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Peacebuilding
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Peacebuilding, the local and the

international: a colonial or a
postcolonial rationality?
Vivienne Jabri

Department of War Studies , King's College London , UK

Published online: 18 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Vivienne Jabri (2013) Peacebuilding, the local and the international: a colonial
or a postcolonial rationality?, Peacebuilding, 1:1, 3-16, DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2013.756253
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2013.756253

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Peacebuilding, 2013
Vol. 1, No. 1, 316, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2013.756253

Peacebuilding, the local and the international: a colonial or

a postcolonial rationality?
Vivienne Jabri*
Department of War Studies, Kings College London, UK

Downloaded by [83.37.239.164] at 13:38 25 August 2014

(Received 9 November 2012; final version received 9 November 2012)

There is much debate in the peacebuilding literature on the question of agency and its
locations. Given the interventionist context of peacebuilding operations and the
overwhelming presence of internationals on the scene, the local factor might easily
be seen as being subsumed at best and totally negated at worst. Operations of
peacebuilding can be interpreted as being driven by a colonial rationality wherein the
imperative to govern precedes and informs practices on the ground. One response is to
suggest hybrid agency as a form of articulation that questions a dichotomous
representation of the local and the liberal/universal. Another is to suggest that
peacebuilding practices aim towards capacity-building and hence the enablement of
agency in the post-conflict context. The article argues for a conceptualisation of agency
that takes its starting point from the international as a distinctive location of politics.
Doing so enables a differentiation; on the one hand the colonial rationality that places
primacy in the governing potentials of external intervention, and on the other a
postcolonial rationality that derives its discourse from the postcolonial international
and that hence places primacy on the politics of self-determination. How the
international is invoked hence makes a difference to practices constitutive of
responses to conflict: practices of peacebuilding tend towards a focus on the
government of populations and remain driven by a late modern form of colonial
rationality; while practices that focus on conflict resolution recognise the political
subject of postcoloniality and hence focus on the politics of conflict and not its
government.
Keywords: peacebuilding; conflict resolution; agency; the international; colonial and
postcolonial rationality

When Johan Galtung wrote his piece, Three Approaches to Peace: Peacekeeping,
Peacemaking, and Peacebuilding1 he cannot have been aware of its potential impact on
international practices geared towards responses to violent conflict. That peacebuilding
is now endorsed as a norm is not in doubt, nor is its hegemonic status in the lexicon

*Corresponding author. Email: vivienne.jabri@kcl.ac.uk

1
Johan Galtung, Three Approaches to Peace: Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Peacebuilding, in
Peace, War and Defence: Essays in Peace Research, ed. Johan Galtung (Copenhagen: Christian
Ejlers, 1976).
q 2013 Taylor & Francis

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V. Jabri

that informs the normative underpinning and legitimisation of particular types of

intervention.2 This hegemony is now reinforced institutionally so that international
organisations from the United Nations (UN) to NATO do not just possess specialist offices
dedicated to peacebuilding operations, but view their primary role in responding to
conflicts in terms of peacebuilding. We might hence ask: how does a situation of conflict
come to be captured within the purview of peacebuilding? As will be argued below, what
remains somewhat under-appreciated are the profound consequences of a conflicts
interpellation in terms of peacebuilding. These consequences are not just manifest in
relation to the agency or otherwise of those involved in local contexts of conflict, but also
in relation to the very structure of the international as a distinct juridical-political space.
The two issues are interrelated, and neither can be understood without the other.
The hegemonic status that peacebuilding possesses in our international institutions is
also reflected in the realm of knowledge production. Peacebuilding now forms a major
scientific research programme, to use a well-worn Lakatosian term. As a research
programme, it transcends disciplinary boundaries and has as its baseline a discursive
formation3 that reveals a degree of consensus as to what the concept means and what
practices it makes reference to. Such consensus is perhaps surprising, given that the
concept of peacebuilding comes always already heavily laden with meaning and with
value. What it is not is already clear; its distinguishing feature being its distinction from
peacekeeping or conflict resolution.4 More importantly, when read as a signifier,
peacebuilding suggests a term of architecture or even design. It also suggests
transformation of sorts. Those who build the peace are hence immediately evocative of
those who can build and who have the imaginary to design or even re-build afresh, from
the rubble that is conflict. The genealogy of the concept affirms this element and, once

