transitional justice and its discontents: Socioeconomic justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the limits of international intervention’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 361–81. Lambourne, W. (2004), ‘Post-conflict peacebuilding: Meeting human needs for justice and reconciliation,’ Peace, Conflict and Development, 4, 1–24. Lambourne, W. (2009), ‘Transitional justice and peacebuilding after mass violence’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 3 (1), 28–48. Lamont, C. K. (2016), ‘Contested governance: Understanding justice interventions in post-Qadhafi Libya’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 382–99. Leonardsson, H. and G. Rudd (2015), ‘The “local turn” in peacebuilding: A literature review of effective and emancipatory local peacebuilding’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 825–39. Lundy, P. and M. McGovern (2008), ‘Whose justice? Rethinking transitional justice from the bottom up’, Journal of Law and Society, 35 (2), 265–92. Mac Ginty, R. (2011), International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mac Ginty, R. (2013), ‘Introduction: The transcripts of peace: Public, hidden or non-obvious?’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 7 (4), 423–30. Mac Ginty, R. (2014), ‘Everyday peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflict-affected societies’, Security Dialogue, 45 (6), 548–64. Mac Ginty, R. (2015), ‘Where is the local? Critical localism and peacebuilding’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 840–56. Mac Ginty, R. and O. P. Richmond (2013), ‘The local turn in peace building: A critical agenda for peace’, Third World Quarterly, 34 (5), 763–83. Maddison, S. and L. J. Shepherd (2014), ‘Peacebuilding and the postcolonial politics of transitional justice’, Peacebuilding, 2 (3), 253–69. Majstorović, D. (2007), ‘Construction of Europeanization in the High Representative’s discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Discourse and Society, 18 (5), 627–51. Mani, R. (2002), Beyond Retribution: Seeking Justice in the Shadows of War, Cambridge: Polity. Mani, R. (2005), ‘Rebuilding an inclusive political community after war’, Security Dialogue, 36 (4), 511–26. Martin, L. S. (2016), ‘Practicing normality: An examination of unrecognisable mechanisms in post-conflict Sierra Leone’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 400–18. Martin-Ortega, O. and J. Herman (2012), ‘Hybrid tribunals: Interaction and resistance in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Cambodia’, in O. P. Richmond and A. Mitchell (eds), Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-Liberalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 73–87. McGrattan, C. (2009), ‘“Order out of chaos”: The politics of transitional justice’, Politics, 29 (3), 164–72. McGrattan, C. (2010), ‘The politics of transitional justice or all’s well that ends well: A reply to Brown’, Politics, 30 (2), 125–30. Millar, G. and J. Lecy (2016), ‘Disciplinary divides in post-conflict justice and peace: Tracking if and how we share ideas’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 302–20. Miller, Z. (2008), ‘Effects of invisibility: In search of the “economic” in transitional justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2 (3), 266–91. Mitchell, A. (2011), ‘Quality/control: International peace interventions and “the everyday”’, Review of International Studies, 37 (4), 1623–45. Nagy, R. (2008), ‘Transitional justice as global project: Critical reflections’, Third World Quarterly, 29 (2), 275–89. Ní Aoláin, F. (2009), ‘Women, security, and the patriarchy of internationalized transitional justice’, Human Rights Quarterly, 31 (4), 1055–85. Ní Aoláin, F. (2012), ‘Advancing feminist positioning in the field of transitional justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 6 (2), 205–28. Nielsen, C. A. (2014), ‘Can we salvage a history of the former Yugoslav conflicts from the Milosevic trial?’, in T. William Waters (ed.), The Milošević Trial: An Autopsy, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 326–48. Obradovic-Wochnik, J. (2017), ‘Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice: The problem of “bringing the local back in”’, Journal of International Relations and Development, online first, 1‒22, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​s41268​-017​-0129​-6. Oette, L. (2010), ‘Peace and justice, or neither? The repercussions of the al-Bashir case for international criminal justice in Africa and beyond’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 8 (2), 345–64. O’Reilly, M. (2016), ‘Peace and justice through a feminist lens: Gender justice and the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (3), 419–45.

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding  197 Paffenholz, T. (2015), ‘Unpacking the local turn in peacebuilding: A critical assessment towards an agenda for future research’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (5), 857–74. Pouligny, B. (2006), Peace Operations Seen from Below: UN Missions and Local People, London: Hurst. Pugh, M. (2005), ‘The political economy of peacebuilding: A critical theory perspective’, International Journal of Peace Studies, 10 (2), 23–42. Pugh, M., N. Cooper and M. Turner (eds) (2008), Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richmond, O. P. (2009a), ‘Becoming liberal, unbecoming liberalism: Liberal–local hybridity via the everyday as a response to the paradoxes of liberal peacebuilding’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 3 (3), 324–44. Richmond, O. P. (2009b), ‘The romanticisation of the local: Welfare, culture and peacebuilding’, The International Spectator, 44 (1), 149–69. Richmond, O. P. and A. Mitchell (eds) (2012), Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-Liberalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sampson, S. (1996), ‘The social life of projects: Importing civil society to Albania’, in C. M. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, London: Routledge, pp. 121–42. Schuett, O. (1997), ‘The International War Crimes Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia and the Dayton Peace Agreement: Peace versus justice?’, International Peacekeeping, 4 (2), 91–114. Sharp, D. N. (2013a), ‘Beyond the post-conflict checklist: Linking peacebuilding and transitional justice through the lens of critique’, Chicago Journal of International Law, 14 (1), 165–96. Sharp, D. N. (2013b), ‘Interrogating the peripheries: The preoccupations of fourth generation transitional justice’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 26, 149–78. Solomon, A. (2015), ‘Truth, justice and development’, 24 March, https://​blog​.usaid​.gov/​2015/​03/​truth​ -justice​-and​-development/​(accessed 2 July 2019). Sriram, C. L. (2004), Confronting Past Human Rights Violations: Justice vs. Peace in Times of Transition, London: Frank Cass. Sriram, C. L. (2007), ‘Justice as peace? Liberal peacebuilding and strategies of transitional justice’, Global Society, 21 (4), 579–91. Sriram, C. L. and S. Pillay (eds) (2011), Peace Versus Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa, Martlesham: James Currey. Tolbert, D. (2009), ‘International criminal law: Past and future’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, 30 (4), 1281–94. USAID (2016), ‘Peacebuilding and reconciliation’, https://​www​.usaid​.gov/​what​-we​-do/​working​-crises​ -and​-conflict/​peacebuilding​-and​-reconciliation (accessed 2 July 2019).

19. Civilian protection in the context of interventions Cecilia Jacob

INTRODUCTION The norms, laws, and practice in the use of military force pertaining to human protection have radically changed over the past two centuries. Not only have new military technologies, altered geopolitical realities, and internal drivers of violent conflict transformed the battlefield, but also the normative obligation to ‘protect’ civilians has challenged the legitimacy, justification, and operational mode of military engagements. This chapter situates the concept and practice of civilian protection within the context of military intervention, whereby protecting civilians has shifted from being a minimal consideration within the strategic purpose of operations to becoming a primary justification and determinant of military operations. In doing so, it also points to ongoing ambiguities in defining protection and identifying civilians on the contemporary battlefield, and discusses ethical and operational challenges for implementing protection mandates through military means. The chapter provides a brief historical account of the development of the concept of civilian protection, and identifies the international legal framework for civilian protection as it relates to contemporary military interventions and state-building enterprises. It then considers civilian protection in the context of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping, and through the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

THE CONCEPTS OF PROTECTION AND CIVILIAN Defining protection for civilians is notoriously difficult, and the emphasis on legal, political, and operational dimensions of protection varies between communities with human rights, humanitarian, or peacekeeping responsibilities (Sheeran and Kent 2016, p. 43). As Elizabeth Ferris (2011, p. xii) argues, ‘the concept has been stretched to include all manner of important activities – from provision of food to curriculum development, from advocacy to monitoring, from building latrines to voter registration’. Given the conceptual ambiguity of the concept, it is common for practitioner communities and policymakers to refer to very different priorities and activities when invoking protection, and indeed when formulating priorities for programmes and policies. In the context of interventions, the need to determine what constitutes ‘protection’ for a given population is equally as ambiguous and open for interpretation by actors with typically very broad and unspecified protection mandates.1 For example, the direct application of armed 1 One UN definition of the Protection of Civilians demonstrates this: ‘all necessary action, up to and including the use of force, aimed at preventing or responding to threats of physical violence against civil-

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Civilian protection in the context of interventions  199 force may comprise protection by removing a direct military threat to civilian populations. However, there are numerous proximate protection concerns in situations of armed conflict, such as forced displacement and second-order victimisation (such as sexual violence within displacement camps), health pandemics due to the destruction of hospitals and clinics – as seen in the cholera outbreak in Yemen ‒ or excessive violent crime in contexts of weak or dysfunctional security institutions. It is important, therefore, that civilian protection in the context of armed intervention be conceptualised from a holistic perspective to prepare for contingencies and unintended consequences of military action. The contemporary battlefield has become much more complex given the urbanisation of warfare and the prominent role of non-state armed groups. Distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants for the purpose of protection has become much harder in practice. Non-state armed groups regularly use civilian infrastructure such as schools as military bases and interrogation centres, employ civilians for support roles that are necessary to sustain combat, and hide themselves among civilian populations, all of which bring civilians into direct line of fire in battle and increase the difficulty of targeting to achieve strategic objectives. The infiltration of refugee camps by militants is a prominent example of where the inability to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in contemporary conflicts poses direct threats to civilian populations. Just as the concept of protection can refer to a diverse range of legal approaches and programme areas, defining ‘civilian’ also presents a number of conceptual challenges. In her historical tracing of the concept of the civilian in international humanitarian law (IHL), Helen Kinsella (2011) has argued that the distinction between combatant and non-combatant has been crucial in carving out the modern concept of the civilian. The devastating impact of the First and Second World Wars on civilian populations substantially strengthened the protections for civilians in the Geneva Conventions (1949), and ‘[c]ivilians rightly became central moral subjects in the ethics and practice of war’ (Slim 2016, p. 17). Based on this principle of distinction in IHL between combatant and non-combatant, the definition of a civilian has come to be juxtaposed with the notion of combatant, and civilians are therefore largely considered as passive victims of conflict, and neutral actors. There has, however, been a growing recognition that civilians often contribute to armed conflict despite their non-combatant status, including through crucial support roles such as intelligence, accommodating and providing for combatants, and propaganda that makes their perceived neutrality questionable. The ethical and legal deliberations as to how far IHL protections extend to civilians are contested when there is evidence of civilians directly participating in armed hostilities (Crawford 2015). In challenging perceptions of civilians as ‘innocent’ and passive victims requiring external protection, scholars have also paid greater attention to the agency and resilience of civilians themselves in pursuing their own protection (Baines and Paddon 2012; Jose and Medie 2015). The implications of this research has led to a reassessment of the impacts that external interventions may have in removing the agency of civilians and creating dependencies on external actors, and to recalibrating protection efforts towards building resilience within communities for more sustainable protection and livelihood outcomes (Betts and Collier 2015).

ians, within capabilities and areas of operations, and without prejudice to the responsibility of the host government to protect its civilians’. United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations/Department of Field Support (2015, p. 3).

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FOREGROUNDING CIVILIANS IN THE POLITICAL AND LEGAL FRAMEWORKS OF ARMED CONFLICT The impact of violent conflict on civilians is central in media accounts, in international debates over the legality of military interventions, and in UN resolutions that condemn state and non-state actors for violating the human rights of populations forced to withstand the worst of military offensives and mass displacement. While civilians feature at the centre of moral discourses around armed conflict today, this was not the case for most of the twentieth century when political actors largely considered civilian suffering an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of violent conflict (Valentino 2014, p. 94; Harff 2017). Although major genocides and mass killings took place during the Cold War period ‒ for example, in Biafra, Cambodia, East Pakistan, and Indonesia ‒ the international community was not responsive to these events given the geopolitical considerations of major powers during this period. Military interventions for the purpose of protecting civilians was not characteristic of the Cold War period, although scholars have pointed to the actions of Vietnam in Cambodia, India in East Pakistan, and Tanzania in Uganda as precursors to the notion of humanitarian intervention (Evans 2008, pp. 23‒5) that came to prominence in the humanitarian debates of the 1990s. In the initial years following the end of the Cold War, there was heightened optimism in the workings of the UN to prevent and end conflicts, which catalysed a surge in the number of UN Security Council resolutions, and implementation of peacekeeping operations. The Security Council established nearly twice as many peace operations from 1988 to 1994 than in the forty years prior (Foley 2017, p. 78). This optimism quickly faded in the wake of significant failures by the international community to protect civilians from genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing during the 1990s, notably in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, and recalibrated the focus of international political and legal responses towards the impact of violent conflict on civilian populations. The dissemination of images and reports from the genocides of the early- to mid-1990s challenged the perception that domestic political violence and civil war were beyond the purview of international security, and rendered the unwillingness of the international community to respond to internal conflicts as no longer feasible. Alongside these political, normative, and institutional developments to strengthen human protection in the post-Cold War period, scholarship has also delved beyond its traditional focus on understanding the causes of major interstate war, to understanding the underlying causes and dynamics of violence in internal conflicts (Jacob 2017). The insights gleaned from this new generation of research has cultivated both more scientific approaches to identifying the early warning signs of violent conflict and prevention,2 and a more normatively oriented literature debating the ethics of using military force for purposes of human protection (Wheeler 2000). As discussed further in the sections below, these developments have had a substantial impact on widening the scope of global governance and security practices towards prevention and protection agendas in contexts of armed conflict, including numerous examples of the Security Council approving forceful mandates for the specific purpose of civilian protection. Despite the tragic politics that played out, notably by the major superpowers in response to the mass atrocities in the post-Second World War period (Menon 2016), there were a number of crucial developments in international law that created a foundation for the rapid expansion



2

For a comprehensive survey, see Straus (2016, pp. 131‒48).

Civilian protection in the context of interventions  201 of human protection norms and doctrine in the post-Cold War period. Indeed, scholars have argued that the ‘humanisation’ of the laws of war (Meron 2000; Teitel 2011) that occurred during this period fundamentally reoriented the international legal order away from the protection of state security towards the prioritisation of human rights protection. The most significant shift that occurred after the Second World War was the creation of the UN in 1945, and the prohibition of the use of force in international relations except for individual or collective self-defence (United Nations 1945, Chapter VII, Article 51) or for restoring international peace and security (United Nations 1945, Chapter VII, Article 42). Prior to 1945, war was accepted as a practice of statecraft. Since then, there has been a fundamental repurposing of international military interventions through the UN to prevent the outbreak of international war (United Nations 1945, Preamble). It is, however, unclear if the charter permits the use of force for human protection under the notion of collective security, and international lawyers have long debated this question (Menon 2016, pp. 60‒76). It was only by the 1990s that human rights and protection come to the fore as a justification for the use of force, as evidenced in the debates over humanitarian intervention. Crucial to the debates of the 1990s that sought to reorient principles of security from the state as the primary referent, to people, was the consolidation of international human rights norms in the decades preceding. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), with the subsequent International Conventions on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), formalised human rights norms in global politics and paved the way for expanding the notion of rights to other areas of international law. Examples include the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) defined and prohibited genocide and created additional legal provisions for human protection – although these were not implemented throughout the Cold War period. IHL was substantially expanded through the Geneva Conventions (1949) that developed new protections for civilians in armed conflict, particularly in Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. The additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions in 1977 extended the remit of IHL to non-international armed conflicts to take into account the realities of civil conflict that accompanied decolonisation and Cold War politics of the period. When considering civilian protection in the context of military operations, IHL serves as the touchstone for thinking ethically about the need to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and the need to limit the use of force within armed conflict through principles of humanity, the distinction between civilians and combatants, proportionality, and military necessity (ICRC n.d.). IHL in and of itself, however, provides an inadequate basis for protection of civilians in armed conflict given its permissiveness of the use of force, and its emphasis on restraint and the minimisation of harm to civilians during warfare, as opposed to protection being the strategic objective of military interventions in its own right. The ‘right to flee’ is arguably one of the most crucial options that civilians have to protect themselves from the impact of violent conflict (Orchard 2014), particularly when external interventions are not forthcoming, or are too little, too late, or overly destabilising. The international refugee regime, grounded in the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), laid the international legal and institutional framework for refugee protection, founded on the core principle of non-refoulement to provide international protection for populations forcibly displaced by violent conflict and persecution. The refugee convention was designed

202  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding to repatriate the millions of European refugees displaced by the Second World War, and therefore had both geographical and time boundaries. The 1967 Protocols to the 1951 Convention removed these limitations to become an indispensable pillar of the international protection regime for populations affected by violent conflict worldwide. The sharp increase in the number of violent civil conflicts at the end of the Cold War led to a surge in the number of people displaced by violent conflict worldwide, either within their own borders as internally displaced persons or internationally as refugees. This upward trend, now at a historic high of 68.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide (UN Refugee Agency 2018), has shifted the humanitarian mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees towards a greater politicisation of its role due to efforts of states to contain refugee movements within their countries or regions of origin (Betts et al. 2012). Despite these challenges, the refugee regime remains central to global protections for civilian populations fleeing conflict today. Finally, the creation of international criminal law (ICL) in the 1990s consolidated earlier efforts to address state impunity for mass violations of human rights in the context of war. The Nuremburg (1945‒46) and Tokyo (1945‒48) trials following the Second World War were the earliest iterations of international tribunals charged with prosecuting German and Japanese leaders for crimes committed by their military forces during the war. These have been criticised for representing a ‘victor’s justice’ as they were conducted by the allied powers, yet they were instrumental in establishing war crimes and crimes against humanity as international crimes (Minear 2001). It was not until the 1990s, with the creation of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (1993) and Rwanda (1994) that international jurisdiction over war criminals was established. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) defined the four international crimes of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression; and established the International Criminal Court that came into force in 2002. From the perspective of protection, ICL ‘protects’ indirectly by acting as a deterrent for the commission of future international crimes and increasingly the level of international accountability for episodes of mass violence. The definition of the four international crimes and the body of jurisprudence since the mid-1990s has paved the way for identifying acts such as the systematic and widespread use of sexual violence as a crime against humanity, cultivating international consensus around core protection agendas such as women, peace and security in Resolution 1325 (2000). These developments have also improved the scope of early warning frameworks and preventive action to account for patterns of violence that previously went under the international community’s radar. These developments in international law have extended human rights obligations into considerations of armed conflict and served as precursors to new international protection frameworks, such as children and armed conflict (Resolution 1261 (1999)), Protection of Civilians (PoC) (Resolution 1296 (1999)), women, peace and security, and R2P (ICISS 2001). The combination of these international legal standards and norms has generated a comprehensive regime for advancing the protection of civilian populations during periods of armed violence. The remit of these international protection frameworks includes intervention by member states of the international community to prevent or halt the targeting of civilians from armed violence, and the full spectrum of peace operations from peacekeeping through to peace enforcement and stabilisation missions. This next section considers the two core civilian protection frameworks pertaining to the context of intervention ‒ PoC and R2P. PoC refers to a specific operational mandate of

Civilian protection in the context of interventions  203 United Nations peacekeeping missions since 1999, whereas R2P is a framework that provides guidance to the international community on responding to instances of mass atrocity within states. Both frameworks are permissive of the use of armed force for the purpose of civilian protection, and while the political debate and implementation of these two frameworks operate in very distinct contexts, there has been an increasing overlap between the mobilisation of these protection frameworks in response to major humanitarian crises generating international interventions.

PROTECTION OF CIVILIANS: PROTECTING THROUGH PEACEKEEPING The PoC doctrine evolved alongside the transformation of UN peacekeeping at the end of the Cold War. Indeed, PoC has become a priority mandate of peacekeeping missions that are routinely deployed in situations of protracted violent conflict. Beyond the UN, multilateral organisations such as the European Union, NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the African Union, and the Economic Community of West African States deploy peacekeeping missions that include PoC responsibilities. Operating with UN mandates, these organisations bolster the capacity of the international community to engage in conflict prevention, peace enforcement, stabilisation, and transition from conflict to peacebuilding. Peacekeeping was, according to former UN Secretary-General Bhoutros Bhoutros-Ghali (1992, para. 46) ‘the invention of the United Nations’, first deployed to the Middle East to monitor the ceasefire during the Arab–Israeli war in 1948. Peacekeeping was never envisaged by the founders of the UN or included in the UN Charter, therefore it has always held an ambiguous status between the Charter’s Chapter VI call for the peaceful resolution of disputes and Chapter VII that enables the Security Council to authorise the use of force for maintaining international peace and security. While traditional peacekeeping missions were mandated to monitor ceasefires and implement peace agreements, UN peacekeeping operations stationed in a series of volatile civil wars during the early post-Cold War period, including in Angola, Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, failed to prevent the mass killings of civilian populations. These failures occurred both on the watch of UN peacekeepers without adequate protection mandates, such as the massacre of Srebrenica in 1995, but also at the hands of UN peacekeepers themselves, as documented atrocities by peacekeepers in Somalia exposed (Foley 2017, pp. 85‒7). The experiences of the 1990s raised difficult ethical and legal questions surrounding the legality of using force to protect civilians within the sovereign jurisdiction of states through UN peacekeeping. Traditional peacekeeping maintained principles of consent by the host state, and neutrality and impartiality that had restrained the UN from mandating Chapter VII forceful interventions in internal conflicts, the United Nations Operation in Somalia (1992‒93) being the first exception. The failures of this period prompted actors within the UN to turn their attention to the plight of civilians in armed conflict, and to consider the conditions under which the use of force in UN peacekeeping missions could be extended to protect civilian populations. The first UN Security Council resolution on the thematic issue of protection of civilians was Resolution 1265 (1999) where support was expressed for including civilian protection within the mandates of UN peacekeeping.

204  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding In 2000, Lakhdar Brahimi submitted the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (which he chaired) to the Security Council, proposing a series of reforms to strengthen UN peacekeeping that included better resourcing and clearer mandates with sufficient support from UN member states (United Nations 2000). The Brahimi report questioned the relevance of traditional peacekeeping principles of state consent, neutrality and impartiality, arguing that the contemporary context of armed conflict required mandates that were more ‘robust’. He argued: ‘when the United Nations does send its forces to uphold the peace, they must be prepared to confront the lingering forces of war and violence, with the ability and determination to defeat them’ (United Nations 2000, p. viii). The Brahimi report marked a new phase in UN peacekeeping, whereby over 95 per cent of UN peacekeepers today operate under a PoC mandate (United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations 2018a), including a Chapter VII mandate for the use of force in every multi-dimensional peacekeeping mission since 1999 (Howard and Dayal 2018). Contemporary peacekeeping operations continue to face numerous challenges in implementing PoC mandates. Shrinking peacekeeping budgets come at a time when UN peacekeepers are required to cover an ever-growing number of tasks (Di Razza 2017). The 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on United Nations Peace Operations report drew attention to a number of priorities for peacekeeping to help manage expectations and scope mandates in a more realistic manner. Among these priorities, the report emphasised the need to prioritise the prevention of violent conflicts through political processes and mediation, recognising the limited capacity of UN peace operations to protect civilians on the ground, and the need to address the broader problem of solving intractable conflict in which civilians are vulnerable. The report also called for a better realignment between peacekeeping mandates and the actual capacity of peacekeeping forces on the ground, arguing that ‘on the ground, the results are mixed and the gap between what is asked and what peace operations can deliver has widened in more difficult environments’ (United Nations 2015, p. ix). In March 2018, the UN Secretary-General implemented the Action for Peacekeeping plan to address some of these issues and encourage clearer, stronger mandates. The pressure comes both from fiscal constraints3 and political pressure over the perceived ineffectiveness of missions engaged in protracted conflicts without clear exit strategies. It is yet to be seen how this will be implemented, however, particularly in the context of long-running missions in still very fragile situations. In 2013, the UN mission in South Sudan opened its compound doors to over 75,000 civilians fleeing a massacre. This act was ‘arguably the single most successful measure ever taken by the United Nations to directly protect the lives and human rights of civilians’ (Gilmour 2014, p. 244). However, the population that the PoC sites were established to host has now grown to over 200,000 residents (UNMISS 2018), with the intractable conflict in the country making return a difficult prospect. PoC considerations therefore place long-term responsibilities on intervening parties that have moral and security obligations to support dependent populations in the absence of effective domestic will and capacity. Finally, the use of force for the purpose of protecting civilians presents new challenges and opportunities for PoC through peace operations. Peacekeepers have increasingly become engaged in combat situations in the field, moving decisively away from the principle of neutrality to side with governments in fighting militia groups responsible for targeted attacks on 3 The budget for the 2018‒19 fiscal year is US$6.7 billion, a drop of 1.4 per cent from the preceding year (United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations 2018b).

Civilian protection in the context of interventions  205 civilians. The Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) is the most prominent example of a combat unit established within the larger UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), MONUSCO (Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en République Démocratique du Congo), that was created by Security Council Resolution 2098 (2013) with the explicit mandate to neutralise and disarm the M23 militia in 2013. FIB was controversial given its decision to side with the DRC government that itself is accused of committing mass atrocities, and there has been a push back within the UN on the move towards militarisation and the robust turn towards stabilisation within Security Council mandates (Andersen 2018). In breaching the principles of neutrality and impartiality, UN peacekeepers become legitimate targets in armed conflict, causing an increase in attacks on UN peacekeepers in the field. Furthermore, the difficulty for local militia in distinguishing between UN military and civilian staff increases the vulnerability of humanitarian workers inside the country at large, and further increases the vulnerability of civilian populations with whom they are in close proximity. The Santos Cruz (2017) report emphasised the risk to UN peacekeepers engaged in stabilisation missions and reinvigorated the debate over the appropriateness of such missions without adequate resourcing and support. These debates are particularly salient for troop-contributing countries that the UN relies on given the risk to their own soldiers’ lives.

THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT: PREVENTION AND PROTECTION DURING MASS ATROCITIES The genesis of R2P shares its origins in the tragic failings of the international community to prevent mass killings of civilians, or to provide protection for populations while atrocities unfolded on their watch. Whereas PoC was defined in relation to the mandates of peacekeeping missions, R2P served to provide clarification as to which responsibilities the international community at large had to populations facing mass violations within state borders given the rights to non-interference enshrined in the UN Charter (Article 2.4). In 1999, evidence of Serb targeting of Kosovar minorities triggered a NATO-led air campaign to prevent potential mass killing and ethnic cleansing. The Security Council did not approve of this intervention, nor did it condemn it – causing commentators to argue that the intervention was illegal but legitimate (Menon 2016, pp.  68‒70). In September 2000, the Canadian government established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to provide clarity to the question of legality of forceful interventions for the purpose of human protection in cases of imminent humanitarian crises. The resultant report (ICISS 2001) sought to reorient the language away from ‘right to intervene’ (or droit d’ingérence) that underscored arguments for humanitarian intervention in the 1990s, towards framing sovereignty as contingent on responsibility for protecting populations. The normative justification for the use of force for human protection by the international community was to be based on the unwillingness or inability of states to protect their own populations from mass atrocities (Evans 2008). R2P has been more controversial than PoC as a doctrine for protecting civilians, including through the use of force. R2P was included in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document (United Nations 2005, paras 138‒9) that limited the scope of R2P protections to instances of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The R2P framework accords primary responsibility for preventing mass atrocities and protecting populations to

206  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding states and extends protection to all populations within the state (para. 138). The responsibility of the international community to assist states in fulfilling their responsibility affirms the primacy of national governments for protecting their own populations. However, the World Summit Outcome Document included provisions for the international community to take collective action based on the UN Charter to protect populations from the four atrocities, including the use of force as a last resort, when national authorities ‘manifestly fail’ to do so themselves (para. 139). Over 170 states endorsed this condensed version of R2P in the World Summit Outcome Document, however many states have viewed R2P as providing a justification for powerful states to intervene militarily into the domestic jurisdiction of weaker states. Although R2P shares a common legal grounding with PoC in international humanitarian, human rights, and refugee law, R2P continues to be seen as a political concept that lacks operational guidance for consistent implementation (United Nations Security Council 2012, para. 21). In many regards, R2P has become an established international norm in that it has clarified levels of responsibility for protecting populations, first with national governments, and second the international community, founded on UN Security Council authority. Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council resolutions routinely cite R2P, which denotes an accepted rationale for the international community to remind states of their obligations to respect international human rights and humanitarian law in international forums (Jacob 2018). However, following the controversial NATO-led intervention into Libya in 2011 (that was authorised by the Security Council based on R2P in Resolution 1973 (2011)) in an operation that culminated in ousting former dictator Muammar Gaddafi and regime change, the Security Council has not invoked R2P in a resolution mandating forceful intervention to protect civilian populations. As a result of international wariness of using R2P as a tool for military intervention and regime change, much of the debate around R2P has focused on strengthening the preventive dimension of R2P. These measures include promoting structural prevention through building governance capacity, security sector reform, and transitional justice, to direct prevention through the use of non-forceful measures such as asset freezes, travel bans, and targeted sanctions (Sharma and Welsh 2015). The strong focus on prevention is a welcome contribution given the difficulties that the UN and its member states have had in instilling a ‘culture of prevention’ within the organisation to prevent the cycles of violence and conflict behind much of the deadly violence faced by civilians around the world. However, it also demonstrates the lack of appetite and political will in the current multilateral environment for taking collective action to halt imminent atrocities in response to the world’s most serious humanitarian crises. The fallout from past interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the messy civil war produced by the Libyan intervention remind the international community of the high costs of military interventions – including those with a humanitarian rationale. The resurgence of geopolitical rivalry in the past decade has also slowed down cooperation among the permanent five members of the Security Council to arrive at a consensus over the use of force for protection purposes.

Civilian protection in the context of interventions  207

CONCLUSION This chapter has traced the historical momentum within international legal, political, and ethical debates surrounding the relationship between state sovereignty and human rights. Legal developments over the past half-century served to foreground significant new human protection frameworks in the years following the end of the Cold War. The genesis of the two core doctrines pertaining to international protection for civilians in the context of violent conflict and mass atrocities ‒ PoC and R2P ‒ occurred in the turbulent years of the 1990s in which international policymakers grappled with the dilemma of responding to mass violations of human rights taking place within state borders. Both doctrines are founded in international human rights law, IHL, and international refugee law, and are supported by developments in ICL. However, while the sustained integration of PoC into the operational context of UN peacekeeping has led to the concept being largely depoliticised and legitimate, R2P remains deeply politicised and divisive in global politics – with the strongest area of consensus converging over the preventive dimension of the principle. These developments show that human rights and humanitarian concerns have significantly moved to the foreground of international politics, where in the past they had long been subordinated to state security interests. However, these protection frameworks have been implemented in many diverse and difficult contexts, and there remains overinflated expectations as to how much protection external interveners can achieve. After several decades of increasingly robust and diverse protection agendas, recent reports and political developments show signs that international organisations and states are keen to rein in the human protection agenda, and that the global appetite for forceful interventions for human protection purposes is indeed greatly reduced.

REFERENCES Andersen, L. R. (2018), ‘The HIPPO in the room: The pragmatic push-back from the UN peace bureaucracy against the militarization of UN peacekeeping’, International Affairs, 94 (2), 343–61. Baines, E. and E. Paddon (2012), ‘“This is how we survived”: Civilian agency and humanitarian protection’, Security Dialogue, 43 (3), 231‒47. Betts, A. and P. Collier (2015), ‘Help refugees help themselves: Let displaced Syrians join the labor market’, Foreign Affairs, 94 (6), 84‒92. Betts, A., G. Loescher and J. Milner (2012), UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection, 2nd edn, Abingdon: Routledge. Bhoutros-Ghali, B. (1992), ‘An agenda for peace: Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping: Report of the Secretary-General’, A/47/277–S/24111, 17 June. Crawford, E. (2015), Identifying the Enemy: Civilian Participation in Armed Conflict, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Di Razza, N. (2017), ‘Reframing the protection of civilians paradigm for UN peace operations’, New York: International Peace Institute, November, https://​www​​.ipinst​​.org/​wp​​-content/​uploads/​2017/​11/​ IPI​​-E​​-RPT​​-Reframing​​-the​​-Protection​​-of​​-Civilians​​.pdf (accessed 5 November 2018). Evans, G. (2008), The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Ferris, E. G. (2011), The Politics of Protection: The Limits of Humanitarian Action, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Foley, C. (2017), UN Peacekeeping Operations and the Protection of Civilians: Saving Succeeding Generations, New York: Cambridge University Press. Gilmour, A. (2014), ‘The future of human rights: A view from the United Nations’, Ethics and International Affairs, 28 (2), 239‒50.

208  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Harff, B. (2017), ‘Genocide and political mass murder: Definitions, theories, analyses’, in M. Stohl, M. I. Lichbach and P. N. Grabosky (eds), States and Peoples in Conflict: Transformations of Conflict Studies, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 208‒30. Howard, L. M. and A. K. Dayal (2018), ‘The use of force in UN peacekeeping’, International Organization, 72 (1), 71‒103. ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) (2001), The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) (n.d.), ‘How does law protect in war? Fundamentals of IHL’, https://​casebook​​.icrg​​.org/​law/​fundamentals-​​ ihl (accessed 6 November 2018). Jacob, C. (2017), ‘Human considerations in conflicted societies’, in N. Farrelly, A. King, M. Wesley and H. White (eds), Muddy Boots & Smart Suits: Researching Asia-Pacific Affairs, Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, pp. 40‒55. Jacob, C. (2018), ‘From norm contestation to norm implementation: Recursivity and the responsibility to protect’, Global Governance, 24 (3), 391‒409. Jose, B. and P. A. Medie (2015), ‘Understanding why and how civilians resort to self-protection in armed conflict’, International Studies Review, 17 (4), 515–35. Kinsella, H. (2011), The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Menon, R. (2016), The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, New York: Oxford University Press. Meron, T. (2000), ‘The humanization of humanitarian law’, American Journal of International Law, 94 (2), 239‒78. Minear, R. C. (2001), Victor's Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. Orchard, P. (2014), A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santos Cruz, C.A. dos (2017), ‘Improving security of United Nations peacekeepers: We need to change the way we are doing business’, Independent Report for the United Nations, 19 December, https://​ peacekeeping.​​ un​​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​improving​​_security_​​ of​​_united​​_nations​​_peacekeepers_​​ report​​ .pdf (accessed 6 November 2018). Sharma, S. K. and J. M. Welsh (eds) (2015), The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity Prevention, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sheeran, S. and C. Kent (2016), ‘Protection of civilians, responsibility to protect, and humanitarian intervention: Conceptual and normative interactions’, in H. Willmot, R. Mamiya, S. Sheeran and M. Weller (eds), Protection of Civilians, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 29‒62. Slim, H. (2016), ‘Civilians, distinction, and the compassionate view of war’, in H. Willmot, R. Mamiya, S. Sheeran and M. Weller (eds), Protection of Civilians, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 11‒28. Straus, S. (2016), Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Teitel, R. G. (2011), Humanity’s Law, New York: Oxford University Press. United Nations (1945), Charter of the United Nations, https://​www​​.un​​.org/​en/​charter-​​ united​​-nations/​ (accessed 4 July 2019). United Nations (2000), ‘Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, chaired by Lakhdar Brahimi’, A/55/305, 21 August. United Nations (2005), ‘World summit outcome document’, A/RES/60/1, 24 October. United Nations (2015), ‘Uniting our strengths for peace: Politics, partnership and people: Report of the High-Level Independent Panel on United Nations Peace Operations’, New York: United Nations, 16 June. United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (2018a), ‘United Nations peacekeeping’, https://​ peacekeeping.​​ un​​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​dpko​​-brochure​​-2018v17​​.pdf (accessed 6 November 2018). United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (2018b), ‘Note by the Secretary-General approved resources for peacekeeping operations for the period from 1 July 2018 to June 2019’, A/C.5/72/25, 5 July 2018. United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations/Department of Field Support (2015), ‘Protection of civilians: Implementing guidelines for military components of United Nations peacekeeping missions’, New York: United Nations, February. United Nations Security Council (2012), ‘Report of the Secretary-General on the protection of civilians in armed conflict’, S/2012/376, 22 May. UNMISS (United Nations Mission in South Sudan) (2018), ‘PoC update’, 19 March, https://​reliefweb​​ .int/​sites/​reliefweb.​​ int/​files/​resources/​20180319​​%20​​-​​​%20PoC​​%20Update​​.pdf (accessed 5 November 2018).

Civilian protection in the context of interventions  209 UN Refugee Agency (2018), ‘Figures at a glance’, Statistical Yearbooks, http://​www​​.unhcr​​.org/​en​​-au/​ figures​​-at​​-a​​-glance.​​ html (accessed 6 November 2018). Valentino, B. A. (2014), ‘Why we kill: The political science of political violence against civilians’, Annual Review of Political Science, 17, 89‒103. Wheeler, N. J. (2000), Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

20. The spatial dimensions of statebuilding Annika Björkdahl and Stefanie Kappler

INTRODUCTION Why do certain states form and others fail to do so? This chapter illustrates how a spatial approach to statebuilding casts light on the material and symbolic dimensions of statebuilding. It will help understand the reasons for which a state like Kosovo ended up being widely recognized, both internationally and domestically, while Republika Srpska (RS), one of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s (BiH) entities, has never completed this process despite its strong ambitions to do so. Based on our earlier work on spatial transformation and agency (Björkdahl and Kappler 2017), we suggest that statebuilding practices can be subdivided into material categories (place-making) and political-symbolic practices (space-making). Only when a newly emerged state combines place-making and space-making can it successfully act as a new state. In this chapter, we argue that, whilst Kosovo and RS have both acquired a material territory through their statebuilding ambitions, only Kosovo has managed to obtain the necessary political and symbolic resources for it to become an independent state. It has acquired recognition at the domestic and international scale, whereas RS primarily enjoys recognition at its domestic scale. This chapter does not suggest that successful statebuilding is positive or negative per se, but instead casts light on the interplay between material and symbolic spatial conditions of statebuilding that explain the different possible outcomes in the process.

STATE-MAKING AND SELF-PROCLAIMED STATES A sovereign state is not always the outcome of struggles for independent statehood and statebuilding processes. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to failed, suspended or abandoned statebuilding attempts. Like successful state formation processes, fledgling states have their origins in an idea about the state based on the right of self-determination within a territory (Buzan 1991; Visoka 2018; Lemay-Hébert 2009). The emergence of a state therefore has a symbolic (self-determination and recognition) as well as a material (territory) dimension. Sometimes, statehood is claimed based on ethnicity or nationality and performed through independence or secessionist movements’ vision of a ‘homeland’ (Billig 1995). Once territorial control and state-like institutions are achieved, de facto independence may be claimed. Since these self-proclaimed states often are born out of violent struggles, they are seen to violate the principle of territorial integrity of the established state and are thus rarely internationally recognized. The lack of recognition means that the state in the making is in limbo, outside the international system of sovereign states (Bartelson 2001; Bryant 2014; Caspersen 2012; Bliesemann de Guevara 2012). As state-making processes around the world evidence, these processes may not always produce sovereign states. Recent research identifies a number of possible outcomes of unfinished, interrupted or stalled state-making processes and suggest that even some suspended or 210

The spatial dimensions of statebuilding  211 abandoned processes may result in a state-like entity (Kuftinec 1998, p. 85; Stjepanović 2015). A variety of concepts is available to describe these entities; de facto states, para-states, statelet, unrecognized states, pseudo-states and quasi-states (cf. Kolstø 2006). The concept of ‘de facto states’ has been used by a number of scholars to characterize polities that have achieved de facto independence including territorial control and have managed to maintain this for some time. They function as a state and may be recognized as such by their population, but are unrecognized by the international community of states. Anthropologist Rebecca Bryant (2014, p. 126) points us towards ‘liminality’ as a key feature of de facto states. Liminality describes transitional periods or phases and it is often used to analyse thresholds in rites of passage towards statehood. Unrecognized de facto states are described as ‘permanently liminal’, a status which shapes their ambiguous statehood and puts them in a ‘precariously unstable situation’ (Bryant 2014, pp. 126, 138). In this, RS and Kosovo have been analysed as holding fragmented or ethnic sovereignty, and as such have failed to gain full international recognition (Fawn and Richmond 2009). Unrecognized statehood points at states that strive for international recognition and membership in the international community of states (Caspersen 2012). Recent research on international recognition by Edward Newman and Gëzim Visoka (2016) demonstrates the agency of fledgling states as well as the hybrid justifications behind the recognition of statehood and independence. In contrast, the notion of quasi-states refers to a state that only possesses external sovereignty and that can exist because of international recognition, and not because they control their territory or provide for their citizens (Jackson 1991). By critically excavating polities with internal sovereignty, referring to entities recognized by its population as a state and performing as a state, it is possible to unpack the concept of the state to reveal the multi-layered and fluid nature of its construction in order to attempt to understand under which conditions it successfully represents itself as coherent and singular (Gupta 1995). James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) as well as Aradana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (2006) explore the social processes through which state ideas are reproduced. With the rise of the nation-state, the idea of the state came to rest on the nation and the idea of national self-determination. It links the rights of nations to the notion of self-determination and the rights of states to questions of sovereignty (Lemay-Hébert 2009). Following from this idea of the nation-state, state-making is becoming a struggle to represent and emplace the nation within the borders of a sovereign state. The physical territory of the two case studies for this chapter, Kosovo and Republika Srpska, emerged as a result of the breakup of Yugoslavia in which one bigger state-level unit was broken down into smaller entities. This process can also be said to have been accompanied by the collapse of Tito’s idea of ‘brotherhood and unity’, which had served as a centripetal force in Yugoslavia. Kosovo was initially part of Serbia, but had held a degree of formal autonomy. RS emerged as a result of the ethnically segregated outcomes of the Dayton Peace Accords, which sought to gain the agreement of all warring sides by granting them their own territory. The territory of the RS was therefore established in dialogue with the international actors who had facilitated the agreement and, with it, the decentralized constitution of BiH. It was one way to use the state to end the violence and organize the country in spatial terms once the war had ended (Dahlman and Ó Tuathail 2005). This was linked to the ethnic segregation of BiH, coupled with the displacement and migration of people who now predominantly live in ethnically homogeneous areas.

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SPATIALIZING THE STATE There are different ways in which the state is spatialized and how a population comes to imagine the space as a formal state with certain spatial properties. The spatialization of the state refers here to the spatial and material forms that ideas and practices take on in statebuilding processes (cf. Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016). It is about the emplacing the idea and the practices of the state through a fusion of ideational and material properties. Contestations and conflicts over space and place may create new spatial arrangements. This results in a new way of ordering space, gives rise to new ideational and territorial landscapes and emplaces a given idea of the state (Campbell 1998; Kliot and Mansfield 1997). Thus, the state is understood to be both material and territorial as well as imagined and ideational. It is emplaced, constituted and populated by the way people experience its ideational and material forms (Björkdahl 2018). However, spatialization is a fluid process as it is constitutive of and constituted by peoples’ continued belief in the idea of the state and the actualizations of certain spatial orders such as the state. ‘“Placing” the ethnic or national community in “its” territory, physically and symbolically, is inseparable from the process of the bounding of the nation and of the making of the state’ (Kostovicova 2004, p. 270). It forges ‘the mystic bond between people and place’, that is, between nation and homeland. Such work is particularly intense during statebuilding processes, according to Smith (cited in Kostovicova 2004, p. 270). Thus, the state becomes a means of institutionalizing the link between identity and territory. Based on these insights, we suggest that a state emerges through two fundamental spatial processes: place-making on the one hand, and space-making on the other hand (cf. Björkdahl and Kappler 2017). We understand ‘place’ as a material, physical and bounded entity, a location. It represents the territory that a state needs to govern a peace within its boundaries. Space, instead refers to the ideational, symbolic counter-part of place, its relational qualities and the meanings associated with it. Indeed, a state needs a repertoire of symbols in order to function in our global system – not only a flag and an anthem, but also the recognition of its citizens and the international community. The processes of place-making and space-making are thus not the same, but have to take place jointly if a new state is to emerge.

SCALING PLACE-MAKING AND SPACE-MAKING Place-making and space-making are processes that are not limited to the scale of the nation-state, but reach across different scales of analysis. They take place in the interplay of local, national and international actors. In this context, in the bulk of work on scalar politics, most attention has been given to the social construction of spatial scales as a way of governing. A lot of this work has referred to the global capitalist economy as a sphere in which spatial hierarchies are created, with an underlying assumption that the scale of the ‘global’ is superior to that of the ‘national’ and ‘local’ (Sassen 2000, p. 226). It has been acknowledged that the establishment of scales in itself is a political process (Brenner 1998, p. 460) and ‘imbued with power’ (McCann 2003, p. 160). If we take this for granted, then we have to acknowledge that our scalar understanding of politics, that is, at what geographical level politics take place, is fundamentally instrumental. It reflects assumptions about which scale is best suited for the implementation of particular policies

The spatial dimensions of statebuilding  213 (McCann 2003, p. 163) as well as about the types of actors who have the right to reshape and transform a place (McCann 2003, p. 172). In that sense, following Swyngedouw (2000), the choice of scale, the attempt to rescale politics from one level to another, and the resistance against this process, can all be considered spatial expressions of power (pp. 67, 70). Brenner (1998, p. 473) derives the need for a fixation of scales from the divisions inherent in the global economy and associated imperial practices. This is certainly not to say that scales are natural givens in terms of where politics can best take place. Much in contrast, scalar categories are a matter of representation and thus power (Cox 1998, p. 43). When it comes to statebuilding practices, we can observe a strategic interplay between local, national and international dynamics and actors. Which scale is dominant depends on the given case as well as point in time. Different actors at various scales of governance mobilize and inhibit each other, depending on the desired outcome of their statebuilding ambitions. Geographical places to host a state can be created locally or internationally and often in the mutual support of specific domestic and international actors, as the case of Kosovo and its internationally managed statebuilding process clearly demonstrates. It is the very interplay between scales of actors and policy makers that helps us understand, in a geographical sense, how mechanisms of statebuilding are initiated, sustained and resisted at different levels of agency.

PLACE-MAKING AS A MEANS OF STATEBUILDING Place-making is the process through which a material presence is given to an idea (Björkdahl and Kappler 2017). In the context of statebuilding, this is materialized in the establishment of a given territory on which a state can emerge, that is, the materialization of the idea of the state. A place is not neutral, but reflects power. A homeland may become an arena where a dominant nation may enforce its vision, but also a ground for the contestation of that vision (Tuan 1976, p. 35). Thus, the state is understood as territorial and it is emplaced and constituted and populated by the way people experience the place. Republika Srpska Already in 1990, the wartime Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadžić revealed the emergent ethnoterritorial idea of BiH held by the Serbian ethno-nationalist party, the Serb Democrat Party (SDS). Karadžić, a renewal nationalist, was elected leader of the SDS because of his powerful oratory, and he came to be one of the founding fathers of RS. Following the refusal of Serb politicians in BiH to endorse the referendum on the independence of BiH, Karadžić spoke to the secessionist parliament set up in Pale and declared the independence of the Republic of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina in early 1992 (later renamed RS), stating that BiH no longer existed (Stjepanović 2015; Woodward 1995). In the declaration of independence of RS, Karadžić stated his aim to control the territory of Eastern Bosnia that he expected to be the material foundation of the RS. In his rhetoric, Karadžić portrayed BiH as a land of primordial violence and Serbs as perpetual victims of its different empires in order to legitimize the ideas about a Serb homeland. Consequently, in the declaration of independence, Karadžić also outlined the strategic goals for the army of RS (Toal and Dahlman 2011). These goals included ethnic cleansing and territorial control to make up the Bosnian-Serb state. Through the ethnic

214  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding cleansing of territory, the Bosnian-Serb leadership reinforced their claim to the place. The ethnic cleansing was done mainly by paramilitaries1 assisted by the JNA/VRS to secure territory for the new Bosnian-Serb state. By removing different ethnic groups from a formerly mixed location and by erasing the material and tangible heritage of ‘the other’, the past was erased and cleared the way for the new state. The RS became rooted in the place as the material legacy of the other was demolished and the territory became associated with Serb identity. Serbian flags, party symbols, portraits of Bosnian-Serb ethno-nationalist political leaders, Serb-Orthodox churches replacing mosques, all came to mark the territory as Bosnian-Serb. The place thus became ethnicized and marked as ‘belonging’ to the Bosnian-Serb community as part of their historic homeland. Bosnian-Serb ethno-nationalist political elites, their supporters as well as many Bosnian-Serbs in their everyday acted as if RS was an established, internationally recognized state. The fragile achievements of RS as a ‘state’ relied on the repeated performance of its existence, and an ‘ethnic sovereignty’ (Fawn and Richmond 2009) was established. RS was performed through controlling territory, declaring independence and establishing a constitutional framework and state institutions. RS still continues to exist in opposition to and as one part of the Dayton-sanctioned state BiH and an internal inter-entity boundary line divides the territory of BiH into two ‘sub-states’ the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with 51 per cent of the territory and the Bosnian-Serb RS, with 49 per cent of the territory (Toal and Dahlman 2011). Kosovo/a In contrast, Kosovo,2 a region which has historically had a certain degree of autonomy with respect to Yugoslavia, saw its autonomy status suspended in 1989. Ambitions for secession from Serbia resulted in the outbreak of a violent conflict in the late 1990s and the eventual creation of an independent state in 2008. With a Serb minority scattered across Kosovo and predominantly in the north, the internationally supervised statebuilding process has not been without resistance (cf. Jansen 2000). However, the Kosovar territory could fairly easily be delineated from Serbia due to Kosovo’s historical status of autonomy and therefore did not come with the same degree of displacement and restructuring as was the case at the creation of RS – a more a-historical entity. From early on, a range of international agencies, particularly American and European, were involved in the associated statebuilding processes. More specifically, Visoka and Richmond (2016) suggest that international actors strategically used statebuilding as a means to respond to the requests of Kosovo Albanians, whilst resorting to peace-building techniques to accommodate the demands of the Kosovo-Serb minority. Statebuilding in Kosovo has therefore been clearly performed and enacted at multiple scales, including domestic and international actors. Those actors may have worked in agreement as well as disagreement with each other: NATO and the United Nations Mission in Kosovo being primary forces of international involvement in Kosovo’s statebuilding process with an increasing role of the EU is contrasted with the Kosovo-Albanian Vetëvendosje! 1 This involved persons and groups such as Vojislav Šešelj and his paramilitaries, also known as Šešeljvci (Šešelj’s men), Arkan’s Tigers under the command of the Serbian criminal Željko (Arkan) Ražnatović and Beli Orlovi (White Eagles). 2 We refer to Kosovo and Kosova as ‘Kosovo’ in this chapter.

