Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding

ISSN: 1750-2977 (Print) 1750-2985 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/risb20

Problematising UN-local Civil Society Engagement

in Peacebuilding: Towards Non-modern Epistemes
Through Relationality

Ignasi Torrent

To cite this article: Ignasi Torrent (2019): Problematising UN-local Civil Society Engagement in
Peacebuilding: Towards Non-modern Epistemes Through Relationality, Journal of Intervention and
Statebuilding, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2019.1580129

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2019.1580129

Published online: 21 May 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=risb20
JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING
https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2019.1580129

Problematising UN-local Civil Society Engagement in

Peacebuilding: Towards Non-modern Epistemes Through
Relationality
Ignasi Torrent
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article seeks to argue that the problematic engagement between United Nations;
United Nations peacebuilding and local civil society reveals an peacebuilding; local civil
ontological tension between different forms of conceiving of actors society; relationality; non-
and processes in peacebuilding contexts. Relationality is introduced modern epistemes
as a potential analytical breakthrough. The article problematises UN
static categorisations as failing to capture the complexity of local
civil society and imposing a highly technical form of engagement.
Unaware of these limitations, the UN seeks to instrumentalise local
civil society to engage it in peacebuilding settings. This pattern is
critically presented here as a totalising process through which the
UN attempts to secure modernity.

Introduction
One of the most challenging theoretical developments in contemporary cutting-edge
human sciences addresses the repositioning of the human in the world. In other words,
the relations between the human and the rest of the real (see Clark and Haraway 2018;
Connolly 2017; Grosz 2017; Morton 2013; Wark 2016). This enterprise has noticeably
been rooted in the ontological exploration of beings, both human and non-human,
living and non-living, and in unveiling the circumstantial relations of beings as their
prime processual constituencies (see Emirayber 1997; Latour 2005). This relational turn,
based on the work of philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Hanna Arendt and
Bruno Latour, has re-emerged in contemporary academia alongside the affirmation of
the Anthropocene geological age, whose devastating effects on the planet are challenging
the hierarchical relations of earthly beings. In the potential advent of extinction, humans,
spiders, rocks and dreams face the same possibility of disappearance, thus questioning the
overarching modern paradigm of human exceptionalism.
While these theoretical developments fall short of practical materialisation in the every-
day life of people, this article elucidates the potential of relationality to enhance the under-
standing of complex realities as for instance peacebuilding settings. In vein with the
peacebuilding relational accounts presented below, major international agencies such
as the United Nations (UN) have been gradually replacing the hardcore problem-solving
approach, based on the identification of cause-effect social relations with the linear

CONTACT Ignasi Torrent ignasi.torrent@gmail.com

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 I. TORRENT

functioning of Newtonian mechanics, by accepting, affirming and internalising that the