There are many definitions of and perspectives on conflict and peace. Oliver Richmond provides a
useful overview (or genealogy) of peace and conflict theory in the form of four generations: the first
focuses on conflict management and the restoration of order within a largely Westphalian model;
the second generation focuses on conflict resolution, influenced largely by John Burton and his
focus on a pluralist understanding of conflict and its resolution based on human needs and their
violation as the root cause of conflict; the third generation is a product of second generation work in
combination with peace research and its dominant voice, Galtung, where the focus is not simply on
the resolution of conflict, but social transformation through peacebuilding and statebuilding
based on the idea that the root cause of conflict is state failure. The fourth generation, influenced by
critical and poststructural theory, has its focus on emancipatory analyses and responses to conflict,
emphasising recognition of local and hybrid agency over and above the universalising
assumptions of the liberal peace project. See Oliver P. Richmond, A Genealogy of Peace and
Conflict Theory, in Advances in Peacebuilding, ed. Oliver P. Richmond (London: Palgrave, 2010),
14 38. As a contributor to the fourth generation, my aim in this article is to move the debates within
the fourth generation forward, and specifically towards what I would see as a postcolonial
understanding of peace and conflict theory. See, for example, Vivienne Jabri, Discourses on
Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) or Vivienne Jabri, War and the
Transformation of Global Politics (London: Palgrave, 2007).
3
I use the Foucauldian term, discursive formation, to highlight the mutually constitutive
relationship between knowledge production and relations of domination, specifically tactics and
strategies of power. See M. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith
(London: Routledge, 1997).
4
For valuable discussions of how peacekeeping, conflict resolution and peacebuilding relate, see, for
example, Oliver P. Richmond, The Transformation of Peace (London: Palgrave, 2005) and A.B.
Fetherston, Peacekeeping, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding: A Reconsideration of
Theoretical Frameworks, International Peacekeeping 7, no. 1 (2000): 190 218.

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Peacebuilding

again, this has profound consequences for how we understand agency in relation to
peacebuilding, as will be argued below.
So the hegemony of peacebuilding is manifest institutionally and as a norm, it is
manifest as a scientific research programme and, furthermore, in its capacities to transcend
distinctions. Delving further into what the concept signifies, we find the disappearance of
distinctions between theory and practice, scholarship and the advocacy of responses to
real life problems. When looking into operations that come under the purview of
peacebuilding, it is no longer possible to clearly distinguish, for example, between the
roles of governments and those of non-governmental agencies, or indeed between military
organisations geared to the defeat of an enemy and aid agencies geared to the re-building
of societies.5
The literature on peacebuilding, especially the critical literature, has sought to
question practices of peacebuilding and the question of agency and its locations. The
question of agency might be summarised in the form of three perspectives. As Richmond,
Mac Ginty and others argue, where the liberal peace project has tended to assume the
primacy of the internationals over the locals as agents of peacebuilding, a critical
approach would entail the advocacy and indeed recognition of local initiatives for peace,
the indigenous as the more authentic voice of local populations.6 Richmond argues for a
post-liberal form of peacebuilding, suggesting liberal-local hybridity, the liberal/
universal in conjunction with local agents, who may themselves use the language of the
internationals just as the latter come to adopt local understandings of the context of conflict
and its potential transformation.7 This perspective rejects a dichotomous representation of
agency, preferring the use of the notion of hybridity to reflect the complex intersection
and interplay of discourses, both local and global. A third approach to agency, capacity
building, can perhaps best be represented by the resilience framework.8 If peacebuilding
is geared towards the building of capacities, institutional or otherwise, then the question
of agency should not be framed in the terms of the primacy of the internationals over the
locals, but rather in terms of an exchange that effects agency on the ground and in the
local.
This article makes a contribution to the debate on agency in peacebuilding from a
different perspective, one that interrogates peacebuilding through the lens of the
postcolonial international as a distinct juridical-political terrain. Viewing the question
through this lens enables a distinction to be made between what I refer to as colonial and
postcolonial rationality.9 Before I move to the argument below, it is important to set the
parameters of the argument. These parameters are informed by a distinctly postcolonial
understanding of the international, in that the postcolonial condition does not suggest the
5

When peacebuilding is understood biopolitically, to use a Foucauldian term referring to the

government of populations, its practices come to be informed by the imperative of security. It is
in this sense that the roles of militaries and humanitarian NGOs can come to be indistinguishable.
Duffield captures this in his analyses of the development-security nexus. Mark Duffield,
Development, Security and Unending War (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
6
Roger Mac Ginty, Indigenous Peacemaking versus the Liberal Peace, Cooperation and Conflict
43, no. 2 (2008): 139 63.
7
Richmond, A Genealogy of Peace and Conflict Theory.
8
See, for example, David Chandler, Resilience and Human Security: The Post-Interventionist
Paradigm, Security Dialogue 43, no. 3 (2012): 213 30.
9
Vivienne Jabri, The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity
(London: Routledge, 2013).