The spatial dimensions of statebuilding  215 (‘Self-determination!’) party, to quote but one example (cf. Vardari-Kesler 2012). Whilst there is a degree of agreement between all of those actors that Kosovo needs to be an internationally recognized state, Vetëvendosje! specifically has long campaigned against the foreign presence of state-builders in the country itself. The recognition of Kosovo as a physical entity is therefore shared to a large degree between those above-mentioned actors, who, however, are in competition with each other about the possible ways in which this territorial autonomy can be achieved. These varied imaginaries about what state should be built, and how, are not just clashing between local and international actors, but can be found between the different minorities of Kosovo as well (Sigona 2012). Having said that, it becomes obvious that the presence of a territory is an important element of statebuilding and, where this territory is not yet delineated, place-making consists in creating a physical territory on which a state can emerge. Different actors operating at different scales have their competing needs and demands that any given territory needs to fulfil. And whilst place-making needs an available territory, we see both in the case of RS and Kosovo a strong international tutelage process through which place is devised, divided up and allocated to different groups and agencies in positions of power.

SPACE-MAKING AS A MEANS OF STATEBUILDING We have now shown that both Kosovo and RS were successful in creating a place, a material base or territory, as a basic precondition of state formation. However, as we shall argue, only Kosovo has been able to achieve some degree of multi-scalar sovereignty in terms of domestic and international recognition through the process we term ‘space-making’. Space-making refers to the creation of a symbolic, ideational counter-part of material place-making (Björkdahl and Kappler 2017). With respect to statebuilding, it extends to the creation of sovereignty, legitimacy as well as the establishment of domestic and international recognition. It reflects the political capital that any given material entity requires in order for it to act as a state on the global stage. A key dimension of statebuilding is turning the territory under control into a sovereign state. The process of space-making represents the crafting of an idea of the state that resonates with domestic, regional and international audiences. Such crafting relies on myths, symbols, narratives and is reinforced through processes of ‘acting like a state’ (Visoka 2018). Thus, the physical place, that is, the ‘homeland’, is where the idea and the practice of statehood is grounded and then, socially and symbolically emplaced through processes of state-making. Republika Srpska Among Serb nationalists, the territory of RS has long been regarded as a state for the Serbs and claims of sovereignty were derived from the right to self-determination. Such sovereignty based on claims to ethnicity is based on a self-constructed ‘web of meaning’ of which perceptions of sovereignty is an important part (Fawn and Richmond 2009, p. 210). There was an ideological reservoir to tap into to construct the idea of a sovereign RS. The space-making process centred around the idea of a new Greater Serbian state, based on Serbdom’s ‘historical and ethnic borders’ and a romanticization of the nation (Toal and Dahlman 2011, p. 44). Furthermore, the power of state symbols, historical narratives and selective remembrance were

216  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding tools that nationalist politicians used prior to, during and after the war in the space-making process as giving meaning to the Serb ethnic homeland, the material foundation of RS. As a visual representation of RS, its flag was frequently used in building the ideational foundation of the state. Many Bosnian-Serbs have continued to fly the RS flag outside their houses, for example when celebrating the national holiday. The Dan Republike, the ‘entity day’, commemorates the establishment of RS on 9 January 1992 and is celebrated every year on that day as a sign of pride, despite the celebration of statehood being ruled as unconstitutional. The national anthem ‘Bože Pravde’ was seen by both the ethno-nationalist elite and its supporters to represent the Serbs in RS as well as in Serbia. Moreover, the national flag was a version of the Serbian flag of Serbia, but without the coat of arms displayed. Thus, the state symbols of RS connected it with Serbia proper. Epic warfare values as well as personal heroism and self-sacrifice dominated historical narratives that were dug up before the outbreak of the war in the early 1990s and legitimized the idea of the historical correctness of the Serbs’ own nation. Through narratives selectively referring to a particular memory, such as crimes committed by Croats relating to the Jasenovac concentration camp during the Second World War, the idea of the RS was also projected into the past (Stjepanović 2015). These narratives became important to ethno-nationalist politicians to ensure the ‘right’ understanding of the Serbian history, to assert Serbian national belonging. Thus, these ideas held symbolic power and impelled the statebuilding process forward. The constitution of RS reaffirmed the idea of RS as a Serb state, referring to it as the State of Serbs (Stjepanović 2015). Article 1 of the Constitution stated that Republika Srpska3 was a ‘territorially unified, indivisible and inalienable constitutional and legal entity that shall independently perform its constitutional, legislative, executive, and judicial functions’. In the narrative of ethno-nationalist Serbs, RS was the supreme territorial identity, its very name demarcating an ethnic-based homeland. To mark the territory, the names of various cities and municipalities falling within its territory were amended by Serb politicians at various levels of governance, during and after the war to demonstrate that these were Serb cities or municipalities. One example is the renaming of a town called Foča in an ethnically cleansed South-East part of BiH. After Foča’s non-Serb population was forced to flee or killed, the town was renamed ‘Srbinje’, which means ‘the place of Serbs’. This renaming captures the ethno-nationalist idea of the Serb state being built purely along ethnic lines (Mannergren Selimovic 2011; Toal and Dahlman 2011). Serb names for cities and municipalities in RS can be seen as a symbolically powerful statement reinforcing the idea of the state of RS. Thus, by utilizing the symbolic power of historical narratives of a selected past, and by naming the territory ‘RS’, a web of meaning that signifies the space-making process helped build domestic recognition for RS. The idea of RS, however, failed to gain international support. So, despite its claim for right to self-determination and despite control over a particular territory, RS failed to secure international recognition and was unable to pass the threshold of statehood and until this day it is caught in what can be described as permanent liminality. The Dayton Peace Accords legalized and legitimated RS not as a state, but as an entity emplaced on the territory claimed through large-scale ethnic cleansing (Belloni 2007). Now RS exists as one part of the Dayton-sanctioned state BiH, confirming a de facto spatialization 3 The Constitution of the Republika Srpska was formally approved on 28 February 1992. It has been amended several times since to comply with the constitutional agreement of the Dayton Peace Accord and the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The spatial dimensions of statebuilding  217 of ethno-nationalist state ideas (Toal and Dahlman 2011), yet without creating an internationally recognized state of its own. The contemporary discourse in RS is a referenda discourse and the secessionist rhetoric of Milorad Dodik, leader of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats and a key force in RS politics, who constantly threatens to hold a referendum on independence which keeps the idea of a Bosnian-Serb state alive (Toal 2013; Ker-Lindsay 2016). Kosovo/a In contrast to RS, Kosovo is now widely recognized as a state. Not only did the leaders of the independence movement make claims to a physical territory, but they also kept performing the state in different ways (cf. Jeffrey 2013). Elsewhere, we have written about the labelling and marking of the urban space of the capital city Pristina (Björkdahl and Kappler 2017, p. 56ff.). Such efforts of engraving the state in a symbolic landscape aim to give it social legitimacy by repossessing symbols and claiming heritage for political purposes (cf. Björkdahl and Kappler 2017). In Kosovo, this process was always directed at varied audiences. First, the marking primarily of urban spaces serves as a means to consolidate a distinct Kosovo-Albanian identity in the state – the featuring of sculptures dedicated to Albanian heroes such as Mother Teresa or Skanderbeg is certainly no coincidence (cf. Krasniqi 2013). Second, this serves to send a message to the Kosovar Serbs, most of whom are located north of the river Ibar, with some smaller communities still scattered across the south, about the nature and control of the ‘newborn’ state – to which there is even an explicit statue in Pristina. Third, the language of symbolism is directed at an international audience, which had to be able to grant international recognition to Kosovo for its inclusion in a world family of states (cf. Caspersen 2015). Whilst the Republic of Kosovo is not a member of the United Nations, primarily due to Russia’s opposition, it is meanwhile a member of various other international organizations, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as seeking eventual EU accession. As Jeffrey (2013) suggests, the ways in which states are performed by their managers embeds power relations of both control and resistance and relies on scripting and improvisation alike. For instance, the resourcefulness that Pristina’s city planners have shown to reinvent and reframe the state’s heritage is an indication of a performative practice vis-à-vis its different audiences. Such processes certainly face resistance, which a glance to the Kosovo-Serb-dominated north of Mitrovica shows with its own use of cultural symbolism, memorials and political performance. Clearly, the spatial markers of statehood lend themselves not only to the cementation of power structures, but equally to possibilities of challenging those.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION What our discussion of the spatial dimension of statebuilding as well as our two chosen case studies show is that the processes through which states emerge are firmly rooted in both material and symbolic dimensions. Statebuilding is, by its very nature, a spatializing operation. Its ever-changing dynamics can therefore be understood in the transformation of place (territory) into space (symbolism) and vice versa. Every state needs a material presence as much as the necessary performances and symbolic acts that reinforce its legitimacy and existence. Coupled

218  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding together, these processes serve to generate the recognition that they need, domestically, regionally and globally. Space-making and place-making must therefore not be viewed in isolation, but as two connected processes which emerging states engage in to manifest their existence and identity in material and ideational terms. None works without the other. In that, state recognition has to be seen as multi-scalar, operating at various levels of society, government and international community. The importance of the global and the domestic scale, respectively, vary from case to case. Yet, there are always multiple processes of place-making and space-making at work at different scales. They may operate in mutual concordance, or in friction with each other. They might reinforce or oppose each other, and actors striving to build a state – at whichever scale they may be operating – have to work with actors at different scales in order to achieve their goal. However, this is not to say that once statehood has been achieved, it is a completed process. Spatially and temporally, statehood has to be performed and reperformed as it is always at risk of being undone or challenged. To this day, Kosovo is seeking universal recognition of its status as much as RS is being denied it by the majority of states. Statebuilding, in spatial terms, is the recognition of statehood engraved in the physical and ideational landscapes of power and control. As much as it can be granted and promoted, it can be resisted and challenged – by international, regional or local actors. It is only when a group asserts control over both the territory and the symbolism of a state – its place and space – that it stands a chance of being recognized as such at its different scales of existence.

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The spatial dimensions of statebuilding  219 Ferguson, J. and A. Gupta (2002), ‘Spatializing states: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality’, American Ethnologist, 29 (4), 981‒1002. Gupta, A. (1995), ‘Blurred boundaries: The discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state’, American Ethnologist, 22 (2), 375–402. Jackson, R. (1991), Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jansen, S. (2000), ‘Victims, underdogs and rebels: Discursive practices of resistance in Serbian protest’, Critique of Anthropology, 20 (4), 393‒419. Jeffrey, A. (2013), The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ker-Lindsay, J. (2016), ‘The hollow threat of secession in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Legal and political impediments to a unilateral declaration of independence by Republika Srpska’, LSE Papers on South Eastern Europe, London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Kliot, N. and Y. Mansfield (1997), ‘The political landscape of partition: The case of Cyprus’, Political Geography, 16 (6), 495–521. Kolstø, P. (2006), ‘The sustainability and future of unrecognized quasi-states’, Journal of Peace Research, 43 (6), 723–40. Kostovicova, D. (2004), ‘Republika Srpska and its boundaries in Bosnian Serb geographical narratives in the post-Dayton period’, Space and Polity, 8 (3), 267–87. Krasniqi, G. (2013), ‘State borders, symbolic boundaries and contested geographical space: Citizenship struggles in Kosovo’, Transitions, 52 (2), 29‒51. Kuftinec, S. (1998), ‘Walking through a ghost town: Cultural hauntologie in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Mostar: A performance review’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 18 (2), 81‒95. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2009), ‘State-building without nation-building? Legitimacy, state failure and the limits of the institutionalists approach’, Journal of Intervention and State-Building, 3 (1), 21‒45. Mannergren Selimovic, J. (2011), ‘Remembering and forgetting after war. Narratives of truth, justice and reconciliation in a Bosnian town’, doctoral dissertation, Gothenburg University. McCann, E. J. (2003), ‘Framing space and time in the city: Urban policy and the politics of spatial and temporal scale’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 25 (2), 159‒78. Newman, E. and G. Visoka (2016), ‘The foreign policy of state recognition: Kosovo’s diplomatic strategy to join international society’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 14 (3), 367–87. Sassen, S. (2000), ‘Spatialities and temporalities of the global: Elements for a theorization’, Public Culture, 12 (1), 215‒32. Sharma, A. and A. Gupta (2006), ‘Introduction: Rethinking theories of the state in an age of globalization’, in A. Sharma and A. Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State. A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1‒42. Sigona, N. (2012), ‘Between competing imaginaries of statehood: Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian (RAE) leadership in newly independent Kosovo’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (8), 1213‒32. Stjepanović, D. (2015), ‘Territoriality and citizenship: Membership and sub-state polities in post-Yugoslav space’, Europe-Asia Studies, 67 (7), 1030–55. Swyngedouw, E. (2000), ‘Authoritarian governance, power, and the politics of rescaling’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18, 63‒76. Toal, G. (2013), ‘Republika Srpska will have a referendum: The rhetorical politics of Milorad Dodik’, Nationalities Papers, 41 (1), 166‒204. Toal, G. and C. Dahlman (2011), Bosnia Remade, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuan, Y. (1976), ‘Geopiety: A theme in man’s attachment to nature and place’, in D. Loewenthal and M. J. Bowden (eds), Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 11–39. Vardari-Kesler, A. (2012), ‘Politics of protest in supervised statehood: Co-shared governance and erosion of citizenship: The case-study of the Vetevendosje! Movement in Kosovo’, Southeastern Europe, 36 (2), 149‒77. Visoka, G. (2018), Acting Like a State: Kosovo and the Everyday Making of Statehood, Abingdon: Routledge. Visoka, G. and O. Richmond (2016), ‘After liberal peace? From failed state-building to an emancipatory peace in Kosovo’, International Studies Perspectives, 18 (1), 110–29. Woodward, S. (1995), The Balkan Tragedy. Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC: The Brookings Insitution.

21. The temporal dimension in the study of interventions Róisín Read and Roger Mac Ginty

INTRODUCTION This chapter has three ambitions. The first is to explore the notion of temporality as it relates to international relations and to its role as a framing and ordering device that often reflects wider issues of power and culture. The second is to unpack the making of a crisis and especially how the temporal dimension is deployed in identifying situations as acute, chronic and in need of intervention. The third ambition of the chapter is to consider the issue of exit strategies in relation to intervention and how the urgency for an exit is linked to the politics of the intervening party rather than the situation in the intervened state. The consideration of exit strategies will examine the complexity of exit timelines and the criteria that are used.

TEMPORALITY AND FRAMING IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Though time and questions of temporal framing have become increasingly popular in international relations in recent years, analyses of the politics of time continue to be under-theorised and disconnected from each other (Hom 2018a). Time is often presented as an abstract concept, divorced from specific contexts in which understandings of time become meaningful. Terms like ‘post-conflict’, ‘conflict prevention’ and ‘after war’ are often used in an un-reflective manner. They carry with them a set of assumptions about time, and particularly the idea that there can be neat phases of a conflict like pre and post-conflict. In recent years, those studying interventions and statebuilding have increasingly argued that we need to pay more attention to the way narratives of peace, conflict and intervention rely on different time framings (for example see, McLeod 2013; Hom 2016; Read and Mac Ginty 2017; Kappler 2018). If, then, we understand temporality ‘as a structuring narrative’ – in which ‘we make sense of the past and anticipate the future within our specific cultural and political contexts; we put the “events” and “non-events” of life together in order to gain insight and understanding’ (Read and Mac Ginty 2017, p. 151) – what are the implications of this for how we think about temporality in intervention and statebuilding? Importantly, these narrative structures are culturally inflected. Some actors, especially those in the Global North and with framing power, are able to impose their temporal understanding on others. Conflicts are the site of numerous contestations, for example, over territory, material wealth, identity, political legitimacy and identity. One site of contestation relates to time: who has the power to declare that a civil war has begun or ended, or that the time is right for elections? There has been some scholarly work on timing and sequencing in relation to peace processes, some of it following on from earlier work on foreign policy analysis and decision-making 220

The temporal dimension in the study of interventions  221 (Allison 1971). Work on peace processes has concentrated on identifying ‘ripe moments’ or when it might be propitious for parties to a conflict to engage in conciliatory actions (Zartman 2001). This has sparked debate on whether it is appropriate to identify ‘moments’ or whether it is more prudent to envisage peacemaking as a process that requires long-term groundwork rather than tactical intervention at a specific time period in a peace process (Lederach 2008). These debates were largely uninterested in conceptual questions about the meanings and purpose of time. Early analyses of time in relation to conflict and international relations have focused on questions of trauma, memory and memorialisation (for example, Edkins 2006; Ferreira and Marcelino 2011) or challenged the dominance of particular (linear) notions of time and their political impacts (for example, Roche 2003; Hutchings 2008; Hom 2010, 2018a). In recent years, this field has bloomed, with a wide range of analyses which take on different facets of how time is understood and have highlighted, through a variety of different case studies, what the implications of this are (for example, Hom 2016: Brun 2016; Hom et al. 2016). In the peacebuilding literature, the focus has been on time framing and its relationship to narratives. For example, gender security (McLeod 2013) and the legitimation of intervention through narratives of ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness’ in Bosnia (Kappler 2018). Two other fields of literature in international relations have also made time a central concern: security studies and crisis or disaster management. Within these literatures the focus is on how our understanding of the future impacts on how the present is experienced and the central role that crisis and uncertainty play in determining the politics that get enacted (for example, Aradau and van Munster 2011; Kleist and Jansen 2016; Hu 2017). In particular, there is a focus on the cyclical temporality of crises as contrasted with more linear temporalities of progress which have previously dominated international politics (Jordheim and Wigen 2018). Under the cyclical temporality of crisis, global politics becomes an exercise of managing ever present and multiplying catastrophes (Chakrabarty 2018). Under this mode of thinking, there may be a temptation among some analysts to ‘write off’ conflict areas and regions as permanently ‘war-torn’. Such temporal framing can be manipulated in various ways. For example, a region can be framed as being permanently fragile and therefore in need of permanent intervention. This is the rationale behind the ten-year-old United States Africa Command (Africom), or a long-term military presence in the region (USAFRICOM 2019). The implications of this for international interventions in conflict will be explored in the next section.

CRISIS AS A MOMENT OF OPPORTUNITY In this section, we will focus on how ‘crisis’ is produced as a moment of opportunity, which serves both to legitimate international intervention (see also Kappler 2018) and to, apparently, offer a way out of entrenched conflict and mismanagement. It will argue that crisis as a temporal framing is important for three main reasons. First, as others have explored, the ‘emergency imaginary’ (Calhoun 2010, p. 30) has become a dominant interpretive schema for making sense of global events. Second, it will highlight how crises serve as entry points, which legitimate international intervention. It will suggest that crises have been discursively framed as moments of opportunity for international interveners to transform otherwise hopeless, intractable situations. Third, the section will show how the logic of crisis as ‘moments of opportunity’ is perpetually re-created, leading instead to crisis as a suspended state, a perpetual present.

222  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding A Global ‘Crisis Imaginary’? As a temporal framing, crisis has a number of important implications for how we make sense of events in the world. As Andrew Hom (2018b, p. 72) points out, ‘[t]iming standards help us integrate and coordinate otherwise discordant phenomena into an intelligible whole supporting orientation, direction and control’. Unlike other dominant timing standards, such as clock time, crisis is not regular or consistent, but in some ways, it is predictable. As an ordering device, the notion of the ‘crisis’ brings with it a logic or mode of thinking that demands that societies and governments are prepared for the ‘next crisis’. This is particularly the case for risk averse, economically interdependent, and technologically advanced societies and governments. Planning for the next crisis becomes mainstreamed and ‘common sense’ (Hom 2018b, p. 71). The ‘crises’ which form the increments/measurements of the timing standard take different forms, including: ‘the next attack’ (Aradau and van Munster 2012; Stockdale 2016); the codes of early warning systems; the ‘synthetic history’ (Aradau and van Munster 2011, p. 22) of scenario and contingency planning; market volatility; disease surveillance; and various potential ‘shocks’ (climate, environmental, economic, conflict, etc.). Through the framing of crisis, these disparate events and potential events produce an ordering logic: ‘contemporary life is haunted by the spectre of a disastrous unknown that is paradoxically known to be lurking in the future’s unknowable depths’ (Stockdale 2016, p. 178). Crisis, then, as a timing standard, offers us a view of the future that is defined by catastrophic events; we do not know what form the next crisis will take – or even when it will happen – but we do know that it will happen. The ever-present threat of crisis is Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknown’ (Rumsfeld 2002). In this respect, crisis is predictable, if only in the sense that we are in a constant planning cycle for the next crisis event (Hu 2017, p. 107). The ascendancy of crisis as a timing standard is key to thinking about intervention. Calhoun (2010) and others (see Fassin and Pandolfi 2010) see this as a post-Cold War shift, a product of the rise of humanitarian government (Fassin 2012), while those writing within a security studies tradition point to the events of 9/11 as precipitating the change (see Aradau and van Munster 2011). However, a consequence of both framings is the rise of resilience as the main response to crisis as it ‘presupposes a disastrous world, a world of constant exposure to disaster or catastrophe. This is a permanent condition requiring constant global disaster management as well as intervention’ (Stilhoff Sörensen and Söderbaum 2012, p. 13). In this way, crisis serves as a legitimating framing for intervention through ‘actionism’: that actors ‘will almost always decide to act or to undertake rather than not to act or not to undertake’ (Descartes quoted in Hannah 2010, p. 399). Crisis as an Entry Point? In situations of intervention in conflict, the actors deciding to act are increasingly non-governmental organisations. This section will explore how both the crisis and the need to act are produced by looking at the case of Oxfam in South Sudan1 during the 2005‒13 peace agreement transition period up to the outbreak of conflict in December 2013. Oxfam has been selected as an example not because they were particularly special in the ways they represented 1 At the time, this region was known as southern Sudan, as this was prior to independence in 2011, but for clarity I will refer to South Sudan throughout.

The temporal dimension in the study of interventions  223 South Sudan during this time, but because they were typical of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at the time. Oxfam classified South Sudan as a ‘fragile, conflict-affected context’2 (Hughes 2012; Oxfam 2011b, 2012c). This classification indicated that Oxfam sees crisis as an ever-present possibility as: ‘[b]y their nature, conflict and fragile contexts are unpredictable, insecure and subject to rapid social, political and economic change’ (Oxfam 2012c, p. 1). These are the ‘shocks’, to which we have already been introduced. Oxfam’s 2012 Strategic Steer document tells us that ‘shocks’ and this kind of volatility make people vulnerable to crises (Oxfam 2012b, p. 3). Emergency3 response is a special category of Oxfam’s work, as their website stated; ‘[w]hen an emergency hits, Oxfam is there’ (Oxfam 2012a). It is revealing that, not only does emergency require a response, but it requires a response from Oxfam. This is made clear in Oxfam’s documents on South Sudan; the January 2010 briefing document stated that ‘[f]ailing to act is not an option’ (Oxfam International 2010, p. 27), echoing the ‘actionism’ (Hannah 2010) discussed earlier. If we look at the history of Oxfam in Sudan and South Sudan, we can see that multiple crises have functioned as entry points, and opportunities for the expansion of Oxfam’s work. The timeline of Oxfam’s work in the Sudans shows us that in 1983, Oxfam first entered the country to ‘provide emergency water and medical aid to internally displaced people and villages in Equatoria’ (Oxfam 2009). Previously the system had been to provide grants to partner organisations from offices based in the UK or Nairobi, but due to the crisis created by the outbreak of the second period of civil war, the first in-country office was opened (Oxfam 2009). New offices and projects were set up between 1984–85 when ‘[d]evastating famine hit Sudan’ (Oxfam 2009). Moments of crisis punctuate the story of Oxfam’s aid to the Sudans, from the first instance in 1983 to the ‘world’s worst humanitarian crisis’ in Bahr el Ghazal in 1998, to the Darfur crisis in 2003‒04 (Oxfam 2009), to the most recent post-2013 period of conflict. What is interesting about these moments of crisis is that, for Oxfam, they are also moments of opportunity. Oxfam views crises as dangerous but also as moments for potential change. Oxfam’s corporate documents note the need to create and protect a ‘moment for change’ (Oxfam 2010, p. 3). In Oxfam’s ongoing conversations about theories of change (for example see Krznaric 2007), one element that appears repeatedly is the idea of change emerging from crisis. This is a dynamic idea of change occurring through ‘shocks, tipping points and breakthroughs’ (Green 2011). In the ‘Within and without the state’ programme report it is suggested that Oxfam now has an understanding of change inspired by complexity thinking ‘that focuses on a more emergent theory of change’ (Hughes 2012, p. 17). In the Oxfam-published book also, From Poverty to Power (Green 2008), this idea is explored further. In it the idea of ‘creative destruction’ is raised to highlight the potential that moments of crisis offer for transformation (Green 2008, p. 21). The term ‘creative destruction’ originates in economics. It was coined by Schumpeter to refer to ‘the same process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’ (Schumpeter 1942, p. 82, emphasis in original). In this, we can again see evolutionary, complexity-based ideas of change as an emergent property of complex 2 The ‘Within and Without the State’ project works to strengthen civil society and encourage accountable governance in conflict-affected and fragile contexts (Oxfam 2012a, 2012b, 2012c). 3 In their literature Oxfam uses the terms ‘emergency’ and ‘crisis’ interchangeably.

224  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding systems. In economics, it has become linked to the necessarily4 destructive growth cycle of the capitalist system. What does it mean, then, that this term is being used to talk about crisis more generally? Barnett argues that aid agencies have treated ‘moments of destruction as opportunities for political change’ (Barnett 2011, p. 5) and, looking at Oxfam in South Sudan we can see this. Oxfam argues that in fragile states, with high levels of risk, ‘there is always the potential to bring about positive change and we have the ability to balance and respond to it’ (Oxfam 2011a, p. 4). We can again see that, although these events are potentially dangerous, Oxfam also sees these as offering promise. Oxfam notes that ‘[v]olatility can also create opportunities for discontinuous, abrupt change’ and that these ‘[e]xtreme events can also galvanise unprecedented social action nationally, and we need to work hard to not lose the moment for change’ (Oxfam 2012b, p. 3). From this we can see how these events are useful to Oxfam, as opportunities for the organisation to affect change on a level which it would otherwise not be able to achieve. For Oxfam, sometimes the unpredictable environment of crisis is actually useful as ‘it is during these moments that organisations and individuals have the opportunity to make “the impossible” possible’ (Angus 2011, p. 7). Crisis as Perpetual Present? If, then, crisis is functional for NGOs, and others seeking to bring about change through intervention, what are the implications of their use of crisis? There seems to be a paradox developing in which crisis is a moment of opportunity for change but crisis management seeks to preserve a status quo. Within this paradox crises become simultaneously both acute and chronic due to the contradictory logic at the heart of crisis temporality and responses to crisis. As Hu (2017, p. 103) puts it: The important temporality of action within disaster apparatus is not a bold leap into a future different from the present and the past, but the manic stretching out of a contemporary state of affairs from one moment to the next. The global disaster management complex pressures this new description, ruling out others – action in the negative, turned to obstruct the arrival of the very future it predicts.

We see this echoed in Cathrine Brun’s analysis of peoples’ experiences of humanitarian crisis in refugee camps in Jordan; ‘[p]eople feel stuck when biographical life, transcendence and consequently the future are not available: they feel trapped in a never ending presence’ (Brun 2016, p. 400). This leads to a protracted crisis situation in which ‘crisis’ serves to legitimate seemingly ever increasing intervention in the name of urgency and ‘actionism’ but, far from bringing the radical transformative opportunity hoped for by international intervenors, it instead leads to perpetual crisis management. Dominant contemporary crisis management ‘stimulates neither aspirations to gradual improvements nor revolutionary transcendence of the given, but instead motivates a logically endless cycle of anticipation and pre-emption, aimed to postpone future whose contingency is taken for an urgent problem’ (Hu 2017, p. 98). In this context, the question of exit strategies becomes a vital matter to consider.

4 It is seen as ‘necessarily’ destructive as, in order for a new cycle to begin, the old systems must first be destroyed to make room for the new system to emerge.

The temporal dimension in the study of interventions  225

TEMPORALITY AND EXIT STRATEGIES The final substantive section of this chapter interrogates the notion of an ‘exit strategy’ as a way to further unpack our thinking about time in relation to international intervention. The term ‘exit strategy’, like other terms that we use to describe conflict – such as ‘pre-war’ or ‘post-conflict’, are based on an assumption of a linear conflict with discrete time-markers that delineate one conflict phase from another. In such a view, conflict might be conceived of as extending along a continuum of pre-conflict tension, outright conflict, and post-conflict reconstruction – with various other time-markers in between. In this conflict imaginary, international actors might become involved to monitor a ceasefire, oversee post-war reconstruction, or implement a peace accord. When these tasks were completed, the international actors would then exit. The abovementioned imaginary is worth deconstructing, especially its reliance on the notion of conflicts having distinct phases and endpoints. While it is possible to identify temporal moments in a conflict – such as the date of an invasion or ceasefire – a more sociological understanding of conflict helps us transcend the notion of conflict as a series of events. In this sociological view, conflicts can be seen as more than power plays by political and military elites (Mac Ginty 2015). Certainly such actors often have a significant role to play. But populations, societies and cultures are also often mobilised as part of conflict. Conflicts rely on long-standing cultural tropes that can be deeply embedded in how society characterises itself and others. Anti-semitism in Germany, for example, had a long history that predated the rise of the Nazi Party (Goldhagen 1996). Given this, and the long and multi-faceted mobilisation of the German people in the 1930s, can we really say that the Second World War began in Europe in 1939? And, if we then look at the apparent end of the Second World War in 1945, can we really say that the conflict ended then? Violent conflicts have a long afterlife in terms of displacement, grief, the time required for reconstruction, and the bedding down of new political, military and economic dispensations. It is reasonable to say that the lives of millions of people currently alive have been shaped by a war that supposedly ended decades before they were born. If we move our gaze towards contemporary conflicts, then we can see that international intervening actors often place immense emphasis on an exit strategy or an endpoint to their own intervention. An international intervention may be justified as an intervention to assist a society or state transition towards a particular outcome. In the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, these outcomes were often narrated in terms of democracy, the protection of human rights, an opening up of an economy, and the removal of regimes that were injurious to their own populations. In the aftermath of the costly Iraq and Afghanistan interventions, such apparently emancipatory outcomes have largely been replaced by outcomes that employ the language of security and stabilisation (Dennys 2014). Regardless of the outcome, however, international actors often narrate and justify their intervention as temporary and scheduled to end when national actors have enough capacity to organise their own politics, economics and society in a way that is deemed acceptable by international actors. Aside from the paternalism of such a worldview, there is a clearly a linear logic at work. In a sense, international actors work towards their own redundancy. By imparting good governance capabilities, mentoring military and police forces, and by binding the new political dispensation to a series of internationally recognised protocols, then – in theory – the reason for the intervention will have dissipated.

226  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding The notion of exit requires interrogation, however. The extensive and profound nature of international intervention means that we can question the finality of the notion of exit. The idea of an exit suggests a terminal point in time, with the international intervention ending. The complexity of intervention, however, means that international interventions are likely to have a significant afterlife that is marbled through many aspects of the economy, polity and society. An extended example of Afghanistan will help make this case. In Afghanistan, international troop numbers have decreased significantly and considerable effort has been invested in an ‘Afghanistan-isation’ of security (Gibbons-Neff and Mashal 2018). The notion of an exit is popular among many in Afghanistan who feel that international actors are – variously – offensive, heavy-handed, culturally inappropriate, and a symbol of Afghan incapacity. The idea of an exit is also popular in many political narratives in the Global North where the Blair–Bush adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan was costly in terms of blood and treasure and seemed to bring few rewards. The ‘job done’ message plays well with western publics, and at the early stage of the Afghan regime change, political leaders made clear that the intervention was a temporary exercise to ‘fix’ a ‘broken’ country. But the complex nature of intervention means that it is difficult to conceive of a definitive exit (Lieven 2019). The drawdown of international military forces from Afghanistan may be significant in terms of numbers, but the legacy of NATO capacity-building will be considerable in terms of the weapons systems and tactics used by the Afghan National Army and the purchase and maintenance contracts for the weapons. The size and orientation of the Afghan security forces is largely the result of funding and direction from the Global North. Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency and others have given huge amounts of arms to anti-Taliban militias (Raghavan 2015), thus further securitising swathes of Afghanistan and making localised conflicts particularly deadly. Moreover, there is a danger of confusing a withdrawal of combat troops with an exit. Despite the withdrawal of troops, airstrikes and the actions of relatively small numbers of special operations troops mean that Afghanistan has experienced extremely high levels of civilian casualties. This is from an intervention that is supposedly in its end phase. Indeed, just as Afghan peace talks were underway in July 2019, a NATO airstrike killed seven people, six of them children – illustrating the difficulty of ‘clean breaks’ (Gannon 2019). Other military legacies will continue beyond any ‘exit’. For example, NATO forces relied on Afghan interpreters. When their term of employment was completed, many of these interpreters found themselves in danger as the Taliban and others regarded them as collaborators with an invading force. Some of these interpreters have been able to move to the UK, US and other countries. For them the notion of a conflict exit is illusory; it has become permanent migration (UK Parliament Defence Committee 2018). The most obvious aftermath of conflict that leads us to question the notion of ‘exit’ is conflict-related death and injury. Survivors living with grief, children not born because potential parents have been killed, and those persisting with injury mean that conflict does not end. Instead, it evolves. For example, many NATO soldiers – and doubtless Afghan and Taliban forces – have suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In some cases, PTSD has contributed to suicide (Finley 2011). Can we call such suicides war deaths if that conflict is deemed to be over? Beyond the military aspect of intervention, it is important to note the role that external actors have had in shaping the post-Taliban state. The form of government is truly a hybrid (Mac Ginty 2011, pp. 91‒114). Afghanistan is a democratic republic with a parliament, president, elections and other trappings that conform to the ideal of state-ness. Yet significant aspects of the Afghan polity draw on indigenous modes of thinking and procedure. Such hybrid polit-

The temporal dimension in the study of interventions  227 ical orders, which will continue to evolve over time, again suggest that we must be prudent in regarding conflicts as having an endpoint. They also suggest that we should be cautious in relation to the notion of an exit ‘strategy’. While governments and military planners can develop strategies, there is a good chance that complex conflict situations may thwart the best-laid plans. A final point to be made in relation to the notion of an ‘exit’ is that publics outside of the intervention site can believe that a conflict is over (or largely over). In the United Kingdom, at any rate, public awareness of the continuing violence in Afghanistan can be said to be low. The continuing conflict gets little media coverage and does not appear prominently on lists of issues that concern voters. A June 2018 Ipsos-MORI poll, for example, found that the amalgamated category of ‘defence, foreign affairs, terrorism’ was the ninth most pressing issue affecting UK respondents (Ipsos-MORI 2018). When significant numbers of UK troops served in Afghanistan, and especially when those troops were sustaining casualties, then the issue did draw public attention. A troop drawdown, compassion fatigue (Moeller 1999), and the issue agenda filling with other concerns, means that for many in the British public the conflict in Afghanistan can be said to be ‘over’. Again, this reinforces the point that temporal understandings of conflict are a construction and, as such, are subject to multiple pressures.

CONCLUSIONS The chief point of this chapter is to emphasise that time is fungible. It is a social construct and an imaginary rather than a definite unit established by somehow immutable laws of physics. A crucial aspect in the construction of the time imaginary is the question of power. Specifically, what actors have the power to construct an imaginary of time and impose it on others or have it willingly accepted by others? Clearly some actors have more power than others and are able to mobilise material, cultural and social resources to make their version of time matter more than other versions of time. For example, an international intervening actor may be able to mount significant power to label a particular moment as ‘ripe’ for intervention, exit or some other policy. This labelling may be widely broadcast and accepted. When US President George W. Bush stood in front of the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, no rival voices were able to muster similar bandwidth (Lucey 2018). In a sense, the material power of the United States, together with significant allied social and cultural power, was able to make time – or, at least, a widely accepted version of time. The Iraqi example, however, reminds us that material power, even if allied with considerable social and cultural power, is unlikely to have a monopoly on time-making. Other types of power were also in existence, especially in Iraq itself, and these provide a useful guide to how we should understand time in relation to international intervention. While the United States and its allies were busy proclaiming that the mission was accomplished, and thus that military intervention could give way to other – less kinetic – forms of intervention, Iraqi actors had other ideas. For them, many of the time-markers that meant something to the US military and political elite (such as, the electoral cycle and the need to satisfy the US news media’s time cycle) meant little. Instead, and doubtless influenced by the hard years of living through Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the attendant wars and sanctions, a different set of priorities were at work. These priorities, and the socio-cultural, economic and political factors that influenced them, did not rely as heavily on material power. Thus many Iraqis waited in the

228  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding long grass. More precisely, they realised that it would be prudent to wait for the intervening powers to tire. Many realised that they could not resist the intervening force (although many others did just that and/or engaged in internecine violence) and waited. This logic of waiting – of taking time to pause before acting – is somewhat different from much of the logic at work from the intervening parties. The temporality of intervention depended on time-markers such as ultimatums and data on the security and economic situation (Anderson 2017). The localised sociological understandings of time were based largely on immaterial and anecdotal factors that very probably were relatable to observations on everyday life. The chief point of this chapter is to question definitive notions of time in relation to international intervention. Instead, there are different versions of time that are, in turn, shaped by different versions of power. Analyses of intervention that remain wedded to linear and political versions of time that are imposed by intervening parties seem incomplete.

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The temporal dimension in the study of interventions  229 Green, D. (2008), From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World, Oxford: Oxfam International. Green, D. (2011), ‘How can theories of change help in working with the private sector?’, Oxfam Blog, 13 July, https://​oxfamblogs​​.org/​fp2p/​how​​-can​​-theories​​-of​​-change-​​ help​​-in​​-working​​-with​​-the​​-private​​ -sector/​(accessed 10 July 2019). Hannah, M. G. (2010), ‘(Mis)adventures in Rumsfeld Space’, GeoJournal, 75, 397–406. Hom, A. (2010), ‘Hegemonic metronome: The ascendancy of Western standard time’, Review of International Studies, 36 (4), 1145–70. Hom, A. (2016), ‘Angst springs eternal: Dangerous times and the dangers of timing the “Arab Spring”’, Security Dialogue, 47 (2), 165–83. Hom, A. (2018a), ‘Silent order: The temporal turn in critical international relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 46 (3), 303–30. Hom, A. R. (2018b), ‘Timing is everything: Toward a better understanding of time and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 62 (1), 69–79. Hom, A., C. Mcintosh, A. Mckay and L. Stockdale (eds) (2016), Time, Temporality and Global Politics, Bristol: E-IR Publishing. Hu, C. (2017), ‘“A jungle that is continually encroaching”: The time of disaster management’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (1), 96–113. Hughes, L. (2012), ‘Within and without the state: Strengthening civil society in conflict-affected and fragile settings: A summary of current thinking and practice’, Oxfam research report, Oxford: Oxfam. Hutchings, K. (2008), Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ipsos-MORI (2018), ‘Ipsos MORI Issues Index June 2018’, 28 June, https://​ www​​ .slideshare​​ .net/​ IpsosMORI/​ipsos​​-mori​​-issues​​-index​​-june​​-2018 (accessed 10 July 2019). Jordheim, H. and E. Wigen (2018), ‘Conceptual synchronisation: From progress to crisis’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 46 (3), 421–39. Kappler, S. (2018), ‘The legitimisation of post-conflict intervention: Narrative frames of backwardness and progress’, Political Geography, 66, 130–38. Kleist, N. and S. Jansen (2016), ‘Introduction: Hope over time – Crisis, immobility and future-making’, History and Anthropology, 27 (4), 373–92. Krznaric, R. (2007), ‘How change happens: Interdisciplinary perspectives for human development’, Oxfam Research Report, Oxford: Oxfam. Lederach, J. P. (2008), ‘Cultivating peace: A practitioner’s view of deadly conflict’, in J. Darby and R. Mac Ginty (eds), Contemporary Peacemaking: Conflict, Peace Processes and Post-War Reconstruction, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 36–44. Lieven, A. (2019), ‘Afghanistan’, in A. Ozerdem and R. Mac Ginty (eds), Comparing Peace Processes, London: Routledge, pp. 37‒55. Lucey, C. (2018), ‘Bush was haunted by his own “mission accomplished”’, Boston Globe, 14 April. Mac Ginty, R. (2011), International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Mac Ginty, R. (2015), ‘Political versus sociological time: The fraught world of timelines and deadlines’, CRPD Working paper 23, Leuven: Centre for Research on Peace and Development, University of Leuven, https://​soc​​.kuleuven.​​ be/​crpd/​files/​working​​-papers/​working​​-paper​​-mac​​-ginty​​.pdf (accessed 10 July 2019). McLeod, L. (2013), ‘Back to the future: Temporality and gender security narratives in Serbia’, Security Dialogue, 44 (2), 165–81. Moeller, S. (1999), Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sells Disease, Famine, War and Death, New York: Routledge. Oxfam (2009), ‘Oxfam in Sudan timeline’, http://​www​​.oxfam​​.org​​.uk/​oxfam​​_in​​_action/​where​​_we​​_work/​ sudan/​timeline/​html (accessed 14 February 2011). Oxfam (2010), ‘Strategic steer 2011/12-2013/14’, http://​www​​.oxfam​​.org​​.uk/​what​​-we​​-do/​about​​-us/​plans​​ -reports​​-and​​-policies/​plans​​-reports​​-and​​-policies-​​ archive (accessed 30 November 2018). Oxfam (2011a), ‘Programming in fragile and conflict-affected countries: Programme policy guidelines’, Oxford: Oxfam. Oxfam (2011b), ‘Within and without the state: Effective programming in conflict and fragile contexts’, Oxford: Oxfam. Oxfam (2012a), ‘Emergency response’, http://​www​​.oxfam​​.org​​.uk/​what​​-we​​-do/​emergency-​​ response (accessed 12 December 2012). Oxfam (2012b), ‘Oxfam strategic steer, 2012/13‒2014/15’, http://​www​​.oxfam​​.org​​.uk/​what​​-we​​-do/​about​​ -us/​plans​​-reports​​-and​​-policies/​plans​​-reports​​-and​​-policies-​​ archive (accessed 30 November 2018).

230  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Oxfam (2012c), ‘Within and without the state: Effective programming in conflict and fragile contexts’, Oxford: Oxfam. Oxfam International (2010), ‘Rescuing the peace in southern Sudan’, joint NGO briefing paper, Oxford: Oxfam International. Raghavan, S. (2015), ‘CIA runs shadow war with Afghan militia implicated in civilian killings’, Washington Post, 3 December. Read, R. and R. Mac Ginty (2017), ‘The temporal dimension in accounts of violent conflict: A case study from Darfur’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (2), 147–65. Roche, M. (2003), ‘Mega-events, time and modernity: On time structures in global society’, Time and Society, 12 (1), 99–126. Rumsfeld, D. (2002), ‘News transcript’, Department of Defense news briefing, 11 January, http://​archive​​ .defense​​.gov/​Transcripts/​Transcript.​​ aspx​​?TranscriptID​​=​​2636 (accessed 30 November 2018). Schumpeter, J. (1942), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper & Row. Stilhoff Sörensen, J. and F. Söderbaum (2012), ‘Introduction – the end of the development–security nexus’, Development Dialogue, 58, 7‒19. Stockdale, L. (2016), ‘Catastrophic futures, precarious presents, and the temporal politics of (in) security’, in A. Hom, C. Mcintosh, A. Mckay and L. Stockdale (eds), Time, Temporality and Global Politics, Bristol: E-IR Publishing, pp. 176–92. UK Parliament Defence Committee (2018), ‘Fifth report: Lost in translation? Afghan interpreters and other locally employed civilians’, London: House of Parliament. USAFRICOM (2019), ‘2019 posture statement to Congress’, Senate Armed Services Committee, 7 February, https://​www​​.africom​​.mil/​about​​-the​​-command/​2019​​-posture​​-statement-​​ to​​-congress (accessed 10 July 2019). Zartman, I. W. (2001), ‘The timing of peace initiatives: Hurting stalemates and ripe moments’, Global Review of Ethnic Politics, 1 (1), 8–18.

22. Statebuilding and narrative Josefin Graef and Raquel da Silva

INTRODUCTION The study of narrative has enjoyed popularity in the social sciences ever since the narrative, spatial and temporal turns began to open up new perspectives for exploring how human beings make sense of social reality through storytelling, which may be defined as the organisation and synthesising of events in their spatial and temporal contexts (Sarbin 1986; Bruner 1987; Polkinghorne 1988; Brockmeier 2009; Frank 2010). Research on peace, conflict and statebuilding, particularly in the critical tradition, has also begun to draw on the concept of narrative to explore how various actors – internal and external, national and international, individual and collective – engage with each other in the creation and strengthening of government institutions in (post-) conflict environments (e.g. Senehi 2002; Brewer 2010; Justino et al. 2013; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013). This is evidenced by the increasingly frequent appearances of the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ in books and articles published within the field, with a noticeable surge over the past five years or so. It is striking, however, that both terms appear very rarely in the title or keywords relating to these publications. This is not a coincidence, but rather an indication that very few authors actually engage in-depth with the conceptual and empirical idiosyncrasies of narratives and processes of storytelling. In fact, as in many other areas of the social sciences, much of the statebuilding literature which mentions the terms ‘narrative’ or ‘story’ does not employ a narrative approach at all. Instead, ‘narrative’ is frequently used as a synonym for ‘discourse’, ‘frame’, or ‘argument’ (e.g. Hellmüller 2014; Pedersen 2018). At the same time, the human disposition for telling stories is all too often seen as somewhat self-explanatory rather than as a distinct level of analysis. This narrow view limits scholars in how they approach and evaluate the rich qualitative data that their research on statebuilding processes often generate. This chapter provides an overview of the uses of narrative in the field to date. It illustrates how recent work has begun to carve out its particular value for exploring the complexities of peace- and statebuilding practices, and what gaps remain to be filled.

