MONUSCO Photos, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
How can peacebuilding be made to work in a diverse world? How do differences impact peace operations? International peacebuilding as a practice and academic field has always been embroiled in the ‘problem’ of difference. Three errors are paradigmatic.
Throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s, dominant understandings of peacebuilding relied on universalist frameworks and blueprints, rendering culture and cultural differences trivial. As the anthropologist Kevin Avruch (1998) explained, ‘undervaluing culture’ is the ‘first type of error’ in conflict resolution efforts. Conflict resolution, he explained, tended 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. International interventions to build peace in conflict-affected societies ignored the relevance of cultural difference and assumed that by merely fixing state institutions each society would transform into a peaceful liberal democracy (i.e. the West’s self-image). These interventions thus privileged the ‘universal’ values of international agencies and undermined ‘local’ culture and differences.
The second error appeared in the process of overcoming the first. By becoming sensitive to cultural differences, peacebuilding ended up ‘over-valuing culture’ (Avruch 2003). Indeed, the emphasis on identities, differences, or on local perspectives on peace ran the risk of legitimizing belligerent ideas and reproducing frictions and divisions in societies affected by conflict – of making peacebuilding blinded by culture (Valbjørn 2008). Particularly when deploying essentialist conceptions of identity and culture, which assume that groups are primordial, homogenous and clearly separated by their differences, interventions were guilty of replicating ethno-nationalist perspectives and war-antagonisms (Behr 2018). For peace practitioners, overvaluing culture made finding a common ground among different groups difficult. In other words, difference became a problem to be solved.
Trying to move away from these two errors, critical peacebuilding scholars have urged us to engage more fully with ‘local’ differences. For them, differences are a resource that local populations can mobilise to build peace rather than being a problem to be solved (Brigg 2018; Wilcock 2021). Peacebuilding operations should therefore be open to the myriad of differences in conflict-affected societies. These approaches became loosely gathered under the umbrella of the ‘local turn’ – a group of scholars and practitioners attached to a better inclusion and/or understanding of the ‘local’ as a way to improve peacebuilding outcomes. These approaches to peace are meant to be more tolerant of difference, solving both the first and second errors outlined above.
However, these discussions essentialized difference insofar as the conditions that make difference exist in the first place were not acknowledged. Indeed, if the ‘local’ can be identified at all, it is thanks to its difference from the (intervening) Self. The result is the reproduction of the ‘stigma of difference’ (Mathieu 2019): the local is (what is) intrinsically different from the norm, and therefore deviant and inferior. This means that local differences are recognised and valued, but can never be considered as equal and equally useful to build peace.
Is there a productive way to think about difference and peacebuilding that overcomes these three errors? Even more importantly, can international peacebuilding be made to work in a diverse world? Yes, we argue: thinking about difference in peacebuilding requires continually thinking about relationality, performance and power. The first step is to recognize that differences are performative and as such situated in time and context. As feminist scholars show, attention should be placed on the multiple forms of identity and difference that defy categorization and are expressed in the everyday (Read 2018). Scholars and practitioners should look at how people identify themselves, express feelings, anxieties and fears, write culture, form associations and collectives, and the politics involved in these complex and relational processes (including their own place in them). A second step is to recognize that difference emerges in relation to power and is linked to social structures that enable and reinforce certain differences, while silencing others. Who is different (and for whom) is intrinsically linked to powerful worldviews about the ‘normal’. Imaginaries of peace that are open to difference must therefore be attentive to situations of domination and control, and how identities resist and move, adapt, evolve or fall silent. In the absence of such a reflection, the well-intentioned strategy of current peacebuilding – to value the ‘local’ as a resource for peace – could lead to reproducing difference as a problem.
This post is based on the article: Pol Bargués-Pedreny & Xavier Mathieu (2018) Beyond Silence, Obstacle and Stigma: Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Difference in Peacebuilding, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 12:3, 283-299. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17502977.2018.1513622
References
Avruch, Kevin. 2003. “Type I and Type II Errors in Culturally Sensitive Conflict Resolution Practice.” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 20 (3): 351–371.
Behr, H. 2018. “Peace-in-Difference: A Phenomenological Approach to Peace Through Difference.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12 (3): 335–351.
Brigg, Morgan. 2018. “Relational and Essential: Theorizing Difference for Peacebuilding.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12(3): 352-366.
Mathieu, Xavier. 2019. “Critical peacebuilding and the dilemma of difference: the stigma of the ‘local’ and the quest for equality.” Third World Quarterly 40(1): 36-52.
Read, Róisín. 2018. “Embodying Difference: Reading Gender in Women’s Memoirs of Humanitarianism.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12 (3): 300–318.
Valbjørn, Morten. 2008. “Before, During and After the Cultural Turn: A ‘Baedeker’ to IR’s Cultural Journey.” International Review of Sociology 18 (1): 55–82.
Wilcock. Cathy A. 2021. “From Hybridity to Networked Relationality: Actors, Ideologies and the Legacies of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 15(2): 221-243.
Xavier Mathieu
Xavier Mathieu is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Liverpool (UK). His research focuses on post-colonial legacies in global politics, in particular as they impact past and current notions of sovereignty, international interventions, and identity/difference. His current project explores the way (post)colonial violence opens up spaces of resistance by disrupting the frontiers between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Pol Bargués
Pol Bargués is research fellow at CIDOB (Barcelona Center for International Affairs), Barcelona, Spain. His research examines war-peace transitions and the evolution of international interventions. He is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding