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V. Jabri

end of coloniality, but is constitutively meaningful only in relation to coloniality and its
legacies. The conceptual framing of the international, as Siba Grovogui, for example,
argues is imbued with a colonial trajectory that continues in the aftermath of
independence.10 However, this should not be interpreted as the persistence of coloniality
beyond independence, for this would suggest that the postcolonial world has had no impact
on the modern international. Rather, I have argued that the post in the postcolonial
matters, for it is this temporal break that confers meaning to the postcolonial world and its
struggles for self-determination. Access to the international by the formerly colonised did
not mean the defeat of structures of domination that continue to impoverish much of the
postcolonial world. However, it did mean the transformation of the international and the
incorporation of discourses that emerged in the struggles for self-determination. Thus,
while a colonial rationality would view the juridical-political boundaries of the
postcolonial state as irrelevant in its calculations and formulations of schemes of
government, a postcolonial rationality would take the politics of the postcolonial condition
very seriously; including the political contestations that generate conflict and contention
about those very boundaries. Conceived in relation to peacebuilding, the significant
distinction is not between internationals and locals therefore, but rather, between
practices that view their target as populations to be governed and practices that recognise
these populations and their conflicts as distinctly political. While the two might be
mutually imbricated, where the accent lies matters when the question relates to agency.
The article will take this argument forward by locating peacebuilding in the context of
the international. The first section explores peacebuilding as an element in the normative
construction of the international, while the second section focuses on peacebuilding as a
practice of design. Both are approached through the lens of the international, thereby
enabling the revelation of rationalities at work. This discussion will reveal the problems
that emerge when a distinction is made between the so-called internationals and locals,
problems that in some ways both challenge and reinforce the idea of hybrid agency. Such
a problematisation might also reveal that the practice of conflict resolution as distinct from
peacebuilding reflects a postcolonial rationality that recognises conflict as a domain of
politics and not simply of government.

The norm11 of peacebuilding and the international

There is much that is taken for granted in the conceptual and praxiological framing of
peacebuilding. Specifically, the relationship between peacebuilding as a distinct response
to conflict and the structure of the international is overwhelmingly under-theorised, so that
the literature is largely descriptive and even normative in relation to preferences for
particular practices. The implications of peacebuilding practices are hence confined to
10

Siba Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in

International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
11
There is a wide constructivist literature on norms in International Relations, largely based on the
argument that ideas can constitute the structure of the international; see, for example, Martha
Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,
International Organisation 52, no. 4 (1998): 887 917 and Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of
International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). My intention here is not to
provide an engagement with this literature. Rather, it is to argue that practices, discursive and nondiscursive, come to constitute structures that are drawn upon in interactions.

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Peacebuilding

their effects on the ground, in the locations of conflict wherein such interventionist
practices take place, from Timor Leste to Guatemala to the Solomon Islands, to
Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and the multiplicity of other contexts. When explored
ontologically, we begin to see a complex interplay not just between the local and the
international, but networks of interaction that are not so easily confined within the one or
the other. However, it is important to understand how peacebuilding, both as a concept and
as a set of practices, relates to the international as a distinct domain of politics.
One question that is of interest to any international political theorist relates to the
extent to which peacebuilding is implicated in the transformation of the normative
constitution of the international. The idea of peace as such, defined as the absence of war,
has always been a powerful discursive element that underpins the textual construction of
the international. The UN Charters reference to international peace and security is
exactly one such evocation of peace as a valued condition in a modern global order that
has been replete with violence. Indeed the two dominant discourses in International
Relations, namely realism and liberalism, provide an understanding of international
order that is often suggestive of peace, even as such a peace may in fact be a product of
adversity and balances of power. Peace, in both realist and liberal understandings hence
takes a distinctly juridical note, even though the realist would deny that this was the case.
The neo-realist would certainly argue for the regulative potential of an ordered
international system of states whereby the name of the game is self-regulation premised on
the consequences of what might happen otherwise. The juridical appears in full form in
liberal discourses, whereby we move from self-regulation to the force of law as the pacifier
of nations. The anarchical system kept in check through consequential fear, as in realism,
and an anarchical system kept in check through the pacifying force of law, as in liberalism,
seems to be a system premised on regulation as the guarantor of peace.12
There is, however, a crucial difference between the two perspectives that goes to the
heart of our discussion here. One of the core assumptions of the neo-realist understanding
of the structure of the international is that while states may have access to different
resources, they remain un-differentiated in relation to the structure of the international.
This assumption of, in effect, formal equality, informs Kenneth Waltzs understanding of
war as emergent from changes in the balance of power internationally as opposed to any
transformations that might take place internally to the state and its institutions.13 Waltzs
third image is hence the neo-realist guarantee for continuity in the international system
of states. Understood in the context of conflict and peace, the internal constitution of the
state is irrelevant in as far as the continuity of the system is concerned. For the liberal,
however, the internal governance structures of the state have implications for that states
relationships externally. The so-called liberal peace project is hence captured in Waltzs
second image, the location wherein peacebuilding initiatives direct their operations. For
a neo-realist, such practices are not only a diversion of resources away from the primary
concerns of the state, namely its relations with other states and in an anarchical
international system, but might also be argued to constitute a not too desirable
12

For a recent reflective piece on realist and liberal perspectives on what he refers to as legalism
and moralism in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century international politics, see Robert
O. Keohane, Twenty Years of Institutional Liberalism, International Relations 26, no. 2 (2012):
125 38. For a ground-breaking treatment of peace in International Relations theory, see Oliver
Richmond, Peace in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2008).
13
Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).