STRATEGIC NARRATIVES IN STATEBUILDING PROCESSES The key reason that narrative research on statebuilding has been relatively slow to develop is that both too little and too much narrative complexity may have negative effects on such processes (Dauphinee 2015). Preference is often given to “a stable narrative history of conflict that all parties are expected to accept and reproduce” (Dauphinee 2015, p. 264) in order to provide a solid basis for the creation – and legitimisation – of government structures and social cohesion that statebuilding aims at. In fact, the international peacebuilding agenda as a whole is shaped by a particular historical narrative governed by the imperative to reproduce the 231

232  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding hegemonic international order and its normative ideal of liberal market democracy, as Lacher (2007) has shown with regard to the US-led post-conflict reconstruction of Iraq. Unsurprisingly, then, the notion of ‘strategic narratives’, developed in the discipline of International Relations, has also proven popular among scholars of statebuilding. These are narratives that fulfil a political purpose by projecting a particular story about how a socio-political order has been disrupted by a specific event (e.g. a terrorist attack, a civil war, an uprising), and what measures need to be taken to re-establish that order. In doing so, these narratives help to define what is at stake in a particular conflict (or post-conflict situation), and hence serve as a tool to shape collective action and manage expectations in a contested process of sense-making (Miskimmon et al. 2014; Levinger and Roselle 2017). As Egnell (2010) explains, strategic narratives are useful because they help the public to make sense of political transformation processes against the background of contradictory and often irreconcilable norms. An example of this is the tension between the liberal democratic framework for peacekeeping and the importance of ‘local ownership’ and self-determination, particularly emphasised in the critical tradition (Egnell 2010, p. 466; see also Mac Ginty 2008). By ironing out inherent contradictions, at least to a certain degree, these narratives seek to render international statebuilding more effective. Egnell emphasises, however, that such narratives are easily disrupted if they do not correspond to actual activities on the ground, risking “discontent and possibly opposition amongst the local population” (Egnell 2010, p. 467). Kostić (2017), similarly, shows that informal networks of “shadow peacebuilders” in post-2010 Bosnia-Herzegovina promote strategic narratives as a way of creating knowledge about the conflict to influence policymaking. Their success in the ‘battle of ideas’, mainly in opposition to the ‘official’ peacebuilding policy, would not only depend on the provision of a compelling story – composed of the definition of a situation, its disruption, and potential solution – agreed upon by members of the network. Rather, coherence between talk and action would play an important role in that it binds such networks together by endowing them with a sense of purpose and common identity. The weakening of their strategic narrative would thus risk a defeat of the network as a whole – and with it a defeat of alternatives to authoritative, top-down narratives of statebuilding. The strategic construction of statebuilding narratives by both international and local actors (as well as those who blur the boundaries between them) thus oscillates between acknowledgement and denial of the inherent contingencies and ambiguities of storied realities in an effort to shape policymaking and reduce political risks. Ultimately, however, they may undermine statebuilding processes, precisely because they potentially render the complex lived experiences on the ground invisible and disconnect macro- and micro-level narratives from each other. In order to challenge hegemonic as well as simplified narratives, and to better connect statebuilding to social realities, in particular those of less powerful actors, more attention needs to be paid to the interaction between different stakeholders and their naturally complex stories.

STATEBUILDING AND THE RICHNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCES Promoting narrative complexity, then, may challenge the legitimacy of political and social authority. Hence, a plurality of stories might be “seen, ironically, as a problem to overcome, rather than a condition to be nurtured and supported” (Dauphinee 2015, p. 265). To respond

Statebuilding and narrative  233 to this dilemma, scholars have recently begun to show how narrative research can help not only to uncover the complexity inherent within and the interaction between stories, but also to reconcile the competing stories of different stakeholders through re-imagination, dialogue, and performance. Nussio (2011), for example, emphasises the importance of understanding the narratives of non-state actors for successful disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of illegal armed groups. More specifically, he explores how ex-paramilitaries of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia imagine their personal post-conflict security through storytelling. Paying close attention to the temporal dimension of notions of threat, Nussio identifies narratives relating to potential and imminent threats perceived as a result of ex-combatants’ particular sensitivity to security issues and previous disarmament. They may imagine (and simultaneously respond to) future insecurity by hiding their identity as a demobilised person, isolating themselves from former comrades, or distancing themselves from state institutions. Ex-combatants may also relocate to a different area, drop out of reintegration programmes, re-join armed groups, or resort to self-defence and vigilantism to increase their personal security, especially if anonymity, isolation, or protection by the state are unattainable. From this Nussio concludes that policy-makers, instead of making ex-combatants’ alleged proneness to violence their focus, are better advised to address their feelings of personal insecurity by improving reintegration programmes (e.g. facilitating orderly relocation) so that ex-combatants’ confidence in state institutions is strengthened. By influencing their imagination of future security in a positive way, chances for effective de-mobilisation can be increased. This approach sits well within the growing literature on the role of narrative in motivating individual and collective action (Davis 2002; Andrews 2014; Graef et al. 2018). Read and Mac Ginty’s (2017) work on the United Nations–African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) in Sudan further highlights the ways in which narrative constructions of time and memory are shaped by power relations, and how this, in turn, impacts statebuilding. Drawing on security incident records of the conflict in Darfur and interviews with Darfurian refugees living in United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees camps in Chad, they conclude that international and local actors record violent events differently. This happens not only in terms of what is reported (e.g. sexual violence in the official database as a ‘non-event’ leads to under-reporting), but also in terms of their temporal order and importance vis-à-vis each other. The different accounts are of two types – one ‘top-down’, that is, bureaucratic, purposeful, hegemonic, and recorded in ‘real-time’ with technological support, and the other ‘bottom-up’, that is, local, experiential, and remembered. The authors find that the two types result in different narratives of the conflict as a whole, especially as they relate to perceptions of uncertainty and (hence) insecurity. This suggests that, in order to close the gap between bottom-up and top-down analyses, the two accounts should be seen as complementary to improve the quality of ‘actionable data’ to inform peacebuilding processes, given that both are prone to particular omissions and inconsistencies (see also Mac Ginty and Firchow 2016, and Read and Mac Ginty, Chapter 21 in this volume). Müller and Bashar (2017), building on a similar study of the narratives of UNAMID and Darfurian refugees, also emphasise that the parallel narrative worlds in which peacebuilders and local populations often live need to be merged to create trust and to “contribute to long-term conflict resolution strategies and mediation efforts grounded in local realities” (Müller and Bashar 2017, p. 775). Another emerging strand of research connects storied experiences of violent conflict to art, as a tool for responding to the needs of communities on the ground. Premaratna (2018a), for

234  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding instance, argues that theatre performances form an important element of peacebuilding efforts because they are capable of rendering visible everyday experiences of structural violence. This is violence that fosters inequality between groups, which is often excluded from official, quantitative peacebuilding data (Mac Ginty 2017; Read and Mac Ginty 2017). The dynamic plays performed by the grassroots activist group in the Indian state of West Bengal that Premaratna examines, ‘rescript’ power hierarchies through a combination of audience participation, dance, song, and symbolic action. In doing so, they not only expose existing injustices, but also empower local communities as marginalised groups to become the narrators of their own stories and resist hegemonic narratives. The theatre group’s political activism helps to connect participants’ on-stage transformation to their everyday lives off-stage. Theatre is thus capable of initiating social transformation by breaking the self-reinforcing cycle of structural and physical violence to create a more sustainable peace (see also Premaratna 2018b; Hatley and Hough 2015; Giesler 2017). However, Premaratna also points out that challenging power asymmetries in a peaceful way requires dialogue. Otherwise, encouraging resistance to narratives of violence, instead of producing empathy, may provoke emotions of revenge that threaten rather than promote peacebuilding (Premaratna 2018a, p. 15).

NARRATIVE RESEARCH AS AN ETHICAL PRACTICE In light of its sensitivity for power imbalances, injustices, and subjective experiences, narrative is not only a powerful tool for effecting social change, but also a meaningful ethical practice of doing research on statebuilding (Dauphinee 2015; Kappler 2013). Researchers – and other stakeholders such as journalists, activists, soldiers, and civil servants – take on a particular responsibility as they simultaneously listen to, evaluate, and tell stories, thereby acting – not always knowingly – as intermediaries between different stakeholders who are embedded in a complex network of power relations, as well as their respective audiences. Researchers, therefore, are not only fieldworkers, but also often witnesses to a particular conflict on some level. Again, recent work in the field has begun to engage in greater depth with the possibilities opened up by such a perspective. Bake and Zöhrer (2017), for instance, address the importance of stories’ authenticity – that is, their ability to have their claim to truth accepted – for raising public awareness in order to motivate collective action and effect policy change. Building on the assumption that ‘telling the stories of others’ creates actionable (narrative) knowledge, they compare the methodologies of two intermediaries of different sites of conflict (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Syria, and Gaza): the non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch and the US comic journalist Joe Sacco. Their findings show that both manage to achieve an ‘authentic authority’ in how they represent knowledge about these conflicts to their audiences: one by relying on institutional reports, fact checking and an ‘objective’ style, the other based on his detailed drawing style and the inclusion of ambiguities and contradictions, as well as the foregrounding of his own emotions. The two also share elements that emphasise the truth content of their narratives, especially their physical presence at the site of conflict, personal testimonies from locals, and the integration of the research process itself into the stories they tell. This suggests that the way the researcher chooses to approach his or her own role in the research process has an impact on whether narrative knowledge about peace and conflict is

Statebuilding and narrative  235 perceived as objective, factual and independent of the researcher’s own position and experiences, or as subjective and shaped by the complex emotions of ‘real’ people. This choice does not only concern methodological questions, but also the degree to which the process of mediation between research subjects and the researcher’s audiences becomes visible. Williams (2018) also emphasises that it is important to reflect on the opportunities and risks afforded by the fieldwork methodology a researcher chooses. This could concern, for instance, his or her degree of immersion within the local community. This reflection, he argues, helps to avoid “ethically unacceptable consequences” (Williams 2018, p. 612) such as stigmatisation or self-incrimination of interviewees through their storytelling or their very act of speaking when their stories become accessible to unintended audiences (e.g. neighbours or international tribunals). Another important part of narrative scholars’ duty to reflect carefully on the ethical dimensions of their role vis-à-vis other stakeholders and intermediaries of the peacebuilding process is a sensitivity to the absence of stories. Any narrative analysis needs to take into consideration who gets to talk to whom about what, under what circumstances, and with what consequences for storytellers, audiences and their communities (Gready 2013). This becomes even more important in a context in which many stories remain untold because their narrators have been silenced through trauma, oppression, or death, and survivors remain highly vulnerable in the aftermath of violent conflict, war, and genocide (Graybill 2004; Ben-Ze’ev et al. 2010; Meierhenrich 2011; Dauphinee 2015). Successful peacebuilding, then, is partly dependent on the fragile balance between remembering a violent past and imagining a non-violent future. Narrative approaches can help to uncover the complexities behind practices of (not) speaking and how they shape (non-) agency. In their study of Timor-Leste and Bougainville, George and Kent (2017), for example, deal critically with the fact that women’s (and other vulnerable groups’) silence about their experiences of conflict-related sexual violence is generally treated either as a precondition for or an obstacle to peacebuilding, often reflecting a conflict between local and international approaches. Silence, however, is not always imposed on them from above, but may also be a form of agency in the context of the post-conflict order by resisting or opposing certain stories of suffering that perpetuate victim identities, or may lead to stigmatisation and (thus) socio-economic marginalisation. In this way, silence enables women who have been subjected to sexual violence to maintain “their personal sense of peace” as well as the “peace that holds within the broader community” (George and Kent 2017, p. 527) which they contribute to. While the authors do not reflect actively on the narrative terminology that they employ, referring for example to “certain types of storytelling about women’s experiences in conflict” (George and Kent 2017, p. 531), the phenomenon under investigation is clearly a narrative one. By remaining silent on some events, the telling of other stories becomes possible in the first place, thereby strengthening, rather than weakening, these women’s agency. Taking these dynamics into consideration, the authors point out, is particularly important in the context of hybrid peacebuilding where local norms, customs, and regulatory structures intersect with global efforts at promoting a “gender-just peace” (George and Kent 2017, p. 518) in problematic ways (see also Wilén 2014, and Boege, Chapter 12 in this volume).

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UNCOVERING NARRATIVE Another phenomenon pertaining to narrative research on peace- and statebuilding is that a lot of the narrative work that is already being done in the field remains hidden, usually for one of the following three, often overlapping, reasons. Some scholars, as indicated at the beginning of this chapter, make frequent use of the terms ‘narrative’ or ‘story’, but do not employ them in a conceptual manner, instead equating them with common-sense notions such as ‘views’, ‘perceptions’, ‘ideas’ or ‘assumptions’. Mitton (2013), for instance, dedicates a whole section of his piece on the post-civil war period in Sierra Leone to ‘Narratives of War and Peace’. However, his discussion of data gathered from official reports and non-structured interviews with ex-combatants does not actually engage with the dynamics of narrating conflict, but focuses on causal explanations for conflict and peace rooted in materialistic aspects and rational interests. While the latter certainly form an important part of ex-combatants’ storied experiences of war and conflict transformation, Mitton does not comment on the temporal and spatial links between these and other narrative elements (see also Zanotti et al. 2015 on the ‘UN narrative concerning sport and peacebuilding’). A second group of authors effectively conducts narrative analyses without labelling them as such. Henry’s (2015) study of the “peacekeeping economy” in Liberia is a case in point. While she emphasises that these actors co-construct their “social, cultural, moral and everyday worlds” through “narrating experiences of living and working as a peacekeeper” (Henry 2015, p. 373), she does not comment on the particularities of narrative inquiry. Her distinction between “the professional and personal, the military and civilian, and the disciplined and imperial” (Henry 2015, p. 375) as “narrative positions”, instead, draws on a general discursive framework which assumes that the “talk about” everyday experiences and “embodied practices” of peacekeeping co-construct the peace missions themselves as a meaningful practice. A third category of authors makes use of narrative as a conceptual lens, but does not follow it all the way through to their analytical method. In particular, the features of narrative interviews vis-à-vis other forms of interview data – which are drawn on by many scholars anchored in the discipline (Brounéus 2011) – are rarely reflected on. Twort (2019), for example, adopts an ethnographic approach to “explore the webs of meaning attached to education as a narrative in everyday life” (p. 1) in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Drawing on non-structured interviews with locals about their life trajectories and personal success, Twort identifies education as a narrative itself to the extent that its meaning in everyday contexts results from a composition of life events geared towards achieving a better future. While this narrative perspective is very much present in the author’s analysis, it is somewhat unclear how it emerges from the interview data. This is because the focus is on education as a ‘theme’ and ‘frame’, rather than the narrative elements that produce perceptions of continuity, threat, disruption, and so on. A more in-depth engagement with these elements could strengthen the author’s argument about the need for a bottom-up approach to the role of education in order to establish long-term, sustainable peace.

Statebuilding and narrative  237

CONCLUSION: THE VALUE OF NARRATIVE FOR STATEBUILDING This chapter has addressed the particular value of narrative for research on and practices of peace- and statebuilding. While the literature in the field reflects the perspectives opened up by the narrative, spatial, and temporal turns in the social sciences, the ways in which heterogeneous events are selectively and purposefully combined to create stories, and what role such storytelling processes play in post-conflict situations, remain under-explored. As the discussion illustrates, engaging in greater depth with conceptual and analytical perspectives on narrative as a sophisticated qualitative approach can lead to a better understanding of the nature of power imbalances between different stakeholders on the local, regional and international level, and the ways in which they create, negotiate, and exchange certain forms of knowledge. It can also help us understand how intermediaries such as researchers and activists need to present this knowledge in order to effect social and political change. Narrative approaches, therefore, present one important avenue for ensuring that the overall “mixed balance sheet” ascribed to practices of state- and peacebuilding (Goetze 2016, p. 215) actually leads to improvements. Drawing on ideas from disciplines other than political science and law, especially sociology and cultural studies (Higate and Henry 2010; Read and Mac Ginty 2017, p. 148), and engaging in a more intense dialogue with related fields in the social sciences where similar challenges are faced (such as political violence and terrorism studies) may also help to realise this goal.

REFERENCES Andrews, M. (2014), Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bake, J. and M. Zöhrer (2017), ‘Telling the stories of others: Claims of authenticity in human rights reporting and comics journalism’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 81‒97. Ben-Ze’ev, E., R. Ginio and J. Winter (eds) (2010), Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brewer, J. D. (2010), Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach, Cambridge: Polity Press. Brockmeier, J. (2009), ‘Reaching for meaning: Human agency and the narrative imagination’, Theory & Psychology, 19 (2), 213–33. Brounéus, K. (2011), ‘In-depth interviewing: The process, skill and ethics of interviews in peace research’, in K. Höglund and M. Öberg (eds), Understanding Peace Research: Methods and Challenges, New York: Routledge, pp. 130‒45. Bruner, J. (1987), ‘Life as narrative’, Social Research, 54 (1), 11‒32. Dauphinee, E. (2015), ‘Narrative voice and the limits of peacebuilding: Rethinking the politics of partiality’, Peacebuilding, 3 (3), 261‒78. Davis, J. E. (2002), ‘Narrative and social movements: The power of stories’, in J. E. Davis (ed.), Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 3‒29. Egnell, R. (2010), ‘The organised hypocrisy of international state-building’, Conflict, Security & Development, 10 (4), 465‒91. Frank, A. W. (2010), Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. George, N. and L. Kent (2017), ‘Sexual violence and hybrid peacebuilding: How does silence “speak”?’, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2 (4), 518‒37. Giesler, M. A. (2017), ‘Teaching note – Theatre of the oppressed and social work education: Radicalizing the practice classroom’, Journal of Social Work Education, 53 (2), 347‒54. Goetze, C. (2016), ‘The same old story of peacebuilding: Institution building, legitimacy and global governance’, International Peacekeeping, 23 (1), 211‒17. Graef, J., R. da Silva and N. Lemay-Hébert (2018), ‘Narrative, political violence, and social change’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, online first, pp. 1‒20, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2018. 1452701.

238  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Graybill, L. S. (2004), ‘Pardon, punishment, and amnesia: Three African post-conflict methods’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (6), 1117‒31. Gready, P. (2013), ‘The public life of narratives: Ethics, politics, methods’, in M. Andrews, C. Squire and M. Tamboukou (eds), Doing Narrative Research, 2nd edn, London: Sage, pp. 240‒54. Hatley, B. and B. Hough (eds) (2015), Performing Contemporary Indonesia: Celebrating Identity, Constructing Community, Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Hellmüller, S. (2014), ‘A story of mutual adaptation? The interaction between local and international peacebuilding actors in Ituri’, Peacebuilding, 2 (2), 188‒201. Henry, M. (2015), ‘Parades, parties and pests: Contradictions of everyday life in peacekeeping economies’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (3), 372‒90. Higate, P. and M. Henry (2010), ‘Space, performance and everyday security in the peacekeeping context’, International Peacekeeping, 17 (1), 32‒48. Justino, P., T. Brück and P. Verwimp (eds) (2013), A Micro Level Perspective on the Dynamics of Conflict, Violence and Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kappler, S. (2013), ‘Coping with research: Local tactics of resistance against (mis)representation in academia’, Peacebuilding, 1 (1), 125‒40. Kostić, R. (2017), ‘Shadow peacebuilders and diplomatic counterinsurgencies: Informal networks, knowledge production and the art of policy-shaping’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 120‒39. Lacher, W. (2007), ‘Iraq: Exception to, or epitome of contemporary post-conflict reconstruction?’, International Peacekeeping, 14 (2), 237‒50. Levinger, M. and L. Roselle (2017), ‘Narrating global order and disorder’, Politics and Governance, 5 (3), 94‒98. Mac Ginty, R. (2008), ‘Indigenous peacemaking versus the liberal peace’, Cooperation and Conflict, 43 (2), 139‒63. Mac Ginty, R. (2017), ‘Peacekeeping and data’, International Peacekeeping, 24 (5), 695‒705. Mac Ginty, R. and P. Firchow (2016), ‘Top-down and bottom-up narratives of peace and conflict’, Politics, 36 (3), 308‒23. Mac Ginty, R. and O. P. Richmond (2013), ‘The local turn in peace building: A critical agenda for peace’, Third World Quarterly, 34 (5), 763‒83. Meierhenrich, J. (2011), ‘Topographies of remembering and forgetting: The transformation of Lieux de Mémoire in Rwanda’, in S. Straus and L. Waldorf (eds), Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights After Mass Violence, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 283‒96. Miskimmon, A., B. O. Loughlin and L. Roselle (2014), Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order, London: Routledge. Mitton, K. (2013), ‘Where is the war? Explaining peace in Sierra Leone’, International Peacekeeping, 20 (3), 321‒37. Müller, T. R. and Z. Bashar (2017), ‘“UNAMID is just like clouds in summer, they never rain”: Local perceptions of conflict and the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping missions’, International Peacekeeping, 24 (5), 756‒79. Nussio, E. (2011), ‘How ex-combatants talk about personal security: Narratives of former paramilitaries in Colombia’, Conflict, Security & Development, 11 (5), 579‒606. Pedersen, R. (2018), ‘Was something rotten in the state of Denmark? Three narratives of the active internationalism in Danish foreign policy’, Cooperation and Conflict, 53 (4), 449‒66. Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988), Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Premaratna, N. (2018a), ‘Theatre for peacebuilding: Transforming narratives of structural violence’, Peacebuilding, online first, pp. 1‒16, DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2018.1491278. Premaratna, N. (2018b), Theatre for Peacebuilding: The Role of Arts in Conflict Transformation in South Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Read, R. and R. Mac Ginty (2017), ‘The temporal dimension in accounts of violent conflict: A case study from Darfur’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (2), 147‒65. Sarbin, T. R. (1986), ‘The narrative as root metaphor for psychology’, in T. R. Sarbin (ed.), Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct, New York: Praeger, pp. 3‒21. Senehi, J. (2002), ‘Constructive storytelling: A peace process’, Peace and Conflict Studies, 9 (2), 41‒63. Twort, L. (2019), ‘An exploration of the narrative of education in Bo, Sierra Leone: A bottom-up perspective’, Peacebuilding, 7 (1), 88–102. Wilén, N. (2014), ‘Security sector reform, gender and local narratives in Burundi’, Conflict, Security & Development, 14 (3), 331‒54. Williams, T. (2018), ‘Visiting the tiger zone: Methodological, conceptual and ethical challenges of ethnographic research on perpetrators’, International Peacekeeping, 25 (5), 610‒29.

Statebuilding and narrative  239 Zanotti, L., M. Stephenson Jr and M. Schnitzer (2015), ‘Biopolitical and disciplinary peacebuilding: Sport, reforming bodies and rebuilding societies’, International Peacekeeping, 22 (2), 186‒201.

23. Myths and the international politics of intervention and statebuilding Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Catherine Goetze

INTRODUCTION The international politics of intervention and statebuilding are replete with myths – from the ‘international community’, which is invoked when humanitarian emergencies call for immediate action, to the vivid image of Afghanistan as a ‘graveyard of empires’ unable to discipline this home of ‘warlords’ into a functioning state, and from ideas of ‘antiseptic battlefields’ and ‘precision killings’ in modern warfare to concepts of ‘coordination’, ‘participation’ and ‘effectiveness’ in the work of international intervention organisations. We use the term myth here to refer, most generally, to “the socially significant product of humanity’s irrepressible urge to construct meaning” (Von Hendy 2002, p. 333). Myths are manifestations of such meaning making by constituting social foundational narratives or paradigmatic commonly held beliefs. While myths have been studied in depth as socio-cultural foundations for nations and nation-states, looking for myths in international politics seems at odds with the utilitarian or interest-based self-descriptions and scholarly appraisals of the field. In these traditions international intervention and statebuilding are represented either as manifestations of institutionalised norms in global politics, or conversely as expressions of state power and national (material) interests in the international state system. Scholars who analyse myths argue, contrary to these utilitarian approaches, that international interventionism draws on a large range of socio-culturally constructed yet deeply normalised complexes of narratives, norms and ideas (Goetze 2016a, 2017). Understanding such myth constructions can offer researchers and students of international intervention and statebuilding rich vantage points into the ways international intervention, statebuilding and peacebuilding are socially, culturally and politically legitimised, normalised and bestowed with meaning. In order to analyse myths as forms of socio-cultural making of meaning, scholars have borrowed from a diversity of academic disciplines that have developed analyses of myths before (Bliesemann de Guevara 2016; Goetze 2016a; Müller 2016; Münch 2016). In the following, we distinguish between four socio-political functions that myths have been argued to fulfil, distinguished along two axes: myths can stand in either for a calculated strategy or represent a social construction; their effect can be either an ideological delusion of the actors or a necessary fiction that enables action in the first place (see Table 23.1) (Bliesemann de Guevara 2016, p. 32). The remainder of this chapter is organised along those four core functions of myth. The first section discusses studies which focus on the strategic and agential aspects of myth-making and telling. Such approaches see myth production as conscious means to establish or maintain a specific politico-social power hierarchy (determining functions of myth). The second section delves deeper into the creative, proactive and enabling aspects of conscious myth-making. Here, myth is seen to help actors to cope with specific troubling parts of their reality and can 240

Myths and the international politics of intervention and statebuilding  241 Table 23.1

Socio-political functions of myth organised by (a) source and (b) effects ascribed to myth by different myth conceptualisations

Calculated strategy Source of myth Social construction

Effects of myth Ideological delusion

Necessary fiction

Determining functions of myth

Enabling/emancipating functions of myth

Naturalising/dehistoricising functions

Constitutive functions of myth

of myth

even lead to change, hence pointing to the emancipatory potential of myth-making in international politics (enabling/emancipating functions). Such analyses of myths as actor strategy are distinguished from understandings of myths as social constructs. In the third section, we explore studies which conceive of myth as powerful socially constructed narratives and widespread paradigmatic beliefs which found the very possibility of international interventions – hence, their label as necessary fiction (constitutive functions). By the same token, studies in section four focus on the naturalising, dehistoricising and de-politicising dimensions of such myths, hence ideological delusions, that have allowed to articulate sharp criticism of interventionism, state- and peacebuilding (naturalising/dehistoricising functions). Both types of analysis focus on the constructedness of myths and on their enabling capacities, however the critical study of myth-making unveils the mechanisms implicated in normalising such foundational narratives. None of these approaches understands myth as falsity or lie; indeed, it is widely acknowledged that myths often mix facts and fantasy. Rather, myths are understood as partly fictional, partly factual stories actors tell about this specific global policy field and which have powerful effects on political imaginations in intervention policymaking and practice.

MYTHS DETERMINE THE WAY INTERVENTIONS, STATE AND PEACEBUILDING ARE IMAGINED A row of studies understand myths as an instrument in the hands of strategic actors, who aim to impose or maintain a specific version of socio-political order (cf. Schmitt 2018). Strategic communication, branding, public relations, and propaganda are terms which have been used to describe intentional myth-making by military and civilian intervention actors (e.g. Miskimmon et al. 2013). These are perceived as spinning stories and performing these through rituals and other symbolic practices. In this reading, myths – and their rituals, ceremonies and symbols – are essential to create the imaginaries that legitimise interventions. Since interventions and interveners are often sharply criticised, at home and abroad, their legitimation requires enacting deeply symbolic stories to convincingly elevate such policies above reproach and scrutiny (cf. Higate and Henry 2009; Jeffrey 2013). The ceremonies and events in Bosnia and Herzegovina and abroad celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) in 2015, for example, can be read as enactment of such a foundational myth. The celebrations assert and reaffirm that peace has been successfully created in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The DPA myth thereby recasts the international intervention as having actually started only in December 1995. It occludes the many forms in which foreign actors were involved in the run-up to and evolution of the war between 1992 and 1995 (like the neoliberal interventions into the Yugoslav state, which

242  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding have, according to some, precipitated the demise of the socialist state and the outbreak of war; the endless string of failed or counter-productive diplomatic peace negotiations; or the infamous role that western diplomats and UNPROFOR peacekeepers played in the massacres of Srebrenica in 1995). Doing so, the DPA myth forms the foundation of the unity among peacebuilders as a supposed ‘international community’. Casting 1995 as the starting point for international engagement in BiH articulates the narrative that the DPA was, albeit being far from perfect, the only possible way of ending violence at the time of its signing. These analyses of myths in peacebuilding can refer to a row of sociological or cultural theories that have formulated the relationship between strategic action and myth-making. French semiologist Roland Barthes claimed that the myths underpinning the everyday ideological functioning of bourgeois society in France were based on strategic ‘producers of myth’ – especially journalists and other creators of everyday mass-cultural artefacts – who continuously produce a specific ideological view of French society that is unconsciously and uncritically consumed by the mass of ‘readers of myth’ (Barthes 2013 [1957]). While for Barthes myth-making is an everyday phenomenon, German political philosopher Ernst Cassirer has drawn attention to the role of myth-manufacturing in times of crisis. In his posthumously published work The Myth of the State, in which he analyses the role of myth in Nazi German politics, he likens myths to other modern technologies of war: “[The new political myths] are artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans.… myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon – as machine guns or airplanes” (Cassirer 1967 [1946], p. 282). Myth-making and war-making go hand in hand in this reading of strategic foundational narratives – with severe consequences for democratic politics. As a number of analyses of the ‘tales and images of the battlefield’ in modern warfare have shown, myths can function as legitimation strategies not only in times of severe political crisis that Cassirer was focused on, but also, and more importantly, in times of presumed peace. Starting from Barthes’ idea of myth as “a system of communication, a message” (Barthes 2013 [1957], p. 217), Finlan argues that “[m]yth plays a very important role in mediating, negotiating, and legitimising the horror of contemporary warfare to societies in the West, especially in the twenty-first century”. Such myths are necessary fictions because war’s “intention is almost antithetical to a democratic nation-state built on the peaceful social principles of freedom, individual rights, and social order” (Finlan 2016, pp.  194‒95). Similar to Barthes, Finlan argues that modern popular culture, especially films and video games, play an important role in rationalising the horrors of warfare in western democratic societies. In the Global War on Terror, notably, they contribute to propagating the ‘antiseptic battlefield’ myth – that is, the idea that war can be fought without major damage to the civilian population. This myth is, in turn, embedded in a ‘regime change’ myth: war is fought to topple an undemocratic regime, not to destroy its people. The ‘antiseptic battlefield’ is narrated in many different versions, for instance through the powerful narratives of ‘collateral damage’ and ‘human shields’. These variants explain civilian deaths within the ‘antiseptic battlefield’ claim. Similarly, the ‘precision killing’ commonly associated with satellite-guided ammunition (drones) and ‘target killing’ are important ‘side stories’ of the main myth of modern warfare, since they construct the imaginary of risk- and cost-free wars. Contrasting the normalising and legitimising functions of these narratives in the troop-sending countries with the reality of modern warfare for the civilians in target countries of intervention, Finlan concludes that the effect of the modern warfare myth has been

Myths and the international politics of intervention and statebuilding  243 “wittingly or unwittingly… the marginalisation of the human costs in Afghanistan and Iraq of the military interventions for the indigenous people of those countries” (Finlan 2016, p. 205). Consequently, this myth that has been spread through strategic myth-makers (e.g. the media) and in popular culture helps western societies to overcome the seeming incommensurability of their liberal values and violent actions (see also Millar 2016).

MYTHS ENABLE ACTION A number of approaches which understand myths as calculated strategy and are focused on their enabling and emancipating capacities highlight their creative and proactive functions. Myths can be either a coping strategy to smoothen ambiguous realities or a driving force for change. Stanford School sociologists John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, for instance, have explored how myths enable the functioning of organisations whose legitimacy depends to a high degree on their larger acceptance by society. They argue: First, (myths) are rationalized and impersonal prescriptions that identify various social purposes as technical ones and specify in a rule-like way the appropriate means to pursue these technical purposes rationally. Second they are highly institutionalized and thus in some measure beyond the discretion of any individual participant or organization. They must, therefore, be taken for granted as legitimate…. (Meyer and Rowan 1977, p. 343)

A commonly held societal belief of the kind Meyer and Rowan describe with their definition, is for instance the myth of rationality that organisations have to abide by (cf. Midgley 2004). In order to conform with such societal beliefs, organisations engage in ceremonial activities at the structural level even if such ‘rational’ structures may not be best suited to produce desired work outcomes. Organisations, hence, tend to reproduce such societal beliefs not only because the actors inside the organisation necessarily share these but in order to enable action in the first place. The larger social myths of technicality, technical expertise or rationality are conditions of possibility for organisational action that individual actors cannot ignore or deny. Stephan Hensell (2016) has argued that such a double strategy of outward-looking rationalised myth-making and inward-looking loose coupling and informal functioning is what lies behind the growing drive towards coordination mechanisms in international interventions. Through his explorations of international efforts to reform the police in Albania, Hensell concludes that “the rule of coordination has become something of a ‘happy peace formula’ for a consensual approach that tends to disguise more contentious and controversial issues by seeking rationalised solutions through the technical jargon of coordination” (Hensell 2016, pp. 281‒2). The myth of coordination enables intervention organisations to generate a sense of purpose by developing ever more rationalised mechanisms of intervention, while leaving the contentious political issues within the intervention unaddressed. Looking closer at tensions within organisations, political ethnographer and interpretive methodologist Dvora Yanow (1992) has argued that myths appear (usually unconsciously) when incommensurable organisational values threaten to create existential threats to the organisation. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (2014) has used this approach to explore three incommensurabilities underpinning the work of the influential think tank International Crisis Group (ICG): problem orientation versus success orientation in its knowledge production and political advocacy efforts; moral claims versus a lack of a defined moral standpoint; and claims

244  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding of independence versus the think tank staff’s deep entanglements with the policy community. These incommensurabilities are masked, in her argument, by the myths of ‘field facts’, ‘flexible pragmatism’ and ‘organisational uniqueness’, and ‘neutrality/independence’, respectively, which help members of the ICG to make sense of their role in the global policy field of managing and preventing violent conflict despite the structurally limited nature of this role. Other approaches have attributed myth with the ability to emerge from deep contradictions with a truly transformative and emancipatory potential. French syndicalist Georges Sorel famously claimed that “contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things” (Sorel 2004 [1908], p. 29). Myths provide powerful future-oriented narratives that empower people to take dramatic action. In this regard, it does not matter, argues Sorel, whether these futures ultimately materialise: “Myths must be judged as a means of acting on the present; all discussion of the method of applying them as future history is devoid of sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important” (Sorel 2004 [1908], pp. 116‒17). Historian of religion Bruce Lincoln has similarly argued that actors can employ myths in three ways in order to contribute to change: first, by providing counter-narratives which contest the myths underpinning the established order; second, by creating new foundational narratives that help construct new socio-political orders; and third, by reinterpreting old myths in novel ways so as to enable gradual change (Lincoln 1989, pp. 25‒37 and chapter 2). In the case of intervention, state- and peacebuilding, such myths have not yet been analysed in depth. The myths of the world’s people’s revolutions, and in particular anti-colonial struggles, might be understood as such emancipatory myths. True to Anderson’s (2006 [1983]) saying that nationalism imagines communities and enables large political groups to act together, nationalist myths of liberation can also be mobilised to justify resistance to interventions. Accordingly, the myth of national liberation struggles has also been mobilised as intellectual critique of interventions (Bickerton 2007). In general, however, it can be noted that the emancipatory side of purposeful myth-making in international interventions has as yet been understudied – perhaps itself an effect of where intervention and statebuilding myths imagine agency to lie, namely with the interveners rather than the ‘recipients’ of intervention.

MYTHS ARE CONSTITUTIVE OF THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OF INTERVENTION Other authors argue that myths have to be understood beyond being the product of strategic communication. They are an essential part of the social construction of meaning and cannot be traced back to specific sources or interests. Among these social-constructionist approaches are those who understand myths as constitutive of our social reality. Many works on the constitutive functions of myth draw on Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth, in which he distinguishes the work of myth (its function) from the work on myth. Working on myth means its constant repetition and eventual adaptation to new circumstances. Blumenberg argues that the function of a myth is to name the unknown and to provide orientation in the world by converting “the numinous indeterminacy into nominal determinacy” (Blumenberg 1979, p. 32; also pp. 11‒12, 40‒67). Myths do not obscure; on the contrary, by structuring reality they provide logical, common-sensical explanation. Myths are “stories that are distinguished by a high degree of constancy in their narrative core and by an equally pronounced capacity for marginal varia-

Myths and the international politics of intervention and statebuilding  245 tion” (Blumenberg 1979, p. 40). Myths ‘work’ because they are told and retold since times that lie well before the listener’s existence and because these stories are deeply embedded in cultures and societies. A myth’s exact origins cannot be analytically grasped but how its storylines provide logical explanations to our contemporary circumstances or problems can. Blumenberg’s ideas help to describe micro-processes of sense-making and to analyse the macro-foundational narratives legitimising the politics of intervention and statebuilding. Kristian Frisk, for instance, has zoomed into the Danish Army’s practices of giving military installations in peace missions in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan Viking names. He argues that these naming practices create a mythological connection between Denmark’s imagined ancient warrior past and its more recent military history. These mythical names “function as principal devices for creating, reproducing, and transforming cultural narratives” that provide “significance to the experience of [contemporary] war” (Frisk 2019, p. 23). Incidentally, such “aesthetic translations” of myth (Bottici and Challand 2006, p. 325) create specific narratives of “national origin, heroic greatness and warrior ancestry (within) clearly nationally oriented frames of orientation” which are barely shareable as transnational myths, hence, undermining the transnational character of intervention. Florian Kühn (2016) employs Blumenberg’s theory to explore the constitutive myths underpinning intervention and statebuilding in Afghanistan. He argues that, as a form of “secular belief-structure guiding actions”, a range of myths have shaped western scholarly and practitioner thinking about the country, with structuring effects on policymaking (Kühn 2016, p. 148). Exploring in detail the myth of Afghanistan as a ‘graveyard of empires’, unconquered successively by British, Soviet and US forces, Kühn unpacks how myths work through what he calls reasoning by under-complex analogy: compelling truth claims are made by comparing the failures of the contemporary intervention with historical defeats, yet without dwelling on different contexts and complexities or paying attention to contrary evidence. Other myths discussed are the ‘Afghan fierce fighters’ myth, which by highlighting Afghan modes of fighting and jihadist mentality explains their battle victories and supports the ‘graveyard of empires’ myth; the myth of Afghanistan as a ‘safe haven’ for terrorists, which has provided one of the main justifications for the intervention in Afghanistan after 2001; and finally the myth about the ‘democratic Afghanistan state’, which rationalises the international statebuilding efforts in the country. Kühn shows how all these myths provide the ‘epistemological software’ that underlies analysis of and action on Afghanistan and creates specific subjectivities, or senses of self and other, which makes thinking otherwise about Afghanistan and outsiders’ engagement with Afghan society hard to conceive (see for a related argument Bottici and Challand 2006). Katarzyna Kaczmarska (2016) takes the analysis of the constitutive functions of myth up another scale to the level of the ‘international community’. Drawing on Chiara Bottici’s (2007) Blumenberg-inspired myth concept, she argues that the “idea of international community has become a narrative that not simply helps make sense of experience but provides significance, inspires people, and guides action” (Kaczmarska 2016, p. 210). She explores this claim with regard to statebuilding practitioners, who she sees as “principal authors of the international community discourse”. The work on the ‘international community’ myth takes place in the tension created by its claims of representing, on the one hand, universal humanity, and being, on the other hand, a highly diverse conglomerate of individual actors (Kaczmarska 2016, pp. 215‒20). While the claim to universal humanity legitimises interventionism as an altruistic act, the diversity of states, notably the distinction of developed/underdeveloped states, creates real hierarchies within the ‘international community’ (Kaczmarska 2016, pp.  220‒4). The

246  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding ‘international community’ myth depoliticises both, these hierarchies and interventionism, and hence naturalises and legitimises interventions by opening a mythical horizon of universal humanity through which difference can be overcome.

MYTHS NATURALISE AND DEHISTORICISE INTERNATIONAL INTERVENTIONS Kaczmarska’s analysis points to others who explore how myths (as social construction) enable the depoliticisation, dehistoricisation, and naturalisation of socio-political orders. Myths are expressions of diffuse structures of power and knowledge. Hence, they are conditions of possibility of specific forms of power and knowledge. Yet, they also conceal the political and historical nature of precisely this reproduction by making them seem natural and without alternative rather than contingent and a product of historical and political processes with all their inherent violences (Bliesemann de Guevara 2016, pp. 34‒5). A number of critical authors have drawn on Roland Barthes’ work on ‘empty signifiers’ to deconstruct how myths obscure the violence of entire socio-political orders. For Barthes: [M]yth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system becomes a mere signifier in the second. (Barthes 2013 [1957], p. 223)

A myth hence alienates the original (historical) meaning of a sign by building it into a new system of meaning, thereby veiling its historical coming-into-being and naturalising what is historical and ideological. Peace icons in international intervention and statebuilding may be seen as such ‘empty signifiers’. In a study of the world-views and political attitudes of UN peacebuilders, Goetze explored their political imaginations, among other routes, through an exploration of UN peacebuilders’ historical reference points. Asked who their heroes in history were, a vast majority of respondents mentioned Mahatma Gandhi, closely followed by Nelson Mandela and further down the list Martin Luther King (Goetze 2017, pp. 197‒202). These three icons of non-violent struggle were not mentioned in reference to specific lives and struggles but as generic symbols of social justice devoid of specific politics. The analysis of a myth’s narrative structures similarly allows deconstructing its naturalisation of entire socio-political orders. In order to analyse the warlord/state myth of the intervention in Afghanistan Catherine Goetze (2016a, 2016b) has merged Claude Lévi-Strauss’ method of analysing the apparent and underlying structures of myths with Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of social structures that underlie legitimate narratives. Lévi-Strauss (1955, 1978) argued that myths have a double structure: on the surface, they tell one story (syntagmatic structure), and underneath, by alluding to binary associations, they tell another, paradigmatic one in parallel. Applying Bourdieu’s critique of Lévi-Strauss to the analysis of this double structure further reveals that such underlying binaries are anything but innocent but reflect and naturalise structures of social domination (Goetze 2016a). In a systematic study of the ‘warlord myth’ in international politics, Goetze shows how this powerful social foundational narrative works through its mirror-image – the western state – to legitimise the current hierarchies in the international systems of states. By creating “binomial

Myths and the international politics of intervention and statebuilding  247 oppositions such as chaos-order, warlord-state, arbitrariness/criminality-law etc.”, the warlord myth and its mirror-myth of the legal-rational state justify international intervention by leading to the narrative conclusion that “Western military intervention is the only way of ending violence in the world” (Goetze 2016b, p. 143). Goetze also points to the detrimental effects of the warlord myth on academic knowledge, thus cautioning scholars of intervention and statebuilding not to fall into the trap of using the same mythological language that legitimises interventions in the first place: “Abandoning warlordism can open our eyes that there are cases which represent – historically, politically, intellectually, and academically – alternatives to the ‘modern’ and ‘diplomatically recognisable’ state and which challenge the idea that the state is the best guarantor of welfare and peace” (Goetze 2016b, p. 144).

CONCLUSION AND WAY AHEAD The international intervention and statebuilding myths discussed here are representative for the legitimating narratives of intervention and peacebuilding. Yet, not only is the liberal world order which these myths reflect crumbling and fissuring, the interventions themselves have changed in the past decade. How the stories we tell about interventions and their effects on power and domination in the world change is something to be explored in the future. Liberal intervention myths have not only bolstered dividing narratives of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, that is, between interveners and intervened, but also between different outlooks within the group of intervening states and organisations. Interventions by states such as Russia, Turkey and Iran, who do not pretend to be implementing liberal values, pose a challenge for the liberal narratives and their associated discourses of governance. Scholars are now tasked with exploring the question of what kind of myths non-liberal interventionism creates (see Schmitt 2018 on the perception of the Russian strategic narrative in France). Following Blumenberg’s work on myths, it is to be expected that the narrative core of the international state system’s foundational myths will be reinterpreted but not fundamentally change. The core myth of the international state system will continue to strategically shape politics and give meaning to changed political realities. In most of the examples discussed, myths have rather strengthened the status quo; they rarely founded emancipatory politics. Yet, intervention and statebuilding myths have had rather dividing than uniting effects in the global arena. They have therefore remained particular myths that cannot extend to the whole of humanity, hence raising the question of whether there can be global, inclusive myths for everyone. This, in turn, raises the question of how a globally inclusive and equitable political project can be possible without a global creation of meaning and sense.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (2006 [1983]), Imagined Communities, New edition, London/New York: Verso. Barthes, R. (2013 [1957]), ‘Myth today’, in Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang. Bickerton, C. J. (2007), ‘State-building: Exporting state failure’, in C. J. Bickerton, P. Cunliffe and A. Gourevitch (eds), Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations, London: UCL Press, pp. 93‒111. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. (2014), ‘On methodology and myths: Exploring the International Crisis Group’s organisational culture’, Third World Quarterly, 35 (4), 616–33.

248  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Bliesemann de Guevara, B. (2016), ‘Myth in international politics: Ideological delusion and necessary fiction’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 15‒46. Blumenberg, H. (1979), Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bottici, C. (2007), A Philosophy of Political Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bottici, C. and B. Challand (2006), ‘Rethinking political myth: The clash of civilisations as a self-fulfilling prophecy’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (3), 315‒36. Cassirer, E. (1967 [1946]), The Myth of the State, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Finlan, A. (2016), ‘Tales and images of the battlefield in contemporary warfare’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 193‒208. Frisk, K. (2019), ‘Armadillo and the Viking spirit: Military names and national myths in transnational military interventions’, Critical Military Studies, 5 (1), 21‒39, DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2017.1319644. Goetze, C. (2016a), ‘Bringing Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu together for a post-structuralist methodology to analyse myth’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87‒106. Goetze, C. (2016b), ‘Warlords and states: A contemporary myth of the international system’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 129‒46. Goetze, C. (2017), The Distinction of Peace: A Social Analysis of Peacebuilding, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hensell, S. (2016), ‘Organising Babylon: The coordination of intervention and the denial of politics’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 267‒86. Higate, P. and M. Henry (2009), Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia, London: Zed Books. Jeffrey, A. (2013), The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Kaczmarska, K. (2016), ‘The powerful myth of the international community and the imperative to build states’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 209‒28. Kühn, F. P. (2016), ‘Afghanistan and the “graveyard of empires”: Blumenberg, under-complex analogy and basic myths in international politics’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 147‒72. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955), ‘The structural study of myth’, Journal of American Folklore, 68 (270), 428–44. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1978), Myth and Meaning, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lincoln, B. (1989), Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyer, J. W. and B. Rowan (1977), ‘Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony’, American Journal of Sociology, 83 (2), 340–63. Midgley, M. (2004), The Myths We Live By, London: Routledge. Millar, K. (2016), ‘Mutually implicated myths: The democratic control of the armed forces and militarism’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 173‒92. Miskimmon, A., B. O’Loughlin and L. Roselle (2013), Strategic Narratives. Communication Power and the New World Order, London: Routledge. Müller, F. (2016), ‘How to study myths: Methodological demands and discoveries’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 107‒26. Münch, S. (2016), ‘Beyond national policymaking: Conceptions of myth in interpretive policy analysis and their value for IR’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in International Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 47‒66. Schmitt, O. (2018), ‘When are strategic narratives effective? The shaping of political discourse through the interaction between political myths and strategic narratives’, Contemporary Security Policy, 39 (4), 487‒511, DOI: 10.1080/13523260.2018.1448925. Sorel, G. (2004 [1908]), Reflections on Violence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Von Hendy, A. (2002), The Modern Construction of Myth, Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press. Yanow, D. (1992), ‘Silences in public policy discourse: Organizational and policy myths’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2 (4), 399–423.

24. Cyber security: states, development and intervention Kristan Stoddart

CYBER SECURITY AND STATES Tensions clearly now exist in terms of freedom, order and governance of cyberspace. This encompasses not only the Internet but ‘walled garden’ intranets and a multiplicity of Self-Monitoring Analysis And Reporting Technologies (SMART or ‘smart’) which sense their environment and are developing into the ‘Internet of things’ (IoT) (DeNardis and Raymond 2013). There are also tensions between private industry and national governments over issues like encryption, surveillance and freedom of speech. This includes disputes with major ICT providers such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Huawei along with social media providers like Facebook, Twitter, WeChat and Weibo. These take place within and between central governments, their citizens and members of civil society. The capacity to produce, communicate, and use information affects significant areas of statehood, from the manner we govern ourselves (including through ‘e-government’), to interference in political processes (from influence operations to ‘information warfare’). This is also seen in the way activists (and ‘hacktivists’) and extremists can mobilize support across borders and through transnational criminal activities. Meanwhile, cyberattacks have demonstrated abilities to violate sovereignty and have been used alongside military force in Georgia and Ukraine and in other territorial disputes and for election interference and disinformation which has prejudiced political independence (Carr 2009, pp. 15‒18). As Acker et al. (2012) articulated in their study of global ICT trends: Technological developments such as handheld devices, pervasive sensors, “big data” analytics, digital supply chains, search engines, social networks, satellite-based geographic tracking, interconnected real-time digital infrastructure, and massive server farms have fundamentally altered our society. The 2010s are arguably as different from, say, the 1980s as 1950, with ubiquitous electricity, automobiles, and broadcast radio, was from 1850.