context in which humans live is vague, complex and often unintelligible to our under-
standing.1 Through examining the UN peacebuilding endeavour to engage local civil
society in war-torn countries, this article seeks to critically discuss first, the failure of
static and reductionist categorizations, still persistent in the UN conceptual framework,
in meeting field realities; second, a conceptualisation sensitive to the relational condition-
ality of beings to potentially free the never-ending sense of anxiety of UN peacebuilders;
and, third, that by not paying attention to the limitations of the linear problem-solving
approach, the UN is, purposely or not, activating mechanisms that perpetuate a
modern, liberal and linear form of progress, thus preventing alternative earthly encoun-
ters, stories and epistemes from emerging.
The local civil society engagement in peacebuilding settings has been a major chal-
lenge for the UN over the last two decades (see AGE 2015; UN General Assembly 2004;
UN General Assembly 2005a; UN General Assembly and Security Council 2000; UN
General Assembly and Security Council 2015). Seeking to broaden legitimacy and effec-
tiveness in peacebuilding engagements by including and prioritising the interests of
local civil society, the UN peacebuilding apparatus has gradually turned the highly
liberal, top-down and externally-led engagements from the late 1990s and early 2000s
into bottom-up, context-sensitive processes. In support of this shift, Arnault (2014)
argues that peace processes led by international organisations cannot thrive unless
they are able to generate a critical mass of domestic legitimacy. Similarly, Street, Mollet,
and Smith (2008) comment that the consensus over peacebuilding priorities needs to
be an inclusive process in which civil society plays a critical role. However, despite
efforts by policy-makers and academics towards centring the peacebuilding process on
‘the locals’, externally-led engagements are increasingly becoming protracted and real
self-government remains deferred (Bargués-Pedreny 2018; see also Philipsen 2014; Ran-
dazzo 2017).
Numerous scholars have rethought and criticised international policy attempts at
peacebuilding, questioning why these attempts have had rather limited results in
turning externally-led peacebuilding processes into bottom-up processes in which field-
based local actors adopt a central role.2 This article further develops this discussion by
arguing that the UN’s limited results engaging local civil society in peacebuilding contexts
reveals a deep-rooted tension based on a narrow conceptualisation of actors and pro-
cesses in war-torn realities. Internalising the relational condition of beings is presented
as a potential breakthrough in the peacebuilding policy domain, not in the sense of reveal-
ing a solution but instead through reconsidering the expectations of these interventions
(see Brigg 2013). In addition, the article addresses the implications of the UN disregarding
this ontological turn, including the instrumentalization of local civil society and the projec-
tion of the UN modern and linear understanding of reality over conflict-affected contexts,
defined as a totalising process.
To shed light on these arguments, the article examines the UN’s attempts to engage
local civil society in peacebuilding settings in Sierra Leone, Burundi and the Central
African Republic (CAR). The empirical results stem from a previous comparative analysis
of engagements led by the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and the new Peacebuild-
ing Architecture (PBA). Specifically, it develops comparative content analysis of policy
papers and reports, from the UN and external sources, as well as a comparative discursive
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 3

analysis of interviews with UN officers and members of local civil society. The fieldwork
was conducted during two periods, from May to September 2016 in Freetown (Sierra
Leone) and from December 2016 to April 2017 in New York City (USA). Experts on
Burundi and the CAR were interviewed via skype.
The article is organised into four sections. The first section introduces a brief theoretical
foreword to frame the emergence of the relational turn in critical peacebuilding literature.
The second section examines the UN’s narrow conceptualisation of local civil society in
peacebuilding contexts and argues for the potential of an ontological approach based
on relationality, namely the interactions and ex-changes of stakeholders with their circum-
stantial encounters. The third section analyses how the limited results of the highly tech-
nical and materialised form of engagement through which the UN peacebuilding
apparatus seeks to engage local civil society further illustrates this static conceptualisation.
The fourth part of the article examines how the UN, unaware of the potential of the rela-
tional ontological turn, seeks to overcome its poor achievements by moulding and instru-
mentalising local civil society to fit it into the liberal parameters of the organisation. This is
critically discussed as a totalising pattern through which the UN perpetuates linear stories
of progress in conflict-affected societies and prevents non-modern epistemes from
thriving.

