Relations are increasingly emerging as a tool to understand war-torn scenarios for peace scholars and policymakers. In peacebuilding debates, authors have emphasised the suitability to focus on relations and interactions between actors and actions in conflict-affected contexts to capture the complex interconnectedness that shape the peacebuilding milieu. In brief, the relational perspective in peacebuilding centres on the outcomes that these encounters entail as well as on the seeming unpredictability in which these unfold.
Morgan Brigg argues that the prime position of a peacebuilder in a relational approach is the acknowledgment of the absence of authority and the capacity of the individual to know the world over the recipient of peacebuilding, as that epistemological collision mutually constitutes its participants. The author suggests that from a relational position hierarchy is less important than openness and change. Thus, Brigg emphasises the need to recognise other forms of thinking, doing and knowing as equivalent to our forms of thinking, doing and knowing. In all, relational peacebuilding perspectives focus on the unexpected negotiations between actors to reach a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of peacebuilding settings, in which these relations produce unforeseeable effects, such as the ‘local resistance’ of the so-called peace spoilers.
Based on narratives and practices emerging from fieldwork observation, reports, and interviews, the following lines allow for the production of a broader picture of the emergent challenges in the peacebuilding milieu; particularly three. First, through critically reflecting upon the limited results of UN peacebuilding efforts in Sierra Leone in knowing and engaging ‘the locals’ in peacebuilding projects, I came to problematise the UN mode of knowing and capturing the host society as a homogenous actor independent from the international organisation. Rather, I hint that the UN and the ‘locals’ are mutually reshaped in relation. Thus, I hint at the benefits of not thinking both actors as fully separate entities, but instead as stakeholders that constantly transform one another. Second, thinking with the UN flawed performance to achieve organisational system-wide coherence in Burundi as a necessary step to enhance the peacebuilding outcomes, I interrogate the assumption that events unfold in a linear and rational mode in conflict-affected scenarios. Everyday reality shows that actors cannot expect that strategy A will lead to strategy B unproblematically. Beyond these deterministic cause-effect relations, I suggest that peacebuilders center on their potential resilience and ability to respond to the unpredictable. Third, in light of the UN faulty performance amidst a network of numerous deployed actors in the Central African Republic, I hint that the more stakeholders deployed in the war-torn milieu, the more vulnerable the autonomous agency of actors, since they can avoid influencing one another. This is indicative of the need for collective ways of doing.
In other words, by engaging with these three real cases, the relational lens allows for, first, questioning the efforts towards engaging ‘the locals’ as if these were ‘out-there’ independent actors,. Secondly, it allows for actors to realise the importance of being resilient and ready for the unexpected. Third, it allows for undermining a supposedly autonomous agency of actors and invoke for a networked action. In the words of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, ‘the experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose’, an assumption that frees peacebuilders from their protracted anxiety induced by the constant failure of peace efforts. It is not the object of this brief text to provide a recipe or a formula for peacebuilders, for there is none. Entanglements, relations, collisions, tensions, negotiations, frictions, entwinements, knots and so forth are not presented here to claim how the world should be. Rather, they are introduced as tools for a better comprehension of peace processes. Seeking to impose a particular peace, even if it follows a relational sensitivity, it is bound to reproduce exclusionary schemes that will leave behind those segments of the local population which resist it or simply cannot jump on board the strategy. Different from the goal-oriented stance of UN peacebuilding endeavours, and many other organisations, relationality in this text offers an invitation to see the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader world, as radical openness, where events result from the clash of an infinite multiplicity of world-making possibilities. Being open to affirm this radical openness, I suggest, might be a first good step towards thinking and doing peace.
For a more developed version of the above arguments, see:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21647259.2021.1999166
Ignasi Torrent
Dr. Ignasi Torrent is a senior lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the Department of Social Sciences at University of Hertfordshire. He holds a PhD in International Relations from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He teaches modules on peacebuilding, international conflicts, International Relations Theory and the Anthropocene. His previous academic engagements include research and teaching fellowships at University of Sierra Leone (Freetown), the City University of New York and University of Westminster (London). His research interests are framed in the area of Critical Peace and Conflict Studies, International Relations Theory, the Anthropocene and new materialisms.