This has been termed the “fourth industrial revolution” (Schwab 2017). Much like the Industrial Revolution, production costs have decreased as ICT has matured and propagated. This made home computing affordable and portable in the form of smartphones, desktops, netbooks and tablets. The take-up of SMART technologies includes their uses in ‘smart grids’ and for ‘smart cities’, in driverless cars and for transportation control. All of which, alongside the apps on our smartphones, can track our movements; know where we work; how we socialize; recognize our colleagues, friends and family; our shopping habits; our political leanings; and much else besides (Kelion 2015). Increasing processing power, growing memory capacity, and the shrinkage of highly capable computer chips, and many other areas of technological innovation are facilitating these developments and bringing about societal changes. A twelve-fold increase in mobile data is now being predicted by 2023 with 6.1 billion unique subscribers. 249

250  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding This is being driven by consumer demand with the largest take-up rates in China, India, Asia Pacific and Africa (Ericsson 2018a, 2018b). The pace and depth of this ICT revolution has changed home and working life; how private industry, governments and militaries operate; and has been promoted by governments and fuelled by developments and usage around the globe.

THE IOT AND DEVELOPMENT These global communications tools enable hyper-connectivity and fuel ‘globalization’. The pervasiveness of these technologies, and particularly SMART products and services are dubbed the IoT (Mikail and Aytekin 2016). By 2020 the IoT will incorporate 30 billion devices and this number will only grow (Stack 2018). The IoT represents “one aspect of a Future Internet”, for which “many application areas have been postulated – not only in industrial domains such as manufacturing, logistics, retail, service management, energy, public security, and insurance, but also for the life of every citizen – where IoT can bring significant improvements, and leading to new business models” (Haller and Magerkurth, p. 1; Ross 2016). The usefulness of the Internet and SMART IoT enabled technologies as a tool of development offers great promise. In agriculture: The integration of wireless sensors with mobile apps and cloud platforms now helps in the collection of vital information related to environmental conditions such as temperature, rainfall, humidity, wind speed, pest infestation, and soil humus or nutrient content. These can be used to improve and automate farming techniques, make informed decisions, and minimize risk and waste. For example, farmers can now detect which areas have been fertilized, whether the land is too dry, and predict yield. (Stack 2018; see also European Commission 2017)

IoT developments are also being felt in sectors such as healthcare. This includes areas such as disease treatments and immunology; remote healthcare and patient monitoring; bed occupancy and medical stocks; and in scientific research. These are driven by the increasing developments and adoption of sensors in hospitals and ambulances; in medical devices and wearable or embedded biomedical technology; and the use of data analytics allied to cloud computing and data sharing (Bhatt et al. 2017; Laplante and Laplante 2016, pp. 2‒4). It is estimated that by 2020 40 per cent of the IoT will be healthcare related, making it the biggest user (Dimitrov 2016, pp. 156‒63). These trends are collectively known as ‘Industry 4.0’ which includes manufacturing and the ‘factory of the future’ alongside further developments in the use of robotics (Thoben et al. 2017, pp. 4‒16). We are also faced with an aging population from improvements in healthcare and an increasing abundance of food. The UN is predicting that “the number of older persons – those aged 60 years or over – is expected to more than double by 2050 and to more than triple by 2100, rising from 962 million globally in 2017 to 2.1 billion in 2050 and 3.1 billion in 2100” (United Nations n.d.). Set against this background, the IoT could be essential for population control and resource management. However, without commensurate ‘security by design’ measures in place throughout global supply chains, developing nations are facing the same cyber security problems that have affected the developed world. This includes insecurity in legacy ICT systems and, by rushing to bring IoT devices to market, not ensuring that ‘security by design’ is built into products. The IoT is also designing people out of these processes in favour of increasing automation.

Cyber security  251 This is apparent already in the delivery of many services. This includes manufacturing and the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or ‘drones’), used for mapping and monitoring purposes in areas such as climate change, law enforcement, crowd control, traffic control, ecology and environmental conservation, disaster relief, and infrastructure inspection (Economist 2017). For militaries, UAVs, and their combat variants – UCAVs – are in such widespread use combined with deployments and developments for land and maritime operations that, alongside the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a humanless loop is on the visible horizon (Enemark 2013; Ford 2015; Sharkey et al. 2018). Even a post-human and transhuman world built on AI developments culminating in ‘Singularity’, when an AI passes the Turing Test and surpasses human intelligence and cognitive capacity, is postulated. AI, and ‘Singularity’ could be felt in areas of military intervention through ‘drone’ use and remote warfare more generally (Human Rights Watch 2016). It could also be used to map and forecast demographic changes and migrations, population control, and for the eradication of disease and poverty. There have also been notable concerns. In a 2015 open letter signed by 150 of the world’s leading scientists, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, they warned of existential dangers as AI crosses “the threshold from laboratory research to economically valuable technologies” (Future of Life Institute 2015). Meanwhile, there are signs of technological conjunctions driven by industry and consumer demand. Acker et al. (2012) convincingly argue that “The traditional sectors of the ICT ecosystem – a multi-trillion-dollar industry whose members include enterprise service providers, hardware producers, telecom companies, and software developers (including the purveyors of Internet services and social media) – are blurring and converging”. Furthermore “The industry is also being invaded by a host of hungry new Internet players, who offer innovative Web-based solutions that bypass the systems of the past” (Acker et al. 2012). Now companies such as Facebook can appear out of nowhere by tapping into a hitherto unknown, under exploited or unexploited consumer driven markets. These drivers can, in turn, create demand or fuel existing demand. They also shape patterns of social behaviour; enable individuals to engage increasingly online; permit geographically disparate groups of people to connect with one another and cooperate or compete. These innovative processes remain difficult to map into predictive patterns even with the use and utilization of big data analytics. AI and ‘singularity’ could predictively map these patterns.

INTERNET POLICING AND GOVERNANCE Meanwhile, governmental controls over the Internet and future nationally controlled country-wide intranets that regulate national cyberspace continue to be debated. This has been a major part of a long-standing and wider debate on Internet governance and Internet freedom but has been accelerated by increasing cyberespionage and attempts by states to be able to monitor and control their borders. The US political economist Milton Mueller suggests that “The Internet is haunted by the ghost of telecommunications’ past. Thanks to telecom service trade liberalization and the deregulation of information services it is the Internet, not traditional telecommunications, that forms the present and future of communications” (Mueller 2014). He goes on, “These neoliberal trends… undermined the regulatory authority of national governments over telecommunications and elevated the policy making role of markets, technologists, business and civil society instead”. He terms this ‘Internet neo-nationalism’ (Mueller 2014).

252  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding National governments, particularly global hegemons such as the United States (which has traditionally dominated Internet governance) as well states in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, have sought to impose their cultural and law-based values upon this ‘global commons’. This has encompassed debates over freedom of speech and expression and the protection of intellectual property. A number of governments want to see a ‘policing’ of the Internet, especially through public–private partnerships with industry. Currently, a multi-stakeholder system of dialogue, negotiation and regulatory ‘governance’ which also involve Non and Intergovernmental Organizations (NGOs/IGOs) is a more apt description. Currently legislative and regulatory controls over cyberspace are nascent and weak and exacerbate prevailing conditions. These conditions are semi-anarchic with “Bureaucracies, whether corporate or governmental… undercut by formal and informal organizations… [where] Individuals and private organizations have joined states as direct players in world politics” (Van Epps 2013, p. 17). It is equated to the landscape of a ‘Wild West’ juxtaposed on the World Wide Web with deputies and marshals but without a ‘sheriff’ and central authority to maintain law and order (Carr 2016). This raises jurisdictional problems and questions which are difficult to resolve (Suganami et al. 2017). The decentralized nervous system of hardware and software that makes not only the Internet but global communications possible, have evolved from insecure communications protocols into a world of hyper-connectivity. This technical architecture is a key enabler of ‘globalization’ and development (Mikail and Aytekin 2016, pp.  345‒50). This is breeding a high-dependency on ICT which alongside far-reaching benefits to business and society, has also brought discord, threats and dangers. A brutal appraisal of this present and future reality was provided by Chris Demchak in her testimony to the US government in 2017: Cyberspace is widely misunderstood and has been from its outset. It is now a deeply intertwined “substrate” connecting all the critical components of every nation’s domestic “socio-technical-economic system” (STES), built with fault-tolerant programming and insecure hardware routinely sent too quickly to market with overblown promises of fast returns. Three interrelated cognitive blinders in western approaches to the spread of cyberspace hindered accurate assessments of the emerging reality. These were unrealistic optimism in early utopian cyber visions blended with security-blind IT capital goods business models, and [which has] endured far longer than reason would suggest due to deeply institutionalized western societies’ hubris about the permanency and moral superiority of their Cold War legacy control of the international system despite the overwhelming demographic and eventual economic scale of the rest of the non-western world. The “winners” of the Cold War ignored the reality of their cultural uniqueness. The result was insufficient security concerns for the national wealth in their own IT capital goods manufacturing, and of the possibility that the international system they created could be contested and bested by the scale of dedicated, rising adversaries. (Demchak 2017, p. 4)

Internet access is not a human right and many states filter both access and content and monitor cyberspace. States are also permitted to shut down all communications, including Internet access, in their territories under the universally recognized constitution of the International Telecommunications Union which governs technical standards across the globe (Schmitt 2017, pp.  291‒4). Milton Mueller, succinctly captures these competing dynamics with his diagnosis of the difficulties facing us: Any sentient user of the internet knows by now that creating a gigantic, globalized sphere for social interaction means that the activity there will exhibit all the classical problems of human society: bullying, fads and follies, propaganda, political domination, rumor-mongering, theft, fraud, and

Cyber security  253 inter-group conflicts ranging from nationalism to racism. We have been accepting and responding to that reality for the past decade, instituting various technical, legal and behavioral controls on Internet use while seeking to preserve the freedom and openness that made the Internet such a valuable resource. That is why we are having dialogue about internet governance and security at the global, national and local levels. (Mueller 2011)

Within this global landscape of hyper-connectivity and interdependence, cyber security has become a geopolitical issue. Cyberthreats are enduring despite growing awareness and European Union (EU) initiatives like the Budapest Convention on Cyber Crime, which seeks to coordinate policing and cooperation within and beyond Europe (Council of Europe Treaty Office 2001, 2018), and NATO’s Tallinn process which analyses how existing international law applies to cyberspace (NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence 2017). This forms part of an international process to legislate cyberspace. For these reasons EU governments continue to promote ‘responsible state behaviour’ in cyberspace alongside participation in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to discuss Confidence Building Measures and in the UN Group of Governmental Experts which agreed in 2013 in a consensus report that international law applied in cyberspace (UK Cabinet Office 2014, p. 17). Bilateral treaties and negotiations take place alongside these supranational and global initiatives but the national interest remains dominant in conceptualizing and securitizing cyberspace. However, we all swim in the same information ocean and current measures do not deal sufficiently either with organized crime which spans national jurisdictions or with building trust between states and state organizations. There is a clear need for ‘building blocks’ at the diplomatic level to establish ‘red lines’ and rules for state behaviour in cyberspace (Corera 2015). In addition, as the Director General of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5, Andrew Parker, has argued, the threat from terrorism is at its greatest level in his thirty-four years in the service (Corera 2017). For him, and many others who share these concerns and see terrorist threats in cyberspace, there are good reasons to increase international state collaboration (Nesi 2006). Counter-terrorism aside, among the greatest of the threats we see has been from external state-on-state intervention through clandestine cyberespionage.

INTERVENTION AND ESPIONAGE Cyberattacks can be a force multiplier for weaker nations against stronger, more developed nations and help offset hard military capabilities and the economic and industrial capacity that underpin them. This encompasses highly protected military systems and assets, many of which are profoundly dependent on ICT and increasingly rely on global positioning systems to perform to their best (Libicki 2011).1 The United States, together with their allies in NATO, see offensive cyber operations at operational and strategic levels as part of military planning and declared cyber to be a fifth domain of warfare at NATO’s meeting in Warsaw in July 2016

1 Remarks made under Chatham House Rules at the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre, RAF Molesworth, 2–5 November 2015.

254  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding (NATO 2016).2 China and Russia, both members of the United Nations Security Council, also recognize cyberspace to be a warfighting domain (EU Parliament 2014, p. 3). Ever since the Snowden disclosures of the activities of the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, there has been increasing awareness of the presence of national governments in cyberspace. Both the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were criticized for the use of invasive tools and infringement of civil liberties in their pursuit of intelligence gathering (Greenwald 2014; Fidler 2015). The Chinese government has also been an active player in cyberspace both for domestic surveillance and intelligence-led operations that have exfiltrated intellectual property from commercial and government entities in the West. They, alongside Russia, have also been active in infiltrating targets that run critical infrastructure (Stoddart et al. 2016). Russia and China too are concerned about attacks upon their own critical infrastructure but it also must be understood that cyberespionage by states is permitted under international law (Schmitt 2017, pp. 168‒76). Intervention through cyberespionage should not be seen as a zero-sum game. Chinese consumer electronics are replete in Western markets and Western products a major part of China’s electronic infrastructure. This includes Microsoft’s operating systems and CISCO’s routers. China has proved itself to be highly capable at re-engineering products but far less capable of innovation (Larson 2018). This is where they have turned to industrial espionage; especially through cyber means. Chinese espionage has mainly been directed at economic targets and was at the centre of the agreement signed in 2015 between President Obama and President Xi. Chris Demchak argues that “Chinese leaders see the 2015 Obama-Xi agreement regarding cyber-espionage as support for China’s Rising Great Power narrative” (Demchak 2017, p. 13). Demchak sets this ‘great power narrative’ in the following context: In the 1980s, the former leader of China Deng Xiaoping predicted China would equal the US as a global great power over a period of roughly 70 years because of its demographic and economic weight in the global system…. By most measures, the rise of China was inevitable but has occurred faster than anticipated. Analyses… predicted parity would occur by 2025, with China doubling that of the US by 2050… various authors argue that China has been roughly at parity for several years (at least since 2014). (Demchak 2017, p. 17)

It is argued that part of the Chinese strategy aiding its rise is ‘political warfare’. ‘Political warfare’ is set in the context of global competition for power and influence. It is described in a thorough study on the topic by the RAND Corporation as utilizing “all the tools of national power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic… [involving] a deliberate policy choice to undermine a rival or achieve other explicitly political objectives by means other than routine diplomacy or all-out war” (Robinson et al. 2018, pp. 5‒6). Whilst distinct from Russia’s policy of ‘hybrid warfare’, it not only shares similarities but Chinese intelligence has taken note of Russian successes in its mis and disinformation campaigns and in influencing elections and the political process. This “holds that an adversary’s political, social and economic institutions – particularly the media – should be targeted before a shooting war ever begins” (Harrington 2018). Like Russia, China also uses proxies for intervention and a cloak of plausible deniability (Maurer 2018, pp. 107‒19). For China, this 2 Remarks made during presentations at the 8th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, Tallinn, Estonia, 1–3 June 2016.

Cyber security  255 is being combined with systematic ‘soft power’ policies of “economic, social, cultural and media initiatives” (Harrington 2018). Foreign direct investment and construction projects are simultaneously being used for long-term economic growth and foreign and security policy aims (Center for Strategic and International Studies 2018). Meanwhile, Russia’s ‘hybrid warfare’ strategy has included state sponsored cyberattacks over the last few years ranging from attempts to influence foreign political campaigns and elections to successful penetrations of the networks of energy companies who form part of critical infrastructure. Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election and similar attempts on other elections (most notably the 2017 French election and the UK Brexit referendum) (US Senate 2018) and their potential impact on the fundamental functioning of a liberal democracy have been well documented (Director of National Intelligence 2017). More widely, “Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine have served as testing grounds and signalling arenas for Russia’s cyber forces, providing opportunities for them to refine their cyberwarfare techniques and procedures while demonstrating their capabilities on the world stage to influence or deter Russia’s adversaries” (Connell and Vogler 2017, p. 25). András Rácz has detailed how political, economic, informational and other non-violent means of influence and coercion have been utilized alongside military use of force in Russian interventions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine as part of this ‘hybrid warfare’ strategy (Rácz 2015, pp. 33, 19‒24). Cyberattacks from Russia against Ukraine have been used during the 2010s alongside “other forms of cyber disruption and espionage to conduct a steady drumbeat of cyberattacks targeting Ukraine’s government, military, telecommunications, and private-sector information technology infrastructure” (Connell and Vogler 2017, p. 19). Ukraine’s disputes with Russia culminated in conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014. There then followed a step change into cyber-physical attacks. Ukraine was the first nation to experience a cyberattack which took down part of its power grid at Christmas 2015 (Zinets 2017). Although it lasted only a few hours, 225,000 customers were affected (CISA Cyber-Infrastructure 2016).3 Ukraine’s Security Service immediately and publicly blamed Russia’s security services (Polityuk 2015; SANS Industrial Control Systems and Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center 2016, p. iv). This was followed up with a further very limited attack in Kiev a year later. These provide a proof-of-concept and can be leveraged for any future intervention alongside mis and disinformation campaigns and other non-violent aspects of ‘hybrid warfare’. Although Russian actors are not the only players on the field they, alongside China, are highly active. They are joined by Iran and North Korea in this great game against ‘Western’ interests – and this includes South East Asian targets; especially in the economic powerhouses of Japan and South Korea. The Snowden revelations also made clear that many Western nations are also highly capable cyberespionage actors and are highly active. States are not currently deterred from conducting cyberattacks or mounting cyber campaigns from their intelligence agencies. Cyberespionage is being used with increasing frequency as a relatively low-risk and high-gain means of intelligence gathering; for economic and military advantage; or prepositioning for future operations and political intervention.

3 The activities of Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) and related organizations provide a valuable protective barrier.

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CONCLUSION The Internet transcends borders which is a fundamental organizing principle of nation-states. For both liberal-democracies as well as authoritarian states this poses a series of national security questions that are proving problematic.4 Moreover, “cyberspace does have a direct effect on the information environment… is very disruptive of many processes heretofore considered safe such as the exchange of money and the relative security of personal, industrial and governmental data, as we can see from the burgeoning statistics on cyber-crime and cyber-espionage” (Betz and Stevens 2011, p. 129). Social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Internet forums also have profound effects on individuals and society even if their effectiveness is difficult to map, skewed towards a younger generation brought up with the Internet and growing interconnectedness. For liberal-democracies especially, cyberspace is proving difficult to ‘police’ with problematic areas. This includes debates over freedom of speech; national(ism) and religious and personal persecution; Internet trolling; the role and responsibilities of social media companies; the ‘echo chamber’ effect; and political radicalization. As John Arquilla (2011, p. 47) advised, “social networks have risen to considerable power at the same time as the emergence of cyberwar, it is now incumbent upon world leaders to learn how to work with them”. Simultaneously digital divides within and between states are shrinking as the take-up rate grows higher and the entry points lower with disenfranchisement from the Internet seen as a barrier to knowledge, competition and economic development within and between individuals, social groups, private industry and between nations. In an ideal world there should be more promise than peril. Time will tell.

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25. The plain drone, the armed drone and human security Astri Suhrke

INTRODUCTION Drones have become ubiquitous in our physical and policy environment; they have also generated much debate about benefits, dangers and regulation. This chapter examines the role of drones in intervention and statebuilding contexts. When considered in a broader framework of human security, are they useful or counterproductive items in a policy-maker’s toolbox? Are they mere tools, or “technological enablers” that in themselves drive policy? While “human security” has been defined broadly to include social, economic, political and cultural entitlements (Commission on Human Security 2003), its core is arguably the right to life, without which other entitlements are irrelevant. This chapter consequently focuses on the armed drone, which more immediately affects the right to life than the plain, or unarmed, drone. The chapter surveys the international spread of the possession, use and production of armed drones during the past two decades and argues that, as a technically superb weapon with no immediate risk to its user, the armed drone encourages militarization of conflict, and violations of international law.

PLAIN DRONES AND STATEBUILDING INTERVENTIONS The main feature of the plain drone as a policy tool in a statebuilding paradigm is its “multiplier” effect, which permits quick, safe and increasingly efficient interventions in numerous development and governance sectors (Sandvik and Gabrielsen Jumbert 2017). The impact on the affected communities, however, depends heavily on the nature and purposes of the operating agent. The drone can be used for data collection in agricultural production to enhance social justice, establish democratic accountability and improve personal security; it can also be used to reduce these collective and individual goods, for example by discriminatory economic interventions, illegal police surveillance or manipulation of elections. In humanitarian crisis response, the drone is useful for crowd estimates and supply drops, but the overall will to respond, commit resources and indeed effectively utilize the drone’s technical multiplier capability are more important for the outcome. The impact of plain drones for surveillance in peacekeeping operations is likewise heavily dependent on the context – its simple presence can be a deterrence (Karlsrud and Rosén 2013), but it could also provoke hostilities or create a false sense of security. Deeply conflicted contexts will likely incentivize the use of the plain drone (e.g. for policing or intelligence gathering) by both state and military agents. If armed drones are also used for military purposes, fear and anger in the affected communities may well cancel out any benefi260

The plain drone, the armed drone and human security  261 cial effects associated with the plain drone as it is not possible on the ground to know whether the distinctive buzzing of an approaching drone signals danger or a helpful action.

THE ARMED DRONE Use, Possession and Production By mid-2018, a relatively small number of countries and non-state actors were using armed drones against enemies at home or abroad. Yet the list of actors acquiring or producing these weapons had grown rapidly since the US employed them in “the war on terror” after 9/11, and armed drones of different sizes, technological sophistication and prices were readily available on the international market. Patterns of contemporary use reflect technological advancement and international military activism. While Israel pioneered the use of armed drones in combat in the 1982 war with Lebanon (Callam 2010), the US took the lead in developing and using this weapons system in the “global war on terror” declared after the September 11 attacks on its territory. Within a few years, the US was regularly using armed drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and increasingly also in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. An upsurge of strikes in Pakistan occurred during the second half of the Obama Administration (2013‒16), and the tempo soon picked up under the Trump Administration (de Luce and Naylor 2018). A study of drone strikes during the first three months of 2018 reported US strikes in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan (Cole 2018). All targets were individuals or groups reportedly associated with militant Islamist or Iran-supported movements or their infrastructure. Close American allies were also using armed drones in these and related conflicts. The UK was using the US-produced Reaper in Iraq and Syria as part of the coalition campaign against Islamic State forces (Cole 2018). The French Ministry of Defense announced in October 2017 that it would be arming their Reapers for anti-terrorist operations against militant Islamists “in West Africa”, probably in Mali and Niger where French forces were operating. Previously used for surveillance during the French 2013 intervention in Mali, the Reaper was easily weaponized. The Russian government has been using its heavier drones in Syria mainly for surveillance, although Russian special forces were equipped with the smaller hand-launched drones designed for surveillance as well as combat. Russia lags behind the US and Israel in unmanned technology, but was reported in 2017 to be developing its capacity in this area and preparing to enter the export market (Karnozov 2017). Israel never denies or confirms its use of armed drones, but appears to be a frequent user, most recently in Egypt’s Northern Sinai and Gaza (Cole 2018; Kirkpatrick 2018). Also other states were moving into the drone-league. By 2018, Turkey was producing its own model and had concluded an export agreement with Qatar for the sale of five vehicles (Begdil 2018). Its armed forces have used the weapon in Syria as well as against Kurdish-populated areas within Turkey. Egypt reportedly has been using Chinese-produced drones to strike in the Sinai. The Nigerian Air Force, having purchased five armed drones from China in 2015, used one for the first time in 2016 to destroy a logistics base of the militant Islamic movement Boko Haram (Runsewe 2016). Iranian drones have been spotted in the Syrian war, while armed

262  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding drones attributed to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were reportedly used in the war in Yemen (Cole 2018). Non-state actors have entered the field as well. Hezbollah has been using armed drones in Syria, and, according to Israeli sources, has sent surveillance drones and armed drones towards Israeli territory. The weapons are reportedly of Chinese and Iranian provenance (Alami 2017). Islamic State forces used drones for surveillance in the war in Syria, possibly also with simple arms attached, and in Iraq. China has not intervened militarily in conflicts outside its territory in recent years, and there are no reports of drones being used against internal dissident movements. China’s role in the drone story so far is that of a rapidly growing producer and exporter. “Chinese cut-rate versions of American armed drones like the MQ-9 Reaper have begun showing up in smaller African, Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries, signalling the country’s ambitions to take market shares” from the US and Israel (Goh and Doyle 2018). The price tag on a Chinese drone (US$5 million) versus a US-made one (up to US$100 million), makes the Chinese models attractive to less affluent militaries; officials from Myanmar, for instance, were seen visiting the Chinese drone booth at the 2018 international air show in Singapore. Nigeria, as noted above, was an early customer. Also affluent Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have bought Chinese-made drones with weapons capability. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan reportedly bought versions of the main Chinese model, Wing Loong, while Indonesia in 2018 put in an order for five (Parameswaran 2018). Governments that wish to have a national capability but have decided not to invest in developing their own model can enter into joint-production agreements with already established drone-producing states. Israel in 2017 concluded a transfer-of-technology agreement with Kazakhstan (Office of the Prime Minister, Kazakhstan 2016). The following year, Turkey agreed to collaborate with Indonesia in the production of an Indonesian version. Three Problematic Features Unlike plain drones, the effect of armed drones on human security does not simply depend on who is using them or for what purpose. Armed drones are tactically very effective weapons – able to hover over a target for a long time, execute precision strikes from a considerable altitude, and return home unscathed or at most risking the loss of the platform itself. Most important, although the user may suffer retaliation, the immediate risk is very low as the weapon is operated remotely from a safe distance. There are other advantages as well. If properly targeted, drones can execute pinpoint strikes, thus reducing collateral damage. A single small drone may not be easily detected, and even large drones can easily fly under the political radar at home and internationally. This is particularly the case when drone flights, as in the US, are operated by special forces or the intelligence services that do not readily publicize their activities. The drone’s tactical advantages are also the source of its three most problematic features. Its low-risk, low-cost qualities tend to encourage overuse of the military option, consequent violations of international law, and proliferation. These consequences result from the qualities of the weapon and are independent of the nature and intentions of the agent possessing it.

The plain drone, the armed drone and human security  263 Overuse of the military option The likelihood that drones will encourage armed intervention is regarded as their main problematic feature (Boyle 2015; Buchanan and Keohane 2015; Kaag and Kreps 2014; O’Connell 2012; UN 2010, 2013a, 2013b). As a group of eminent international lawyers told the UK Parliament in 2015, “drones make targeted killing so much easier” (Heyns et al. 2015, p. 45). They are a high-tech illustration of the adage that if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Initially designed as an anti-tank weapon, the armed drone had by the mid-2010s become the weapon of choice for certain kinds of armed interventions, above all small-scale missions targeting individuals and leadership infrastructure. As “technological enablers”, they have permitted US or US-led coalitions to strike at will against “terrorist targets” in a wide swath of the Middle East, West Africa and South Asia and to maintain military pressure on militant movements without deploying significant ground forces of their own, hence incurring little risk of loss to own personnel and little political visibility at home. Armed drones have also been used in conventional war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan; here they were part of a much larger and officially recognized military presence of US-led coalitions. It is in smaller operations that can fly under the political radar that the armed drone is so suitable for the task that it may encourage intervention. By contrast, a conventional US-led combat presence in areas where Washington now only uses drones – as in in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – would be quite controversial at home and abroad. A UK commission of experts recently challenged the view that armed drones are likely to incentivize the use of military force in general, and with respect to the UK in particular (Birmingham Policy Commission 2014, pp. 11, 59). The safeguard in the UK case, according to the commission, was the oversight role of the UK Parliament. The argument is not wholly convincing. It is not clear that the British Parliament will always understand its oversight role to include restraint on armed response in a tense situation. Critics will cite the Parliament’s approval of the 2003 armed intervention in Iraq, for instance. As for smaller missions of the kind where a drone is an ideal weapon, the government may not seek parliamentary approval in the first place, thus sidestepping the oversight function (All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones 2018). Armed drones have tempting tactical advantages in domestic conflicts as well. Governments that face militant opposition at home may find it easier to eliminate their opponents with lethal force rather than following an uncertain trajectory of negotiations or a law enforcement approach, which requires capturing the suspects and instituting criminal proceedings. Armed drones, as noted, have been used in Turkey against the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and in Nigeria against the Islamist movement Boko Haram. Authoritarian governments might find armed drones such as low-cost Chinese models particularly useful for intimidating or eliminating domestic opponents. For non-state actors, in turn, drones can reduce some of the asymmetry in their conflict with states, whether militant movements such as Hezbollah and ISIS or coup-plotters in Venezuela; President Maduro was evidently subject to an assassination attempt by drone during a public ceremony in July 2018. In short, to the extent that the very existence of the armed drone encourages militarization of situations that otherwise would be addressed by non-military means such as negotiations

264  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding and diplomacy, or a law enforcement approach, the drone has an immediate, negative impact on human security.1 Violations of international law Frequent and expansive use of armed drones by the US after 2001 intensified a simmering debate, previously focused on Israeli strikes in Palestinian territories, over its legality under international law (International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and Global Justice Clinic 2012, chapter 4; Brunstetter and Jimenez-Bacardi 2015). While there is broad agreement that the armed drone is not in itself an illegal weapon, its use in the “war on terror” raised questions whether some strikes were extra-judicial executions rather than legal acts of war, and whether instances of civilian casualties violated legal principles of proportionality and distinction. To counter such criticism, the US government articulated a legal rationale for its practices. Washington’s basic position throughout has been that the US is exercising its right of self-defence to attack Al Qaeda and its affiliates in any location. It further claims that this right does not require the consent of the host-country when the latter is “unable or unwilling” to act, as Barack Obama reiterated in the closing days of his presidency (White House 2016, p. 10). A broad range of critics from the human rights community, the UN and other legal scholars found this an overly broad position – a stretching and blurring of boundaries of international law that amount to “a licence to kill”, as UN Special Rapporteur Phillip Alston concluded already in 2010 (UN 2010, p. 1; Donald 2017). One issue is the location of strikes. The concept of a “global battlefield” so central in the “war on terror” has no place in the laws of war, critics noted (Pejic 2015). Rather, there are areas of armed conflict, where international humanitarian law applies, and areas where violence does not meet the threshold of armed conflict as understood in international law. Here international human rights law applies, which is more restrictive than the laws of war as regards the use of lethal force. Above all, human rights law does not permit killing as the sole objective of an operation, but requires a law enforcement approach designed to capture rather than kill. Drones, as we know, do not take prisoners. Strikes in situations that did not meet the criteria for “armed conflict” consequently opened for charges that these were extra-judicial executions rather than lawful acts of war. The number of potential cases is substantial. The US government reported in 2016 that it had killed around 2,600 persons in 473 strikes on “terrorist targets” outside “areas of active hostilities” (Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria) in the seven-year period 2009‒15 (Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2016). While not identified in the report, targeted areas would be mostly in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia and presumably were carried out by drones. A proposal to curb executive authority on ordering strikes by having special courts approve target selection in advance backfired when critics claimed that the strikes in question amounted to extra-judicial executions and thus at the outset were illegal under international law (O’Connell 2015). Another dimension of the legal debate concerns the impact on civilians. While drones are technically “smart” and can execute precision strikes, it soon became apparent that they were not always very smartly used. Reports of significant “collateral damage” to civilians sug1 The long-term impact of militarization of a conflict obviously depends on how the particular situation develops.

The plain drone, the armed drone and human security  265 gested violations of provisions in international humanitarian law designed to protect civilians. Faulty or misleading intelligence at times led to strikes on the wrong targets, while strikes that hit the intended target also killed non-combatants in the immediate vicinity. A controversial procedural bias in target selection was introduced during the Obama Administration, which based strikes on a person’s general behaviour (connections to “terrorist” networks or, in Afghanistan, the drug trade) and personal characteristics (notably military-aged males, MAM). These so-called signature strikes appeared to violate legal obligations to clearly distinguish between civilians and military and to target civilians only when they were actively engaged in hostilities. Independent investigations found evidence of probable violations of international law. Reports issued by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen concluded that war crimes might have been committed (Amnesty International 2013; Human Rights Watch 2013). Two prestigious US law schools found the legality of signature strikes in themselves “highly suspect” (International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and Global Justice Clinic 2012, p. 103). In the UK, a two-year probe by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones examining drone operations in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia warned that participating British military personnel risked complicity in alleged war crimes committed by the US and could be prosecuted (All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones 2018). No court, however, has as yet ruled on the legality of drone strikes under international law carried out by the US or its close allies. Widely differing estimates of civilian causalities contributes to the contested atmosphere of facts and law that envelops the use of armed drones. US official estimates tend towards the low side. The 2016 summary of the Directorate of National Intelligence of US strikes outside “areas of active hostilities” for the 2009‒15 period estimates one civilian death for every 22 or 37 combatants killed. Non-official sources are much higher. For Pakistan, where most of the US strikes have occurred, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has closely tracked casualties; it finds that for the same period at least one civilian was killed for every seven combatants, or a minimum of 256 civilians as against 64 civilians in the US estimate (Bureau of Investigative Journalism 2017). Western military analysts have used a similar ratio (1:5) for strikes in Pakistan (Kilcullen and Exum 2009). Apart from death and physical injury, drones cause widespread additional damage and suffering. Hearing the distinct buzzing of the drone, but not knowing where, when and against whom it might strike, creates traumas and pervasive fear, undermining the stability necessary for individual and community life. In affected areas in Pakistan, American researchers found that drone strikes reduced economic, social and cultural activities, limited educational opportunities as parents feared sending their children to school, and imposed economic hardship by destruction of property. Even efforts to rescue and assist victims, and to attend funerals, were limited as people feared another strike (International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and Global Justice Clinic 2012, chapter 3). Expansive interpretations of law and impunity for possible violations have both direct and indirect impact on human security. The direct impact in terms of loss of life, property and fractured communities is clear. There is also an indirect impact. The drone’s comparative advantage in secretive and non-attributable operations means that violations of international law are difficult to investigate. Impunity for possible grave violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in turn erodes the role of law in maintaining international order and stability, which in a globalized and interdependent world is foundational for human

266  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding security. More insidious damage to the standing of international law arises from the stretching and blurring of legal boundaries, as well as the limited accountability and lack of transparency about particular strikes. These features have all accompanied Washington’s incorporation of drone strikes in its foreign and national security policy since 2001. Given the power of precedent in customary international law, this may encourage other states and non-state actors to likewise claim that expansive use of lethal force is legally justified (Kaag and Kreps 2014). The prospect made UN Special Rapporteur Christof Heyns issue a clear warning in 2013, “If the right to life is to be secured, it is imperative that the limitations posed by international law on the use of force are not weakened by broad justifications of drone strikes” (UN 2013b, p. 2). Proliferation Rapid proliferation seems inevitable. A tactically attractive weapon, the armed drone is readily available on the international market, and the basic technology is relatively simple for those wishing to produce their own. By the mid-2010s, some 50 states had, or could readily acquire, drones for reconnaissance, surveillance or targeting (Melzer 2013, p. 7). A few non-state actors were following suit. A 2013 report for the European Parliament anticipated that remotely controlled armed drones soon would become a “veritable cornerstone of sophisticated military capability” worldwide, driven in part by the confrontation between states and transnational networks of armed groups for which the drone was particularly well suited (Melzer 2013, p. 11). Other drivers were national defence industries eager to get their share of a rapidly developing technology and an expanding market. Trump announced in early 2018 that he would loosen restrictions on US export of drones to help American industries compete with China and Israel on the international drone market. In the UK, drone advocates noted that British industries were on “the cutting edge” of manufacturing and designing the weapon and concluded that “retaining this technological edge is essential in a growing global market-place” (Birmingham Policy Commission 2014, p. 6). The prospect of a global proliferation of low-cost, low-risk drones brings up alarming images. Technological innovation has led to “swarming”, whereby several drones are launched at once. Simple swarms attacked Russian military bases in Syria in early 2018. The swarming technology is being perfected by China – illustrations appear as a wonderful New Year fireworks display of a thousand miniature drones lighting up the sky (Romaniuk and Burgers 2018). Down the road there is the autonomous, armed drone, capable of identifying targets and responding to counter-attacks. In the meantime, the present, low-cost, low-tech 5 million dollar armed drone may become another widely distributed and poorly regulated weapon, taking the place of the automatic rifle. The impact on human security is surely negative. Regulative Issues Regulation of the use of armed drones can be viewed from a moral, legal or prudential perspective. In ethical terms, the ability of a drone to inflict lethal damage from a distance, without immediate risk to its user, entails a high degree of moral hazard. Using an armed drone thus violates basic moral norms of risk and responsibility (Kaag and Kreps 2014). Strikes outside major war zones blur the distinguishing line between war and peace. More broadly, the ability of users to launch strikes in other states, out of sight and below the political radar at home, lulls the publics in user nations into passivity, pre-empting political mobilization to uphold law and justice. Apart from a simple rule of non-use, however, ethics are in this case a poor

The plain drone, the armed drone and human security  267 guide to regulation. Hence analysts who decry the moral hazard dimension of armed drones are also open to prudential reasoning, citing proliferation among other dangers, to limit their use (Kreps and Zenko 2014). In legal terms, the use by Israel and the US of armed drones appear particular problematic because they occur outside conventional theatres of armed conflict, thereby contravening established norms in international law. While Israeli governments have chosen to not comment on their drone strikes at all, successive US administrations have publicly challenged established norms by articulating extremely broad interpretations of the right to self-defence. The practice has led some legal analysts in the UN system to seek clarification from users on interpretation of relevant law, possibly leading to a consensus on interpretation (UN 2013a). The approach elicited little response. Most legal analysts reporting to the UN system, as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross, hold that the armed drone does not require any change of existing international law; the issue is full compliance with existing law (UN 2010, 2013b; Heyns et al. 2015; Pejic 2015). A prudential rationale for regulation starts from the premise that because the armed drone technically speaking is such a superb weapon, some restraint is necessary to ensure its continued use (Zenko 2013). Above all, present users must seek to limit proliferation (Kreps and Zenko 2014), and allow sufficient transparency and accountability for operations to prevent a domestic “blow-back” of criticism against their use (Birmingham Policy Commission 2014). Exercise of self-restraint is a key principle in this reasoning, as is the call for major user nations to take a lead internationally in developing a regime to curb undesirable practices and developments. Some analysts have outlined an international regulatory regime based on voluntary participation but with an authoritative mediation mechanism (Buchanan and Keohane 2015).

CONCLUSIONS The plain drone and the armed drone differ so greatly in the consequences of their use for human security that they scarcely belong in the same discourse. The plain drone is in essence neutral, its impact dependent on the nature and purpose of the agent wielding it. The armed drone, precisely because of its technically superb features as a weapon of stealth and precision that carries no immediate risk to its user, encourages militarization of conflict, violations of international law and proliferation. Exemplifying this dynamic, the US use of armed drones in its global “war on terror” has caused concerns that the drone permits systematic violence that contravenes international law, and is sparking a race of ever more sophisticated models unregulated by international institutions or national self-restraint. Two decades into the “war on terror” there is little progress towards stronger international regulation of the use of the armed drone. A UN Special Rapporteur trying to start consultations with user states so as to clarify the legal basis for their strikes had after four years received no response and his mandate elapsed (UN 2017). Discussions in Geneva to regulate the development of autonomous, armed drones within the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons started in 2013 and are in a very early phase. National self-restraint in existing user states was not in much evidence, although the US had become more open in disclosing criteria for target selection and the number of casualties. That left self-interest – perhaps in the form of fears of proliferation and a demanding technological race – as the main

268  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding barrier against the temptation in a growing number of states to reach for the armed drone to resolve a conflict.

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26. New forms of intervention: the case of humanitarian refugee biometrics Katja Lindskov Jacobsen

INTRODUCTION Since the 2000s, biometrics (fingerprint and iris scan) have been used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to register refugees seeking assistance from the agency. Whilst scholars have devoted attention to biometrics in the ‘war on terror’ (Baldaccini 2008; Amoore 2006; Amoore and de Goede 2008), in airports (Salter 2003; Sparke 2006; Muller 2008), and in asylum procedures (van der Ploeg 1999; Broeders 2007), attention to the use of humanitarian biometrics has been more limited. Individual case studies have examined biometrics in specific humanitarian programmes (Aas 2006; Jacobsen 2015b; Hosein and Nyst 2013; Ajana 2013; Belliveau 2016). Yet, the widespread use of humanitarian biometrics has up until now escaped attention. This chapter offers a description and a critical analysis of the scope of humanitarian refugee biometrics. It traces a development from a few UNHCR-pilot projects (early/mid-2000s), to the emergence of an official UNHCR policy with biometric registration described as a “strategic decision” (UNHCR 2013a, p. 1). One important issue that this shift from pilot projects to strategic decision invites us to revisit is that of experimentation. Thus, the first section discusses whether humanitarian biometrics has moved ‘beyond’ experimentation. Furthermore, the chapter engages with current debates about intervention. Approaching ‘humanitarian biometrics’ from a position that recognizes ‘matter’ as having constitutive agentic capacity (Aradau 2010; Coole 2013) enables us to appreciate how humanitarian biometrics contribute to the emergence of new forms of intervention qua the technology’s constitutive effects. Attending to the technology’s agentic capacity makes it possible to see how biometric registration contributes to the making of a new type of digital refugee body, rendering additional dimensions of refugee existence intervenable (Jacobsen 2010). The third section combines ideas about new forms of intervention and biometrics as having constitutive capacity in an analysis of UNHCR’s use of refugee biometrics. With attention to constitutive effects, the chapter shows how the emergence of digitalized biometric refugee data adds a new dimension to UNHCR’s already challenged relation to host states and donor states. UNHCR is placed both as the gatekeeper responsible for guarding biometric refugee data and as the potential gateway for sovereign states seeking to test new technologies of intervention and/or to extend the reach of their interventions into additional domains of refugee existence, namely the digitalized refugee body. Accordingly, data-sharing practices and policies emerge as crucial issues in this analysis of how humanitarian biometrics enables new forms of intervention. Certainly, data-sharing is not just a technical matter; guarding against or allowing non-humanitarian actors access to biometric refugee data has implications for the reach of sovereign states’ interventions into newly accessible dimensions of refugee existence, 270

New forms of intervention  271 and thus for the refugee’s exposure to interventions potentially prioritizing national, rather than refugee, security.

HUMANITARIAN BIOMETRICS: FROM PILOT PROJECT TO STRATEGIC DECISION In a 2001-report by the Executive Committee of UNHCR, the Committee “encourages States and UNHCR to introduce new techniques and tools to enhance the identification and documentation of refugees and asylum-seekers, including biometrics features, and to share these with a view towards developing a more standardized worldwide registration system” (UNHCR 2001). The following year, in 2002, UNHCR initiated its first use of biometric refugee registration: the agency “started testing an iris-recognition system among Afghan refugees in Peshawar” (Kessler 2002). To obtain repatriation assistance, Afghan refugees had to register biometrically with UNHCR. This marked “the first field use of such iris technology anywhere in the world” (Kessler 2003), referred to by UNHCR as “experimental iris testing” (Kessler 2003). This was UNHCR’s first deployment of biometric technology. In 2003, the US Embassy in Rome reported, “Tanzania will serve as the pilot for a new initiative for registering refugees” (US Embassy in Rome 2003). Thus, in the early/mid-2000s, UNHCR piloted biometrics, not only in the Afghan–Pakistan borderland but also in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa, including Djibouti, Kenya, Ghana and Tanzania (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada 2007). Beyond Africa and Afghanistan, a news story from 2006 described the introduction of biometrics in Malaysia as a “historical moment” for UNHCR, as Malaysia had become “the first country in Asia to launch UNHCR’s new biometric registration system” (Ismail 2006). These cases represent some of UNHCR’s first uses of biometric refugee registration, many of which UNHCR has itself described as ‘pilots’ and as ‘experimental’ (Jacobsen 2015a). In December 2010, UNHCR announced its first official policy on biometric refugee registration. The policy states that; “… UNHCR should introduce the collection of biometric data as a regular and routine feature of its registration processes in support of identity verification exercises among refugee populations” (UNHCR 2013a). Although the policy is mentioned in UNHCR news stories (e.g. UNHCR 2014b), a keynote by UNHCR’s Senior Registration Officer, and in other documents, including UNHCR’s 2013 Request for Proposals for “the provision of a biometric identity management system” (UNHCR 2013a), the policy itself was not publicly available. UNHCR nonetheless stressed in various statements, that with this new policy, biometric refugee registration had become more than a few pilot projects. UNHCR now defined its use of biometrics as “a strategic decision” with biometrics to be included as “a routine feature” in refugee registration practices (UNHCR 2013a, p. 1). This is not to say that ‘biometric pilots’ would no longer occur, but with the new policy, the aim of such trials would not be to gauge whether the technology could be usefully applied in the context of refugee registration but rather how to design the most optimal system of biometric refugee registration. Following the announcement of this policy, UNHCR’s use of biometrics expanded. By the end of 2011 “15 countries had rolled-out biometric registration in their various operations” (UNHCR 2013c, p. 17), and in 2012 “UNHCR deepened its data collection abilities with the use of new technologies, including… forms of biometric registration like digital fingerprinting” (UNHCR 2013d, p. 21). During 2013 and 2014, at least two aspects of UNHCR’s

272  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding use of refugee biometrics deserve attention. First, a different type of piloting was initiated towards the end of 2013; the Dzaleka Camp in Malawi was selected for the testing of a new multi-modal biometric system that captures both facial images, iris scans and fingerprints (Hopkins 2014). The aim was to demonstrate “that a complex biometric solution could be successfully deployed in UNHCR environments” and “to understand what factors of the UNHCR environment would influence the specifics of the technology solution” (Hopkins 2014). Such knowledge was valuable to UNHCR before rolling out this new system on a larger scale: “The experience in Malawi will inform our decision on further development and roll-out of the new biometrics tool in our operations around the world” (Ghelli 2014). Second, biometrics became an important part of UNHCR’s regional response to the Syrian refugee crisis, as iris-scanning was for example, rolled out in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon (UNHCR 2014a) on the note that this would “enable UNHCR and its partners to better address the needs of the population” (UNHCR 2014a). In short, we saw the advent of a regional biometric response system, which represents a shift from focusing on country-based biometric systems (Hopkins 2014, p. 41) to a concern with “cross-border identity solution” (Vrankulj 2014). After Experimentation? The shift from pilots to strategic decision with biometrics as a routine feature of UNHCR’s assistance efforts raises various questions. One is whether this shift implies a move away from experimental sentiments evident in UNHCR’s initial pilots (Jacobsen 2015a). Bearing in mind the ‘pilot’ in Malawi and the regional cross-border trial in the Middle East, it seems that rather than being a move ‘beyond’ experimentation, new types of trials unfolded as new versions and/or functionalities were being tested. Thus, as used by UNHCR, biometrics is a technology which is always ‘in-progress’. Thus, elevating biometrics to a strategic decision should not too readily be interpreted as a move away from trials with potentially undesirable effects.

TRIALLING BIOMETRICS: CONSTITUTIVE EFFECTS AND NEW FORMS OF INTERVENTION Two concepts are particularly useful for advancing a more critical appreciation of the link between humanitarian biometrics and debates about changing forms of intervention: technology as capable of constitutive capacity and humanitarianism as part of a broader “assemblage of intervention.” Technology as Capable of Constitutive Agency Conceptualizing technology as having “agentic capacities” (Coole 2013) – as capable of bringing about effects that cannot be reduced to the result of human intent – has been advanced in international relations by scholars drawing on insights from techno-feminism (Aradau 2010) and science and technology studies more broadly (Barry 2013; Leander 2013; Nexon and Pouliot 2013; Walters 2014; Jacobsen 2010; Agathangelou 2016). Adding to this, are critical analyses of other humanitarian technologies, be it mundane technologies like stoves (Abdelnour and Saeed 2014) or technologies like drones (Karlsrud and Rosén 2013; Sandvik and Lohne 2014) or ‘big data’ (McDonald 2016).