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V. Jabri

transformation of the international system, especially when such transformation reflects a

dispersion of power towards multiple and indeterminate centres.
For the liberal, on the other hand, global order is a product of stable internal
governance structures, so that the existence of the civic peace within can determine a
rule-governed orientation in the external relations of the state. Peacebuilding as a set of
practices that we have seen evolve towards what amounts to an international consensus on
responses to violent conflict might be interpreted as an extrapolation of what in
International Relations is referred to as democratic peace theory or indeed the liberal
peace project.14 While much attention, within the former perspective, has focused on the
testing of the theory that democracies do not fight each other, the latters attention has
focused on the actual transformation of societies into as near a reflection of liberal
democracy as can be achieved institutionally in historically and culturally different
societies. The project of peacebuilding is hence one of institution-building, one that is
geared towards the transformation of the state itself.
We can see a clear trajectory of thought and practice that comes to constitute what
looks like an international normative consensus now structurated into the discourses and
practices of what can be referred to as an international civil service at large, both state and
non-state, military and civilian, international and local, engaged in a multitude of practices
that can in one way or another come under the rubric of peacebuilding. Indeed the
research programme on peacebuilding itself reflects this multitude of practices and their
implications and ramifications, some concerned with effectiveness, others with
implications for gender or culture, others still with the agencies involved, from the
UN to NATO, to the NGOs involved.15 Then there are the different practices seen to
constitute peacebuilding; the demobilisation of militias, the reintegration of child soldiers
into families and neighbourhoods, the setting up of truth and reconciliation commissions,
the trials of war criminals, compensation measures for victims, the reform of security
sectors, gender and human rights awareness training, the provision of development
projects, the reinstitution of industries and the monitoring of elections.
Looked at from the postcolonial perspective, both realism and liberalism are complicit
in the perpetuation of structures of domination that relegate the postcolonial world to
continued poverty through resource dispossession and discourses that place primacy on
Western knowledge systems and norms. Thus, where the international is regulated, its
terms of reference are primarily scripted elsewhere, including those that determine
economic and juridical relations. At the same time, and as I state above, the post in the
postcolonial matters, especially so when the postcolonial subject carries the memory
traces of the colonial era and as such places value on the international as a domain that
accrues recognition to the political subjectivity that emerges through anti-colonial

14

There is no space in this article to engage fully with the democratic peace theory. For a critique of
liberalism in relation to war and peace, see Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics. For
a critical review of the democratic peace literature, see John MacMillan, Beyond the Separate
Democratic Peace, Journal of Peace Research 40, no. 2 (2003): 233 43.
15
See, for example, the special focus on NATO and peacebuilding in the journal Global Governance;
specifically: Alexander Gheciu and Roland Paris, NATO and the Challenge of Sustainable
Peacebuilding, Global Governance 17, no. 1 (2011): 75 9 for an introduction to the set of articles
included in the focus. Gender and peacebuilding is also an expanding research focus. See, for example,
Tarja Vayrynen, Gender and UN Peace Operations, International Peacekeeping 11, no. 1 (2004):
125 42 and Tarja Vayrynen Gender and Peacebuilding, in Advances in Peacebuilding, 137 153.

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Peacebuilding

struggle. The narratives of postcoloniality must remain core to an understanding of the

postcolonial international and its potentials, especially when we are considering agency in
the context of conflict in all its phases.
The local is not the driver behind the practices of peacebuilding I highlight above,
even though the local may, at some point come on board, may be mobilised, as indeed it
has to, simply to render operations on the ground workable. From the use of translators to
local professionals like teachers or health workers, the local comes into the frame, and in
doing so may influence the tenor of relationships, from accruing legitimacy to
incorporating local sensitivities, to enabling negotiation between locals and internationals.
What is important to highlight is that, as far as the normative ordering of peacebuilding as
a practice goes, it is the international context that matters. The international, its institutions
and normative structuration, weighs heavily on the local.
As I indicate above, peacebuilding is now a norm structurated into the very fabric
of the international. This is both a discursive and an institutional fabric, so that what
began life as a concept is now an internationally accepted norm that informs the
decisions and conduct of global institutions.16 As concepts travel, as they become
incorporated into institutional discourses, so too they transform well beyond their
authors original intentions. We might trace this clearly in comparing the Galtungian
text17 with what the concept later became when rendered through Boutros BoutrosGhalis Agenda for Peace,18 a ground-breaking UN document the purpose of which
was primarily to respond to the atrocities of the Balkans conflict, Sierra Leone and
other locations wherein the targeting of populations by militias and the security services
of their states was, it seemed, not just a means in the conduct of war, but its very
purpose. Hence, where Galtung sought to define the agenda for Peace Research,
Boutros Boutros-Ghali sought to transform the agenda of the UN and its capacities to
respond to the extremes of violence. These capacities had, according to Boutros-Ghali,
for long been constrained by the formative norm in the international system of states,
namely state sovereignty. Faced with atrocity and in an international context that had
witnessed the establishment of a normative order based on human rights and the laws
of war, the pinnacle global institution, the UN, had to mobilise its resources towards
the prevention of such atrocity and to do so meant the trumping, in certain instances, of
sovereign rights by human rights. Interventions in the name of human rights, in the
name of the rescue of populations, came to form the linchpin of another formative
concept, namely the Responsibility to Protect. Thus where protection would be the
first response, driven by necessity, then peacebuilding would ensure the prevention
of future atrocity.
Protection encompassed a policing rationality. Prevention encompassed far more than
the immediacy of a policing operation geared towards the rescue of populations from
violence. While prevention is also driven by a policing rationality, it encompasses a wider
framing that incorporates the causes, one might say, of violence. These causes are not
defined in terms of politics, but in terms of institutional government; the government of
populations and the institutions required for such government (I will return to this

16

Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics.