A theoretical foreword: the relational turn in the critical peacebuilding

debate
The ontological assumption for which relations and interactions between humans, non-
humans and non-living objects are constitutive parts of themselves has origins in conti-
nental philosophy from the early twentieth century which openly questioned the Carte-
sian subject-object divide. Heidegger elucidates the implication of questioning this
dualist ontology: the human subject is no longer a sine qua non condition for the existence
of objects. His masterpiece Being and Time became one of the first attempts to theorise the
possibility of the existence of things-in-itself (da-sein, in German), regardless of the exist-
ence of human beings (Heidegger 1993, 53). Whitehead (1985) elaborates on this critique
by exposing that Kantian and Hegelian idealism, based on the thought-matter binary, fail
to explain the world as it is. Bogost (2012), highly influenced by these thinkers, points out
that modern empiricism, founded on a Humean form of knowledge production, faces a
problem of access to things, beings, reality (see also Harman 2018). For Kant, the world
emerges from the subject; for Whitehead the subject emerges from the world. By advocat-
ing his speculative philosophy, Whitehead defines ‘actual entities’ as infinitely divisible
real beings the world is made of. In opposition to the Aristotelian principle of ‘primary sub-
stance’, or Leibnitzian monism, which presupposes that a subject finds an eternal primary
data, for Whitehead atomism is the final causation of ‘actual entities’. The ontological prin-
ciple is that an ‘actual entity’ is a composite (term later used by Haraway), meaning that
every item in the universe is constituent of any ‘actual entity’ (hereinafter, beings, things
or actors). Therefore, relations and interactions precede the existence of ‘actual entities’
(Whitehead 1985, 24, 148, 312). In other words, the process of becoming is intrinsically
tied to the relational conditionality of beings.
In the current contemporary era, Bruno Latour is one of the proponents that most pro-
minently has led the theoretical developments of a non-human form of agency and the
4 I. TORRENT

implications of the interconnectedness between humans, non-humans and objects. This

philosopher, often associated with the rise of new materialism, contends that non-
human objects are actors too and stresses that the ontology of these actors is recognised
through the interactions, associations and ties with each other (Latour 2005). Coole (2013,
452), reflecting the ethos of new materialism, depicts a world in which interactions
produce self-organising processes of change and emergence revealing an ontology of
becoming, which gives primacy to process.
The unveiling of the relational conditionality of beings on the planet has been increas-
ingly pushed forward by the contemporary debate on the Anthropocene, in which the
same Latour takes a notorious part. Over the last ten years, a vast number of scholars
have affirmed the Anthropocene geological age (see Crutzen 2002; Emmanuel 2007;
Simil 2013; Worm et al. 2006), ‘the epoch in which human disturbance outranks other geo-
logical forces’ (Tsing 2015, 19). The affirmation of the Anthropocene questions the viability
of the hierarchical relation on which human beings have based their understanding of pro-
gress: humans have always conceived of the world as if it was theirs, positioning them-
selves at the top of the hierarchy of life. This form of progress has been reduced to
using up not only natural resources but also non-human living species to exacerbated
levels. The struggle for survival that humans, non-humans and objects face in the Anthro-
pocene has stirred a growing number of scholars to question the essentialised and domi-
nant ontological position of the human being in the world, the pillar of the 300-year
project of modernity (see Morton 2013). Following Bryant’s (2011, 44) flat ontology,
‘humans are no longer monarchs of being, but are instead among beings, entangled in
beings, and implicated in other beings’.
This line of argument, which diminishes human agentic capacities (see Bennett 2010),
might contribute to catalyse a new lens through which to look at contemporary peace-
building processes. Peace, security, violence, conflict and war were never solely human
processes (see Cudworth and Hobden 2015). In most circumstance they might indeed be
triggered by human action, but the ongoing transformation of these societal processes
responds to the material conditions in which they are framed. In a research masterpiece
on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Weizman (2017) argues through the concept ‘politics
in matter’ that the built environment, the massive infrastructural systems and the
environmental conditions, of a human or non-human origin, are not just the background
of conflict. Rather, they constitute a fundamentally political space that enables and
enacts processes of repression and domination. Accordingly, going beyond-the-
human and looking into how materialist implications shape human processes seems
necessary to enhance the capture and understanding of actors and their relations in
war-torn scenarios.3
The empirical observations and critical reflections exposed in the following sections do
not speak to how relations between humans and matter have constrained the peacebuild-
ing processes in Sierra Leone, Burundi and the Central African Republic. Instead, the
empirics essentially shed light on the ontological challenges that prevent the UN peace-
building architecture from succeeding in its linear and modern pursuit of the establish-
ment of lasting peace. In addition, the new materialist account is brought on board to
argue that undermining the analysis from the human perspective might contribute to a
growing sensitivity to different forms of thinking and perceiving of peacebuilding settings,
which do not necessarily reproduce a teleological historical narrative in which the human
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 5