New forms of intervention  273 Contributing to these debates about how to conceptualize the role of technology in contemporary global politics, and to debates about humanitarian technology more specifically, this chapter argues that attentiveness to technology’s constitutive effects can advance our appreciation of seemingly ‘peripheral’ humanitarian technology uses. Whilst technical failures have given rise to certain challenges, paying attention to constitutive effects illuminates the emergence of other challenges, like those that emerge once biometric registration has successfully created a digitalized and newly intervenable type of refugee body (Jacobsen 2015a). With attention to such constitutive effects, it becomes possible to understand the politics of apparently technical matters. New Forms of Intervention Furthermore, scholars have called attention to changing forms of intervention (Aaronson et al. 2016; Bachmann et al. 2015; Duffield 2007; Abrahamsen and Williams 2011) and to the need for a broader conceptualization of “international intervention” or “interventionism” (Doucet 2016, p. 116; Olsson 2015, p. 426). To understand contemporary international intervention, we should look beyond practices that in juridical terms qualify as ‘intervention’ and include a broader set of practices like capacity building (Jeandesboz 2015; Jacobsen 2017), crisis management (Andersson and Weigand 2015) and ‘neoliberal reforms’ (Harrison 2010). Building on this literature, my analysis of humanitarian refugee biometrics begins from a similarly broad understanding of intervention. Specifically, I suggest that the notion of “assemblages of intervention” (Bachmann et al. 2015; Abrahamsen and Williams 2011; Acuto and Curtis 2013) offer a fruitful starting point through which to call attention to human and non-human aspects of intervention (Orford 2015) and to how intervention is made up of multiple component parts (Doucet 2016, p. 116; Duffield 2007). This perspective invites us to question the usefulness of commonplace distinctions between “military, intelligence, police and humanitarian actors” and to focus instead on exploring the implications of blurring of such boundaries (Orford 2015, p. xvii). In the case of humanitarian biometrics, data-sharing is an example of a practice, which ‘blurs’ the distinction between security actors and humanitarian actors but which also contributes to cementing this specific interventionary assemblage through a shared vision of the importance of biometrics in “developing a more standardized worldwide registration system” (UNHCR Executive Committee 2001). The notion of ‘assemblages of intervention’ enables a focus on (a) technology’s agentic capacity and on (b) the relations between component parts of the assemblage, including the role of technology in shaping such relations. Experimentation How do new forms of intervention become possible, and how to conceptualize the role of experimental humanitarian technology uses? Scholarly attention to experimentation in humanitarian contexts is not new (Newberg 1999; Duffield 2001) and continues to receive attention (Jacobsen 2015a; Duffield 2016; Sandvik et al. 2017; Chandler 2017; Pandolfi 2008). Adding to that literature, this chapter explores the role of humanitarian biometrics in advancing new forms of intervention. Specifically, two things are highlighted: (a) how testing biometrics facilitates their perfection and normative acceptability, and (b) how the technology’s constitutive effects render new domains of refugee existence open to intervention (Foucault 2003).

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FROM ‘ROUTINE FEATURE’ TO NEW FORMS OF INTERVENTION When accounting for the shift from pilot-approach to strategic decision to develop an integrated worldwide registration system, UNHCR highlights three ‘biometric benefits’; efficiency, accuracy and anti-fraud. Below, I illustrate how these arguments figure in UNHCR’s own accounts, before identifying considerations that are largely absent from these representations, notably the safety of the biometric refugee data that UNHCR produces. Humanitarian Expectations: Efficiency, Accuracy and Anti-fraud That biometrics is seen as capable of speeding up cumbersome registration processes is for example evident in UNHCR’s account of how “the time that Syrians need to register as refugees in Jordan has been slashed from up to eight months to zero after the UN refugee agency rolled out new technology” (Alsalem and Riller 2013). Another much-heralded benefit is biometrics’ alleged ability to deliver more accurate population figures. UNHCR, for example, notes how “Project Profile provides more accurate information on the exact number of refugees” (WFP/UNHCR 2005) and how biometrics can enable accurate identification of individual refugees/refugee claimants: “The use of biometrics provides an accurate way to verify identities” (UNHCR 2015a). Indeed, population figures are important in UNHCR’s appeals for funding, and in such contexts, donors have for example depicted biometrics as a solution to what they see as “questionable refugee population figures” (US Embassy in Rome 2003). That counting refugees is surrounded by a ‘politics of numbers’ is nothing new (Crisp 1999). The point to stress here is that biometrics is not a technical solution that does away with such politics. A third benefit that UNHCR highlights is the technology’s fraud prevention capacity: “the global rollout of biometrics will not only improve protection outcomes but will also strengthen fraud prevention systems” (UNHCR 2014c). First, in response to “duplication or fraud” (Maron 2013), UNHCR saw biometrics as being “able to detect double or multiple registrations” (UNHCR 2013c, p. 17). When introducing iris recognition of Afghan returnees, UNHCR for example stressed how biometrics could help “prevent refugees from collecting benefits more than once” (UNHCR 2007; see also Jacobsen 2010). Whilst these benefits are often highlighted, what receives less attention is the politics and ruptures that emerge as different actors express an interest in gaining access to UNHCR’s database of biometric refugee data. Unintended consequences As noted by a joint WFP/UNHCR assessment team, not only did technical failures emerge, so too did various unintended effects – some stemming from how biometrics affected power dynamics in the refugee camp. The assessment team for example observed that in the Dadaab camp, “school-going children” had to “skive school in order to comply with the requirements of the biometric food distribution system” (WFP/UNHCR 2014, p. 18). Consequently, the team recommended that UNHCR enhances its monitoring of biometrics in food distribution (WFP/UNHCR 2014, p. 5). Thus, even after elevating biometrics to a routine feature, the technology continued to produce unintended consequences.

New forms of intervention  275 Enhanced acceptability Not only may UNHCR’s ongoing biometric trials produce useful insights that can help enhance the technology’s functionality – as was for example the case when it was discovered during the pilot in Malawi that “either grey or blue backgrounds allow for improved quality facial recognition scanning” (UNHCR 2015a, p. 2). What is more, UNHCR’s use of biometrics has also helped produce enhanced acceptability. In different ways, these UNHCR trials have given rise to ‘success stories’ about the ability of biometrics to advance benevolent objectives like improved refugee assistance (Jacobsen 2015b) – such stories contribute to the legitimacy and acceptability of biometric technology. Put differently, humanitarian success stories can influence the normative framing of biometrics and thus the normalization and routinization of these technology uses (Olsson 2015) in humanitarian contexts and beyond. One example is UNHCR’s account of how, “thanks to the success of the system in Jordan, there are plans to expand it to other countries in the region as part of the Syria crisis response” (UNHCR 2015b). Such success stories travelled into policymaking contexts, thus helping legitimize biometrics in new aid programmes. The aforementioned ‘success story’ from Jordan travelled into an EU policy context (EC 2016) and other success stories have been used by technology providers to confer legitimacy on biometrics, also in non-humanitarian contexts. In these ways, humanitarian biometrics can contribute to the constitution of biometrics as acceptable and legitimate, in ways that silence contemporary controversies (e.g. about privacy concerns) as well as controversial historical legacies (Pugliese 2010). Constitutive effects In addition to how UNHCR’s uses of refugee biometrics have helped enhance its acceptability, biometric technologies themselves have also had important effects. Crucially, the technology has produced digitalized templates of refugees’ uniquely identifiable iris patterns and/or fingerprints, which in turn has rendered new domains of refugee existence accessible and open to intervention. Initially to UNHCR whose intervention into the digital refugee body is justified with reference to the abovementioned benefit and the overarching aim of improved refugee assistance. However, in principle – and as we shall now discuss – the very nature of digitalized refugee data, the speed and ‘invisibility’ with which it can be shared, means that it might also become accessible to other actors beyond UNHCR’s own biometric identity management system. As the idea of ‘assemblages of intervention’ highlights, UNHCR is only one of many actors in a larger ‘assemblage of intervention’ defined in part by a common belief in the benefits of biometric data-sharing. Considering this, we can begin to appreciate how biometric refugee registration alters as well as adds new dimensions to UNHCR’s relationship to donors and host states. Digital Refugee Bodies Made Intervenable: UNHCR between Guard and Gateway Attending to the technology’s agentic capacities, biometric registration constitutes a digital template of a unique bodily feature, which in turn makes it possible to identify this individual refugee with unprecedented accuracy in subsequent encounters with a compatible biometric system. Put differently, in order for a biometric system to identify an individual, this person must have been registered beforehand; only when a digitalized template exists can the person be ‘identified’ – be it in UNHCR’s Biometric Identity Management System, Kenya’s biometric voter registration system, or biometric security systems at Western borders. As we shall

276  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding see below, besides the risk of unauthorized access, several states have requested access to UNHCR’s biometric refugee data. Thus, the accessibility of the digitalized refugee bodies that biometric technologies produce is not necessarily limited to UNHCR’s own systems of and rationales for intervention. Accordingly, a longstanding dilemma of refugee protection versus national security concerns acquires a new manifestation. One example of data-sharing discussions between UNHCR and host states was the case of Lebanon where the government claimed a right to access the biometric refugee data collected by UNHCR on its territory (Lutz 2014; Jacobsen 2016). Whilst discussions about biometric data-sharing with host governments are absent from UNHCR accounts of biometric benefits, various statements suggest that UNHCR is aware of this functionality. In 2011, UNHCR stressed that its use of biometrics is “not effective in an operation where there is no existing fingerprint database of nationals of the country.… Ideally, there should be an existing national fingerprint database to ensure cross-matching” (UNHCR 2013c, p. 27). That UNHCR links the functionality of refugee biometrics to the existence of external biometric databases illustrates why these endeavours are best understood as part of an assemblage of intervention, held together in part by a common vision of biometrics as an important security technology, and by practices of data-sharing. Yet, such assemblages entail different, competing visions (Bachmann et al. 2015), including different visions of the relative importance of refugee protection (including protection of biometric refugee data) and national security (which ‘requires’ access to rather than protection of biometric refugee data). With these discussions about host-state access, the prospect of digital refugee data made accessible to actors beyond UNHCR is well appreciated. What is less appreciated is the question of how prospective circulation of biometric refugee data exposes refugees potentially conflicting rationales for intervention into the newly digitalized dimensions of their existence. For UNHCR the purpose of biometric recognition is to eliminate fraud, yet for other actors, the purpose of such recognition may be to eliminate threats in the form of “terrorists disguising themselves as refugees” (Lee 2015). Amongst refugees, concerns have emerged about potentially undesirable consequences of having their biometrics exposed to competing security rationales. In Kenya, “refugees have expressed insecurity concerns about the exposure of their identity” to the government of Kenya (Kanere 2013). In the case of Lebanon, refugees have expressed concerns about “the prospect of their biometric data being shared with the Lebanese authorities” (Knutsen and Kullab 2014). Adding to this, donor states consider biometric data-sharing a favourable initiative. The US Department of State recommends that the US government should “encourage UNHCR to mandate biometric identifiers in registration documents and records wherever possible” (Martin 2004). One reason to reflect critically on this donor interest in ‘biometric identifiers’ is that when state security does not overlap with humanitarian imperatives, this creates a situation where UNHCR’s refugee data, if shared with donor states, may not be used in a manner that advances humanitarian aims. That biometric refugee data can be valuable to donors in their ‘war on terror’ has been highlighted by technology experts who link UNHCR’s use of biometrics in Senegal to donor states’ concerns about terrorist threats in neighbouring Mali (Mayhew 2012). Such observations are arguably indicative of a critical challenge, namely the risk of refugee biometrics being shared with and used by donors in ways that places national security above the protection of refugees.

New forms of intervention  277 UNHCR is not immune to the influence of ideas advocated by donor states (Hammerstad 2014, p. 12). Whilst UNHCR’s refugee protection practices depend on funding, close associations with the security priorities of donors may have negative implications for UNHCR’s legitimacy and neutrality and for the safety of those that UNHCR is mandated to protect. Concerning the issue of data-sharing, privacy experts stress that while UNHCR has internal policies, “there’s no way to know exactly what agreements they’re reaching with governments or how they deal with the data they have” (Knutsen and Kullab 2014). That some degree of secrecy (rather than transparency) surrounds this important question was also seen in UNHCR’s response to a “requests for clarification” about proposals that UNHCR issued when procuring its new biometric system (UNHCR 2013a). A question posed to UNHCR was: “Are there plans to exchange biometric data with their partners (NGO [non-governmental organization], Governments, etc.)? If yes, have the legal implications of sharing biometric data among foreign countries/governments been considered?” In response, UNHCR answered: “Biometrics will be used at UNHCR’s discretion. Whether or not UNHCR exchanges data with partners, is not relevant” (UNHCR 2013b). This response invites more questions than answers, including the implications of accepting that data-sharing is an issue to be decided by UNHCR alone and according to no publicly available policies. Indeed, a key question is how UNHCR positions itself to guard the safety of the biometric refugee data that it collects globally.

CONCLUSION: ON BIOMETRIC INTERVENTION AND CONTEMPORARY SOVEREIGNTY When considering how biometrics intervenes into new domains of life, which in turn become sites of contestation over access and different rationales for intervention, it also becomes possible to appreciate additional dimensions of the post-structuralist argument about intervention’s constitutive relationship to sovereignty. Considering the above, what biometrics enables is a type of intervention that neither targets nor justifies itself with reference to legitimate/ illegitimate affairs within a sovereign state. Rather, two things must be said. First, in rendering new domains of life open to intervention, biometric refugee registration and data-production allows sovereign states to undertake a new form of intervention that targets digital domains of life. These domains consist of uniquely identifiable refugee data that are instantly accessible from afar, even without the knowledge – let alone consent – of the individual refugee. In this sense, biometrics intervenes in ways that blur the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ – notably in the absence of a UNHCR policy on legitimate criteria for ‘internal’ searches in UNHCR’s own biometric system versus searches via ‘external’ databases. Second, with these newly intervenable domains, come new struggles to define when and for what purposes intervention into these domains are legitimate. Considering how debates about the legitimacy or not of intervening into a particular state, have constitutive effects on the meaning of sovereignty (Weber 1992), we should consider how similar effects may emerge in debates about the legitimacy or not of intervening into digital domains of refugee life. Based on the above it seems that what gets constituted in these debates about the legitimacy of intervening into the digital refugee body is not so much the meaning of acceptable/ unacceptable forms of statehood, but rather the meaning of acceptable/unacceptable forms of life – whose digital bodies it will accordingly be illegitimate/legitimate for states to intervene

278  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding into. Thus, underwriting the abovementioned struggles over access to biometric refugee data is not only issues of power relations between UNHCR and different states, but also important questions about how contemporary state sovereignty and attending practices of security are bound up with practices of intervention targeted not at disagreeable forms of statehood, but at disagreeable forms of life. These crucial demarcations of agreeable/disagreeable forms of life, and related arguments about the legitimacy of their exposure to biometric intervention does not only involve new domains but also new logics. For, what a focus on biometrics adds to our appreciation of the constitutive relationship between sovereignty and intervention is not only that new domains are made intervenable, which in turn generates new debates about the legitimacy or not of such interventions, but also that these technologies can contribute to changing the very logic of these justifications. For example, the belief that biometrics can identify terrorists ‘disguising themselves as refugees’ depends on a constitution of digital refugee bodies as legitimate targets of intervention prior to or indeed irrespective of any ‘unsafe’ undertaking. Whilst this ‘pre-emptive’ logic of security has been elaborated elsewhere (Aradau and van Munster 2007; Amoore and de Goede 2008), the contribution that this article makes is to shed light on how humanitarian technology feeds into the expansion and development of this logic of state security through pre-emptive intervention.

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New forms of intervention  279 Baldaccini, A. (2008), ‘Counter-terrorism and the EU strategy for border security’, European Journal of Migration and Law, 10 (1), 31–49. Barry, A. (2013), ‘The translation zone: Between actor-network theory and international relations’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 41 (3), 413–29. doi:​10​.1177/​0305829813481007. Belliveau, J. (2016), ‘Humanitarian access and technology: Opportunities and applications’, Procedia Engineering, 159, 300–6. Broeders, D. (2007), ‘The new digital borders of Europe. EU databases and the surveillance of irregular migrants’, International Sociology, 22 (1), 71–92. Chandler, D. (2017), ‘Securing the Anthropocene? International policy experiments in digital hacktivism: A case study of Jakarta’, Security Dialogue, 48 (2), 113–30. Coole, D. (2013), ‘Agentic capacities and capacious historical materialism: Thinking with new materialisms in the political sciences’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41 (3), 154‒69. Crisp, J. (1999), ‘Who has counted the refugees? UNHCR and the politics of numbers’, Working Paper no.12. UNHCR Policy Research Unit. ISSN 1020–7473 https://​www​.sfu​.ca/​cmns/​courses/​2012/​801/​ 1​-Readings/​Crisp​_countingrefugees​.pdf (accessed 11 July 2019). Doucet, M. G. (2016), ‘Global assemblages of security governance and contemporary international intervention’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (1), 116–32. Duffield, M. (2001), ‘Governing the borderlands: Decoding the power of aid’, Disasters, 25 (4), 308–20. Duffield, M. (2007), Development, Security and Unending War, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Duffield, M. (2016), ‘The resilience of the ruins: Towards a critique of digital humanitarianism’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, 4 (3), 147‒65. EC (2016), European Commission Conference on Understanding and Tackling the Migration Challenge, European Commission, Brussels, 4–5 February 2016. Foucault, M. (2003), Society Must Be Defended, translated David Macey, New York: Picador. Ghelli, T. (2014), ‘UNHCR pilots new biometrics system in Malawi refugee camp’, UNHCR News, 22 January, http://​www​.unhcr​.org/​52dfa8f79​.html (accessed 2 June 2019). Hammerstad, A. (2014), The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor: UNHCR, Refugee Protection and Security, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, G. (2010), ‘Practices of intervention: Repertoires, habits, and conduct in neoliberal Africa’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4 (4), 433–52. Hopkins, A. (2014), ‘Biometrics in a humanitarian context’, presentation to the Connect:ID Conference, Washington, DC, March. Hosein, G. and C. Nyst (2013), ‘Aiding surveillance: An exploration of how development and humanitarian aid initiatives are enabling surveillance in developing countries’, I&N Working Paper 2014/1, London: Privacy International. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (2007), ‘Somalia: Documentation and other means of identification of Somalis in United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) camps in Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen’, Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 4 May, SOM102473.E. Ismail, Y. (2006), ‘Fingerprints mark new direction in refugee registration’, UNHCR News, 30 November, http://​www​.unhcr​.org/​456ede422​.html (accessed 2 June 2019). Jacobsen, K. L. (2010), ‘Making design safe: A hidden history of humanitarian experimentation’, Citizenship Studies, 14 (1), 89–103. Jacobsen, K. L. (2015a), ‘Experimentation in humanitarian locations: UNHCR and biometric registration of Afghan refugees’, Security Dialogue, 46 (2), 144‒64. Jacobsen, K. L. (2015b), The Politics of Humanitarian Technology: Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences and Insecurity, London: Routledge. Jacobsen, K. L. (2016), ‘UNHCR, accountability and refugee biometrics’, in K. B. Sandvik and K. L. Jacobsen (eds), UNHCR and the Struggle for Accountability: Technology, Law and Results-Based Management, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 159‒79. Jacobsen, K. L. (2017), ‘Maritime security and capacity building in the Gulf of Guinea: On comprehensiveness, gaps, and how maritime capacity building influences security priorities’, African Security Review, 26 (3). doi: 10.1080/10246029.2017.1291441. Jeandesboz, J. (2015), ‘Intervention and subversion: The EU border assistance mission to Moldova and Ukraine’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (4), 442–70. Kanere (2013), ‘Classified fingerprinting’, 30 November, https://​kanere​.org/​2013/​11/​30/​classified​ -fingerprinting (accessed 2 June 2019). Karlsrud, J. and F. Rosén (2013), ‘In the eye of the beholder? The UN and the use of drones to protect civilians’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 2 (2), 1‒10. Kessler, P. (2002), ‘Afghan “recyclers” under scrutiny of new technology’, UNHCR News, 3 October, http://​www​.unhcr​.org/​3d9c57708​.html (accessed 2 June 2019).

280  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Kessler, P. (2003), ‘Iris testing of returning Afghans passes 200,000 mark’, UNHCR News, 10 October, http://​www​.unhcr​.org/​cgi​-bin/​texis/​vtx/​search​?docid​=​3f86b4784 (accessed 2 June 2019). Knutsen, E. and S. Kullab (2014), ‘Power to strip refugee status agreed’, Daily Star (Lebanon), 3 June. Leander, A. (2013), ‘Technological agency in the co-constitution of legal expertise and the US drone program’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 26 (4), 811–31. Lee, J. (2015), ‘SIBA recommends multimodal biometrics capture to identify and track Syrian refugees’, BiometricUpdate.com, 25 November. Lutz, M. (2014), ‘Lebanon seeking refugees’ biometric data: Derbas’, Daily Star (Lebanon), 31 May. Maron, D. F. (2013), ‘Eye-imaging ID unlocks aid dollars for Syrian civil war refugees’, Scientific American, 18 September 2013, https://​www​.scientificamerican​.com/​article/​eye​-imaging​-idunlocks​ -aid/​(accessed 11 July 2019). Martin, D. A. (2004), ‘The United States refugee admissions program: Reforms for a new era of refugee resettlement’, 8 July, http://​2001​-2009​.state​.gov/​g/​prm/​refadm/​rls/​rpts/​36958​.htm (accessed 2 June 2019). Mayhew, S. (2012), ‘United Nations using biometrics to identify refugees in Senegal’, Biometric Update, 23 October. McDonald, S. M. (2016), ‘Ebola: A big data disaster privacy, property, and the law of disaster experimentation’, CIS Papers 2016.01, Bengaluru and Delhi: Centre for Internet and Society, March. Muller, B. J. (2008), ‘Securing the political imagination: Popular culture, the security dispositif and the biometric state’, Security Dialogue, 39 (2–3), 199–220. Newberg, P. R. (1999), ‘Politics at the heart: The architecture of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan’, Carnegie Paper, July, https://​carnegieendowment​.org/​1999/​07/​02/​politics​-at​-heart​-architecture​-of​ -humanitarian​-assistance​-to​-afghanistan​-pub​-686 (accessed 2 June 2019). Nexon, D. H. and V. Pouliot (2013), ‘“Things of Networks”: Situating ANT in international relations’, International Political Sociology, 7 (3), 342–45. doi:​10​.1111/​ips​.12026​_4. Olsson, C. (2015), ‘Interventionism as practice: On “ordinary transgressions” and their routinization’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (4), 425–41. Orford, A. (2015), ‘Foreword: War, police and assemblages of intervention’, in J. Bachmann, C. Bell and C. Holmqvist (eds), Police and Assemblages of Intervention, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. xv‒xxvi. Pandolfi, M. (2008), ‘Laboratory of intervention: The humanitarian governance of the postcommunist Balkan territories’, in M. J. DelVecchio Good, S. T. Hyde, S. Pinto and B. J. Good (eds), Postcolonial Disorders, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 157‒86. Pugliese, J. (2010), Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics, New York and London: Routledge. Salter, M. B. (2003), Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations, Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Sandvik, K. B. and K. Lohne (2014), ‘The rise of the humanitarian drone: Giving content to an emerging concept’, Millennium, 43 (1), 145–64. Sandvik, K., K. L. Jacobson and S. M. McDonald (2017), ‘“Do no harm: A taxonomy of the challenges of humanitarian experimentation’, International Review of the Red Cross, 99 (904), 319‒44. Sparke, M. (2006), ‘A neoliberal nexus: Economy, security and the biopolitics of citizenship on the border’, Political Geography, 25 (2), 151‒80. UNHCR (2001), ‘Report of the 52nd Session of the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme, Geneva’, A/AC.96/959, 1–5 October. UNHCR (2007), ‘Agreement Between the government of the Islamic republic of Pakistan, the government of the Islamic republic of Afghanistan, and the United Nations High Commissioner for refugee governing the repatriation of Afghan citizens living in Pakistan’, August 2007, http://​www​.unhcr​.org/​ 46c98acd2​.pdf (accessed 11 July 2019). UNHCR (2013a), ‘Request for proposal: No. RFP/2012/507: For the provision of a biometric identity management system’, 31 January, https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​en​-au/​admin/​sts/​50c85dd69/​request​ -proposal​-rfp2012507​-provision​-biometric​-identity​-management​-system​.html (accessed 2 June 2019). UNHCR (2013b), ‘UNHCR’s responses to bidders’ requests for clarification’, February, http://​www​ .unhcr​.org/​512732395​.pdf (accessed 2 June 2019). UNHCR (2013c), UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2011: Trends in Displacement, Protection and Solutions, Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, http://​www​.unhcr​ .org/​516285ff9​.pdf (accessed 11 July 2019). UNHCR (2013d), UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2012, Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. UNHCR (2014a), ‘Inter-agency thematic update: An overview of registration – Lebanon’, 27 June, https://​reliefweb​.int/​report/​lebanon/​inter​-agency​-thematic​-update​-overview​-registration​-lebanon (accessed 2 June 2019).

New forms of intervention  281 UNHCR (2014b), ‘UNHCR pilots new biometrics system in Malawi refugee camp’, UNHCR news story, 22 January 2014, http://​www​.unhcr​.org/​52dfa8f79​.html (accessed 11 July 2019). UNHCR (2014c), ‘2014 UNHCR Country Operations Profile – Mauritania’, UNHCR, http://​www​.unhcr​ .org/​pages/​49e486026​.html. UNHCR (2015a), ‘Biometric Identity Management System’, http://​ www​ .unhcr​ .org/​ 550c304c9​ .pdf (accessed 11 July 2019). UNHCR (2015b), ‘Iris scan system provides cash lifeline to Syrian refugees in Jordan’, http://​www​ .unhcr​.org/​news/​latest/​2015/​3/​550fe6ab9/​iris​-scan​-system​-provides​-cash​-lifeline​-syrian​-refugees​ -jordan​.html (accessed 11 July 2019). UNHCR Executive Committee (2001), ‘Conclusion on registration of refugees and asylum-seekers’, No. 91 (LII) – 2001, 5 October, http://​www​.unhcr​.org/​excom/​exconc/​3bd3e1d44/​conclusion​-registration​ -refugees​-asylum​-seekers​.html (accessed 2 June 2019). US Embassy in Rome (2003), ‘WFP's collaboration with UNHCR in Providing Food’, 03ROME4672, http://​wikileaks​.org/​cable/​2003/​10/​03ROME4672​.html (accessed 2 June 2019). van der Ploeg, I. (1999), ‘The illegal body: “Eurodac” and the politics of biometric identification’, Ethics and Information Technology, 1 (4), 295‒302. Vrankulj, A. (2014), ‘UNHCR adopts IrisGuard technology for refugee registration’, 21 February, http://​www​.biometricupdate​.com/​201402/​unhcr​-adopts​-irisguard​-technology​-for​-refugee​-registration (accessed 2 June 2019). Walters, W. (2014), ‘Drone strikes, dingpolitik and beyond: Furthering the debate on materiality and security’, Security Dialogue, 45 (2), 101–18. doi:​10​.1177/​0967010613519162. Weber, C. (1992), ‘Reconsidering statehood: Examining the sovereignty/intervention boundary’, Review of International Studies, 18 (3), 199‒216. WFP/UNHCR (World Food Programme/Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) (2005), ‘Joint assessment mission report 2005: Great Lakes Region –Tanzania’, WFP/UNHCR, 8‒14 November 2005, http://​www​.unhcr​.org/​4bb0bc159​.pdf (accessed 11 July 2019). WFP/UNHCR (World Food Programme/United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) (2014), ‘Joint assessment mission – Kenya refugee operation: Dadaab (23-27 June 2014) and Kakuma (30 June–1 July 2014) refugee camps’, WFP/UNHCR, https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​54d3762d3​.pdf (accessed 2 June 2019).

27. Transnational environmental crime: from securitization to intervention and statebuilding Lorraine Elliott

INTRODUCTION Transnational environmental crime (TEC, explained in more detail below) constitutes one of the fastest growing areas of global criminal activity and is a major factor in environmental degradation, habitat loss and continued pollution. It violates international and domestic norms and challenges the authority of states and other private actors. It undermines the effectiveness of multilateral environmental agreements and the institutions and rule-systems of global environmental governance. As with other forms of transnational crime, TEC and associated crimes such as bribery, fraud and money-laundering challenge the ideal-type neo-Weberian state through undermining good governance, corroding the institutions of the state and compromising core values such as democratic processes and the rule of law. The kinds of issues and practices that collectively constitute transnational environmental crime have long attracted attention from environmental scholars for their ecological consequences. More recent commentary has reflected a growing interest from law enforcement and criminal justice researchers and practitioners, motivated by concerns about the growing involvement of transnational organized crime. This momentum has seen specific TEC sectors – especially the illegal wildlife trade and, in some situations, timber trafficking – segue into both ‘political crisis’ and threats to national and international security. This discursive shift does two things. First, the inclusion of criminological and security perspectives brings the analytical focus on transnational environmental crime into proximity with the literature on statebuilding and intervention, particularly when TEC is linked to state weakness and conflict or post-conflict contexts. Second, this shift helps to expose contested assumptions about the state and statebuilding interventions. This chapter sheds some light on those multiple narratives, informed by a critique of neo-Weberian models of the state and associated liberal statebuilding approaches. In doing so, it seeks to move beyond an assumption of the state as a singular administrative or institutional identity (see Lottholz and Lemay-Hébert 2016). It examines ways in which an analytical framework derived from the statebuilding literature informs much of the contemporary discussion of transnational environmental crime through a focus on weak states, borders and sovereignty. It then offers some thoughts on interventions against TEC that expose tensions between more orthodox approaches to invigorating the security and authority of the state, and those that demand a more inclusive and bottom-up approach that reflects a local turn in statebuilding.

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Transnational environmental crime  283

DEFINING TRANSNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME Environmental crime has become increasingly transnationalized as those involved take advantage of economic liberalization and a globalizing of the world economy, increases in the frequency and volume of commodity shipments, fewer border controls, and easier transfers of funds through global financial and banking systems that offer more opportunities to launder profits into ‘legitimate’ enterprise. Globalization, as Peter Andreas (2002, p. 40) has noted, has ‘create[d] a new opportunity structure for those involved in criminalized markets’. Compared with other forms of smuggling and illegal trade, the risks are low and the profits are high – ‘the very essence of rational profit maximizing entrepreneurs described in neo-classical economics’ (Geopolicity 2011, p. 10). In simple terms, transnational environmental crime involves the trading and smuggling across borders of plants, animals, resources and pollutants in violation of prohibition or regulation regimes established by international environmental treaties and/or in contravention of domestic law. In sectoral terms, it includes illegal logging and timber smuggling, wildlife trafficking, the black market in ozone-depleting substances (ODS) and other prohibited or regulated chemicals, the illegal trade in hazardous and toxic wastes, and what is known in the environmental governance lexicon as IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated) fishing. The concept of transnational environmental crime also captures the range of illicit and criminal practices that facilitate the illegal trade in wildlife, timber, ODS and other pollutants and wastes as they move from source to final market. The UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime helps to define what makes such practices both transnational and organized: they involve structured arrangements of three or more people working together over a period of time, where the planning of, preparation for, or implementation of such crimes is committed in or involves those who are active in more than one state. These kinds of crimes can involve extraction or harvest crimes, such as those associated with illegal logging, wildlife poaching and illegal fishing in contravention of domestic legislation or with the taking of species of wild fauna and flora that are protected from trade under the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). They may involve production crimes, such as the manufacture of ozone-depleting substances that are banned from consumption under the terms of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Transportation and dumping crimes involve the smuggling across borders of species that have been illegally harvested or extracted, chemicals that have been illegally produced or obtained by other means, and wastes that are forbidden from trade under the provisions of the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. Smuggling is often facilitated by illegal practices such as fraudulent labelling and the use of counterfeit or misleading export and import permits and other documentation. In the fight against transnational environmental crime, law enforcement agencies face a range of enabling and convergent crimes including bribery, corruption of government officials, fraud, embezzlement, money-laundering of illicit profits, tax evasion, extortion, cyber-crime, various forms of criminal violence, and even labour law and human rights abuses (see INTERPOL 2015). As with most forms of transnational crime, these are complex areas of endeavour. They involve multiple actors not only in the illegal extraction, killing or production process but also in constituting the border-crossing chains of custody that facilitate and protect what has become a high-profit form of smuggling. Sometimes this stays entirely within the illicit economy but

284  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding often it involves ‘laundering’ environmental commodities into legitimate markets. This illegal trade relies on a political economy of ‘lootable commodities’ – those that are ‘high in value but have low economic barriers to extraction’ (Farah 2010, p. 2) – and ‘uncritical markets [that] ensure that there are buyers for goods at the right price, regardless of how they are obtained, processed or transported’ (Nellemann et al. 2010, p. 34). These markets are driven by both price and cost differentials: when expected returns (price) are higher than for analogue legal trade, when ‘demand exceeds the supply of legal products’ (in the case of timber, for example) (OECD 2011, p. 7), and when compliance with regulations (cost) can be avoided through illegal practices as is the case in the black markets in ODS and hazardous waste. As a form of enterprise crime in pursuit of profit, the illegal transnational market in environmental goods and resources has multiple drivers at both the supply and demand ends of the chain of custody. Supply-side drivers include more than just the direct pursuit of profit. Engaging in illegal sourcing or trading of environmental resources, pollutants and wastes can be a means of avoiding excise, taxes and high disposal costs. Demand-side drivers apply particularly to wildlife smuggling. Animals, birds, insects, reptiles and plants, and parts thereof, are taken illegally in response to demands from private collectors and zoos for rare and unusual species, growing middle-class attachment to high-status (if illegal) items, from research facilities for laboratory animals, from niche consumer markets for traditional Asian and African medicines and exotic foods such as reef fish and bushmeat, and from a more mundane global pet trade. These are not occasional movements of goods. In the environmental sphere of the illicit, smuggling of timber, wildlife, pollutants and waste is a daily occurrence. At least some of the activity that constitutes TEC at a global and regional level is opportunistic, or undertaken by individuals or by operators who work at a small scale. It is also an area that has become increasingly systematic and well-financed, involving organized crime groups, sophisticated smuggling chains and complex trade routes with multiple forms of concealment. Large quantities of environmental contraband are moved across borders, sometimes by individual smugglers and rather ordinary forms of concealment (in cars, luggage, express post-bags and, as with drugs, hidden on the person) but often in bulk consignments dispatched by ship, barge, truck, and plane. Compared with the drug trade where goods remain illicit from production to sale, environmental commodities can move in and out of the illicit economy. Logs, for example, can be ‘laundered’ and passed off as legally sourced with documentation that certifies them as CITES-compliant or as having come from legitimate sources, or simply identifying them as a different species. Protected or endangered species can be documented as captive-bred. Contraband ODS are frequently mislabelled as a non-ODS, or as having come from recycled sources which may be legal in international trade. Trans-shipment through third countries or through free trade zones provides opportunities for re-documentation and re-import or trading-on of illicitly sourced goods. As with other forms of transnational crime, the illicit networks involved in smuggling or trafficking illicit environmental goods, resources, pollutants and waste require complex personnel arrangements to sustain trading routes and concealment methods. Those arrangements involve intermediaries and brokers who can charter cargo vessels, arrange for fraudulent or fake documents, issue letters of credit and forge connections between buyers and sellers. They can involve multi-layered business arrangements and use of ‘legitimate’ companies. TEC networks also take advantage of (and are sometimes organized by) corrupt officials, politicians, and members of the military and even law enforcement agencies. It is those complex

Transnational environmental crime  285 arrangements that link environmental crime with cross-over crimes such as corruption, fraud, document counterfeiting and money-laundering. Illicit networks of this kind also derive operational advantages from the in-built redundancy that comes from having few critical nodes – those without which the network would cease to function. As with licit markets, critical nodes exist at the point of production, harvest or capture; at the point of export and import; and the point of retail or final use. But, with multiple actors filling or able to fill any one role, lines of communication and exchange can (easily) be repaired if any one node is removed through interdiction or prosecution. This ‘makes it difficult for law enforcers to pinpoint and unravel them’ (Sangiovanni 2005, p. 9).

WEAK STATE, STRONG STATE? As with other forms of transnational crime, the patterns of bribery and corruption associated with transnational environmental crime undermine good governance, corrode the institutions of the state, call their credibility and legitimacy into question, and compromise core values such as democratic processes and the rule of law. The involvement of organized criminal groups brings the monopoly claims of the sovereign state into conflict with the shadow area of illegality that functions beyond or as a challenge to sovereign space and authority. Weak states, and those characterized by ‘socio-economic destitution’, are assumed more likely to offer the kinds of ‘commercial opportunities’ that attract criminal groups (Wennmann 2004, p. 105). The state is made insecure when the agents of the state are either unable to resist or are actively involved in organized crime and illegality and where, in effect, organized criminals can operate domestically and transnationally with high levels of impunity. Sovereign Borders and Border Regions The kinds of illegal transnational environmental trade identified above challenge the extent to which states are able to control transactions across what would seem to be increasingly insecure and porous borders. This is a threat to the condition of effective sovereignty that Buzan and Wæver (1997, p. 242) define as central to the existence and security of a state. One of the most obvious ‘on-the-ground’ threats comes through active violations of sovereign borders by poachers and harvesters seeking to extract wildlife and timber (for example) from neighbouring regions and by smugglers who are explicitly involved in moving environmental resources and commodities across multiple borders. Border violations are also enacted by those who take advantage of non-physical spaces to launder criminal profits. These kinds of challenges to sovereignty are assumed to be particularly prevalent in countries where border regions are often weakly governed by the centre and where there is a long history of flexible people movements. However, this should not be taken to suggest that there is no complicity in transnational environmental crime in developed countries. The United States and the EU, for example, constitute the second and third largest global markets for illegal wildlife. About 20 per cent of the timber imported into the European Union is thought to come from illegal

286  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding sources. Countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the UK are also source countries for the illegal trade in insects, reptiles, rare plants, and protected birds.1 Guymon (2000, p. 61) suggests that three components of (Weberian forms of) state sovereignty and authority are either challenged or made vulnerable by transnational crime: the ‘control of borders, the monopoly on the use of violence for enforcement, and the power to tax economic activities within state borders’. Castle (1997, p. 6) adds to this the ‘maintenance of the core values of a society’, including the rule of law and the existence of a fair and open marketplace. Security is undermined, he argues, in situations where the state is ‘unable to enforce its own laws in particular regions’ or where a region is ‘beyond effective state control’ (Castle 1997, p. 7). In effect, transnational environmental crime, particularly when it involves a high degree of criminal organization crime, undermines a government’s ability to govern. The geography of illicit chains of custody and logistic trails also points to the importance of border regions as critical nodes in both small-scale opportunistic and more highly organized forms of transnational environmental crime. Sometimes these border nodes – or what Marc Sageman calls network hubs (cited in Levitsky 2008, p. 393) – are little more than convenient crossing points on otherwise ordinary transportation routes. Other border nodes are more akin to ‘global black spots’, areas that ‘appear to be outside of effective, recognized governmental control, sustained by illicit operations, and capable of breeding and exporting insecurity’ (Stanislawski 2008, p. 370). Protection economies can therefore create ‘significant centres of power outside of state control’ (Shaw and Reitano 2014, p. 30). Yet this does not mean that such areas are ungoverned, nor that they are excised entirely from forms of ‘state building’ interventions that underpin rentier elites and kleptocratic states. The Kleptocratic State The involvement of politicians and business, bureaucratic and military elites and lesser officials in sustaining illicit transnational environmental crime markets constitutes ‘shadow states’ (see Duffy 2005) that subvert the usual practices of state-based governance. In the most extreme cases of high-level corruption and personal patronage, the state itself no longer functions in the (orthodox) Weberian sense as a provider and guarantor of public goods but as a ‘protection racket’ or kleptocracy that sustains private appropriation, resource asset stripping and rent-seeking. In this context, the state takes on the appearance of what Felbab-Brown (2017, p. 106) calls a ‘mafia bazaar, with extensive intermeshing of state and crime’. Those who have a vested interest in protecting illicit flows are often able to function with impunity and, therefore, have ‘little or no incentive to support the consolidation of good governance or state control’ (Shaw and Reitano 2014, p. 5). In their most extensive form, transnational environmental crime networks can integrate criminal actors fully into the economic and political institutions of the state, often delivering them significant power and even, as Serrano (2002, p. 18) suggests, consolidating ‘exclusive governing authority’. Duffy (2014, p. 825) draws attention to the ‘complex networks of corruption on which poaching and trading rely to function’. Rather than being just the recipients of bribes, government officials, protection and enforcement officers and politicians can take 1 In the illegal wildlife crime context, species that are threatened by or are vulnerable to poaching are also framed as emblematic of sovereign resources and national heritage in state-owned spaces (see Lunstrum 2014).

Transnational environmental crime  287 key roles as the organizers, facilitators and beneficiaries of illicit market networks. Local officials, customs officers, police and the judiciary are bribed to overlook illegal shipments, to assist with false paper trails and forged documentation, to help evidence disappear during prosecutions, to delay or drop prosecutions, and even to return no convictions when cases are brought to trial. As Wittig (2016, p. 87) suggests, ‘corrupt officials are attracted to the significant rent-seeking opportunities’ available in various forms of environmental crime (he is speaking specifically of the illegal wildlife trade but the point can be more generally applied). Some commentators suggest that these forms of corruption should best be understood not as a pathology of the state, but rather as an instrument of risk management – a strategy for doing business – for criminal groups (Williams 2002, pp. 174‒5). Shaw and Reitano (2014, p. 8) define corruption, along with violence, as ‘classic currencies of protection’ that function to facilitate and maintain smuggling and trafficking economies. These ‘currencies’ function at multiple scale, not only where the state has little reach. The Security/ized State The joining of the language and practice of ‘security’ with various forms of transnational environmental crime – but especially the illegal wildlife trade – has become a prominent feature of public policy debate, regulatory outcomes, and dispute within the research and non-governmental organization (NGO) communities. The discussion earlier in this chapter points to the broader claims about the impact of TEC-related organized criminal activity on the institutions of the state. Wildlife crime in particular is now frequently referred to as a ‘serious threat to the security [and] political stability… of many countries’ (van Rensburg 2013, p. 1). Social conflict and political violence are predicated as key factors in this instability calculus. Conflict is assumed to be both an incubator of illegal resource extraction and a function of it. Yet as Felbab-Brown (2017) points out, the relationships between illicit economies, conflict, and social disorder are rarely straightforward or unidirectional. The factors are complicated: sometimes driven by elite rent-seeking and by efforts to maintain (otherwise illegitimate) claims to power and authority, sometimes as a function of other forms of political grievance, and sometimes as a livelihood strategy in the face of social disruption and extreme poverty. The version of the TEC–security link that has most captured the public imagination and media headlines has been the alleged links between wildlife poaching and trafficking on the one hand, and militia groups and terrorist organizations on the other, a proposition neatly although not entirely accurately captured in the title of a 2007 article ‘Poaching for Bin Laden’ (see Levy and Scott-Clark 2007). Claims about poaching as a national, regional and global security threat have centred on militia groups and terror groups (or groups linked to them) and the illegal killing of large animals in Africa, including in Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic, and Nigeria.2 Groups argued to be profiting from environmental crime include al-Shabaab, the Lord’s Resistance Army, Boko Haram, Janjaweed militia, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army, and Tuareg rebels. Yet the empirical claims about threat finance in a transnational environmental crime context are often poorly substantiated and highly uncertain (see Elliott 2016). This narrative often ignores the 2 Parts of South Asia have also come under this security microscope, involving reports that link militants and rebel groups in Bangladesh and Assam state in India, and possibly even the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to wildlife poaching.

288  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding extent to which states and agents of the state have also been highly implicated in wildlife and other forms of natural resource illegality in conflict-situations. There is credible evidence that during the Angolan conflict in the 1980s, ivory was smuggled with the complicity of South African army units (see Humphreys and Smith 2014). IFAW (2008, p. 10) reports authoritative sources in the DRC who claim that ‘elephant ivory and meat were actively acquired as a source of revenue by military and… even the national police’. Renegade members of the Congolese national army (the FARDC after its French acronym)3 are thought to be involved in the resurgence in poaching in the DRC (Satellite Sentinel Project 2015; UNSC 2014). While much of this securitized commentary has focused on illegal wildlife trade or, more specifically, the supply-side activities associated with poaching and their links to terror-finance, other sectors that fall broadly under the reach of transnational environmental crime have also become associated with civil conflicts and state-sponsored violence (see Douglas and Alie 2014). This is particularly the case with forest crimes associated with illegal timber extraction and trade, sometimes referred to as ‘blood timber’. Blundell (2010), for example, has traced the illegal logging and exploitation of forest resources as a key source of funding in conflicts in Burma, Cambodia, Côte d’Ivoire, the DRC and Liberia. Farah (2010) has explored the crucial role that illegal timber extraction and trade played in funding Charles Taylor’s regime and his war against insurgencies in Liberia. Illegal logging and smuggling across the Thai–Cambodian border was a major source of funding for the Khmer Rouge (see for example Humphreys 2006, p. 151), and control of logging concessions and illegal logging remains a major source of income for both the Burmese regime in its fight against insurgency and for those insurgency (or liberation) groups as well (Felbab-Brown 2013, p. 118). The Social-Network State Lottholz and Lemay-Hébert (2016, p. 1474) call for a more critical and relational approach that challenges a neo-Weberian imaginary of the state by taking into account ‘interactions between state and society’ and the forms of ‘social order’ that such interactions reveal. In the TEC context, local crime groups and (otherwise) legitimate companies that are heavily involved in illegal environmental activity are often able to establish effective control over local communities. They constitute an alternative form of authority that ‘take[s] advantage of corrupt officials and politicians as well as weak governmental institutions and law enforcement agencies’ (Emmers 2002, p. 6). In this regard, transnational environmental crime networks can also be characterized by fluid forms of social network based on patron‒client relationships, a form of mutual but unequal exchange or patronage. For example, local communities who provide labour for illegal logging, timber processing or wildlife poaching are integrated into criminal networks through semi-feudal connections to local timber barons or local officials who control aspects of criminal activity, or through social coercion that takes advantage of economic vulnerability in situations where alternative sustainable livelihoods are not available.



3

Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo.

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INTERVENTIONS AND STATEBUILDING A narrative that focuses on the ‘multiple threats that illegal economies and organized crime pose to the state’ (Felbab-Brown 2017, p. 99) animates assumptions about weak or failing states. As Shaw and Reitano (2014, p. 35) argue, ‘with that view comes a quite binary notion that the state must be strengthened’ in the fight against non-state actors who threaten good governance and the rule of law. In this calculation, states that are poorly governed, rife with corruption and characterized by a high potential for social conflict are economically and politically vulnerable to transnational environmental crime, its impacts, and those who prosecute it. At the same time, this very weakness also means that they are marked by poor regulatory structures, limited administrative and investigative capacity and few law enforcement or judicial resources with which to respond. Strong states are assumed to be in a better position to define the boundaries of illegal market activities and to act to defend those boundaries. Efforts to counter illicit TEC economies have therefore focused on building a strong state, through improving the rule of law, strengthening judiciaries, following the money to disrupt corruption and fraud, and building capacity for law enforcement agencies and on-the-ground environmental protection through ranger education and material support. Yet ‘strong-state’ strategies driven by a liberal statebuilding model come with their own problems. As indicated earlier in this chapter, the market economies that are taken for granted as a central component of post-conflict economies in liberal statebuilding often allow easier access to extractive and consumptive resources of the kind that are demanded in transnational environmental crime sectors. At the same time, efforts to control borders and reassert the role of the state in the face of both licit and illicit market liberalization can have the unintended consequence of encouraging criminal groups to develop more innovative concealment and avoidance strategies. Sovereign borders can also complicate anti-poaching efforts: rangers and patrols cannot pursue poachers once they cross (back) into another country and the absence of extradition treaties that therefore protect the nationals of one country from prosecution in another frustrates this even further. In its 2015 resolution on the illicit trafficking of wildlife, the UN General Assembly called for states to combat such crimes by strengthening ‘capacity-building, criminal justice responses and law enforcement efforts’ and ‘international cooperation’ (UNGA 2015, p. 1). A detailed overview of state-based international cooperation is beyond the scope of this chapter (for more, see Elliott 2017). Two points are worth making. First, the key international treaties mentioned above (CITES, the Montreal Protocol and the Basel Convention) are environmental agreements that make little or no mention of illegality or criminality although each comes with forms of regulatory ‘intervention’ by way of licencing controls, import and export guidelines and, in some cases, the implementation of trade bans. Policy imperatives for responding to transnational environmental crime have been increasingly taken up in criminal justice, trade and border protection fora, raising questions about how to reconcile potentially competing normative frameworks. Second, international cooperation has increasingly taken networked forms, involving states and agents-beyond-the-state as partners in policy-making, capacity building, knowledge exchange, and even enforcement (see Elliott and Schaedla 2019).