Galtung, Three Approaches to Peace.
18
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and
Peacekeeping (New York: United Nations, 1992).
17

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10

V. Jabri

distinction between politics and government later in the article).19 Thus, if the UN was to
participate in peacebuilding, then its remit, as Boutros-Ghali argued, had to change, from
peacekeeping and mediation, towards the re-shaping of societies. However, this was not a
re-shaping that would witness the transformation of the international political economy
and its implications for populations in the postcolonial world. Rather, this was a re-shaping
that would correct, so to speak, the failure of states. The discourse of peacebuilding
hence went hand in hand with the concept of the failed state. The state so interpellated
could then be subject to modes of intervention that would implement the governance
structures required of a working, functioning state, one that could govern internally and
partake in an international political economy along lines favourable to international global
institutions. The World Bank hence became as significant an actor in peacebuilding as the
UN or NATO.
Concepts travel and their impact on the normative structuration of the international
seems to depend on the direction they take. As I indicate above, while Galtungs use of the
concept sought to transform the agenda for Peace Research, Boutros-Ghalis was to
transform the UNs role in responses to violent conflict, and specifically to re-define the
UNs capacities so that these were no longer constrained by the imperatives of state
sovereignty. Once peacebuilding came to acquire a policing rationality, then the concept
had travelled significantly from its original intent an intent that sought the incorporation
of structural violence and the inequalities that cause it into the framework of responses to
conflict. The concept travelled further still when it acquired the governing imperative, so
that its security imperative and its focus on security sector reform came to be twinned
with a developmental discourse that sought to render the failed state not just fit for
government, but fit for a neo-liberal international political economy the structures of
which were most definitely not the subject of radical transformation.
We can hence see, in this trajectory of peacebuilding, that agency as such is at once
enabled and constrained by the structural continuities of the international. Peacebuilding
has had significant implications for the normative structuration of the international, so that
norms such as human rights and sovereignty are at play and in contest in the practices that
are informed by peacebuilding. These practices on the ground have in themselves been
implicated in the transformation of the discursive structuration of the international, so that
conflict is largely not interpreted in terms of political contestation, but primarily as a
matter of the failure of government. Seen in this light, the agents involved should not be
understood in terms of an easy division between the internationals and the locals, but
rather as an international civil service at large that might be state and non-state, local and
international. It, in other words, has the character of a complex network any part of which
may be significant for its overall functioning, though these parts may be differentially
significant, differentially valued. They certainly bring to the network differences in power

19

For how policing rationalities permeate external military operations, see Didier Bigo, The Mobius
Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies), in Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking
International Relations Theory, ed. Mathias Albert and others (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 91 116. For further discussion of the nexus between protection, prevention,
policing and war, see Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War; Jabri, War and the
Transformation of Global Politics; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 2005). For how a policing model implemented in New York City travelled to Iraq see
Katharyne Mitchell, Ungoverned Space: Global Security and the Geopolitics of Broken Windows,
Political Geography 29, no. 5 (2010): 289 97.

Peacebuilding

11

and resources, material or symbolic. These differences often determine who writes the
script, who is involved in its implementation and what trajectories this implementation
takes. The locals as such may well be involved, and their involvement may well be
indispensable, but are they the authors of the script? The script, as we have seen, derives
from elsewhere. The international weighs heavily on the local, when the question of
peacebuilding is placed under the lens of the international. Even where the lens shifts to
the local, it is always already heavily imbricated with the international.

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The architectonics and design of peacebuilding

I have already alluded to the institutional framing of peacebuilding. The concept has
travelled institutionally as well as discursively. It has seen its normalisation in the creation
of a UN Commission on Peacebuilding. It has witnessed other global institutions, from the
World Bank to NATO to the African Union institute their own offices dedicated to
peacebuilding operations. Non-governmental organisations are core to the practices of
peacebuilding, mobilised, much as locals are, into operational practices on the ground,
bringing so-called local knowledge with them.20
My purpose in this section, just as it was in the last, is to unravel the question of agency
in peacebuilding. If the international is now constituted normatively in terms of
peacebuilding and its policing rationality, then its developing institutional framework
works in the service of this rationality and is in turn enabled by it. A multitude of offices
and officers are engaged in the implementation of practices deemed to fulfil a
peacebuilding agenda that seeks to transform socio-political institutions of states deemed
failed into ones capable of government; specifically the government of populations. As
seen above, this might involve a whole array of interventions, from those that seek security
sector reform to the provision of health and education, to demobilisation, to the
dismantling of the apparatus of the state in favour of another deemed more suitable to a
peacebuilding agenda. This agenda may require the involvement of militaries, police
forces, accountants, health workers and others; all internationals involved in the reshaping and re-design of societies. The preventive agenda is clear; a failed state is
implicated in the production of ungoverned spaces and peoples, hence its transformation
requires the institutional design requisite of government.
The concept of peacebuilding enables the practices that it is deemed to describe. The
word comes to acquire meaning when it is somehow stabilised on the page, articulated in
sound, so that its clear distinction from other terms associated with peace is established.
As a signifier, to use a Saussureian term, it seems to at once capture peace and building
as the signified. Yet it seems that the instability of the one, the first term, peace, might well
be subject to the material stability of the other, building, so that the combination of the
two seems to serve the remit required of a stable peace. The architectural and design
aspects of the signifier suggest the laying of the foundations for a lasting peace, one that is
not as precarious as the observation of a ceasefire or a truce, and one that seeks to shift the
terrain of peace from the political and towards the governmental. If negotiation and
conflict resolution are located in the sphere of the political (see last section of the article),
then peacebuilding must be located in the practices of institutions, the foundations of
20

For an excellent institutional analysis of peacebuilding as enacted by 24 institutions see Michael

Barnett, Peacebuilding: What Is in a Name?, Global Governance 13, no. 1 (2007): 35 58.

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which must be both sustainable and in keeping with an essentially Weberian

understanding of the sovereign state. A clear cut distinction is therefore drawn between
the three forms of practice that have come to constitute international responses to conflict,
peacekeeping, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
Observed through the lens of the international, we can understand peacebuilding
practices as those that seek to design a stable social-political order, one the institutions of
which have the capacities to govern populations. In this framework, the political authority
of those who govern is related to their capacity to govern and to govern legitimately. If we
look into the history of the postcolonial state, we see the emergence of the state in the
aftermath, in most cases, of an anti-colonial struggle that had largely acquired nationalist
legitimacy. The discourse of self-determination came to define the parameters of
legitimacy for the immediate postcolonial state. However, as many a postcolonial author
has pointed out, the postcolony21, to use Achille Mbembe, was far from the promise of
independence, revealing local leaderships that held the survival of local regimes in higher
order than the very survival of the postcolonial state as a coherent entity that served the
unmet demands of its citizenry. That which was external to the state, from international
organisations such as the UN to non-governmental organisations and even the colonial
power itself held far greater promise than the immediate local regime. The distanciation of
government and legitimacy has therefore been profound, a distanciation rendered more so
with every intervention geared towards the governing of populations.22
The UNs Peacebuilding Support Office (UNPSO), in a 2010 report, UN
Peacebuilding: An Orientation, appears to recognise the problems that might arise
when legitimacy and governance are so distanciated.23 However, the difficulty is
immediately apparent when the UNPSO suggests that the
success of peacebuilding depends in part on the political decisions of those involved (national
and local governments, communities, donors, the UN itself), in part on effective leadership
(by national governments and within the UN), and on resources like human capital or donor
financing.24

At the same time, the report highlights national ownership as essential to success.
Conceptualised thus, and in recognition of the incapacity of national communities to enact
effective peacebuilding, the UNPSO suggests as a priority the development of national
peacebuilding capacities.25 To do so requires prior assessment of capacity and its
locations, so that there may be pockets of peace or stability, enacted and enabled by the
activities of civil society organisations, resident NGOs and traditional actors. This
awareness, or knowledge, of local conditions also informs the call for what the UNPSO
refers to as conflict sensitivity,26 by which it means, engagement in a conflict analysis
exercise in order to identify both the structural causes of conflict, and (which may be
different) the current riggers or accelerators of potential renewed conflict.27 Conflict

21

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California
Press, 2001).
22
Jabri, The Postcolonial Subject.
23
United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office (henceforth UNPSO) UN Peacebuilding: An
Orientation (UNPSO, New York, 2010).
24
Ibid., 5.
25
Ibid., 6.
26
Ibid., 14.
27
Ibid., 16.