290  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Limitations to Securitized Interventions The securitization of transnational environmental crime of the kind explored in this chapter, and an emphasis on a strong state that retains a monopoly on the use of violence, has been used to legitimize a growing ‘green militarization’ of conservation. Lunstrum (2014, p. 817) describes this as ‘the use of military and paramilitary… actors, techniques, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation’.4 It is reflected in metaphors of (just) war against poachers and their (alleged) militia and terrorist accomplices and in the deployment of the kinds of militarized tactics and matériel more associated with traditional security responses. Governments have used military assets, including personnel, in their training and operational efforts against poaching and other forms of illegal harvest and extraction. Private security actors have claimed appropriate expertise that can transfer into the conservation context and even some conservation NGOs have supported the use of more militarized approaches to anti-poaching and illegal harvest efforts. In the conservation context, strategies of militarization have been criticized as both ineffective and potentially counterproductive in the fight against illegal wildlife and resource extraction activity. There are two main (overlapping) trends in this counter-militarization literature. The first focuses on the limitations to, and negative consequences of, an increased use of military-type tactics and approaches. The second reinforces the importance of the local turn in ‘statebuilding’, with an emphasis on non-militarized strategies, such as improving the role and status of local wildlife rangers, working with local communities on management and conservation, and exploring alternative livelihood options (see Challender et al. 2015; Biggs et al. 2017). Many have raised concerns at what Humphreys and Smith (2011, p. 123) call a ‘classically Clausewitzian escalatory dynamic’ – a kind of conservation arms race (see Lunstrum 2014, p. 822) in which poachers, soldiers and rangers seek to acquire and use increasingly sophisticated weaponry in greater numbers against each other. As Duffy (2014, p. 827) points out, while technology can help, it is not a substitute for more fundamental conservation basics such as personnel on the ground who are ‘well-trained, adequately equipped, well-looked-after and strongly motivated’. That training, in turn, needs to take account of local conditions. The intrusion of military-style training practices, particularly from those with little local experience, has been criticized as both ineffective and inappropriate. The head of the Game Rangers Association of Africa, Chris Galliers, for example, has argued that the ‘mindset and the landscape [in the African context] are so [different] that you can’t just apply a military blueprint that works elsewhere’ (cited in Smith 2013). Douglas-Hamilton (2012, p. 9), founder of the NGO Save the Elephants, has also criticized strategies that rely on ‘pouring in foreign manpower [sic] to solve an African problem’. Such strategies also run the risk of drawing rangers into the dangerous position of ‘protagonists in some of Africa’s most complex regional conflicts’ (Duffy 2014, p. 831). The elite-driven processes that accompany the securitization and militarization of conservation and anti-poaching efforts can validate conservation models in which the participation 4 This militarized approach to conservation practice is part of a longer historical trajectory. Duffy (2014) for example identifies the longer-term impact of British colonial practices that legitimized particular forms of hunting pursued by European hunters and criminalized local forms of hunting – redefined as poaching – in a way that normalized violence against those involved in the latter.

Transnational environmental crime  291 and consent of local communities is increasingly marginalized. Indeed, in some cases those communities are criminalized as part of the problem if they are seen to be a source of poaching or illegal extraction activities. This relationship is complicated further in situations where local people have been forcibly evicted or alienated from areas designated as protected parks or in which their usual hunting and management practices have been prohibited or confined (see Lunstrum 2014). Military-type responses that individuate the target – the poacher or illegal harvester – can also fail to distinguish between opportunist subsistence hunting that may be based within local communities and large-scale activity that involves ‘outsiders’ and well-connected criminals as well (often) as corrupt officials. In this context, opportunities to develop coherent policy responses that include more effective law enforcement chains (from interdiction through to prosecution) and community-based alternative livelihood and conservation strategies, including pro-poor approaches and the empowerment of vulnerable populations, can be limited or undervalued.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS As a contribution to the debates on statebuilding and intervention that inform this volume, this chapter has explored some of the analytical and policy complexities that are exposed when efforts to overcome the negative externalities of transnational challenges – transnational environmental crime in this case – are embedded in debates about statebuilding. There is no doubt that efforts to interdict, prosecute and even prevent the activities associated with various TEC sectors stand a greater chance of success when the institutional, regulatory and enforcement capacities of state agencies are made more robust and sustainable over time. In effect, some version of stronger state practice – and one in which strength is not defined by a kleptocratic and rent-seeking protection economy – is a necessary, though not necessarily sufficient condition for improving the chances of dealing with an environmentally, economically and socially destructive sector that is embedded in forms of illegality and criminality. But as the discussion here has revealed, this begs the question of how a strong state is or should be defined, constituted and practised. The analytical and performative limitations of ideal-type versions of ‘state-being’ that rely on securitized narratives or narrow technocratic forms of ‘bench-marking’ confuse ends and means and fail ‘to adequately take into account the complex and diverse nature of “the state”’ (Lottholz and Lemay-Hébert 2016, p. 1468). Counter-narratives that demand a ‘local-turn’ in interventions against transnational environmental crime, particularly the illegal wildlife trade, articulate concerns for efficiency and effectiveness on the one hand, and for a more explicitly inclusive and participatory model of policy-making and implementation on the other. This distinction maps only unevenly onto (neo-liberal) stakeholder and (post-liberal) rights-holder models of statebuilding and donor-driven strategies for intervention. Nevertheless, it creates opportunities for further opening up the concept of the state as fixed and hierarchical in favour of a better understanding of relationality and scale that are central to more nuanced and locally relevant – and driven – efforts to address and overcome the causes and consequences of transnational environmental crime.

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REFERENCES Andreas, P. (2002), ‘Transnational crime and economic globalization’, in M. Berdal and M. Serrano (eds), Transnational Organized Crime and International Security, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, pp. 37‒52. Biggs, D., R. Cooney, D. Roe, H. T. Dublin, J. R. Allan, D. W. S. Challender and D. Skinner (2017), ‘Developing a theory of change for a community-based response to illegal wildlife trade’, Conservation Biology, 31 (2), 5‒12. Blundell, A. G. (2010), ‘Forests and conflict: The financial flows that fuel war’, Washington, DC: Program on Forests (PROFOR). Buzan, B. and O. Wæver (1997), ‘Slippery? Contradictory? Sociologically untenable? The Copenhagen School replies’, Review of International Studies, 23 (2), 241‒50. Castle, A. (1997), ‘Transnational organized crime and international security’, Working Paper No. 19, Vancouver: Institute of International Relations, University of British Columbia. Challender, D. W. S., S. R. Harrop and D. C. MacMillan (2015), ‘Towards informed and multi-faceted wildlife trade interventions’, Global Ecology and Conservation, 3, 129‒48. Douglas, L. R. and K. Alie (2014), ‘High value natural resources: Linking wildlife conservation to international conflict, insecurity, and development concerns’, Biological Conservation, 171, 270‒77. Douglas-Hamilton, I. (2012), ‘Testimony’, before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, ‘Ivory and insecurity: The global implications of poaching in Africa’, Washington, DC, 24 May. Duffy, R. (2005), ‘Global environmental governance and the challenge of shadow states: The impact of illicit sapphire mining in Madagascar’, Development and Change, 36 (5), 825–43. Duffy, R. (2014), ‘Waging a war to save biodiversity: The rise of militarized conservation’, International Affairs, 90 (4), 819–34. Elliott, L. (2016), ‘The securitization of transnational environmental crime and the militarization of conservation’, in L. Elliott and W. Schaedla (eds), Handbook of Transnational Environmental Crime, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 68‒87. Elliott, L. (2017), ‘Cooperation on transnational environmental crime: Institutional complexity matters’, Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law, 26 (2), 107‒17. Elliott, L. and W. H. Schaedla (2019), ‘Accountability in public-voluntary governance: The case of illegal wildlife trade’, in S. Park and T. Kramarz (eds), Global Environmental Governance and the Accountability Trap, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 169‒95. Emmers, R. (2002), ‘The securitization of transnational crime in ASEAN’, IDSS Working Paper No. 39, Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies. Farah, D. (2010), ‘Transnational crime, social networks and forests: Using natural resources to finance conflicts and post-conflict violence’, Washington, DC: Program on Forests (PROFOR). Felbab-Brown, V. (2013), ‘The jagged edge: Illegal logging in Southeast Asia’, in P.-A. Chouvy (ed.), An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia: The Illegal Trade in Arms, Drugs, People, Counterfeit Goods and Natural Resources in Mainland Southeast Asia, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 113‒36. Felbab-Brown, V. (2017), ‘Organized crime, illicit economies, civil violence and international order: More complex than you think’, Dædalus, 146 (4), 98‒111. Geopolicity (2011), The Economics of Piracy: Pirate Ransoms and Livelihoods off the Coast of Somalia, Dublin: Geopolicity Europe. Guymon, C. D. (2000), ‘International legal mechanisms for combating transnational organized crime: The need for a multilateral convention’, Berkeley Journal of International Law, 18 (1), 53‒101. Humphreys, D. (2006), Logjam: Deforestation and the Crisis of Global Governance, London: Earthscan. Humphreys, J. and M. L. R. Smith (2011), ‘War and wildlife: The Clausewitz connection’, International Affairs, 87 (1), 121‒42. Humphreys, J. and M. L. R. Smith (2014), ‘The “rhinofication” of South African security’, International Affairs, 90 (4), 795‒818. IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) (2008), Criminal Nature: The Global Security Implications of the Illegal Wildlife Trade, Yarmouth Port, MA: IFAW. INTERPOL (2015), Environmental Crime and Its Convergence with Other Serious Crimes, Lyon: INTERPOL Environmental Security Sub-Directorate. Levitsky, M. (2008), ‘Dealing with black spots of crime and terror: Conclusions and recommendations’, International Studies Review, 10 (2), 392‒6. Levy, A. and C. Scott-Clark (2007), ‘Poaching for Bin Laden’, The Guardian, 5 May. Lottholz, P. and N. Lemay-Hébert (2016), ‘Re-reading Weber, reconceptualising state-building: From neo-Weberian to post-Weberian approaches to state, legitimacy and state-building’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 29 (4), 1467‒85.

Transnational environmental crime  293 Lunstrum, E. (2014), ‘Green militarization: Anti-poaching efforts and the spatial contours of Kruger National Park’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104 (4), 816‒32. Nellemann, C., I. Redmond and J. Refisch (2010), The Last Stand of the Gorilla: Environmental Crime and Conflict in the Congo Basin, Norway: UNEP GRID: Arendal. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2011), Illegal Trade in Environmentally Sensitive Goods: Draft Synthesis Report, COM/TAD/ENV/JWPTE(2011)45, Paris: OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate/Environment Directorate. Sangiovanni, M. E. (2005), ‘Transnational networks and security threats’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 18 (1), 7‒13. Satellite Sentinel Project (2015), ‘Poachers without borders’, Longmont, CO: Satellite Sentinel Project. Serrano, M. (2002), ‘Transnational organized crime and international security: Business as usual?’, in M. Berdal and M. Serrano (eds), Transnational Organized Crime and International Security: Business as Usual?, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 13‒36. Shaw, M. and T. Reitano (2014), ‘The political economy of trafficking and trade in the Sahara: Instability and opportunities’, World Bank Sahara Knowledge Exchange, http://​globalinitiative​​.net/​wp​​-content/​ uploads/​2014/​12/​Shaw​​-Reitano​​-​​​%E2​​%80​​%93​​-The​​-Political​​-Economy​​-of​​-Trafficking​​-and​​-Trade​​-in​​ -the​​-Sahara​​-December​​-2014​​.pdf (accessed 20 March 2019). Smith, D. (2013), ‘The economics of the illegal wildlife trade’, Economy Watch, 29 May, http://​www​​ .economywatch​​.com/​economy​​-business​​-and​​-finance​​-news/​the​​-economics-​​ of​​-the​​-illegal-​​ wildlife​​ -trade​​.29​​-05​​.html (accessed 5 November 2015). Stanislawski, B. H. (2008), ‘Para-states, quasi-states, and black spots: Perhaps not states, but not “ungoverned territories”, either’, International Studies Review, 10 (2), 366‒70. United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) (2015), ‘Tackling illicit trafficking in wildlife’, A/ RES/69/314, 19 August. UNSC (United Nations Security Council) (2014), ‘Final report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo’, S/2014/42, 23 January. van Rensburg, B. J. (2013), ‘Speaking notes: CITES CoP16: Enforcement related matters’, http://​www​​ .environmenthouse.​​ ch/​​?q​​=​​en/​events/​cites-​​ cop​​-16​​-debriefing (accessed 5 November 2015). Wennmann, A. (2004), ‘The political economy of transnational crime and its implications for armed violence in Georgia’, CP 6: The Illusions of Transition: Which Perspectives for Central Asia and the Caucasus, Geneva: Graduate Institute of International Studies/CIMERA. Williams, P. (2002), ‘Transnational organized crime and the state’, in R. B. Hall and T. J. Biersteker (eds), The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 161‒82. Wittig, T. (2016), ‘Poaching, wildlife trafficking and organised crime’, Whitehall Papers, 86 (1), 77‒101.

28. The aid bunker: security risk management in conflict zones Florian Weigand

INTRODUCTION While conducting research in Afghanistan in 2014/15, security concerns of my university resulted in a visit of a team of security contractors at my accommodation in Kabul to assess my living and working conditions. My approach was to maintain a low profile and to live my life in Afghanistan as normally as possible, being open about my research interests and drawing on local trust and acceptance. In stark contrast to this approach, the final report of the security service company recommended: [T]o offer Florian secure accommodation in the event of a further escalation of violence. Secure accommodation would be in a complex that is self-reliant with robust security measures and armed guards 24/7.… There could also be a further available measure of armed close protection teams to escort Florian in an armoured vehicle. This is how larger NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and International Embassies carry out similar humanitarian and aid work.

Quite obviously, it is almost impossible to conduct research in communities in Afghanistan, or anywhere else, and to build up trust relationships when arriving in an armoured vehicle and being surrounded by people with guns. Fortunately, my university ultimately agreed to let me continue my research without having to depend on such measures. Nonetheless, the report illustrates a wider challenge of how to work in conflict zones while remaining secure, a challenge faced not just by researchers and academics, but also by many other organizations and individuals that operate in potentially insecure environments. Peacebuilders and aid workers, who commonly work in conflict zones, are particularly affected by this issue. The number of aid workers injured and killed in conflict zones around the world has been growing considerably over the past decades. As the report of the security service company indicates, many organizations have responded to this challenge along the lines of what they suggested to ensure my own security: through ‘hard’ security measures that aim at physical protection and deterrence, such as moving into ‘green zones’ or ‘fortified’ compounds and using armoured cars (see Duffield 2010, 2012). This trend is not limited to Afghanistan but can be seen in conflict zones and other geographies of international intervention around the world (see e.g. Andersson 2016; Chandrasekaran 2006; Friedrichs and Friesendorf 2009; Lemay-Hébert 2018). Smirl (2015) offers a powerful analysis of the role such compounds and visible white 4x4s play for the aid community and scholars like Bliesemann de Guevara (2017) and Kühn (2016) illustrate the far-reaching implications for knowledge production. This chapter suggests that even though such seemingly practical measures certainly do offer a form of protection, they also have further, often unintended but far-reaching consequences. While the aim of aid agencies is to reach beyond international borders, hard security measures 294

The aid bunker  295 establish new hard borders that surround aid agencies while operating abroad. Separating foreign staff from local staff as well as the wider local population reinforces the social boundaries between what Apthorpe (2011) describes as ‘aidland’ and what Autesserre (2014) calls the ‘interveners’ circle’ on the one hand and most other people in a country on the other hand. In consequence, hard security measures undermine international interventions in conflict zones, whether they are about research, statebuilding, peacebuilding or the delivery of humanitarian aid. The chapter draws on interview-based and ethnographic field research conducted in Afghanistan in 2014/15 and on a survey of 80 aid workers (with Ruben Andersson; see Weigand and Andersson 2019), who work in different conflict zones around the world, which was completed in 2016. The empirical material shows that the borders that are constructed through hard security measures undermine international interventions in conflict zones in different ways. First, such measures create a sense of imprisonment for foreign staff, which can result in stress and anxiety. Second, hard security measures create new security risks for the bunkerized aid workers. Finally, a hard approach to security shifts major risks to local staff and organizations, which are now the main victims of violent attacks. Hence, hard approaches do not only fail to provide more actual security, but they also undercut the social fabric that connects international interveners with the country and society they work in.

THE CHALLENGE: A GROWING SECURITY RISK FOR AID WORKERS On 21 April 2018, an employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross was on his way to visit a prison in Taiz, a city in the southwest of Yemen, when a group of armed men opened fire on the vehicle. He died soon after in hospital. Attacks like this one in Yemen reflect a general trend. The recent decades have seen a drastic increase of aid workers falling victim to violent attacks. The total number of aid worker victims who were killed, injured or kidnapped increased from 77 in 1997 to 313 in 2017, with 2013 being a particularly deadly year for aid workers (Stoddard et al. 2012; Humanitarian Outcomes 2018). In the course of attacks, 39 aid workers were killed in 1997 whereas 139 aid workers were killed in 2017 (Stoddard et al. 2012; Humanitarian Outcomes 2018). In 2017, most of these attacks on aid workers occurred in South Sudan (46), Syria (31), Afghanistan (15) and CAR (14). Different reasons have been identified for this trend. Already in the late 1990s, Martin (1999, p. 4) noted, ‘in an environment of increased exposure, deterioration in the rules of war and loss of perceived neutrality, the community of NGOs operating in complex emergencies is facing significantly increased risks to staff safety and security’. Duffield (2012, p. 476) points out that ‘during the Cold War, aid agencies expected and received protection not only from host governments, but also from the armed groups and rebel movements they provisioned’, while today it is ‘taken for granted that host governments are either unable or unwilling to provide protection’. Meanwhile, Hoelscher et al. (2017) argue on the basis of a statistical analysis that the risk for aid workers has increased because conflicts have become more severe. Similarly, van Brabant (2010) suggests that spreading lawlessness and criminality and growing radical ideologies in armed conflicts are a major driver of the attacks on aid workers. Generally speaking, however, the number of victims in the aid industry has grown in parallel with increased aid budgets (Figure 28.1). Hence, the recent decades have also seen

296  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding an increased presence of international aid workers in conflict zones and other areas that are considered to be ‘insecure’. From 1997 to 2017 the total budget for humanitarian assistance increased from $3.7 billion to $27.3 billion (Development Initiatives 2008, 2018). Most of this money has been spent in the context of violent conflicts. Meanwhile, the number of aid workers working for international non-governmental organizations has increased from 115,000 in 1997 to 450,000 in 2014 (Hoelscher et al. 2017, p. 539). For instance, the military interventions in Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003 and Mali 2012 were followed by an increased presence of international aid and development workers, providing humanitarian relief and supporting the attempted ‘statebuilding’ initiatives.

Source: Compiled by author from Development Initiatives (2008, 2012, 2013, 2018); Stoddard et al. (2006); Stoddard et al. (2012); Humanitarian Outcomes (2018).

Figure 28.1

Aid budget and aid worker victims

THE RESPONSE: WALLS, GUNS AND CURFEWS Because of the growing number of aid workers as well as aid worker victims, ensuring the security of staff and managing the risks of missions in conflict zones has become a major concern for international organizations. Traditionally, humanitarian NGOs relied on a ‘soft’, acceptance-based strategy for their security. The idea of such a strategy is to ensure security through interaction and coordination with the relevant stakeholders, such as affected communities, state actors as well as non-state armed groups. But even though soft acceptance-based approaches may help to reduce the risk of being targeted, they do not offer protection against the actual impact of violence, such as a nearby explosion targeting somebody else or a kidnapping attempt. Furthermore, in increasingly complex conflict environments – in which often multiple armed actors operate – negotiating

The aid bunker  297 access and security has become increasingly challenging. Fast (2007, p. 149) points out that ‘integration into local communities and social networks should be undertaken cautiously in contexts with high levels of ongoing violence’. Feeling increasingly under threat, organizations began to think of alternatives and to consider new ways of managing risks. As a consequence, a group of humanitarian NGOs developed the ‘security triangle’ of acceptance, protection and deterrence (see Avant 2007). Writing about NGO field security, Martin (1999) emphasized the importance of the security triangle: ‘An effective local security protocol must balance all three elements.’ While the soft, acceptance-based approach is still the one prevalent among some humanitarian NGOs, other international organizations increasingly rely more on protection or even deterrence, using the compound solution to protect their staff with walls and hiring guards as deterrents. Meanwhile, the provision of security of aid workers and other international interveners has been increasingly professionalized. Most prominently, after the attack on the UN in Baghdad on 19 August 2003, which killed 22 and gained international attention, the UN established its Department for Safety and Security (UNDSS). But not just the UN, also international NGOs began to hire dedicated security officers for their missions. Many of these security professionals did not have a background in negotiating access, understanding of a specific local context or in acceptance-based strategies, but had gained their security experience with the military. Also private military and security companies (PMSCs) – like the one visiting me in Kabul – have benefitted from this trend (see e.g. Spearin 2001). This resulted in a further strengthening of ‘hard’ approaches to security, based on protection and deterrence. For example, an aid worker in Turkey pointed out: ‘Our security manager is former military. As such, he sees the world in black-and-white terms. Either we’re in absolute paradise or we're in the depths of hell.’ As a consequence, the dominant approach to security in conflict zones that has evolved is one of ‘hard’ security, a trend which Duffield (2010) describes as ‘aid bunkering’ and ‘fortification’. Responding to this trend, Egeland et al. (2011) in their report ‘To stay and deliver’ discuss alternatives to bunkerization for humanitarian organizations. However, five years later, Jackson and Zyck (2017, p. 6) conclude in a follow-up study that ‘the humanitarian community continues to grapple with how to stay and deliver effectively and responsibly in highly insecure environments’. The hard security measures have created new heavily militarized borders that separate the foreign staff from the country they live in and the people they work with. Foreign employees of aid agencies now often live and work in the same space, a compound protected by blast walls and armed guards; they have to use armoured vehicles when leaving for meetings and security officers regulate where staff can go and what time they have to be home in their protected compound; and even who can visit their compound is subject to the approval of security officers. For instance, most international employees of UN agencies in Kabul live and work in one of the major compounds, such as the UN Office Complex in Afghanistan (UNOCA). Apart from rides in armoured vehicles to attend rare meetings at ministries and other compounds that are considered to be secure enough or in order to get to the airport, most rarely leave the compound (see Andersson and Weigand 2015). An aid worker in Afghanistan concluded, ‘If you follow all the advice, you'll go crazy simply because you won't be able to leave your residence.’

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THE IMPLICATIONS: NEW RISKS AND NEW VICTIMS While hard security is expensive, such technocratic approaches offer a number of advantages from an organizational point of view. Having visible security measures makes it easy for an organization to illustrate that it is taking its ‘duty of care’ seriously. Furthermore, as the approach is less dependent on personal relationships between staff and stakeholders, hard security measures can offer protection even when staff does not have the ability to form strong local relationships, for instance, because the turn-over of staff is high or because staff spends little time in the country because of R&R1 regulations. In many situations one may argue that adopting a hard approach to security is the only way of enabling a mission to continue its operations without knowingly risking the lives of staff. Nonetheless, hard security measures also have implications that are in conflict with basic ideas of international interventions, particularly for aid workers, creating new problems, including novel security risks. Isolation and Imprisonment First, life in a fortified aid compound that is both office and living space and that is controlled by security officers is one of isolation and, from the point of view of the aid workers, often bears a resemblance with life in prison (see Weigand and Andersson 2019). This isolation results in stress, discomfort and anxiety (see also Duffield 2012; Welton-Mitchell 2013). An international employee of an UN agency in Kabul explained: We live and work on the same compound, with very little opportunity to go outside. Our interactions with locals is limited to work hours with national colleagues. But we are not allowed to visit them in their homes or have them over for dinner at ours for what is described as security reasons. We can’t go shopping or eat in a restaurant. We live in a fear-driven bubble.

Many respondents of our survey further explained that they viewed their security management not only as a severe restriction of their freedom of movement but also as an intrusion of their privacy, as security officers always know where they are going and whom they spend time with 24/7. One respondent, also working in Afghanistan, stated: [It is] more the security measures than the actual insecurity that affect my state of mind. I find it patronizing that I need to ask for permission to go to certain places, I find it an extreme intrusion on my privacy that my Security Manager (and often also the other expats) know exactly where I am, who I am with, and what I am doing. I very much dislike my guesthouse and I hate it that I cannot choose myself where I want to live. And finally I hate every little part of your life being monitored.

During my own time in Afghanistan I observed that such views were widely shared among foreigners in the country. Lacking the ability to leave home makes it difficult to take a break from work and often limits social activities to spending time and drinking with colleagues. This adds to the stress of working in an insecure environment. Many respondents of our survey argued that, paradoxically, the security measures were considerably more difficult to deal with than the insecure environment itself. For instance, one respondent of the survey argued: ‘As



1

Rest and recuperation: regular time out of the country, e.g. one week every four or six weeks.

The aid bunker  299 I live and work in the same compound I find it highly stressful and it is actually the only reason why I need R&R (not the actual security threats).’ New Security Risks Second, ironically, hard security approaches can also create new threats, risks and forms of insecurity. Hard security strategies isolate aid workers in their compounds and disconnect them from the country they live in. Hence, it makes it more difficult for them to understand the local context, to identify risks and threats themselves and to implement an acceptance-based strategy. Furthermore, the isolation affects how aid workers are perceived locally. Eckroth (2010, p. 35) points out that ‘how humanitarian actors convey them through their proximity to the population, by performing their work in a transparent manner, and courteous individual behaviour affect how they are perceived and thus their security’. Therefore, a hard security strategy, which interrupts the interaction of aid workers with the local population and makes it difficult for aid workers to explain who they are and what they want to achieve, may undermine their security. One aid worker concluded: I think the security arrangements both in Yemen and Afghanistan (where I worked for four years) are excessive and place too many restraints on staff. They create barriers between international and national staff, prevent staff from seeing and understanding the country and different elements of the prevailing situation there, and make some staff who may already feel vulnerable even more so in cases where the real threat level is really not as high as the security analysts suggest.

More practically speaking, hard security strategies and visible protection such as the use of an armoured 4x4 vehicle may indicate that a potential target is ‘worth’ the risk of attempting an attack or kidnapping. Realizing how the approach to security of international organizations, including humanitarian actors, had changed and the new risks it created, Egeland et al. (2011, p. 29) suggest the use of ‘discreet protection measures’. However, the use of highly visibly protection measures that are meant to deter attacks prevails. An aid worker in Yemen described: Excessive, visible security provisions actually increase the threat level, in my opinion. If you live in a large compound which has sand bags outside, big metal fences, barbed wire, double lock security doors, armed guards, etc., you’re immediately setting yourself as being different from the rest of the local area, indicating that you are foreigners and becoming a far more attractive and obvious target.

New Victims Third, and even more concerning, hard security shifts the risk to organizations and people without such measures, creating an ‘unequal risk economy’ (see Andersson and Weigand 2015). Armoured vehicles and walled compounds may protect the people who are inside and meant to be protected. But the visibility of such measures may also attract attacks while deflecting the impact of blasts to the outside. Hence, people in the vicinity are more likely to be injured and killed. The aid worker from Yemen concluded: I would feel much more comfortable in accommodation which doesn’t have these [hard security] features – and have experienced doing so when working with [other] organizations. There, I came and went as I pleased, had no visible security, and only unarmed local guards at the gate. It was a much

300  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding more comfortable situation for everyone involved, including my local neighbours, who are also put under unnecessary attention if they live next to a building with extremely visible high security.

Furthermore, aid work usually requires travels to remote and often insecure areas in order to implement projects and to interact with the beneficiaries. As staff are increasingly protected by hard security measures and limited by movement restrictions this becomes difficult. Hence, if an aid agency fully subscribes to hard security measures, its presence in a country results in a merely symbolic one. While aid workers may be working behind walls, they have little impact in the world outside. For some organizations this solution may be attractive as it enables them to signal to donors or the public that they are still active in a certain country. However, often aid agencies simply rely on local staff or smaller local NGOs, which are not subject to the same strict rules, to travel to the more insecure parts of the country or to do other potentially more dangerous parts of the work. My observations in Afghanistan indicate that this approach is usually justified with reference to the better local knowledge of local staff and a lower security risk for them. However, the trend of ‘outsourcing’ risks to local staff is also reflected in the number of aid workers that become victims of violent attacks (see also Jackson and Zyck 2017). Disaggregating the total numbers of aid worker victims and distinguishing foreign from local staff illustrates that despite the sharp total increase of aid worker victims, the number of international aid worker victims has remained fairly stable across the years. Instead, it actually is local staff that bear the brunt and have increasingly fallen victim to attacks (Figure 28.2). For instance, 285 local aid workers were affected by violent attacks in 2017, while foreign members of staff were considerably less affected (28) (Humanitarian Outcomes 2018).

Source:

Compiled by author from Humanitarian Outcomes (2018): Stoddard et al. (2012); Stoddard et al. (2006).

Figure 28.2

National and international aid worker victims

The aid bunker  301

CONCLUSIONS This chapter shows that the growing trend of using ‘hard’ security measures to protect aid agencies and other organizations in conflict zones from security risks constructs new borders between interveners and the country and population that they aim to support. At a time at which states rebuild borders with fences and walls, new ‘hard’ borders are also drawn around interveners in conflict zones to protect aid workers, diplomats and researchers. Whether international interveners want to (re-)build state structures, build peace, conduct research or provide humanitarian aid, hard security structures have the potential to undermine their mission by isolating foreign staff and creating novel security risks. More generally speaking, they undercut the social fabric that connects international staff with the local population. While hard security measures are often seen as a pragmatic response to a growing threat, they do raise ethical concerns that contradict the values of international interventions, such as the principle of humanity in humanitarian aid (see OCHA 2012), when the security risk is shifted from the international interveners to the local population and staff. Considering the growing numbers of aid workers falling victim to violent attacks, there certainly is a need to think about how to provide security for them as well as for other international interveners. Echoing Autesserre’s (2014, pp.  265‒70) findings, international interventions could benefit from strengthening acceptance-based approaches again and facilitating interaction between interveners and the local population instead of interrupting it. There may be a place for ‘hard’ security measures in specific situations or contexts as it can certainly help to deal with some security risks (see also Eckroth 2010, p. 35). However, as the trend of relying on hard security measures has become dominant, it also has to be acknowledged that such approaches do not always provide more security. Unintendedly, hard security measures even create new risks and victims.

REFERENCES Andersson, R. (2016), ‘Here be dragons: Mapping an ethnography of global danger’, Current Anthropology, 57 (6), 707‒31. Andersson, R. and F. Weigand (2015), ‘Intervention at risk: The vicious cycle of distance and danger in Mali and Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9 (4), 519‒41. Apthorpe, R. (2011), ‘Coda: With Alice in aidland: A seriously satirical allegory’, in D. Mosse (ed.), Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development, New York: Berghahn Books, Coda. Autesserre, S. (2014), Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Avant, D. (2007), ‘NGOs, corporations and security transformation in Africa’, International Relations, 21 (2), 143‒61. Bliesemann de Guevara, B. (2017), ‘Intervention theatre: Performance, authenticity and expert knowledge in politicians’ travel to post-/conflict spaces’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11 (1), 58‒80. Chandrasekaran, R. (2006), Imperial life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone, London: Bloomsbury. Development Initiatives (2008), ‘Global humanitarian assistance 2007/2008’, Somerset: Development Initiatives, http://​devinit.​​ org/​wp​​-content/​uploads/​2010/​07/​2007​​-GHA​​-report​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). Development Initiatives (2012), ‘GHA report 2012’, Somerset: Development Initiatives, http://​devinit​​ .org/​wp​​-content/​uploads/​2012/​07/​Global​​-Humanitarian-​​ Assistance​​-Report​​-2012​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019).

302  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Development Initiatives (2013), ‘Global humanitarian assistance report 2013’, Somerset: Development Initiatives, http://​devinit​​.org/​wp​​-content/​uploads/​2013/​07/​Global​​-Humanitarian​​-Assistance​​-Report​​ -2013​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). Development Initiatives (2018), ‘Global humanitarian assistance report 2018’, Somerset: Development Initiatives, http://​devinit.​​ org/​wp​​-content/​uploads/​2018/​06/​GHA​​-Report​​-2018​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). Duffield, M. (2010), ‘Risk-management and the fortified aid compound: Everyday life in post-interventionary society’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4 (4), 453‒74. Duffield, M. (2012), ‘Challenging environments: Danger, resilience and the aid industry’, Security Dialogue, 43 (5), 475‒92. Eckroth, K. R. (2010), ‘The protection of aid workers: Principled protection and humanitarian security in Darfur’, Security in Practice 2, NUPI Working Paper 770, Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, https://​nupi​​.brage​​.unit​​.no/​nupi​​-xmlui/​bitstream/​handle/​11250/​277951/​SIP​​-02​​-10​​-WP​​-770​​ -Eckroth.​​ pdf​​?sequence​​=​​3​​&​​isAllowed​​=​​y (accessed 1 July 2019). Egeland, J., A. Harmer and A. Stoddard (2011), ‘To stay and deliver: Good practice for humanitarians in complex security environments’, OCHA Policy and Studies Series, https://​www​​.unocha​​.org/​sites/​ unocha/​files/​Stay​​_and​​_Deliver​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). Fast, L. (2007), ‘Characteristics, context and risk: NGO insecurity in conflict zones’, Disasters, 31 (2), 130−54. Friedrichs, J. and C. Friesendorf (2009), ‘Privatized security cripples state-building; Iraq is a case in point’, The American Interest, 4 (5), 43–48. Hoelscher, K., J. Milkian and H. M. Nygård (2017), ‘Conflict, peacekeeping, and humanitarian security: Understanding violent attacks against aid workers’, International Peacekeeping, 24 (4), 538‒65. Humanitarian Outcomes (2018), ‘Major attacks on aid workers: Summary statistics (2007–2017)’, The Aid Worker Security Database, https://​aidworkersecurity.​​ org/​incidents/​report/​summary (accessed 1 July 2019). Jackson, A. and S. A. Zyck (2017), ‘Presence and proximity: To stay and deliver, five years on’, independent study commissioned by OCHA, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the Jindal School of International Affairs, https://​www​​.unocha​​.org/​sites/​unocha/​files/​Presence​​%20and​​%20Proximity.​​ pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). Kühn, F. P. (2016), ‘The ambiguity of things: Souvenirs from Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10 (1), 97‒115. Lemay-Hébert, N. (2018), ‘Living in the yellow zone: The political geography of intervention in Haiti’, Political Geography, 67, 88‒99. Martin, R. (1999), ‘NGO field security’, Forced Migration Review, April, https://​www​​.fmreview.​​ org/​ sites/​fmr/​files/​FMRdownloads/​en/​security​​-at​​-work/​martin​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). OCHA (2012), ‘What are humanitarian principles?’, OCHA on Message: Humanitarian Principles, https://​www​​.unocha​​.org/​sites/​dms/​Documents/​OOM​​-humanitarianprinciples_​​ eng​​_June12​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). Smirl, L. (2015), Spaces of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism, London: Zed Books. Spearin, C. (2001), ‘Private security companies and humanitarians: A corporate solution to securing humanitarian spaces?’, International Peacekeeping, 8 (1), 20‒43. Stoddard, A., A. Harmer and K. Haver (2006), ‘Providing aid in insecure environments: Trends in policy and operations’, Humanitarian Policy Group Report 23, September, https://​www​​.odi​​.org/​sites/​odi​​.org​​ .uk/​files/​odi​​-assets/​publications-​​ opinion​​-files/​269​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). Stoddard, A., A. Harmer and M. Hughes (2012), ‘Aid worker security report 2012: Host states and their impact on security for humanitarian operations’, Humanitarian Outcomes, https://​aidworkersecurity​​ .org/​sites/​default/​files/​AidWorkerSecurityReport2012​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). van Brabant, K. (2010), ‘Managing aid agency security in an evolving world: The larger challenge’, European Interagency Security Forum, https://​reliefweb.​​ int/​sites/​reliefweb.​​ int/​files/​resources/​ EAA88FFC​127E6E7E852577EC00712F7D​​-EISF​​_Agency​​_Security​​_nov2010​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019). Weigand, F. and R. Andersson (2019), ‘Institutionalized intervention: The “bunker politics” of international aid in Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, published online, February, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2019.1565814. Welton-Mitchell, C. E. (2013), ‘UNHCR’s mental health and psychosocial support: For staff’, Geneva: UNHCR, July, http://​www​​.unhcr​​.org/​51f67bdc9​​.pdf (accessed 1 July 2019).

29. From gendered war to gendered peace? Feminist perspectives on international intervention in sites of conflict Maria O’Reilly

INTRODUCTION Feminist Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) is a research paradigm that develops and applies feminist theories and methodologies to provoke fresh insights into armed conflict and contemporary peacebuilding. Feminist research offers alternative theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the positivist research that dominates mainstream PCS. Feminist analyses promote emancipatory forms of peace by critiquing the dominant institutions, ideational frameworks, and prevailing practices of contemporary peacebuilding (e.g. True et al. 2017). These studies highlight that international statebuilding often serves the interests of the most powerful actors and institutions in international politics (Pratt 2013). Feminist researchers often deploy ‘bottom-up’ methodologies to excavate and analyse situated experiences of peace and conflict (Väyrynen 2019). Significantly, feminist research is exemplified by a firm commitment to confront the entrenched androcentrism (or gender bias) of PCS research. Feminist scholars challenge the tendency of both mainstream and critical PCS scholars to overlook gender – and the perspectives of women, girls, and non-binary people – in their analyses of armed conflict and of peace processes (McLeod and O’Reilly 2019, p. 128). They argue that a gender analysis is crucial, first, for understanding the root causes and consequences of armed conflict, and, second, for developing adequate theories and practices of building peace (e.g. El-Bushra 2018). Feminist researchers therefore place gender – understood as a social construct, a power structure, or alternatively as performative (Butler 1999) – at the centre of conflict and peacebuilding analyses. They highlight that gender roles and identities, and norms relating to masculinity and femininity, are forged, maintained, yet frequently challenged in conflict and peacebuilding processes (O’Reilly 2013).1 The aim of this chapter is to highlight the key contributions and challenges offered by feminist approaches to PCS. It provides a (necessarily brief) overview of the field of feminist PCS, and spotlights gender as a power-laden social construction that must be unpacked to understand the key drivers of conflict and post-war recovery processes. The chapter begins with an introduction to feminist theory, and briefly considers how feminist PCS scholarship reflects and expands upon various strands of feminist theorising. Next, I move on to explore

1 Following Harding (1986, pp. 17‒18), I understand gendered social life to emerge from processes of gender symbolism (‘assigning dualistic gender metaphors to perceived dichotomies’, such as war and peace), gender structure (‘appealing to these gender dualisms to organize social activity’), and their resulting impact on individual gender identity.

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304  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding the gendered logic and impact of violent conflict. I examine how war reinforces, yet also frequently destabilises, traditional gender norms, relations, and power structures. Unfortunately, opportunities to challenge gendered inequalities in the transition from war to peace are frequently lost. Instead, gendered forms of violence, domination, injustice, and inequality often (re-)emerge in ‘peacetime’. To understand why this occurs, the next section explores feminist analyses of post-conflict peacebuilding, with a focus on the UN’s expanding Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. I note a significant gap between international rhetoric on gender justice and equality, and the reality of implementation in sites of intervention. Peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction initiatives frequently work to re-inscribe rather than contest hierarchical gender roles, identities and structures of power, meaning that gender injustice and insecurity often become (re)entrenched.

FEMINIST THEORIES: AN OVERVIEW Feminist theories are multidisciplinary, and span many ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. Feminist theories have been variously labelled as liberal, Marxist, socialist, radical, standpoint, postcolonial and postmodern. Liberal feminism is grounded in an individualistic paradigm of rights, equality, autonomy and rationality, and is built upon the presumption of sameness between men and women (Beasley 1999, p. 52). Liberal feminists focus on achieving formal equality between women and men (e.g. within education, the workplace, political institutions), through legal and institutional reform (Squires 1999, p. 55). Marxist and socialist feminists contend that gender inequality derives from unequal social-economic structures. They have examined the systematic oppression and exploitation of women as a product of capitalism, arguing that capitalist systems maintain gendered divisions of labour in private (unpaid work in the household) and public spheres (paid work in the workplace) (Jackson 2001, p. 284). Radical feminists argue that women’s shared oppression is rooted in patriarchal power structures which enable and legitimate the domination of women by men (MacKinnon 1989). Instead of gender equality, radical feminists emphasise gender difference and work to reclaim many of the virtues and values associated with femininity (e.g. caring) as a basis from which to (re)build gender-just societies (Alcoff 1988, pp. 408‒15). Feminist scholarship and activism on issues of peace and conflict reflects and extends many of these modernist strands of feminist theorising. For example, recent research supports liberal feminism’s demand for women’s equal representation in formal peace processes, by demonstrating that women’s direct participation in peace negotiations increases the sustainability and quality of peace achieved (Krause et al. 2018). Furthermore, feminist political economy research has illuminated key structures of economic inequality which generate gendered forms of violence and insecurity (Chilmeran and True, Chapter 31 in this volume). Feminist standpoint studies, meanwhile, have documented the everyday dimensions of violent conflict and of peacebuilding processes, by building analyses from the embodied experiences of situated women (Cockburn 2004; Enloe 2014). By foregrounding the relationship between gender and militarism, patriarchy and armed conflict (Reardon 1985; Enloe 2000), these studies have built a more accurate and more complete account of the social processes and structures that produce and sustain violence and insecurity. The notion that women constitute a homogeneous category was convincingly challenged by ‘black’, ‘Third World’, queer, working-class, and/or non-binary feminist scholars and activists

From gendered war to gendered peace?  305 (e.g. Anzaldúa 1987; hooks 1984). These feminists highlight the importance of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989) – of exploring the intricate connections between gender and other structures of hierarchy/oppression, such as nationalism, racism, heteronormativity, and colonialism. Postcolonial feminists have questioned western feminism’s tendency to emphasise difference (Jaggar 2005, p. 187; Narayan 1998). Dominant practices of knowing, interpreting, and speaking about gendered and racialised ‘others’, they argue, perpetuate neo-colonial forms of domination and divest postcolonial subjects of subjectivity and agency (Spivak 1988, p. 272). Poststructuralist feminists, moreover, deconstruct the totalising ‘meta-narratives’ that claim to explain women’s subordination across time and space (Butler 1999). They highlight the importance of exploring how ‘woman’ as subject is constructed within historically and socially situated discourses, enabling certain subject positions to be taken up whilst excluding possible alternatives (Weedon 1997). This points to the importance of honouring the diversity of voices and perspectives that exists among women and within feminism. Feminist analyses of peace and conflict have responded to these important debates and interventions. Feminist PCS scholarship has, for example, outlined the strong connections between gender and nationalism. These studies have exposed the nation and the state as highly gendered social constructions and spotlighted the various modes by which women and men differently participate in ethnic, national, and statebuilding processes (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). The relationship between nationalist agendas and feminist goals of gender equality is revealed as highly ambivalent (Kaplan 1997, p. 3). Nationalist armed struggles rely on women’s labour, yet they frequently discount women’s contributions once arms are laid down to rest (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Enloe 2000). Yet, in some instances armed conflict may represent a ‘potential springboard for women’s emancipation’ (Sharoni 2001, p. 87). Feminist goals are therefore not necessarily incompatible with those of anti-colonial and nationalist movements, particularly in circumstances where women’s emancipation is explicitly included on nationalist agendas (Jayawardena 1998; Kandiyoti 1991; Moghadam 1994).

GENDER AND WAR War-fighting and peacebuilding are profoundly gendered activities. War is associated both historically and currently with men and masculinity, whilst peace is long connected with women and femininity (Cooke 1996). Traditional narratives of war (re)produce stereotypical images of male fighters and women non-combatants as ‘Just Warriors’ and ‘Beautiful Souls’ (Elshtain 1995). With masculinity associated with a life-taking identity, and femininity connected to life-giving and life-preserving (Åhäll 2012), there is often a reluctance to recognise the significant contributions that women make to the war effort, particularly their combatant roles. In response, feminist scholars have worked to identify and challenge many of the gender biases, exclusions and stereotypes associated with women and issues of war and peace (e.g. Cockburn 2007). This includes, for example, exposing how women and men are (differently) mobilised in wartime by states and armed resistance movements. Although women are largely invisible in historical and contemporary accounts of war, feminist scholars point out that armed groups depend upon women’s labour (Enloe 2000, 2014), disrupting assumptions of women’s innate peacefulness. Women have actively engaged as agents of violence – as perpetrators of suicide bombings and other terrorist acts (Hunt and Rygiel 2006), as fighters within

306  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding anti-colonial and national liberation movements (Moghadam 1994), and as combatants within ethno-nationalist conflicts (Alison 2009). Feminist studies tell a ‘different kind of war story’ (Nordstrom 1997). By revealing the myriad (and at times empowering) roles that women take up, feminist scholars contest the traditional meta-narrative of war, disrupting its assumptions and revealing it as profoundly gendered (Cooke 1996). Feminist interrogations of armed conflict note that gendered norms and narratives are frequently mobilised to rationalise and legitimise political violence (Shepherd 2008). The gendered logic of war means that men and boys frequently face gender-specific risks in wartime such as imprisonment and forcible recruitment as combatants, whilst women and girls are often disproportionally affected by sexual- and gender-based violence such as forced marriage and sexual slavery (Brammertz and Jarvis 2016). Individuals who do not identify with binary categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’, ‘girls’ and ‘boys’, and those who do conform to dominant heterosexual norms, often experience increased violence and insecurity (Myrttinen and Daigle 2017). Undoubtedly, armed conflicts produce ‘destructive synergies of loss and suffering’ for individuals and communities who are affected by violence and insecurity (Walker 2009, p. 20). Yet, feminist analyses also highlight that periods of violent conflict frequently destabilise gender identities and power relations (Valji 2007, p. 6). ‘War’, as Turshen (1998, p. 20) writes, ‘…destroys the patriarchal structures of society that confine and degrade women. In the very breakdown of traditions, customs, and community, war also opens up new beginnings.’ Consequently, the aftermath of war is often viewed as providing a crucial ‘window of opportunity’ (Valji 2010) in which to challenge gender inequalities. Nevertheless, once a conflict officially ends and peace is formally re-established, feminists warn that ‘the pendulum of society swings from wartime to peacetime norms, [and] the window for women can close’ (Anderlini 2007, p. 146). Women are often expected to place their hopes and demands for positive transformation on the ‘backburner’ after wars end (Enloe 2004, p. 215). This highlights the importance of examining whether transitional moments represent ‘a critical moment in the shifting terrain of gender power’ (Meintjes 2001, p. 64), or alternatively constitute a ‘moment of retrenchment’ due to the reinforcement of traditional gender norms (Ní Aoláin and Hamilton 2009, p. 381). This includes understanding whether international peacebuilding interventions in (post-)conflict settings work to empower women and enhance their social standing, or alternatively contribute to their marginalisation and disempowerment.

GENDER AND PEACE The UN Agenda on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ The adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (hereafter UNSCR 1325) on WPS in October 2000 created hope that internationally supported peacebuilding and reconstruction interventions in contexts of conflict could contribute to the (re)building of gender-just forms of peace. This resolution is often viewed as a breakthrough in the advancement of women’s rights and marked the first occasion that the UN Security Council specifically placed issues of gender justice and equality on its peace and security agenda (Cohn 2008). UNSCR 1325 and

From gendered war to gendered peace?  307 subsequent WPS resolutions2 outline four priority areas for addressing the gendered impacts of armed conflict and for ensuring that women fully and equally participate in all aspects of peacebuilding. These four ‘pillars’ emphasise the importance of: increasing the participation of women as leaders in decision-making on peace and security matters; ensuring the protection of women’s rights; adopting measures that focus on the prevention of violence; and promoting the relief and recovery of survivors of wartime violence, particularly survivors of sexual- and gender-based violence in war (George and Shepherd 2016). Undoubtedly, the WPS agenda has provoked numerous changes in the policies and practices of key actors involved in international peacebuilding initiatives. Several regional organisations, including the African Union, the European Union, NATO, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, have committed themselves to UNSCR 1325-related goals and activities (Barnes 2011, pp.  23‒4). Furthermore, by 2018, 76 UN member states had adopted National Action Plans for the Implementation of UNSCR 1325,3 albeit with significant variations in implementation, financing, monitoring, and evaluation (Coomaraswamy 2015, pp. 246‒8). UNSCR 1325 has also been embraced as a useful advocacy tool, enabling civil society activists to demand that women’s diverse roles in conflict and peacebuilding be recognised and that women be included in all processes that affect their lives (Anderlini 2007; Basu 2016; McLeod 2015a). However, the subsequent record of UNSCR 1325 indicates serious gaps and persistent obstacles which hamper the meaningful realisation of the WPS policy agenda. For example, nearly two decades after the adoption of UNSCR 1325, formal peace negotiations continue to be dominated almost exclusively by men (UN Women 2012, p. 3). This is despite evidence that the substantive inclusion of women in peace processes exerts a positive impact on the quality and durability of the peace that is produced (Paffenholz et al. 2016). In addition, rape and other forms of sexual violence continue to be perpetrated frequently by both state and non-state armed groups (Nordäs and Nagel 2018). This is despite the existence of increased monitoring and reporting structures. These gendered acts of political violence – which represent serious violations of human rights – continue to be deliberately perpetrated against women and girls, men and boys, and individuals with diverse sexual and gender identities in contexts of violent conflict (Davies and True 2015). Furthermore, women in (post-)conflict settings frequently experience gendered forms of discrimination – preventing many from fully participating in key political and economic institutions, justice processes, and security institutions, and so on, on equal terms as men (Coomaraswamy 2015). Dominant models of post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction appear to be (re)embedding rather than effectively contesting patriarchal discourses and practices in countries recovering from violent conflict. The Liberal Peace: Critical Perspectives In recent years, international peacebuilding interventions in contexts of conflict have sought to create durable peace by undertaking a wide variety of ‘statebuilding’ activities designed

2 At the time of writing, nine WPS resolutions had been adopted: UNSCR 1325 (2000), 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009), 1960 (2010), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013), 2242 (2015) and 2467 (2019). 3 Figures obtained from PeaceWomen website, a project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom which monitors implementation of UNSCR 1325, https://​www​.peacewomen​.org/​ member​-states (accessed 8 October 2018).

308  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding to liberalise the political, economic, and social institutions of post-conflict states (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2007, p. 491). Through ceasefire monitoring, Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) programmes, good governance initiatives, and marketisation and economic restructuring programmes among other activities, international peace operations focus on (re)constructing a ‘liberal peace’ by transforming previously ‘war-shattered states’ into ‘liberal-market economies’ (Paris 2004). The mixed and often disappointing record of international statebuilding interventions – in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mozambique, Timor Leste, and other settings – has sparked ongoing debates concerning the benevolence, efficacy, and legitimacy of the liberal peace project. Critical PCS scholars have interrogated the normative foundations and legitimacy of liberal peacebuilding – by asking questions such as why and how is peace being built? which vision of peace is being constructed? and whose interests are served by post-conflict reconstruction? (Tadjbakhsh 2010, p. 126). Contemporary peacebuilding is critiqued as ‘essentially a colonial undertaking’ (Darby 2009, p. 709) that remains trapped in colonialist structures of thought and patterns of action (Darby 2009, p. 701). Others add that peacebuilding is marked by cultural insensitivity (Mac Ginty 2011), technocratic rationality (Väyrynen 2004), and an unwillingness to engage with everyday needs (Kappler and Richmond 2011). The realisation that liberal approaches may be part of the problem rather than the solution to contemporary conflict has provoked calls to ‘think anew about peace operations’ (Bellamy and Williams 2004). Consequently, critical scholars have recently deployed concepts such as hybridity (Richmond and Mitchell 2012), agency (Kappler 2014), the everyday (Mac Ginty 2014), and peace formation (Richmond 2014), to explore how peace emerges through bottom-up (rather than solely top-down) initiatives, and by informal and endogenous as well as formal and exogenous actors and institutions.

BEYOND THE LIBERAL PEACE: FEMINIST CONTRIBUTIONS AND CHALLENGES Whilst critical PCS researchers have provoked crucial debates about the liberal peace project, they often overlook the significance of women, gender, and feminist perspectives in their analyses of post-conflict reconstruction (McLeod and O’Reilly 2019). Feminist studies point out that women often experience new forms of prejudice and discrimination in the aftermath of armed conflict (Žarkov and Cockburn 2002). Indeed, women in ‘post-conflict’ contexts, often encounter a ‘continuum of violence’ (Cockburn 2004) across war and peace. Sexual and gender-based violence in conflict is frequently not addressed in peace negotiations, leading to impunity (Jenkins and Goetz 2010) and a failure to provide survivors with protection, justice, and redress (Davies et al. 2016). Post-conflict peacebuilding and recovery mechanisms frequently work to (re-)entrench a ‘patriarchal gender order’ (Deiana 2018, p. 200) through the implementation of power-sharing mechanisms (Byrne and McCulloch 2012), DDR programmes (Wilén, Chapter 30 in this volume), transitional justice mechanisms (Mibenge 2013), microfinance (Stavrevska 2018) and other initiatives. By failing to address the gendered structures of inequality that emerge before, during, and after war, the liberal peace often neglects the interests and needs of survivors of wartime violence and fails to build sustainable peace (O’Reilly 2018). This points to the importance of integrating a gender perspective into critical PCS scholarship.

From gendered war to gendered peace?  309 Feminist concepts – such as care (Ruddick 1990) and ‘empathetic cooperation’ (Sylvester 1994) – and methods including narrative analysis (Björkdahl and Selimovic 2018) and institutional ethnography (Smith 2005) – have pushed forward critical debates within PCS (McLeod and O’Reilly 2019, pp. 137‒8). Furthermore, feminist researchers have over several decades provided rich, situated accounts of how peace is built in everyday spaces (Boulding 2000). Despite these insights, feminist scholars and activists are routinely ignored by critical debates on the so-called ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding and explorations of everyday peace (Vaittinen et al. 2019). This is disappointing, as feminist PCS scholarship significantly contributes to, and complicates, critical debates. Feminist studies, for example, cast a spotlight onto the embodied, affective, and ‘personal-political’ experiences of war and post-war reconstruction interventions (McLeod 2015b, p. 54; Partis-Jennings 2017; Väyrynen 2019). They offer vital insights into gendered experiences of war and peacebuilding; and reveal the apparently mundane strategies and tactics that individuals use to survive and at times to resist militarism and violence (Manchanda 2017; O’Gorman 2011). Feminist analyses also highlight the tendency of ‘hybridised’ peacebuilding approaches to sustain gendered forms of violence, insecurity, and inequality (George 2017; M’Cormack-Hale 2018; Oosterom 2017). The failure to promote gender equality as an integral aspect of peacebuilding, they argue, reinforces power hierarchies and conflict dynamics, and leads to justice and security sector institutions being unresponsive to local needs (Gordon et al. 2015). Feminist studies of the power relations that operate within peacebuilding initiatives ‘open the way for a richer analysis of power’ and enable researchers to uncover ‘hidden or mundane practices and processes’ that significantly shape such interventions (McLeod 2015b, p. 52). The gendered power dynamics of hybrid peacebuilding interactions are essential for understanding how and why certain actors and issues (such as gender-based violence) are privileged whilst others are marginalised (Ryan and Basini 2017). Feminist analyses also provide a rich understanding of the gendered forms of agency that emerge in contexts of conflict and peacebuilding (Björkdahl and Selimovic 2015; Henrizi 2015; O’Reilly 2018; Yadav 2016). Far from being passive victims of conflict, women frequently exercise creative, transformative, and/or critical forms of agency (Björkdahl and Selimovic 2015). Peacebuilding interventions may open up, or alternatively close down, opportunities for agency and resistance to be (re-)asserted in the push for gender justice and social transformation. If PCS research wishes to engage with processes of peace formation which provide ‘a contextual, critical, and emancipatory epistemology of peace’ (Richmond and Pogodda 2016, p. 2), then it must strengthen collaborations with feminist scholars and activists located in sites of conflict. Grasping a better understanding of the gender dynamics of conflict, and the everyday activities that are deployed to challenge gendered forms of violence and inequality, are essential for building positive forms of peace.

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30. Romanticising the locals and the externals? Identifying challenges to a gendered SSR Nina Wilén

INTRODUCTION Almost two decades after the concept was coined,1 security sector reform (SSR) remains one of the top priorities for post-conflict states trying to increase security and build sustainable peace. Initially a product of the security–development nexus debate, yet firmly entrenched in the security side of the debate (Abrahamsen 2016, p. 285; Hudson 2012; Hurwitz and Peake 2004; Wilén 2015), the overarching aim of SSR is to make the security sector accountable, legitimate and transparent in the provision of internal and external security and rule of law (Mobekk 2010, p. 279). Parallel to the development of the SSR concept, the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has emerged in the field of international security following the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000, attempting to increase the prevention, participation and protection of women in peace and security issues while simultaneously adopting a gender lens to better understand diverse experiences and correct gender inequalities (UNSC 1325, 2000). Although gender and SSR have been intimately linked in theory and increasingly so in policy papers (Valasek 2008; Bastick 2015; Bastick and Valasek 2009), in practice, SSR has remained a concept operationalised mainly by and for men with gender perspectives often left as ‘add-ons’ for later (Schoofs and Smits 2010). This poses significant problems not only for the realisation of the WPS agenda, but also for the success of SSR and peacebuilding in general. Research has shown that for women especially, the post-conflict period may pose as much, if not more of a threat than the ‘formal’ conflict (Handrahan 2004, p. 434). Adopting a gender lens to capture different experiences is thus crucial to address all types of insecurity. These research findings also exemplify what feminist scholars have termed the ‘continuum of violence’ (Cohn 2013, p. 21), making explicit the link between ‘extraordinary violence’ characteristic for armed conflicts and war, and ‘ordinary’ structural violence which often is silenced, such as for example domestic violence (Roy 2008; Swaine 2010). To address these different types of insecurity and provide protection for all, it is necessary to incorporate a gender perspective in SSR. Adding more women to the security sector is not synonymous with adopting a gender lens to SSR. However, a security sector which does not employ women in similar proportions to men, is not only centralising the monopoly of violence and thereby also a significant element of state power in the hands of men but is also likely to perpetuate discriminating gender stereotypes of men and women in a (hyper) masculine environment (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011; Pruitt 2016).

1 The term SSR is usually ascribed to have originated in a speech by DfID’s secretary of state Clare Short. See Short (1999).

314

Romanticising the locals and the externals?  315 The aim of this chapter is to identify and discuss the challenges to achieve a gendered SSR. Three obstacles are identified: (1) the perceived tension between local ownership/gender equality; (2) intervening actors’ dubious credibility as role models as they, to a large majority, are men benefitting from patriarchal structures; (3) the failure to take into account the private when reforming the public. In doing this, the chapter attempts to deepen discussions about the political/technical, local/external and private/public in the SSR literature while increasing the understanding of why a more transformative reform of the security sector often falls short. The structure of the chapter is as follows: a broad literature overview tracing the conceptual development of SSR and gender starts off the chapter, before a second part identifies and analyses three obstacles to a gendered SSR. A concluding discussion ends the chapter by discussing the implications of these challenges for the broader aim of peacebuilding.

TRACING THE DEVELOPMENT OF SSR SSR has since its inception been the topic for academic analyses that have criticised and developed the concept. Its narrow focus on state institutions has drawn criticism for example (Baker 2010; Ní Aoláin et al. 2011, p. 63), and as a result, recent years have seen the scope broaden to include non-state actors as well, resulting in what has been called a hybrid SSR model (Andersen 2011, pp. 11‒14; Schroeder et al. 2014). While the acknowledgement of non-state security actors is a step towards a widened understanding of security, this is not an undisputed step – as accountability and equality problems may at times be exacerbated in more traditional forms of justice, in particular women’s rights (Kunz and Valasek 2012, p. 125). Academics have also underlined the lack of theorisation of the normative underpinnings of SSR, emphasising its political dimension. The political dimension is both apparent in the neo-liberal characteristics of the concept of SSR and in the implementation of the concept, which implies a fundamental redistribution of power and resources (Egnell and Haldén 2009, p. 33; N’Diaye 2002, p. 137; Jackson 2010; Albrecht et al. 2010, p. 84; Hudson 2012, p. 88). The political character has driven SSR towards militarised train-and-equip reforms to the detriment of more comprehensive, but also more politically sensitive reforms (Abrahamsen 2016; Schroeder et al. 2014; Sedra 2013). Yet the most pervasive critique has been directed against the continuous gap between policy and practice (Andersen 2011, p. 10; Downes and Muggah 2010, p. 137; Ebo 2007; Hudson 2012, p. 83). Feminist scholars have broadened this critique and pointed at the sidelining of gender and women in the discussions and development of the SSR concept (Mobekk 2010; Ní Aoláin et al. 2011; Schoofs and Smits 2010; Wilén 2014). A concrete example of this is the absence of a gender chapter in the first version of the OECD’s handbook on SSR in 2007 (OECD DAC 2007). While this omission was rectified in 2009, it is still symptomatic of a deeper problem of viewing gender as a separate, add-on for later (Schoofs and Smits 2010; Wilén 2014). Progress on this front has however been noted during the past few years, much due to gender experts and feminist scholars pushing for the engendering of SSR (Duncanson 2016, p. 117). In particular a group of feminist scholars from the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces has made significant efforts at providing tangible and practical tools to integrate a gender perspective in SSR (Valasek 2008; Bastick 2015; Bastick and Valasek 2009). Another related feminist criticism against the SSR literature and specifically policy documents is the tendency to confuse gender and women (Hudson 2012, p. 78; Cohn 2013, p. 3).

316  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Different scholars define gender in a variety of ways, but most agree that it refers to socially constructed roles and behaviours associated to men and women’s biological sex, which at heart is a structural power relation (Valasek 2008, pp. 2‒3; Cohn 2013, p. 4). As such, gender roles are fluid and change depending on culture and context, yet many feel their gender identity as something fixed (Duncanson 2016, p. 8). While gender refers to roles and expectations that affect both men and women, ‘women’ refers only to individuals who have the biological female sex. The lack of clear definition of gender and the fact that security institutions usually are ‘gendered institutions’ where a particular type of heterosexual masculinity is the norm, much due to the overrepresentation of males subscribing to and reinforcing such a masculinity, is likely to contribute to the confusion between gender and women (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011, p. 62; Cohn 2013, p. 15; Hudson 2012, p. 87). In order to emphasise the need for femininity to also have both place and space in security forces, policy makers sometimes confuse gender with women (Cohn 2013, p. 3). The ‘gender-woman’ confusion is also linked to the feminist critique against efforts to engender SSR processes only by adding a larger number of women to security forces. The ‘add-and-stir’ debate has underlined the inherent problems of this approach, pointing both at the essentialist and instrumentalist view of women as bringing particular capacities because of their gender, and to the extra burden that is placed on women to transform deeply conservative and traditionalist institutions such as the armed forces (Dharmapuri 2013; Eriksson Baaz and Utas 2012). Considerable research has also questioned the extent to which adding women actually can transform the masculine culture apparent in the core security institutions, showing evidence of women instead co-opting and adapting to the culture in order to fit in (Eduards 2012; Duncanson and Woodward 2016; Simic 2010; Wilén and Heinecken 2018). To address these shortcomings, a gendered SSR would need to be more inclusive and transformative. Inclusive, in the sense that there is a need for broader participation in both defining security needs, but also more practically in the security sector. There are still debates about whether more women would actually bring about any change for the institutional culture and/ or for providing security (Jennings 2011; Bridges and Horsefall 2009), yet it is clear that if women are excluded, the security sector, which is one of the most powerful sectors in a state (Mathers 2013), remains by and for men. SSR also needs to be transformative, questioning traditional gendered understandings of women as unable to both fight and provide protection (Pruitt 2016; Wilén and Heinecken 2018), while at the same time acknowledging men and women’s different security concerns and experiences, both in the private and the public sphere. In the following section, three reasons to why such a gendered SSR still has not materialised are identified and analysed.

IDENTIFYING CHALLENGES TO A GENDERED SSR This part analyses three particular challenges to achieving a transformative, gendered SSR, expanding beyond expressions of lack of political will of the ‘locals’ and budgetary and coordinating problems for the externals to an analysis more centred on gender and power. The tension between local ownership and gender, the improbable role models of the external actors and the failure to take into account the private when reforming the public are singled out as specific obstacles to a more transformative SSR.

Romanticising the locals and the externals?  317 Romanticising the Local? The Tension between Local Ownership and Gender Equality There is no policy document on SSR which does not emphasise the importance of local ownership for reforms to be successful and sustainable (see for example: OECD DAC 2007, pp. 10‒12). Yet, there are several challenges involved with ensuring local ownership, most importantly perhaps, the fact that previous actions by the ‘local owners’ are part of the reason to why SSR is needed in the first place (Scheye and Peake 2005, p. 234; Donais 2009, p. 120). Other challenges include identifying who the ‘clients’ of SSR are (Farr 2004, p. 2; Scheye and Peake 2005, p. 238), who the ‘locals’ are (Gordon et al. 2015, p. 2; Wilén and Chapaux 2011) and related to this, understanding that SSR implies a shift in the power balance which might not be welcomed by those who benefit from the status quo (Nathan 2007, p. 8). Given these challenges, it is quite understandable that there are situations where local and external actors disagree on the priorities for SSR and where local ownership remains contested (see Rayroux and Wilén 2014; Donais 2008). There is a perceived tension between local and external actors when it comes to introducing gender reforms to SSR, and as a result, questions about external top-down imposition arise (Gordon et al. 2015). Indeed, the UN Secretary-General identified a particular role for ‘outsiders’ in making sure that marginalised groups, such as women or minorities, are included in SSR (Hansen 2008, p. 47). Notwithstanding rightful feminist criticism regarding women in developing contexts being framed as victims in need of Western salvation (Kunz and Valasek 2012, p. 123), many developing states are characterised by a broader patriarchal system and traditions which discriminate in particular against women. However, this does not mean that these women have not been part of and contributed to international feminist networks and organisations, nor does it mean that they are helpless or in need of salvation. It does mean however, that it is possible that there will be a clash between traditional, conservative customs and international norms about human rights, including women’s rights (Naraghi-Anderlini 2008, p. 106; Wilén 2014). Kunz and Valasek note for example that customary security and justice actors have been heavily criticised for perpetrating violence and/or discriminating against specific groups, in particular women (Kunz and Valasek 2012, p. 125). Yet, ensuring a local ownership of SSR without gender equality is as Gordon et al. note: ‘meaningless’ (Gordon et al. 2015, p. 2). Institutions need to be responsive to the needs of the people – and not limited to members of a male-dominated security sector (Gordon et al. 2015, p. 2) or patriarchal leaders which are likely to resist such sweeping change (Naraghi-Anderlini 2008, p. 109). This highlights the fact that the post-conflict environment and in particular, the post-conflict security sector, is about male power systems, struggles and identity formation (Handrahan 2004, p. 433) which effectively excludes women and an inclusive gender perspective. The male dominance is however not exclusive to post-conflict or developing states’ security sectors, but can also be observed in Western, industrialised states. Indeed, as Ní Aoláin et al. note: [T]he reformist mode of SSR contains an explicit modelling on Western security sector organizations with a compelling blind spot to the gender distortions inherent in these institutions and their subsequent export to other states. (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011, p. 64)

318  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding This observation brings us to the second aspect preventing a gendered SSR: the doubtful credibility of external actors assisting SSR efforts, given the male dominance prevalent in their security sectors. Romanticising the Externals? Improbable Role Models? There is an obvious paradox in the fact that external actors, coming from male-dominated and heavily gendered security sectors are the ones assisting post-conflict states’ efforts to engender their security sectors. Engaging, to a large majority, male practitioners and/or military from Western security sectors with male military and leaders from the concerned post-conflict state, means that SSR is likely to remain a conversation which excludes women (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011, p. 64). The fact that the security sector and in particularly, the military, is one of the most powerful institutions in a state (Mathers 2013), also underlines how the gendered hierarchy in broader society is reinforced as long as institutions like the military remains staffed to a majority by men. Indeed, as Ní Aoláin (2009, p. 1083) remarks: ‘the modeling of change onto Western democratic notions of institutional structure may look like positive change but in fact, these institutional structures are as deeply patriarchal as their non-western counterparts’. Due to global male domination in the security sector there is thus a strong risk that SSR efforts could actually serve to perpetuate and extend structural patriarchies rather than replace them (Ní Aoláin 2009, p. 1083). The perpetuation of a patriarchal system during SSR efforts by external partners is likely for three reasons: First, because the security sector practitioners are in the main skilled technicians in their own speciality, or retired military male advisors from donor countries, rarely educated in the political or developmental skills necessary to take a broader and more inclusionary view of SSR (Scheye and Peake 2005, p. 247; Gordon et al. 2015, p. 10). Second, local political and military leaders are unlikely to voluntarily give up power yielded through violent and exclusionary structures (Farr 2004, p. 7) and open up for previously side-lined and marginal actors to share power (Naraghi-Anderlini 2008, p. 106). They might argue that the participation of women in the security sector is not socio-culturally acceptable (Naraghi-Anderlini 2008, p. 123). Third, given this local resistance from male counterparts, external male actors may find that ‘imposing’ a gender perspective could be counterproductive to SSR as a whole (Gordon et al. 2015, p. 11), and thereby refrain from taking a broader societal perspective which includes marginalised groups, such as women. Indeed, as Handrahan argues, the post-conflict period is characterised by the ‘international fraternity’, filling the male domestic power vacuum which might have been created during the conflict. The ‘international fraternity’, understood as the community of decision makers and experts who arrive after a conflict and whose sense of patriarchy is intact, are likely to refuse to seriously consider gender issues in post-conflict reconstruction, precisely because of their inability to consider their own patriarchy (Handrahan 2004, p. 436). The fact that both the ‘international’ and the ‘local fraternity’ often perceive the male dominance in the security sector as beneficial to their work, positions and status make it less likely that a transformative, gendered SSR will take root. If both the local and the international interlocutors refrain from taking a broader perspective to SSR, which includes inviting previously marginalised voices, such as women, to the table, there is a strong risk that gender becomes perceived as an ‘add-on’ for later as a minor technical detail, rather than the political

Romanticising the locals and the externals?  319 transformation that it is intended to bring forth (Schoofs and Smits 2010; Wilén 2014). Such a political transformation also requires bringing in elements of the private sphere to the public. The Failure to Take into Account the Private when Reforming the Public A third aspect which is identified here as preventing a more transformative and gendered change of the security sector is the failure to exclude the private sphere from an evaluation of the public. Achieving a radical, engendered transformation of SSR requires going beyond a narrow focus on public security institutions and into the private civilian sphere in order to disrupt and transform the structured power relations between genders (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011, p. 63). Similarly to how war is theorised through men and women’s experiences of it (Sjoberg 2014, p. 135), gendered SSR also needs to be understood less like a technical process focused on reforming institutions and infrastructure during a specific time period and more like a transformation driven and motivated by personal experiences, stories and expectations which enables a complete gendered makeover of not only the security apparatus in a society, but also the way security is understood and defined. Bringing in the private in the understanding of the public renders visible the specific challenges and the silenced ‘ordinary’ gender-based violence which in particular women face, both in the private as civilians and in the public as security actors (Roy 2008; Swaine 2010). To ‘explode the private’ (MacKinnon 1989, p. 191), and blur the lines between the public and private there is a need to open up for broader participation in the SSR efforts. This leads back to the question of who the clients of SSR are (Farr 2004, p. 2; Scheye and Peake 2005, p. 238). In particular feminist scholars have noted that participation in SSR often is limited to the incorporation of particular actors in pre-defined projects (Kunz and Valasek 2012, p. 126), which excludes those in marginal social positions (Farr 2004, p. 4). Indeed, Women’s Organisations are often excluded from security forums and decision-making processes (Gordon et al. 2015, p. 9), leaving priorities to be defined by an exclusive group of national security and political actors (Naraghi-Anderlini 2008, p. 111). By excluding the voices from the marginalised populations when defining security priorities, SSR remains a narrow, state-centred, male-dominant enterprise which only considers violence occurring in the public sphere. This also means that the general culture of impunity for men who exploit women remains intact (Farr 2004, p. 7). A more participatory and gender-sensitive assessment of security and justice needs, which deploys new participant-oriented research methodologies to take into account the voices of the most marginalised (Kunz and Valasek 2012, p. 131; Farr 2004, p. 5), is needed to explode the private and widen the scope of SSR.

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION ‘Gender is, at its heart, a structural power relation’ (Cohn 2013, p. 4), which valorises some categories of people over others and ‘organizes access to resources, rights, responsibilities, authority and life options along the lines demarcating’ the groups (Cohn 2013, p. 4). This does not become much more evident than in the process of security sector reform. No other sector of the state contains so heavily gendered institutions as the security sector, which hosts both the military and the police corps, strongly characterised by male dominance and a particular type of hegemonic masculinity. To reform these institutions to open up for new understandings of

320  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding (in)security in both the private and the public realm, and include new, previously marginalised actors as security agents, implies not only reshuffling local power structures but also attempting to address the unequal gender balance in society more broadly. It is, in other words, no surprise that there is resistance to a gendered SSR. Neither is it a surprise that gender and woman is so often confused in discussions about SSR. The physical dominance of male bodies and the hegemonic masculinity that is promoted through this dominance, means that introducing a gender perspective has to address what is missing in the institution: women and femininity. The call for more women to join the security forces is an effort to address this gendered bias, yet as already noted, adding more women is necessary, but not enough to achieve a gendered SSR. Introducing more women into the security sector can destabilise gendered stereotypes of female victims and male protectors (Pruitt 2016) and disrupt the dominant masculinity (Wilén and Heinecken 2018), yet it will not imply the adoption of a wider gender perspective in the security sector, nor will it substitute for a broader participatory evaluation of how (in) security is perceived in a post-conflict state. In addition, women recruited to security institutions in places where gender equality is not an accepted principle may imply significant security risks for the women (Gordon et al. 2015, p. 14; Wilén 2014). To place the burden for the transformation of a whole sector on a small group of women is not only unrealistic but may also be counterproductive. Achieving a transformative, gendered SSR will include overcoming the three obstacles identified in this chapter: the perceived tension between local ownership and gender; the improbable, external role models; and the exclusion of the private in the reform of the public. While two of these obstacles appear centred on the actors rather than the structure, to overcome them it is nevertheless necessary to envision structural reforms where one of the key words is broader participation. Broader participation for evaluating security needs of the population, including the previously excluded, marginalised voices and broader participation of the same groups in the security sector, making it representative of the population it is supposed to protect. Reforms also need to include a broader perspective than the current, state-centred focus to look beyond ‘extraordinary violence’ and take into account and make visible ‘ordinary violence’, and thereby also make a dent in the ‘continuum of violence’, which affects women to a larger degree than men. Such structural reforms are cumbersome and lengthy and are likely to extend far beyond donors’ deadlines. Moreover, they cut to the core of achieving a gendered SSR: challenging hierarchical gender structures and restructuring power to previously marginalised groups.

REFERENCES Abrahamsen, R. (2016), ‘Exporting decentred security governance: The tensions of security sector reform’, Global Crime, 17 (3‒4), 281‒95. Albrecht, P., F. Stepputat and L. Andersen (2010), ’Security sector reform, the European way’, in M. Sedra (ed.), The Future of Security Sector Reform, Waterloo, ON: Centre for International Governance Innovation, pp. 74‒88. Andersen, L. R. (2011), ‘Security sector reform and the dilemmas of liberal peacebuilding’, DIIS Working Paper 31, Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies. Baker, B. (2010), ‘The future is non-state’, in M. Sedra (ed.), The Future of Security Sector Reform, Waterloo, ON: Centre for International Governance Innovation, pp. 208‒28. Bastick, M. (2015), Gender and Complaints Mechanisms: A Handbook for Armed Forces and Ombuds Institutions to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Related Discrimination, Harassment, Bullying and Abuse, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces.

Romanticising the locals and the externals?  321 Bastick, M. and K. Valasek (ed.) (2009), Gender and Security Sector Reform Training Resource Package, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces. Bridges, D. and D. Horsefall (2009), ‘Increasing operational effectiveness in UN peacekeeping’, Armed Forces and Society, 36 (1), 120‒30. Cohn, C. (2013), ‘Women and wars: Toward a conceptual framework’, in C. Cohn (ed.), Women and Wars, Polity: Cambridge, pp. 1‒36. Dharmapuri, S. (2013), ‘Not just a numbers game: Increasing Women’s participation in UN Peacekeeping’, Providing for Peacekeeping no. 4, New York: International Peace Institute. Donais, T. (2008), ‘Understanding local ownership in security sector reform’, in T. Donais (ed.), Local Ownership and Security Sector Reform, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, pp. 3‒19. Donais, T. (2009), ‘Inclusion or exclusion? Local ownership and security sector reform’, Studies in Social Justice, 3 (1), 117‒31. Downes, M. and R. Muggah (2010), ‘Breathing room: Interim stabilization and security sector reform in the post-war period’, in M. Sedra (ed.), The Future of Security Sector Reform, Waterloo, ON: Centre for International Governance Innovation, pp. 136‒54. Duncanson, C. (2016), Gender and Peacebuilding, Cambridge: Polity. Duncanson, C. and R. Woodward (2016), ‘Regendering the military: Theorizing women’s military participation’, Security Dialogue, 47 (1), 3‒21. Ebo, A. (2007), ‘The role of security sector reform in sustainable development: Donor policy trends and challenges’, Conflict, Security and Development, 7 (1), 27‒60. Eduards, M. (2012), ‘What does a bath towel have to do with security policy? Gender trouble in the Swedish Armed Forces’, in A. Kronsell and E. Svedberg (eds), Making Gender, Making War, Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices, London: Routledge, pp. 51‒62. Egnell, R. and P. Haldén (2009), ‘Laudable, ahistorical and overambitious: Security sector reform meets state formation theory’, Conflict, Security and Development, 9 (1), 27‒54. Eriksson Baaz, M. and M. Utas (eds) (2012), ‘Beyond “gender and stir”: Reflections on gender and SSR in the aftermath of African conflicts’, Policy Dialogue no. 9, Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Farr, V.A. (2004), ‘Voices from the margins: A response to “Security sector reform in developing and transitional countries”’, Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, August. Gordon, E., A. C. Welch and E. Roos (2015), ‘Security sector reform and the paradoxical tension between local ownership and gender equality’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 4 (1), 1‒23. Handrahan, L. (2004), ‘Conflict, gender, ethnicity and post-conflict reconstruction’, Security Dialogue, 35 (4), 429‒45. Hansen, A. (2008), ‘Local ownership in peace operations’, in T. Donais (ed.), Local Ownership and Security Sector Reform, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, pp. 39‒59. Hudson, H. (2012), ‘A bridge too far? The gender consequences of linking security and development in SSR discourse and practice’, in A. Schnabel and V. Farr (eds), Back to the Roots: Security Sector Reform and Development, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, pp. 77‒115. Hurwitz, A. and G. Peake (2004), ‘Strengthening the security–development nexus: Assessing international policy and practice since the 1990s’, Conference Report, New York: International Peace Academy, April. Jackson, P. (2010), ‘SSR and post-conflict reconstruction: The armed wing of state building?’, in M. Sedra (ed.), The Future of Security Sector Reform, Waterloo, ON: Centre for International Governance Innovation, pp. 118‒36. Jennings, K. M. (2011), ‘Women’s participation in UN peacekeeping operations: Agents of change or stranded symbols?’, NOREF Report, Oslo: Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre. Kunz, R. and K. Valasek (2012), ‘Learning from others’ mistakes: Towards participatory, gender-sensitive SSR’, in A. Schnabel and V. Farr (eds), Back to the Roots: Security Sector Reform and Development, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, pp. 115‒43. MacKinnon, C. (1989), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mathers, J. G. (2013), ‘Women and state military forces’, in C. Cohn (ed.), Women and Wars, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 124‒45. Mobekk, E. (2010), ‘Gender, women and security sector reform’, International Peacekeeping, 17 (2), 278‒91.

322  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Naraghi-Anderlini, S. (2008), ‘Gender perspectives and women as stakeholders: Broadening local ownership of SSR’, in T. Donais (ed.), Local Ownership and Security Sector Reform, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, pp. 105‒27. Nathan, L. (2007), ‘No ownership, no commitment: A guide to local ownership of security sector reform’, A study commissioned by the Security Sector Reform Strategy of the UK Government’s Global Conflict Prevention Pool, Birmingham: International Development Department, University of Birmingham. N’Diaye, B. (2002), ‘Central African Republic’, in A. Bryden and V. Scherrer (eds), Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration and Security Sector Reform. Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF). Wien, Berlin: Lit, pp. 115‒43. Ní Aoláin, F. (2009), ‘Women, security, and the patriarchy of internationalized transitional justice’, Human Rights Quarterly, 31 (4), 1055‒85. Ní Aoláin, F., D. Francesca Haynes and N. Cahn (2011), On the Frontlines: Gender, War, and the Post-Conflict Process, Oxford: Oxford University Press. OECD DAC (2007), OECD DAC Handbook on Security System Reform: Supporting Security and Justice, Paris: OECD DAC. Pruitt, L. (2016), The Women In Blue Helmets. Gender, Policing and the UN’s First All-Female Peacekeeping Unit, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Rayroux, A. and N. Wilén (2014), ‘Resisting ownership: The paralysis of EU peacebuilding in the Congo’, African Security, 7 (1), 24‒44. Roy, S. (2008), ‘The grey zone: The “ordinary” violence of extraordinary times’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14 (2), 316‒33. Scheye, E. and G. Peake (2005), ‘Unknotting local ownership’, in A. H. Ebnother and P. Fluri (eds), After Intervention Public Security Management in Post-Conflict Societies from Intervention to Sustainable Local Ownership, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, pp. 234‒60. Schoofs, S. and R. Smits (2010), ‘Aiming high, reaching low: Four fundamentals for gender-responsive statebuilding’, CRU Policy Brief, The Hague: Clingendael Conflict Research Unit. Schroeder, U. C., F. Chappuis and D. Kocak (2014), ‘Security sector reform and the emergence of hybrid security governance’, International Peacekeeping, 21 (2), 214‒30. Sedra, M. (2013), ‘The hollowing out of the liberal peace project in Afghanistan: The case of security sector reform’, Central Asian Survey, 32 (3), 371‒87. Short, C. (1999), ‘Security sector reform and the elimination of poverty’, Speech given at Centre for Defence Studies, King’s College, London. Simic, O. (2010), ‘Does the presence of women really matter? Towards combating male sexual violence in peacekeeping operations’, International Peacekeeping, 17 (2), 188‒99. Sjoberg, L. (2014), Gender, War and Conflict, Cambridge: Polity Press. Swaine, A. (2010), ‘Considering the continuum lens and its potential to capture the wider picture of women’s experiences of violence during and after armed conflict’, Transitional Justice Institute Research Paper no. 10-21. Valasek, K. (2008), ‘Security sector reform and gender’, Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, OSCE/ODIHR/UN-INSTRAW. Wilén, N. (2014), ‘SSR, gender and local narratives in Burundi’, Conflict, Security and Development, 14 (3), 331‒54. Wilén, N. (2015), ‘Security sector reform and statebuilding’, in P. Jackson (ed.), Handbook of International Security and Development, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 101‒94. Wilén, N. and V. Chapaux (2011), ‘Problems of local participation and collaboration with the UN in a post-conflict environment: Who are the “locals”?’, Global Society, 25 (4), 531‒48. Wilén, N. and L. Heinecken (2018), ‘Regendering the South African army: Inclusion, reversal and displacement’, Gender, Work and Organization, 25 (6), 670‒86.

31. The political economy of gender and peacebuilding Yasmin Chilmeran and Jacqui True

INTRODUCTION United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 (2000) emphasises the importance of women’s participation in peace processes and peacebuilding to ensure the sustainability of peace and prevent the recurrence of conflict. UNSCR 1325 highlights the different impacts of conflict on women and girls compared with men and boys and emphasises the importance therefore of mainstreaming a gender perspective in post-conflict recovery. Subsequent Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security have sought to address the issue of sexual and gender-based violence as a weapon of war and threat to international peace and security (Aroussi 2011). In post-conflict contexts, the material inequalities that women face are heightened, contributing to their vulnerability to gender-based violence and structural violence (True 2012). The gendered experiences of conflict, particularly the experience of gendered violence, both empower and constrain women’s participation in the aftermath of conflict. In recent military interventions in the Middle East region, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, rhetoric relating to women’s political participation has been a key part of post-intervention statebuilding with varied success.1 The focus of both post-intervention governments and their interveners on women’s participation and the implementation of 1325 in the Middle East has produced a variety of outcomes, including a women’s quota in the Iraqi parliament. One positive outcome has been the increased political space for women’s civil society organising outside of formal politics and governance. Some of this organising has been prompted by necessity in the face of gendered insecurity and violence, while some organising has been strategic, translating the commitments to women’s participation and conflict prevention in UNSCR 1325 in order to transform peacebuilding. In this chapter, we employ feminist political economy analysis to examine the relationship between women’s experiences of gender-based violence and women’s peacebuilding

1 A number of key policy documents, agreements and resulting constitutional articles reflect the emphasis on women’s political participation and representation in Iraq and Afghanistan, most significantly playing out in the form of women’s quotas in various political bodies (Krook et al. 2010). In Iraq, the 2005 Constitution included Article 49, which specifically puts into place a quota for women’s parliamentary participation (Iraq 2005). In both Iraq and Afghanistan (though Afghanistan much more so than Iraq), the status of women played an important role in rhetoric justifying the military intervention by the United States and its allies and as such, efforts to support women’s participation in the post-conflict process were visible (Kandiyoti 2007; Khalid 2011). Agreements signed following the intervention in Afghanistan, starting with the Bonn Agreement (2001), stress the importance of women’s participation in transitional bodies (like the Emergency Loya Jirga) (Krook et al. 2010, p. 69), as well as other commitments to improving the situation of women through education, healthcare and other development goals, which are reiterated in the Afghan Compact (2006) and the Tokyo Declaration (2012).

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324  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding in post-intervention contexts. Feminist political economists have shown how gender-based violence comes in many inter-related forms, from violence in the home, to the violence of poverty and the structural inequalities tied to this, to the violence enacted in conflict and wars (True 2012). Feminist International Relations scholars have also suggested that to understand violence against women and its causes in post-conflict settings, we need to conceptualise different forms of violence as existing along a ‘continuum of violence’ before, during and after conflict (Al-Ali 2016; Cockburn 2010). Building on this feminist scholarship, we argue that women’s material insecurity in post-conflict contexts both drives and undermines their participation in peacebuilding. On the one hand, women’s vulnerability to violence as a result of their relative poverty and inequality constrains their access to peacebuilding mechanisms. On the other hand, women’s experiences of gendered violence leads to collective engagement with peacebuilding processes and mechanisms on the basis of that experience. A political economy of gender makes visible the relationship between gender, violence and political and economic power (Raven-Roberts 2013). Such an approach analyses the gender dynamics between the roles that women and men play in economic, security and statebuilding processes. For instance, women’s roles in security and statebuilding are frequently not recognised due to the informal nature of these roles, which often take place in the private realm (where household and community labour is not paid or counted and therefore undervalued, and tied to reproductive labour which is seen as natural) (see Enloe 2014). In post-conflict or post-intervention settings, feminist political economy analysis reveals the links between the violence women and girls experience and the ongoing effects of conflict on social and economic security and rights, while also being mindful of the gendered economies present within conflicts and their reliance on women’s bodies as well as women’s labour (True 2012). Without this analysis, gender-based violence in particular would remain hidden and thus, not recognised as crimes or taken into account in political settlements, transitional justice mechanisms and within the remit of new political and economic institutions. Women’s exclusion from peacebuilding governance and formal processes further exacerbates this. A feminist political economy framework is also attentive to the gendered nature of both post-conflict reconstruction and statebuilding, which may exacerbate gendered inequality and injustice if they are not redressed. Reconstruction and statebuilding efforts, however, traditionally favour and seek to support formal economic processes, discounting informal economies and care economies in which women are significantly involved and which become increasingly important in precarious conflict and post-conflict situations (True et al. 2017). As such, applying a feminist political economy analysis to statebuilding helps to appreciate women’s experiences, insecurities and the diversity among them, leading to more gender-responsive frameworks. As our chapter discusses, violence is a key part of women’s and men’s experience of conflict but in distinctive ways. For many Iraqi women activists, working on the prevention of gender-based violence is one significant way that they are able to organise politically as women, contributing to peacebuilding and statebuilding processes. Addressing the root causes of gender-based violence for these women is crucial to the inclusion and representation of women in new post-conflict institutions; it is also crucial to ensuring the sustainability of peace. We explore this argument through an analysis of Iraq after the US-led intervention in 2003 – a key site where these dynamics are at play. We focus on the political economy causes of women’s insecurity and the consequences of this insecurity for women’s participation in the peacebuilding process. We examine what types of peacebuilding women are involved in and

The political economy of gender and peacebuilding  325 why they are often excluded from major peacebuilding decisions which perpetuates the culture of impunity for gender-based violence. In particular, we consider the work that women are doing to address violence and insecurity within their communities outside of state-sanctioned processes. The first part of the chapter maps the different forms of gender-based violence and insecurity that were present in post-2003 Iraq and shows how this insecurity is rooted in gender-based material inequalities in fragmented political contexts around Iraq. The second part of the chapter considers women’s organising to address conflict-related gender-based violence, articulating and acting on their gender-specific experiences of insecurity. Women’s responses to the threat of violence reveal the specific opportunities that women have to address gendered issues in conflict and post-conflict contexts as women – an identity that is cross-cutting in terms of other political divides such as ethnicity and religion. We posit that the opportunities for coalition building around gender-based violence require further investigation. Collective efforts to protect women and girls and to prevent violence in the future constitutes a key site of peacebuilding and community-building after conflict.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WOMEN’S INSECURITY POST-CONFLICT Women’s experiences of insecurity and violence have been numerous and fluid and have affected everyday life in complex ways throughout the different stages of conflict and post-conflict in Iraq. During the presence of US troops and insurgency, violence took on certain forms, while protracted civil war, the presence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and displacement have brought with them other kinds of violence and insecurity. Specific forms of gendered violence have developed since the 2003 US-led intervention in Iraq (Green and Ward 2009; Puttick 2015a, 2015b). In the aftermath of conflict, the many different and interconnected forms of violence have increased, including honour killings, detention, violence related to organised crime including organised crime targeting women specifically, targeting by terrorist groups including ISIS, violence that targets LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and/or intersex) communities or individuals, as well as violence targeting activist and political women. Furthermore, structural violence and sex trafficking have affected Iraqi women in specific ways and women’s vulnerability to these forms of violence has been exacerbated in the post-2003 context (Lee-Koo 2011, p. 1621).2 We situate these different forms of violence in distinct social and political contexts. Major Cities, Armed Groups and Trafficking Post-2003 Although current discussions of gendered violence in Iraq often focus on the atrocities committed by ISIS, the immediate post-2003 period spawned enormous upheavals affecting gendered insecurity and vulnerability to violence. Armed groups and militias have risen up in the context of vacuums of power in post-2003 Iraq. These groups have often purported strong political and moral views that are enforced on communities in which they reside and rule over. 2 The issue of trafficking, prostitution and safe-houses has garnered some international attention, thanks to the work of activists operating in Iraq who focus on this (Abouzeid 2015; Davis 2015).

326  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding They have frequently sought control over women’s mobility, dress code and other behaviours. For instance, in Basra in 2007 it was reported that 133 women were killed, their bodies accompanied or marked by messaging showing that their murder was due to their failure to meet new rules of behaviour (Puttick 2015 cited in Asuda 2017). Trafficking also became a source of concern for some women. Reporting by local and international organisations indicates the development of an economy for women’s bodies (Davis 2015; Human Rights Watch 2003). Other types of violence against women in this context are compounded. According to Human Rights Watch reporting, almost 3,500 women went missing between 2003 and 2006, many of whom were reportedly sold or traded into sex work (True 2012, p. 140). On top of such egregious experiences of violence, women also face direct physical violence from militia groups who want to eradicate the ‘immoral’ practice of prostitution. Reports of this occurring in Baghdad were highlighted in a New Yorker interview with an activist working to both map these cases and provide support to women who may have been trafficked into this work (Abouzeid 2015). While a number of women’s NGOs (non-governmental organisations) in Iraq continue to work on addressing trafficking and forced prostitution and the violence targeting women within suspected brothels, the situation is made more difficult by laws that prohibit non-governmental organisations from providing shelter for women, as well as ongoing threats of violence faced by staff at shelters (Davis 2015). Human Rights Watch reporting on the issues around abduction, trafficking and forced prostitution hinge on the state’s inability to police these activities. Trafficking of women and children is specifically prohibited in Article 35 of the Iraqi Constitution, and in 2012 an anti-trafficking law was passed in Federal Iraq. However, the post-2003 period saw widespread impunity for such crimes and little capacity for any actors to prohibit it. The 2003 Human Rights Watch report on this situates the issue in Baghdad, and shows a number of ways in which gangs took advantage of the post-war chaos to traffic women and girls into forced prostitution, often selling these women to men in Gulf States (Human Rights Watch 2003). One police officer interviewed explained: “this happened before the war too, but now it is worse, they can get them in and out without passports” (Human Rights Watch 2003, p. 3). The violence women faced after occupation was simultaneously random and targeted, meaning that particular high profile women were violently targeted due to their public presence, while women more broadly were facing an increase in many forms of insecurity. The threat of violence also impacted women’s mobility and capacity to access public spaces in major cities. As the security situation worsened, individuals began to be targeted for various reasons. Immediately after 2003, it was against individuals who were thought to be linked to the Saddam Hussein regime (Human Rights Watch 2003). As sectarian violence escalated, threats of kidnapping, rape and other forms of gendered violence were meted out based on sectarian identity. Under ISIS this threat was often used as a punishment for a male family member fleeing or having had a role in the Iraqi police force. Lastly, politically active women who were either activists or electoral candidates experienced similar threats and acts of violence. Violence against individual women was wielded as a tool to hurt them but also to send a message to the wider community about who held power in a rapidly deteriorating security landscape.

The political economy of gender and peacebuilding  327 ISIS, Gendered Violence and Sexual Slavery Sexual violence in many forms has been integral to ISIS’ approach to implementing its extremist agenda in Iraq and Syria (Al-Ali 2016; Davis 2016). Violence carried out by ISIS has involved enslavement of predominantly Yazidi women, sexual and gender-based violence committed against men and boys, particularly those thought to be gay, and arranged or forced marriages (Ahram 2015). Women as well as men have been perpetrators in ISIS, acting as bureaucrats, recruiters and morality police (Dietrich and Carter 2017; Human Rights Watch 2016). Sexual slavery used by ISIS to extend their ideological and political rule continues to horrify, as more details emerge about the political economy of sexual violence forged by ISIS during their occupation of parts of Northern Iraq between June 2014 and July 2017, largely targeting the Yazidi women and girls community (Callimachi 2015). While accurate data collection is difficult to acquire, activist, NGO and journalist reports on the experiences of Yazidi women and girls continues to shed light on the issue.3 Furthermore, reporting by Oxfam and Human Rights Watch described the ongoing yet less obvious impacts of violence on gender relations and norms in communities affected by ISIS presence (Dietrich and Carter 2017; Human Rights Watch 2016). Women often bore the brunt of punishment for their husbands, if the husband had been involved in the Iraqi military or police, or if their husband had fled the area. This punishment could take the form of torture, rape, or forced marriage (Human Rights Watch 2017). The economic as well as physical violence faced by women under ISIS rule is also important: work outside the home for women was forbidden and as such, women were forced to give up work in a number of contexts with implications for their livelihoods and that of their families (Dietrich and Carter 2017, p. 23). Cultural Norms and Gender-Based Violence (GBV) The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraqi Kurdistan is considered to be a relatively better actor when it comes to women’s rights and responses to gender-based violence. This is due to a number of factors. The first is the relative stability that has been the experience in the Kurdish region since 1991, when the region became semi-autonomous from Iraq. The second is the legislative framework that deals with gender-based violence, which has better protections for female victims of violence and a better network of shelters for women fleeing violence. The parliamentary quotas for women in Iraqi Kurdistan sit at 30 per cent as opposed to 25 per cent in Federal Iraq, and laws relating to gender equality are more in line with international gender norms (Kaya 2017, p. 8). The KRG also introduced pro-women’s rights amendments to the personal status law in effect in the region, limiting polygamy and removing protections for perpetrators of honour crimes (Kaya 2017, p. 9). Despite this, two key factors affecting violence against women (VAW) need closer examination in the Kurdish region: cul-

3 Most notably, the work of Yazidi activist Nadia Murad has pushed forward the attempts to categorise the experience of Yazidi women and girls under ISIS as genocide. Murad was one of the women abducted by ISIS militants at the age of 21, and her story highlights the brutality of the violence ISIS inflicted on this minority group – her mother and six of her brothers were also killed by ISIS militants. Murad has gone on to write a memoir about her experiences, The Last Girl. Most recently, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Dr Denis Mukwege for their collective work on addressing the use of sexual violence during conflict.