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sensitive practices may hence involve the equal hiring of local staff, so that in contexts of
inter-ethnic rivalry, one group is not unfairly disadvantaged as compared to another.
The element that stands out on reading the UNPSOs report is the degree of critical
reflection it highlights. This is especially evident in its repeated emphasis on the
involvement of local actors, from national governments to local NGOs and traditional
leaders involved in local conflict resolution initiatives. A United States Institute of Peace
report28 (USIP) is quoted as praising the UNPSO and the UN Peacebuilding Commission
for pioneering a consultative path in relation to the sequencing and timing of action:
as the USIP report states, Knowing if or when to strengthen substate, suprastate, or
nonstate institutions; avoiding an often inappropriate replication of Western institutional
models; and avoiding recreating institutions that caused conflict in the first place requires
local input and deep consultation.29 While different contexts of peacebuilding vary, there
is a clear sense in which practices are geared to making full use of local actors, their
knowledge of their own conditions and their effectiveness as recipients of peacebuilding
support.
Along with the focus on self-reflection and institutional learning, what is also apparent
from the UNPSOs report is the design imperative constitutive of peacebuilding. The
script is already written, in other words, and all the actors involved, locals and
internationals, enact their roles within the boundaries of the script. This is not to argue that
the script is particularly Western as such. This would be to take too culturalist an
orientation to the postcolonial state that is the recipient or target of peacebuilding efforts.
Rather, it is to suggest that the script is one that adheres to the remit of governing: the
functioning coherent state, the definition of functionality in terms of modern, rational
institutions, the importance of planning and co-ordination, the calculation of need, the
pedagogical orientation of training programmes, including initiatives targeted at women
or youth. The design of programmes might in many instances replicate or even be models
for social initiatives targeted at what are defined as problem neighbourhoods anywhere
in the world; from the riot areas of inner cities in the UK in the summer of 2011 to the postelection violence in Kenya in 2007, where the latter might work as a model for the former.
The point above is to suggest that the design of peacebuilding operations is based on a
script that is informed by a distinctly late modern understanding of government, namely
the government of populations and their internal relations. The production of governable
populations and their spaces of interaction is what matters in a biopolitical age wherein the
life of populations is the grounding moment.30 To govern populations implies the
enactment of meticulous planning and calculation, including the incorporation of gender
and culture awareness, so that pedagogy is as significant a factor as is the insertion of
funds into particular initiatives.31 In this governmentalising design imperative, no easy
distinction can be made between locals and internationals. These may indeed be both,
drawing on hybrid discourses geared towards effectiveness; what works best. Thus,
local actors, including women, youth, elders, workers and NGOs, may well draw on the

28

United States Institute of Peace, Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction
(Washington, DC: USIP, 2009).
29
UNPSO, UN Peacebuilding, 15.
30
See Mark Duffield, The Liberal Way of Development and the Development Security Impasse:
Exploring the Global Life Chance Divide, Security Dialogue 41, no. 1 (2010): 153 76.
31
Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics.

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international and its normative ordering to make local claims, to negotiate locally or
nationally for rights violated or for access to resources.
The modern international, its discursive framing and its institutions, is perhaps the
only guarantee of the reinsertion of politics in spaces of governmentality. Peacebuilding is
a project of governmentality, or the government of populations. It is designed in
biopolitical terms as a project of institution-building, or more specifically of statebuilding, and its agents are at once both local and international, military and civilian.
What can be the subject of contestation is where the balance between the internationals
and the locals lies, but this is detail. The formula is already scripted elsewhere, in the
structuration of peacebuilding as a norm constitutive of the normative ordering of the
international.
Looked at through the lens of the international, the formula acquires far greater
significance, for every instance of its detailed implementation has constitutive
implications not just for the societies concerned, but for the international as such. To
define agency, as I am doing in this article, in terms of an international civil service at large
that functions to service the peacebuilding agenda and that blurs distinctions between the
local and the international, or the military and civilian, and that is driven by a policing
rationality the imperative of which is the government of populations and spaces, is to
suggest an understanding of agency as a complex network the nodes of which might shift
from the here to the elsewhere, from the local youth centre to the NATO operatives,
depending on circumstance, competency and all other elements seen to be necessary in an
apparatus the remit of which is government. The research programme that is peacebuilding
may hence delve into the minute practices, reveal the location of nodes and the material
and symbolic capital that enable some and disable others along the network. However, the
imperative remains the government of populations and the research agenda that is
peacebuilding faces the challenge of politics, and specifically the question: what happens
to politics when government is the imperative and security its discursive and institutional
framework? The next and final section engages with the question of politics and
specifically the implications of the peacebuilding norm and its practices for conflict
resolution and diplomatic responses to conflict.
Politics and the nostalgia for conflict resolution
The above has argued that peacebuilding is a powerful norm now institutionalised into the
discourses and institutional practices of international organisations, states and nongovernmental organisations. Its imperatives, as we have seen, are the reshaping and the
redesign of societies and their institutions, thereby creating the conditions assumed to
underpin what is referred to as sustainable peace. The guarantee of sustainable peace is
hence government, specifically the government of previously ungoverned populations and
places. I want to argue that responding to conflict through the logic of government, indeed one
that is based on a policing rationality, can be said to negate the political in contexts of
conflict and contention. The priority in these responses, as shown above, is the building of
capacities, of communities and state institutions alike, so that social breakdown and future
violent conflict are prevented. As seen, the project of peacebuilding is also pedagogical in
orientation, deeming the training of populations as core to building up local capacities.
The question that has troubled peacebuilding, both as a research programme and as a
set of practices institutionalised, as seen, in various global and regional institutional
settings, is that the so-called internationals seem to dominate the agenda and might