328  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding tural norms around violence, such as, the prevalence of female genital mutilation and honour killings and the large presence of internally displaced people (IDP) in Iraqi Kurdistan and their specific needs and vulnerabilities. With respect to the first factor, the threat of ‘honour’ crimes in the Kurdish region of Iraq is not a recent phenomenon. The pervasive nature of violence inflicted on Kurdish women in particular is best understood through a lens of statehood and nation-building, because Kurdish identity has historically been under threat within and outside of Iraq. Nation-building relies on women’s bodies as reproducers of group identity and in need of protection, and this narrative is present in Kurdish identity-making (Al-Ali and Pratt 2011; Alinia 2013, p. 33). As such, the control and subjugation of women’s bodies is closely linked to the strength and identity of a nation, and thus, a woman’s honour serves as a conduit for the honour of the family or the nation (Joly and Bakawan 2016). The second factor affecting VAW in Iraqi Kurdistan relates to the experiences of IDP and refugee women in the area. The KRG region in Iraq contains roughly one third of the 2.6 million IDPs in Iraq, and 98 per cent of the Syrian refugees in the country, the majority of which live in host communities rather than camp-settings (UNHCR 2017).4 IDPs and refugees have either fled insecurity in other parts of Iraq, or have moved there from Iran and Syria. These populations live in a mixture of camps and host communities, and each context brings a different element to women’s experiences of violence, insecurity and safety. We know that insecure housing within host communities, IDP camps and cramped living conditions are major risk factors for VAW the world over (Davies and True 2017), and these risks are ever present in the KRG and Iraq more broadly (IOM Iraq 2016). There is also a common link in the work international organisations do on women’s vulnerability to violence in displacement contexts to economic insecurity, and so VAW prevention work focuses on ‘resilience’ and livelihoods (Kaya 2018). Family Violence Family violence, though persistent across Iraq, is a form of insecurity that has garnered little attention when it comes to processes of justice and peacebuilding. Iraq’s 2005 post-war Constitution specified in Article 29 that “all forms of violence and abuse in the family, school and society shall be prohibited” (Iraq 2005). However, the Iraqi Penal and Personal Status Codes remain problematic, particularly for women experiencing violence and wishing to access justice (Puttick 2015a). The differences in legal protection between Kurdish Iraqi women and Iraqi women living in Federal Iraq also highlight the difficulties in women’s access to justice for gender-based violence occurring in the home or family. Currently, no such law exists in Federal Iraq. However, according to the United Nations Population Fund, 46 per cent of married women are exposed to intimate partner violence (GBV Sub-Cluster – Iraq 2016).

4 While figures of the total number of IDPs in Iraq fluctuate, and returnee numbers are on the rise presently, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s (IDMC) database on global displacement data, approximately 2.6 million people were living in displacement in Iraq at the end of 2017 (IDMC 2018). The 3RP Regional Refugee Resilience Plan 2017‒2018 places figures of displaced people (as of 2014) closer to 3 million (UNHCR 2017).

The political economy of gender and peacebuilding  329 Early and Forced Marriage Early and forced marriage has been widely promoted by ISIS and is one key focus of GBV researchers and organisers in Iraq today. Miriam Puttick gives three reasons why early and forced marriages are continuing to take place in post-2003 Iraq: tribal customs in some parts of Iraq, poverty and the increased insecurity posed by the post-2003 environment, particularly in the sectarian violence that followed (Puttick 2015a, pp. 20‒1). While the legal frameworks around early and forced marriages do not permit women under 18 to be married, and girls 15‒18 years old (in Federal Iraq) require special permission to get married, civil laws on marriage are under constant attack. Most recently, the Ja’afari Law, which was to be an amendment to the 1959 Civil Status Laws, proposed that the age of marriage could be lowered to nine. Under Kurdish law however, no marriages under 18 are permitted. The case of Kirkuk illustrates the contestations around early marriage. It is a contested territory between the KRG and federal Iraqi government, as well as a city that is home to a wide range of ethnic and religious groups. As a result, movements in and out of the city are a cause for concern for women’s NGOs working in the area. In particular, Kirkuk and other border areas are a way for some to skirt laws regarding early marriage, and polygamy, in the KRG region. The porous border between the two regions means that if one form of marriage is not allowed under Kurdish law, a religious/informal marriage can be performed in Kirkuk. Informal marriages more generally seem to be of concern in the Kirkuk area, and have been the focus of the Pana Center, a women’s rights organisation there, for a number of years. In Iraq, the transformation of violence post-2003 means that while violence has increased generally due to conflict, insecurity has increased for women and girls specifically due to the symbolic nature of the violence perpetrated (Green and Ward 2009, p. 612). If women’s bodies are used to symbolise certain national and community identities, since 2003 they have also symbolically demarcated boundaries between communities. These gendered symbolic politics have placed women and girls at particular risk of violence as divisions between communities and ethnic groups in Iraq have deepened (Al-Ali 2005). The continuum of gendered violence affecting women and girls we have described across Iraq affects both Iraqi women’s engagement in and their capacity to contribute to peacebuilding. Conceptualising violence in this way enables us to see the different agendas and responses of women’s civil society groups as inherently related. All groups in various ways confront and aim to address gendered insecurities, whether that relates to the rise of extremism and sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated by ISIS and other militant groups or the structural, everyday violence that women often endure and that affects their vulnerability to physical violence. For example, the rising violence and insecurity in public spaces since 2003 has disproportionately affected (killed and displaced) men but it has led to dramatic increases in widows and female-headed households. More recently, this insecurity has been exacerbated by the liberation of ISIS-held territories in the north-west of Iraq. An important point to highlight is also the vulnerability to economic insecurity faced by female-headed households, particularly those headed by widowed women. Rough estimates place the number of widowed women in Iraq at one million in 2011 (ICRC 2011), which predates the presence of ISIS and the likely rise in widowhood as a result. The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) report on widowed women in Iraq highlights the numerous insecurities these women face, which ranges from the threat of violence to economic insecurity, while having to rely on their extended family for support. While social welfare

330  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding is available in Iraq, women running female-headed households seem to rarely take up this benefit (the ICRC report states that only 19 per cent of the women they surveyed accessed this benefit), which is likely the result of misinformation, and difficulty in accessing the correct paperwork due to a lack of mobility (ICRC 2011, p. 8).

WOMEN’S PEACEBUILDING RESPONSES TO GBV In a report on the gendered impacts of ISIS rule in Iraq by Oxfam, participants of the study outlined the importance of gender roles, and particularly the role of the mother, in withstanding extremist rule. Participants in this study were quoted as describing the role of women in families as “protector of families and children from the brutality of terrorist group[s]”, in part doing so by “not allow[ing] her children to leave the house because they want to prevent them from joining Daesh” (Dietrich and Carter 2017, p. 23). Their testimony highlights the important but frequently unseen role that women play within households during conflict, and which is also an important part of the post-intervention rebuilding. In the second part of the chapter, we explore the significance of women’s organising to address insecurity and increasingly gendered violence. This section builds on our analysis of the common insecurity that Iraqi women and girls experience as a result of diverse forms of gender-based violence in the first part of the chapter, as well as the understanding of women’s roles within households and communities highlighted in the quotes above. Women’s activism to address GBV, including the services delivered by women’s groups to victims and survivors, serve an important function of peacebuilding. Through their GBV responses, Iraqi women’s NGOs provide crucial services at a time when the state is either unable or unwilling to do this work. They both conceive and record GBV as a key part of the conflict experience in Iraq. Service delivery organisations also take on advocacy roles when they connect women’s experiences of violence and insecurity to the wider conflict. The prevalence of gender-based violence in Iraq both demands and enables women to work across political divisions to respond to a specifically gendered need. Local women’s organisations are variously adept or growing their capacity to respond to GBV prevention, service delivery and referral networks. Post-conflict structures created by international organisations facilitate their work. The United Nations Population Fund, for example, facilitates GBV cluster groups in different parts of Iraq, which local organisations use as a way to coordinate their work and pass on referrals when needed. While service delivery and project-based programming may not seem like ‘peacebuilding’ work, Iraqi women’s GBV activism shows that this type of engagement can make some important inroads in the re-shaping of post-conflict communities, families and legal frameworks. We illustrate our argument with relevant examples and cases. Using UNSCR 1325 to Articulate GBV Concerns Iraq has been an important site of both the articulation and implementation of the UNSCR 1325/Women Peace and Security agenda in the Middle East. It was the first Middle East

The political economy of gender and peacebuilding  331 and North African country to adopt a national action plan (NAP), doing so in 2014.5 The emergency 1325 NAP, devised to respond to post-ISIS displacement in Iraq, is a key site for peacebuilding. In this case, we see women’s NGOs using peacebuilding to refer to their work to prevent violence against women and the inclusion of women in policing and strategic reconciliation bodies (Iraqi Alliance for the Implementation of National Action Plan 1325 2015). GBV is pervasive in Iraq as well as being a key component of ISIS’ strategy and yet it would not be addressed without women specifically advocating for its inclusion in relief and recovery in post-ISIS Iraq. UNSCR 1325 has enabled Iraqi women to articulate their security concerns, and the framework has been taken up enthusiastically by some in Iraq’s women’s movement after 2003. While implementation of the plans themselves falter, 1325 provides an important framework within which women’s groups can situate their demands and visions within a larger framework of women’s participation, particularly one that relies on a working relationship between women’s organisations and government. For example, the visions for the implementation of 1325 in local action plans in Iraq has allowed activists to articulate a vision for gender-sensitive services and participation mechanisms in conflict-affected communities. In the Diyala governorate’s version of the local action plan, there is a strong focus on the experiences of rural women in the province, with emphasis on livelihoods in the agricultural sector and access to reproductive health (Diyala 2017). The plan itself differentiates between the needs of rural women, urban women and displaced women, which reflects the demographics of the region it is situated in as well as the focus of the groups involved in its drafting. The Iraq-based work of organisations working on the implementation of 1325 reiterates the connection between women’s organising, the focus on GBV, and the close relationship between this and repairing community relations post-conflict. The ‘Emergency NAP for 1325’ focuses in part on the risks associated with disharmony that may occur when displaced groups relocate to other parts of the country. Thus, one of the focus areas in the ‘Prevention’ section of the plan outlines the importance of “peaceful coexistence” within host communities with high IDP populations, as well as the importance of reintegration of female survivors of sexual violence into communities (Iraqi Alliance for the Implementation of National Action Plan 1325 2015, p. 8). While the implementation of these plans, which involve sporting events, training for young IDPs and dialogue sessions with community leaders, may not have come about during the period of the Emergency Action Plan, the articulation of these goals shows how connected these issues and the suggested solutions are for women’s groups. 1325 as a framework has also provided opportunities for Iraqi women activists to articulate gendered security concerns especially regarding gender-based violence to policymakers and donors on the global stage. To date, four Iraqi women activists focused on different yet vital aspects of the experience of gendered violence have been able to address the UN Security Council (UNSC) in Open Debates and Arria Formula meetings. The Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq’s (OWFI) Yanar Mohammed articulated the links between violence enacted by ISIS on women and LGBTI individuals and the political divisions enshrined in the new post-2003 political system (Mohammad 2015). Mohammad’s statement revealed the complex and interconnected nature of disempowerment within the Iraqi political and economic system, and the violence enacted on women’s bodies. She referenced the trafficking 5 In existence currently is the 2014 Iraqi National Action Plan (NAP), an Emergency NAP (2015) and six Local Action Plans (LAP) in some governorates in Iraq.

332  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding of women “in both ISIS and government controlled areas” (Mohammad 2015). Al-Amal’s Hanaa Edwar used the opportunity at the UN Security Council Open Debate on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in 2018 to share stories of the multiple difficulties women are facing in the aftermath of the conflict against ISIS in Iraq in their roles as leaders in community peacebuilding, as wives of combatants lacking legal protections, and as members of a population lacking access to vital social services (Edwar 2018). The head of Iraq’s UNSCR1325 Cross-Sector Task Force, Suzan Aref, also raised concerns about gender-based violence at the UNSC, specifically highlighting how kidnapping for sexual slavery, rape, and forced marriage are enacted “as a way to subjugate the whole community” in ISIS controlled areas (Aref 2018). With a similar UNSC audience in 2017, Iraqi Kurdish activist Mina Jaf highlighted how crisis impacts women’s insecurity and LGBTI individuals making them more vulnerable to all forms of gendered violence, including domestic violence, early marriage, and smuggling (Jaf 2017). These accounts emphasise the continuum of gendered violence in post-conflict settings where conflict is played out on gendered bodies. Women’s organising around these specific experiences of violence thus contributes to building peace and reconciliation. Displacement, Gender and Vulnerability Addressing GBV in all its forms is the focus of many organisations. It is important to acknowledge that while peacebuilding takes the form of high-level talks and discussions, it is also about community recovery and reconciliation. Tackling GBV in displacement camps and host community areas is a crucial part of peacebuilding, working towards harmonious community relations. GBV civil society activism in the Kurdish region is focused heavily on prevention of violence as well as protection of women and girls in displacement contexts. Prevention work takes on many forms in Kurdistan.6 GBV services focus on both support to victims but also prevention to address what an organisation and their funding partners see as root causes for insecurity. A cluster of implementing organisations delivered a variety of awareness-raising sessions focused on a range of gender issues including: basic understanding of gender, rights and definitions of violence, as well as female genital mutilation and early marriage.7 This work was “not just responding but preventing”, one participant from a large IDP/Refugee services organisation stated very adamantly in a personal interview.8 Women’s NGOs devise programmes to confront threats of GBV within communities and families. These programmes recognise gender-specific material insecurities and the needs of the particular community. This nuanced understanding of what is at stake in peacebuilding was reflected in research with women’s rights activists situated in different parts of Iraq. For instance, when asked about GBV activism and rights awareness, one participant, whose organisation works specifically in the Diwaniya region, discussed the importance of transforming the division of labour in households that relies on farm work and its relationship to cultural and tribal customs that dictate gender roles.

Iraqi Kurdistan is where the majority of interviews were undertaken for this study. Personal interviews with participants from two women’s organisations based in the Sulaimaniya area, interviews conducted in April 2018 in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan. 8 Interview conducted with gender advisor at a large organisation based in Sulaimaniya, April 2018. 6 7

The political economy of gender and peacebuilding  333 Peacebuilding in Mosul’s Aftermath Another example of women’s peacebuilding efforts outside of formal structures and institutions and reflecting women’s experiences of insecurity and violence can be found in the Nineveh region of Iraq. There Dr Farah Al-Sarraj and eight other female parliamentarians held talks amongst themselves to discuss “options for the future and to try and understand what each wanted from the other… to find solutions for the issues in our province”.9 The group was made up of women from a host of different ethnic and religious groups from the region and included Vian Dakhil, who at the time was one of only two Yazidi Members of Parliament. The result of the meetings they held together was a list of recommendations to meet the needs of the Nineveh community affected by ISIS rule that fell outside of the post-ISIS legal framework in Iraq, focusing primarily on community reconciliation. In an interview published in Foreign Policy, Dr Al-Sarraj detailed an incident in which ISIS fighters came to her door to ask for her husband, who was at the time an advisor to the president of Iraq’s office (Kenner 2017). She had to assume then that it was neighbours or perhaps relatives who had told those fighters who they were and which house was theirs. It is precisely these experiences, which would not be dealt with in the legal processes addressing ISIS fighters, their wives and others who committed atrocities in Mosul, but which had led to deep mistrust in their communities, that the nine parliamentarians hoped to address through their plan. Their list of recommendations reiterates a commitment to creating and supporting peacebuilding within the Nineveh community, preventing vigilante justice and initiating a community peace process involving committee representatives of the Nineveh population. This example highlights how women found common ground to build peace based on some common experiences including gender-based violence, and were able to create a multi-group, multi-ethnic space to rebuild their community. In a context characterised by sectarian violence as well as deep political divisions, this inter-communal work by women is relatively path-breaking and sets a precedent for other communities and regions in Iraq. While we do not wish to essentialise the role of women as inherently peaceful or natural peace-builders, their activism and identities as women have been and continue to be a vital tool of peace-making and political agency. As Dr Al-Sarraj stated in a personal interview: “I found that being a woman allows me to raise issues that a man could not, and draw on emotional and personal arguments, as so much of the insecurity is personal.”10 A similar theme is echoed by her colleague Vian Dakhil’s speech in the Iraqi parliament, where she cried as she made an emotional plea to call what happened to the Yazidis “genocide” (Haworth 2015).11 This centring of women’s identities as women in these instances is possible because their experiences of conflict, violence and insecurity are deeply gendered and therefore they call for gender-inclusive responses. Women’s NGOs in Kurdistan offering psychosocial support to victims of violence similarly emphasised the connection among women due to the personal nature of the violence they have endured especially during conflict. In an interview with a social worker from one such NGO, she explained that there are different cultural norms and needs between Arab Iraqis, Kurdish



Personal interview with Dr Farah Al-Sarraj, 21 June 2017. Personal interview with Dr Farah Al-Sarraj, 21 June 2017. 11 The cited article is a long-form interview published by The Guardian. Dakhil’s emotional plea was also raised by Dr Farah Al-Sarraj during our interview with her as an example of Dakhil’s presence in Iraqi politics. 9

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334  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Iraqis, Syrians, Yazidi women and others but that there is also a uniting factor: they share the experience of being exposed to personal violence, and that this experience also cut across education, religious sects and class divides.12 Other avenues for highlighting the threat of violence against women also provide a space where women in KRG and in Federal Iraq can find common ground along advocacy goals. Congregating around advocacy goals like opposing proposed changes to the personal status laws in Federal Iraq (which in part would have lowered the age of marriage to nine) has been an important site of unity of Iraqi women’s groups (Ali 2018). Concurrently, as one participant who works for an international organisation that supports local women’s organisations in the KRG highlighted, Kurdish women’s groups also used the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence to highlight their opposition to the proposed changes (which would not have taken effect in the KRG region).13 Due to the porous nature of the border between Federal Iraq and the KRG, the law would inevitably impact women who move or were forcibly moved across this border for the purpose of marriage. In this sense, the political context as well as the nature of gendered violence in Iraq necessitated a show of unity or support across ethnic divides. Thus, while there are political and ethno-religious divisions present within Iraqi society, and that these affect women as much as men, women’s gender-specific experiences of violence and insecurity, heightened during conflict, have empowered them to work across ethno-religious divisions in a growing number of settings. While the scale for that work is still relatively small compared with the scale of the problem of sexual and gender-based violence, and the examples we present here are few, they do show that new opportunities for peacebuilding are being recognised and developed by some women in some communities.

CONCLUSION We have argued that there is an inextricable connection between the gendered experience of insecurity and gendered forms of post-conflict participation such as new approaches to peacebuilding by women in some communities in Iraq. This chapter examined GBV in different locations across Iraq to reveal how diverse and complex the experience of gendered violence is in post-conflict settings, and how different material contexts give rise to different forms of insecurity. However, we revealed how common patterns of material inequality and structural violence experienced by women and girls contribute to their physical insecurity and vulnerability to gendered physical violence. The chapter also highlighted the diverse efforts of Iraqi NGOs to address violence and gendered insecurity, showing how they have led to new forms of peacebuilding by women across ethno-religious communities. We stress the importance of analysing these GBV responses as part of peacebuilding and indeed, of statebuilding. To further promote increasing women’s participation in peacebuilding mechanisms, however, holistic services and support for women to realise their basic needs and rights are needed. Responding to GBV in the post-occupation and post-ISIS situation in Iraq is not only a part of conflict recovery or transitional justice, it is also a way of bringing women and com-

Interview with a psychosocial support organisation in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan, April 2018. Interview with an international organisation in Amman, Jordan, April 2018.

12 13

The political economy of gender and peacebuilding  335 munities together given their common experiences of violence albeit, and often, at the hands of very different perpetrators.

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336  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Human Rights Watch (2003), ‘Climate of fear: Sexual violence and abduction of women and girls in Baghdad’, Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, http://​pantheon.​​ hrw​​.org/​reports/​2003/​iraq0703/​ (accessed 2 February 2017). Human Rights Watch (2016), ‘Iraq: Women suffer under ISIS: For Sunnis, lives curtailed; for Yezidis, new accounts of brutal rapes’, 5 April, https://​www​​.hrw​​.org/​news/​2016/​04/​05/​iraq​​-women​​-suffer​​ -under​​-isis (accessed 24 September 2018). Human Rights Watch (2017), ‘Iraq: Sunni women tell of ISIS detention, torture’, 20 February, https://​ www​​.hrw​​.org/​news/​2017/​02/​20/​iraq​​-sunni​​-women​​-tell​​-isis​​-detention​​-torture (accessed 20 September 2018). 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(2017), ‘Gender equality and the quest for statehood in the Kurdistan region of Iraq’, LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series 18, January, http://​eprints​​.lse​​.ac​​.uk/​69197/​1/​GenderandStatehoodKRG.​​ pdf (accessed 23 May 2018). Kaya, Z. N. (2018), ‘Resilience policy and internally displaced women in Iraq: An unintentionally flawed approach’, LSE Women, Peace and Security Working Paper 13/2018, http://​eprints​​.lse​​.ac​​.uk/​87156/​1/​ wps13Kaya​​.pdf (accessed 15 October 2018). Kenner, D. (2017), ‘The women who could save Mosul’, Foreign Policy, 6 February, https://​ foreignpolicy​​.com/​2017/​02/​06/​the​​-women​​-who​​-could​​-save​​-mosul/​ (accessed 5 April 2019). Khalid, M. (2011), ‘Gender, orientalism and representations of the “Other” in the war on terror’, Global Change, Peace & Security, 23 (1), 15‒29. Krook, M. L., D. Z. O’Brien and K. M. Swip (2010), ‘Military invasion and women’s political representation: Gender quotas in post-conflict Afghanistan and Iraq’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12 (1), 66‒79. Lee-Koo, K. (2011), ‘Gender-based violence against civilian women in postinvasion Iraq: (Re)politicizing George W. Bush’s silent legacy’, Violence Against Women, 17 (12), 1619‒34. Mohammad, Y. (2015), ‘Statement by Ms. Yanar Mohammad: UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security’, Transcript, 13 October, http://​www​​.womenpeacesecurity​​.org/​resource/​ statement-​​ unsc​​-wps​​-open​​-debate-​​ october​​-2015 (accessed 28 June 2019). Puttick, M. (2015a), ‘The lost women of Iraq: Family-based violence during armed conflict’, Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights and Minority Rights Group International, 4 November, https://​minorityrights​​ .org/​publications/​the​​-lost​​-women​​-of​​-iraq​​-family-​​ based​​-violence-​​ during​​-armed​​-conflict/​ (accessed 1 September 2018). Puttick, M. (2015b), ‘No place to turn: Violence against women in the Iraq conflict’, Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights and Minority Rights Group International, 16 February, http://​reliefweb​​.int/​report/​iraq/​ no​​-place-​​ turn​​-violence​​-against​​-women​​-iraq​​-conflict​​-enar​​-0 (accessed 1 September 2018). Raven-Roberts, A. (2013), ‘Women and the political economy of war’, in C. Cohn (ed.), Women and Wars, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 36‒53. True, J. (2012), The Political Economy of Violence Against Women, New York: Oxford University Press. True, J., C. Chinkin, M. Rees, N. Porobić Isaković, G. Mlinarevic and B. Svedberg (2017), ‘A feminist perspective on post-conflict restructuring and recovery: The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, https://​

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Index

9/11 attacks 179 Abu-Lughod, L. 78 Aceh 133 Acker, O. 249, 251 activism 46, 47, 304 actor-centred approaches 20 academics, experts, strategists 20–22 Actor Network Theory 44 Afghanistan 20, 56, 89, 143, 226, 245, 294 African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) 153, 155 ‘An Agenda for Peace’ 4 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 2030 33 agentic capacities 272 agentic constructivism 180 Aggestam, K. 191 aid budget 296 aid bunker 294–301 aid workers growing security risk for 295–6 isolation and imprisonment 298–9 new security risks 299 new victims 299–300 walls, guns and curfews, response 296–7 Aidland 125–6, 132 al-Bashir, O. 186 Al Qaeda 85, 153, 264 Al-Sarraj, F. 333 ambiguity 50–58 ethics of 51 hierarchy and 58 in intervention and statebuilding 56–8 life-world and politics 56–8 and scientific politics 54–5 of social ‘things’ 52 systems of reference and 58 tolerance to 54–5 Anderson, C. 47 Andersson, R. 50 Andreas, P. 283

Andrieu, K. 188 Anghie, A. 74 anti-semitism 225 antiseptic battlefield 242 anti-trafficking law, Federal Iraq 326 Apthorpe, R. 295 armed conflicts 306 armed drone 260–68 international law violations 264–6 military option, overuse 263–4 problematic features 262 proliferation 266 regulative issues 266–7 use, possession and production 261–2 Armstrong, K. 192 Arquilla, J. 256 Article 35 of Iraqi Constitution 326 Autesserre, S. 23, 126, 128, 129, 133, 134, 295, 301 authoritarian subnational elites 64 Avruch, K. 72, 74 Bake, J. 24 Bakonyi, J. 25 Barkawi, T. 83, 85 Barnett, M. N. 129, 224 Barthes, R. 242, 246 Bauer, T. 54, 56 Bell, C. 187 Benford, R. 109 Benjamin, W. 57 Bernath, J. 78 Bertram, E. 4 Bhoutros-Ghali, B. 203 Bigo, D. 162 Björkdahl, A. 191 Bliesemann de Guevara, B. 26, 243 blood timber 288 Blumenberg, H. 244 Blundell, A. G. 288 blurred boundaries 144 Boko Haram 263

339

340  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Boltanski, L. 166 Bonn powers 108 border interventions, fault lines 168–72 Border Management in Central Asia (BOMCA) 164–6, 168, 171–3 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) 185, 210, 211, 213, 214, 241 Bosnian Croat injustice frames 109 Bosnian Muslims 110 Bosnian-Serb leadership 214 Bosnian Serb statebuilding agents 109 Bosnian statebuilding actors 106 Bottici, C. 245 bottom-up approaches 10–15 problematization of 15 Bourdieu, P. 162, 175, 246 Boutros-Ghali, B. 4 Brahimi, L. 204 Brett, R. 32 Brigg, M. 32, 78 Brown, K. 188, 191 Brun, C. 224 Bryant, R. 211 Budapest Convention on Cyber Crime 253 bureaucracies 23–5 bureaucratic field 162–3 bureaucratic security procedures 128 Bush, G. W. 227 Buzan, B. 285 Bypassed knowledge: A decolonial critique of liberal peacebuilding through grassroots organisations in Afghanistan 89 Call, C. T. 4 Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) 67 Cammett, M. C. 139 Campbell, D. 77 Carbone, G. 99 Cassirer, E. 242 Castle, A. 286 Central Asia 161, 172, 173 states, borders and interventions in 164–6 central ontological fulcrum 71 Chandler, D. 87–8, 99 Cherney, A. 145 Chiapello, È. 166

civil society 36, 42, 45, 63, 73, 307, 329 activism 332 Civil Status Laws, 1959 329 civilian protection in interventions 198–207 during mass atrocities 205–6 political and legal frameworks, armed conflict 200–203 protection and civilian, concepts 198–9 responsibility 205–6 through peacekeeping 203–5 Clark, J. N. 186, 187 coercion 110 coloniality of knowledge 82 coloniality of power 87 complex systems 52 complexity 47, 52 conflict 104 root causes of 20 constant alertness 23 constitutional reform 95 contentious politics research 105 contestation, responding 110 framing concept 109–10 insights from 106–10 mobilising structures 108 political opportunity structures 107–8 continuous hybridization 118 continuum of violence 314, 320 contraband ODS 284 Convention relating to Status of Refugees 201 conventional knowledge 20 Cooley, A. 167 correlationism 14 Corruption Perceptions Index 43 counterinsurgency in Somalia 151–8 strategies 121 counterinsurgency operations (COIN) 158 counterterrorism rents 151 Cousens, E. 4 crisis, moment of opportunity 221–4 as entry point 222–3 global crisis imaginary 222 as perpetual present 224 CrisisWatch report 23

Index  341 Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS) 30, 37, 38 cross-fertilization 85 cultural norms 327–8 curfews 128 cyber security 249–56 and states 249–50 cyberattacks 253, 255 cyberespionage 255 cyberthreats 253 Dahl, R. A. 97 Daniel, J. 25 Danielsson, A. 20, 25 data 23–5, 41–7 avenues for research 47 coding projects into 166–8 collection 41, 42 as intervention 47 reality and 44–7 sciences 43 data-sharing practices 270 Dayton Peace Accords 211, 216 Dayton peace agreement (DPA) 96, 241, 242 de Beauvoir, S. 51 de facto states concept 211 de Zeeuw, J. 98 decentering sovereignty 153 decentralisation 67 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 33 decolonial interventions 82–92 decolonising and rejecting interventions 86–91 post-colonial approaches 85–6 (self-)critical perspectives 83–5 decolonial theory 82, 87, 91 decolonising methodology 83 Demchak, C. 252, 254 democracy promotion 96–7 statebuilding and 93–100 democracy templates 98 democratic civil communities 93 democratic elections 98 Democratic Federation of Northern Syria 91 democratic institutions 94 democratic peace theory 83 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 23 democratisation 73, 93

defined 94 Denskus, T. 84 Dezalay, Y. 162 diagnostic framing 109 dialogical knowledge production process 90 digitally enhanced modes 11 disambiguation 54 discourse-analytical theory 22 discursive decertification 110 disenchantment 132 Doing Business Index 43 domestic actors 104, 108 domestic statebuilding actors 107 Douglas-Hamilton, I. 290 “Dual Track” policy 155 Duffield, M. 56, 87, 295, 297 Duffy, R. 286, 290 Dunn, K. C. 23 dynamic of difference 74 Eckroth, K. R. 299 economic liberalisation 73 economic liberalism 74 Egeland, J. 297, 299 election processes 156 electoral success 98 Emergency NAP for 1325 331 emotional stress 56 Entman, R. 109 epistemic practices 23–5 epistemological problem 14 Escobar, A. 87 Espeland, N. W. 44 espionage 253–5 Ethiopia 144, 155 ethno-nationalism 98 everyday habits 129–31 everyday politics 124–34 ‘evidence’-based policy making 53 exit strategies 225–7 Exo, M. 89, 90 expatriates 128 extraordinary violence 314 family violence 328 Farah, D. 288

342  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Fast, L. 297 Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) 155, 156 Felbab-Brown, V. 286, 287 feminist contributions and challenges 308–9 Feminist Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) 303, 309 feminist political economy framework 324 feminists 46 scholarship 304, 324 theories 304–5 Ferguson, J. 211 Ferris, E. 198 fieldwork 23–5 Finlan, A. 242 Finnemore, M. 129 Fisher, J. 21 Fisk, K. 145 Flanigan, S. T. 142 flexians 21 Food and Agriculture Organisation 33 Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) 205 Foucauldian approach 22 Foucault 44 fragile states 83, 113, 119, 120 fraternity 318 friction 105, 106 From Poverty to Power 223 Galliers, C. 290 Gamson, W. 109 Gandhi, M. 246 Garth, B. G. 162 Gavrilis, G. 165 Gbagbo, L. 180 gender 316 liberal peace, critical perspectives 307–8 and peace 306–8 and war 305–6 women, peace and security, UN agenda 306–7 gender-based violence (GBV) 323–5, 327–8, 334 women’s peacebuilding responses 330–34 gendered peace 303–9 gendered SSR 314–20 explode private 319 identifying challenges to 316–19 improbable role models 318–19 local ownership and gender equality 317–18

reforming public 319 romanticising, externals 318–19 romanticising, local 317–18 gendered violence 324, 326, 327 gendered war 303–9 gender-woman confusion 316 Geneva Conventions 199, 201 Georgakakis, D. 162 German romanticism 52 Ghana 139 Gibson, E. L. 64 Giddens, A. 2 global justice scholarship 176 Global North 32, 226 Global Peace Index 43 global politics 178–9 Global South 22, 46, 85, 113, 114, 152, 179, 181 conflict-affected states of 114 Global War on Terror 242 Goetze, C. 26, 246 The Good Project 132 Goudé, C. B. 180 Gould, R. V. 50, 56, 58 Gramsci, A. 63 Gramscian state theory 62–5, 68 grass-roots communities 15 Grigat, S. 21 Grynkewich, A. G. 140, 141 Gupta, A. 211 Guymon, C. D. 286 Hamas 139, 142 Handrahan, L. 318 Hansen, L. 22 Hegel 52, 53 Hegelian philosophy 52 hegemonic masculinity 319, 320 Hensell, S. 243 Herero 33 hermeneutical approaches 22–3 heterosexual masculinity 316 Hezbollah 262 hierarchisation 24 Higley, J. 96 Hizbollah 139 Hochmüller, M. 21

Index  343 Hoelscher, K. 295 Hom, A. 222 Hönke, J. 85 Hoppers, O. 34 Hu, C. 224 Human Development Index 43 human security 260–68 humanitarian agencies 157 humanitarian imaginary 129 humanitarian refugee biometrics 270–78 constitutive effects 275 contemporary sovereignty 277–8 digital refugee bodies, UNHCR 275–7 efficiency, accuracy and anti-fraud 274 enhanced acceptability 275 experimentation 273 humanitarian expectations 274 new forms of intervention 273 pilot project to strategic decision 271–2 technology, constitutive agency 272–3 trialling biometrics, constitutive effects 272–3 unintended consequences 274 Humphreys, J. 290 hybrid clubs 78 hybrid peace 75 hybrid political orders and intervention 118–20 peace and security in 117–18 state formation and 113–21 hybrid security governance 117 hybrid warfare 255 hybridity 115, 116, 178 defined 105 in peacebuilding 190 of political order 113–16 value-added of 105 hybridization 116, 119, 120 of security governance 117 identity 76, 77, 79 incentive system 126 in-depth ethnography 144 indicators 41–3 indigeneity 30, 34, 37 in post-conflict reconstruction 34–6 relationality and 36–7

indigenous communities 33, 34, 36 indigenous knowledge 31, 34–6 Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) 133 infrastructures 23–5 injustice frame 109 institutional approach 2, 4 institutional core external actors 95 intermediary elites 179 internally displaced people (IDP) 327 international actors 12 international aid, dilemmas for 146–7 International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) report 329 International Court of Justice 180 International Criminal Court (ICC) 175–8 international criminal law (ICL) 202 International Criminal Tribunal 177 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 184, 186, 189, 191 International Crisis Group (ICG) 21, 243, 244 international intervention 56 built environment of 131–2 everyday habits 129–31 everyday politics of 124–34 inefficient practices persistence 133–4 local responses 132–3 professional practices 125–8 reform possibility 133–4 social frames 128–9 transnational community 125 International Intervention and Local Politics 66 international justice political sociology of 179–82 and statebuilding 175–82 international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) 20, 24, 26 international organisations (IOs) 161 International Organization for Migration (IOM) 164, 166–8, 171, 172 international policy-intervention 15 international political sociology 161–73 international politics 19, 240–47 international relations, temporality and framing in 220–21 International Security Assistance Force 143

344  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding international statebuilding cultural difference, undervaluing to overvaluing 72–4 ‘problem’ of difference in 71–9 rethinking difference, conditions of emergence 76–9 stigmatising difference, third error 74–6 international statebuilding interventions (ISBIs) intervention outcomes, four-step method 64–7 politics of scale and 61–8 Internet governance 251–3 Internet neo-nationalism 251 Internet of things (IoT) 249 and development 250–51 Internet policing 251–3 interpretative frames 129 interveners 130 intervention management tools 132 intervention outcomes, four-step method 64–7 analysing 67 forces in contention 65 politics of scale and strategy 65–7 programme/project methodological focus 64–5 interventionary objects 19 Ipsos-MORI poll 227 Iraqi military intervention, 2003 1 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 325, 329, 332

Kenya 154, 155 Kenyan Defense Forces (KDF) 155, 156 Kerr, R. 191 Khoisan 33 King, M. L. 246 Kinsella, H. 199 Kipuri, N. 32, 33, 35 knowledge assumptions 12 knowledge-authority affirming approaches 20, 25 knowledge-authority problematising approaches 20, 25 knowledge-expertise-policy nexus 22 knowledge hubs 25 knowledge-producing networks 44 knowledge production 19 knowledge regimes 20 Koddenbrock, K. 23 Kosmatopoulos, N. 23 Kosovar Serbs 217 Kosovo/a 214–15, 217 Kostić, R. 21, 26 Krause, M. 132, 134 Kühn, F. 84, 245 Kunz, R. 317 Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) 263 Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) 327, 328, 334

Ja’afari Law 329 Jackson, A. 297 Jansen, S. 191 Jeffrey, A. 217 Jerven, M. 42 Jessop, B. 63 Johnson, E. 143 Jung, D. F. 141 Jutila, M. 84

Laffey, M. 83, 85 Lambourne, W. 187 Latour, B. 44 laundering environmental commodities 284 lawyers and intermediaries of globalization 179–82 as statebuilders 179–82 Leander, A. 22 legitimate principle of legitimation 162 Lemay-Hébert, N. 288 Lévi-Strauss, C. 246 LGBTI individuals 331, 332 liberal democracy 73 liberal interventionism 178 liberal multiculturalism 73 liberal paradigm 93 liberal peace 83, 104, 107, 119, 189, 308–9 liberal-pluralist stream 62

Kaba, S. 181 Kaczmarska, K. 245 Kamboni, M. R. 155 Kantorowicz, E. 179 Karadžić 213 Kauppi, N. 162 Kay, N. 151, 156 Keister, J. 145

Index  345 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 139, 141, 144 lidism 57 Lincoln, B. 244 Linz, J. J. 95 local communities 133 local knowledge 24 local ownership 105, 127, 133 Lottholz, P. 288 Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. 106 Lundy, P. 187 Lunstrum, E. 290

Mueller, M. 251, 252 Muimba 33 Müller, M.-M. 21, 22, 85 multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) 161, 169 mapping fields 163–4 The Myth of the State 242 myths 240–47 enable action 243–4 international politics of intervention 244–6 interventions, state and peacebuilding 241–3 naturalise and dehistoricise, international interventions 246–7

Mac Ginty, R. 35, 105 MacLean, L. M. 139 Maddison, S. 191 Madobe, A. 151, 156 Madsen, M. R. 162 Malabo Protocol 181 Mandela, N. 246 Mani, R. 184, 188 Marehan-clan militias 155 Markland, A. 24, 26 Martin, R. 295, 297 Martin de Almagro, M. 78 material rewards 145–6 Maynard, M. 78 McAdam, D. 108 McGovern, M. 187 McGrattan, C. 188 meaning-making processes 20, 23 Meillassoux, Q. 14, 15 Memoli, V. 99 Merkel, W. 96 methodological nationalism 62 Meyer, J. W. 243 Mignolo, W. 87, 88, 90 military knowledge entrepreneurs 22 Millennium Development Goals 43 Minow, M. 75, 78 mission civilisatrice 99 mixed balance sheet 237 modernity-coloniality 90 Moe, L. W. 22 Mohammad, Y. 331 Moreton-Robinson, A. 35

Nagy, R. 187 narrative 231–7 national action plan (NAP) 331 nationbuilding 4, 5 Nay, O. 25 neoliberal globalization 114 neo-Weberian approach 2 Nepal 20 Newman, E. 211 Ní Aoláin, F. 317, 318 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 138, 143, 146, 223, 224, 290 non-state actors 137–48, 262 non-state service provision legitimising effects of 141–3 visibility and attribution 143–5 non-state violence 42 Nuremberg legacy 178 Obama, B. 264 Obama-Xi agreement 254 object-oriented ontology 14 O’Brien, C. 142 Ocampo, L. M. 175 Office of the High Representative (OHR), Bosnia 108 Ogaden-clan militia 155 O’Grady, N. 11 ontological multiplicity 16 ontology of otherness 88 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 164–6, 168, 171, 172 organisational learning 19

346  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding O’Rourke, C. 187 Ottaway, M. 5 ‘output’ legitimacy 137 overseas development assistance (ODA) 146 Oxfam 222–4, 330 ozone-depleting substances (ODS) 283 Paipais, V. 77 Paris, R. 99 Parker, A. 253 participatory intervention 100 Pashtun communities 35 patriarchal gender order 308 peace versus justice debate 186 peacebuilding 4–5, 25, 26, 31, 75, 84, 184–94 production and circulation, knowledge 191–2 question of capital in 192–3 transitional justice in 187–93 peaceful coexistence 331 peaceful political decision-making 93 peacekeepers 1, 25, 125, 128, 153 Persaud, R. 86 Petraeus doctrine 3 Pillay, S. 185 place-making 218 Kosovo/a 214–15 Republika Srpska 213–14 as statebuilding 213–15 plain drone 260–68 and statebuilding interventions 260–61 ‘Poaching for Bin Laden’ 287 policy pulls 175, 178 political economy of gender and peacebuilding 323–35 of women’s insecurity post-conflict 325–30 political opportunity structures 64 political sociology, international justice 179–82 politico-social power hierarchy 240 politics of scale approach 61–8 international intervention, rejection of 66 localisation 67 selective adoption 66 and strategy 65–7 theoretical foundations of 63–4 politique des races 157 post-9/11 securitization 151

post-colonial approaches 85–6 post-conflict democracy promotion 100 challenges of 97–9 post-conflict democratization debating legitimacy of 99–100 through democracy promotion 96–7 “post-conflict” justice 175 post-conflict reconstruction 30–38 post-conflict societies 71, 93, 104 democracy and democratization in 94–6 post-conflict statebuilding 106 as contentious politics 104–11 post-conflict violence 20 post-Dayton Peace Accord 106, 109 post-factual politics 19 posthuman phenomenology 13, 14 posthuman(itarian)ism 14–16 post-liberal interventions 13 post-liberal peace 22, 190 post-structuralist approaches 22–3 poststructuralist feminists 305 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 226 Poulantzas, N. 63 power, vulgarisation of 3 pragmatic tolerance 74 problem-centred approaches 13 ‘problem-solving’ discourse 13 professionalisation 127 prognostic framing 109 Protection of Civilians (PoC) 202–7 Przeworski, A. 96, 97 public transcripts 105 quantification, sociology of 44 Quijano, A. 87 R2P framework 202, 203, 205–7 Ramalingan, B. 46 rationality 51 reality 44–7 regime of power 21 Reitano, T. 287, 289 relational sensitivity 10 relationality indigeneity and 36–7 ‘local turn’ and critique 31–4

Index  347 Rennan, E. 5 Republika S. 213–17 resonant frames 109 Reverse Land Degradation, Angola 33 Richmond, O. 105, 214 rite of passage’-analysis 55 Roeder, P. G. 98 Rogers, P. 57 Rojava 91 romanticisation 193 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court 202 Roth, S. 126 Rothchild, D. 98 Rowan, B. 243 ‘R&R’ (rest and recuperation) regulation 131 Rumsfeld, D. 222 Rustow, D. A. 96 Rutazibwa, O. U. 86 Sabaratnam, M. 87–9, 91 Sacks, A. 144 Said, E. 85 Sajed, A. 86 Santos Cruz report 205 scalar strategies 62 scale managers 66 scaling place-making 212–13 Schlichte, K. 25 scientific minds 54 Second World War 225 sectarian violence 326 Security Dialogue 85 security governance 153 security risk management, conflict zones 294–301 security sector reform (SSR) 314–20 development, tracing 315–16 (self-)critical perspectives 83–5 self-determination 210 self-fulfilling prophecy 132 self-funding 167 Self-Monitoring Analysis And Reporting Technologies (SMART) 249, 250 self-proclaimed states 210–11 semantic distinction 5 Serb Democrat Party (SDS) 213

Serrano, M. 286 service delivery 137–48 service delivery organisations 330 service provision as legitimation strategy 140–41 material rewards to fairness 145–6 performing state 138–40 sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) 128 sexual slavery 327 sexual violence 327 Sharma, A. 211 Sharp, D. 184, 189–92 Shaw, M. 287, 289 Shepherd, L. 191 Shilliam, R. 86 Shire, B. A. 155 ‘short-circuiting’ knowledge 36–7 Shweiki, O. 84 siege mentality 132 Sierra Leone 20 signature strikes 265 Sikkink, K. 180 SIPRI Yearbook 1 Slantchev, B. 145 slow-reasoning 47 ‘small footprint’ interventions 152 Smirl, L. 50, 55–6, 131–3 Smith, L. T. 87 Smith, M. L. R. 290 Snow, D. 109 Snowden disclosures 254, 255 Soares de Oliveira, R. 151 social contract 137, 143 social-economic structures 304 social frames 128–9 social habits 131 social imaginaries 129 social legitimacy 2 socio-economic destitution 285 sociological camps 2 socio-political cohesion 3 socio-political conflict 65 socio-political functions 241 Solomon Islands 66, 68 Somalia 151–8 bottom-up post-al Shabaab governance 153–4

348  Handbook on intervention and statebuilding Jubaland, test-case 154–8 parallel sphere of recognition 153 state enhancement 153–4 warfighting and local statebuilding, interactive effects 158 sonic envelope 132 South Lebanon 25 space-making 212–13, 218 Kosovo/a 217 Republika Srpska 215–17 as statebuilding 215–17 spatial dimensions 210–18 speculative realism 14 Sri Lanka 141, 144 Sriram, C. L. 185, 191 state, spatializing 212 state collapse 2 state formation 2–3 hybrid political orders and 113–21 state fragility 113, 138 state-making 210–11 state weakness 1 statebuilding 4–5 ambiguity of 50–58 democracy promotion 93–100 indicators and 41–3 and international justice 175–82 justice and 176–8 and narrative 231–7 operations 3 place-making as 213–15 results by data 43–4 service delivery and 137–48 space-making as 215–17 spatial dimensions of 210–18 statelessness 114 Stepan, A. 95 Stevens, M. L. 44 Stollenwerk, E. 143 Stone, D. 21 strategic exoticism 85 strategic selectivity 63 strikes 266 structural power relation 319 Suhrke, A. 56 ‘supply-centred’ approaches 12

Sustainable Development Agenda, 2030 10 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 43, 44 Swyngedouw, E. 213 Szekely, O. 143 Tallbear, K. 34 Tarrow, S. 107 Taylor, C. 288 technological innovations 11 Technology Facilitation Mechanism 44 temporal dimension 220–28 temporality, exit strategies and 225–7 territorial orders, Somalia 151–8 tertium quid 74 theories of change 46 three generations, idea of 20 Tilly, C. 104, 110, 140, 158 Timorese framing 110 Tolbert, D. 186 top-down approaches 105 top-down policy assistance 11 transcendental idealism 14 trans-disciplinary dialogue 177 transformative SSR 316 transitional justice 184–94 deeper politics of 194 in peacebuilding 187–93 peace in 185–6 production and circulation, knowledge 191–2 question of capital in 192–3 transnational community 125 transnational environmental crime (TEC) 282–91 defining 283–5 interventions and statebuilding 289–91 issues and practices constitute 282 Kleptocratic state 286–7 securitized interventions, limitations 290–91 security/ized state 287–8 social-network state 288 sovereign borders and border regions 285–6 weak and strong state 285–8 transnationalisation 162–3 Turner, M. 84 Turshen, M. 306 UK policymaking 20

Index  349 UN 2030 Agenda 41 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) 33 UN Monitoring Group 157 UN ‘Zero tolerance’ policy 128 UNIFIL II mission 25 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 164 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 270–72, 274–8 United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 164, 165, 168, 171, 172 United Nations Population Fund 328 United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 314, 323, 330–32 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 201 universal logics 73 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) 251 urban planners 131 US Agency for International Development (USAID) 190 Valasek, K. 317 van Brabant, K. 295 Veit, A. 25 Verhoeven, H. 151 Vetevendosje 108 violence 324 conceptualising 329 women and 326 violence against women (VAW) 327, 328 violent conflict 84, 94 violent internal conflicts 114 Visoka, G. 211, 214 Wæver, O. 285 Wagstaff, W. A. 141 Waldman, T. 20 Walsh, C. 90 war on terror 267 war-peace transition 72 Weaver, W. 46

Weber, M. 2 Wedel, J. R. 21 Weigand, F. 50 Western-centrism 21 western civilisation 34 Western ‘Weberian’ model 121 Whyte, K. 35 Win, E. 45 Wing Loong 262 Wired 47 Wittig, T. 287 Wolff, J. 37 Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda 304, 314 women’s insecurity post-conflict 325–30 cultural norms 327–8 early and forced marriage 329–30 family violence 328 gender-based violence (GBV) 327–8 gendered violence, ISIS 327 International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) report 329, 330 major cities, armed groups and trafficking post-2003 325–6 sexual slavery, ISIS 327 women’s peacebuilding 323 women’s peacebuilding responses, GBV 330–34 displacement, gender and vulnerability 332 in Mosul’s aftermath 333–4 UNSCR 1325 330–32 Woodward, S. L. 20 Work on Myth 244 World Bank 25 Yanow, D. 243 Yashar, D. J. 37 Yazidi women 327, 334 Yazidis “genocide” 333 Zöhrer, M. 24 Zyck, S. A. 297