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define problems in distinctly Western ways at the expense of local systems of knowledge
or even institutions. We saw that the UN institutions in particular, but also others such as
the much respected US Congressionally funded research organisation, the USIP, recognise
the dangers of eschewing local voices, so that peacebuilding efforts are increasingly
geared towards not only drawing on local actors, but also reinforcing these with resources.
Apart from such institutional learning, the peacebuilding research programme has also
captured the notion of hybrid agency in relation to peacebuilding.
I have so far argued that such responses to the question of agency, while contributing
significantly to highlighting the significance of local agency, seem to downplay the role
of the international as such, its normative and institutional structure. Looked at from the
perspective of the postcolonial international, peacebuilding is already a script strongly
structurated into the normative order of the international. As stated above, the weight of
the international bears heavily on peacebuilding practices on the ground, so that the
distinction between the internationals and the locals only becomes apparent in relation
to the minutiae of practices on the ground and the inevitable power imbalances that can
ensue when resource-endowed internationals land in the midst of poverty-stricken and war
weary populations. Thus even where resistance takes place, it does so in relation to the
power of international peacebuilders and their capacities to have the final say on issues, for
example, relating to the distribution of funding. As I indicate above, the question of agency
hence becomes an empirical question investigated in particular contexts of peacebuilding.
The international can therefore be seen as the repository of the norms and institutional
frameworks that can be drawn upon in the formulation of peacebuilding initiatives and in
their implementation. However, what I am suggesting here is that peacebuilding
discourses and practices have in some way reconstituted the international, becoming an
aspect of its normative structuration. Locals and internationals can now draw upon the
realm of the international in their interactions, negotiations and claims. However, this is
exactly where the politics of conflict and contention enter the frame, somehow disrupt and
disturb the governmentalising imperative of peacebuilding.
If peacebuilding has the imperative of government, and if the governmentalising
element of peacebuilding implicates both local and international discourses and
institutions, then to define conflict in political as distinct from governmental terms is to
argue that agency, the local agency we all seek to define, should be specifically defined
as political agency, one that recognises contention as its defining momentum. However,
peacebuilding, as a rationality of policing, cannot capture the political agent other than in
its own over-determining, institutional, terms. At the same time, if peacebuilding is
interpreted as making available the international in the domain of the local, then we can
visualise how the latter might well draw on the former in making distinctly political claims
locally, in relation to the state or indeed other groups or institutions.
Viewed from the perspective of the international, the focus of attention turns on the
political structure of peacebuilding. Viewed as a political structure, the focus turns on the
contestation of the actors involved, how they are organised and how they are
differentiated, in material, discursive and normative terms. What is revealing about
peacebuilding is that the actors constitutive of it transcend the local/international divide.
As stated earlier, peacebuilding is based and premised on a network of interactions that
generates effects that are then subject to evaluation. However, when the focus is on the
political, the differentiation of actors is of vital significance and can reveal much about the
legitimisation or otherwise of practices. As indicated, the governing imperative of
peacebuilding undermines the political.

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The political structure of peacebuilding comes into sharp relief when juxtaposed with
conflict resolution. The latter is premised on the equal recognition of the stakeholders
involved, so that the imperative, or even the rationality is not that of policing, but rather, that
of claim making in relation to the grievances that underpin violent conflict. Where
peacebuilding is a project of government, conflict resolution can be said to be a project of
politics. Some would argue that these practices are not mutually exclusive, that the one
enables the other to take place. If this is the case, then the question of how politics emerges in
spaces of governmentality must be rendered core to the peacebuilding research programme.
A distinguishing feature of the peacebuilding agenda as a research programme is that it
has largely been ignored by the International Relations literature, being perceived and read
as a specialised sub-field more suitably situated within a larger sub-field called Peace and
Conflict Studies. A major reason for this is that peacebuilding, as opposed to, for example,
the arms race, is not recognised as potentially transformative of the structure of the
international. Were it to be understood in this light, then peacebuilding would be
appreciated well beyond its practical, managerial agenda, and into its profound
implications for the juridical-political structure of the international and its constitution.
While most of the literature on peacebuilding is focused on the microcosm of practices on
the ground, seen from an international perspective, we can reveal the transformative,
indeed constitutive power of such practices, and in doing so unravel their underpinning
rationality as being of the colonial and not the postcolonial order.
The questions I raise here go to the heart of what it means for an International
Relations scholar to engage with practices taking place in the microcosm of local conflicts.
The methodological options are not exclusive, ranging as they do from ethnographic
studies of populations on the ground and the analysis of institutional discourses and
practices. However, the question of where ontological primacy lies has always been a core
question and one that is especially challenging when conflicts as well as institutions
transcend traditional state boundaries. Where the peacebuilding research programme
eschews questions of structure, favouring the microcosm of practices, the International
Relations scholar starts, or should start, with the specificities of the international as a
distinct location of politics. A set of practices we might label as peacebuilding might
hence be interpreted differently depending on the lens through which these practices are
viewed; the local or the international. I want to suggest that it is only once viewed through
both lenses, and where the images viewed are appreciated as being mutually imbricated,
can we approach the question of agency and its locations.
Notes on contributor
Vivienne Jabri is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at Kings
College London. Her most recent books include War and the Transformation of Global Politics
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 and 2010) and The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing
Others in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2013).