is the starring role. This is the reason why these beyond-the-human approaches are often
tightly intertwined with decoloniality and indigenous literature, as these forms of being in
the planet do not necessarily deterministically reproduce a human-centred, modern, linear
and liberal form of progress (see Tucker 2018). Beyond post-structuralism, which still repro-
duces the modern dualist ontology (subject/object, external/internal, liberal/local), new
materialism undoes human-centred dualism and focuses on the actual entanglement of
phenomena that have historically been conceptualised as distinct (Coole 2013, 454).
As exposed above, new materialist ontology holds that beings, human and non-human,
stem from non-linear relationality. Although not necessarily considering the non-human
dimension explicitly, in critical peacebuilding debates certain authors have emphasised
how suitable it is to focus on relations, interactions and ex-changes between actors and
processes in conflict-affected contexts.4 Morgan Brigg, whose effort to introduce the rela-
tional turn in the peacebuilding debate is notorious, elucidates:
Historically, social analyses have drawn upon classical Newtonian understandings of the world,
relying upon industrial and mechanical metaphors to develop linear, cause-and-effect under-
standings of social processes, including for influencing and programming social change. These
understandings are increasingly complemented and challenged by ideas of complexity, net-
works, self-organising systems, and emergence- ideas that emphasise fluidity, focus on local-
level interaction among agents within systems, and recognise that small inputs to a system
can have disproportionately large effects and vice versa (Brigg 2013, 14).

Brigg (2013) argues that these scholarly developments embrace a flatter ontology in
which hierarchy is less important than openness and change. In the extension of this
flatter ontology humans lose their privileged status as surveyors of the world, thus accent-
uating the critique towards the human-object divide. He even acknowledges some
measure of agency for non-human objects. Concerning the operationalisation of this rela-
tional sensibility in peacebuilding contexts, Brigg displays a sense of ambivalence. While
acknowledging the potential of this approach to ‘dehierarchise’ power relations
between stakeholders through the internalisation of a flatter ontology, he also warns
about the risks of being sensitive and receptive to the unintended effects of non-
human driven interactions, giving up the possibility of guiding the construction of
peace and opening up space for domination by the powerful in a chaotic context. More
recently, from an analysis of agents and processes in a micro-case study of Australian
Aboriginals, Brigg (2018, 4) defines relationality as giving greater conceptual importance
to relations over entities by attending to the effects of interactions and ex-changes. Like
Whitehead, he stresses that relations bring entities and things into beings. Accordingly,
the prime position of a peacebuilder in a relational approach is the acknowledgment of
the absence of authority and capacity of the individual to know the world over the recipi-
ent of peacebuilding, as that knowledge will be the product of an ex-change and inter-
action. Brigg therefore emphasises the need to recognise other forms of thinking, doing
and knowing as constituencies of our forms of thinking, doing and knowing.
In the following section, I seek to argue the limitations of the UN static and narrow con-
ceptualisation of local civil society in peacebuilding contexts and how a relational
approach has potential to overcome these limitations, not by presenting a magic solution,
but by exposing an alternative set of expectations to those of the linear, technical
problem-solving approach.
6 I. TORRENT

Conceptualising local civil society in peacebuilding settings: from

objectification to relationality
Civil society has been an increasingly contested concept since its expansion in the Western
world, particularly in the context of the May 1968 student movements, the mobilizations
against the Vietnam War in the 1970s and the opposition movements during the 1980s in
Eastern and Central European communist regimes. Yet, still nowadays, the only consensus
concerning the definition of civil society is its ‘ambiguity’ (see Williams and Young 2012;
Young 1994). Throughout the 1990s civil society became associated with a social sphere
composed of active citizens resisting authoritarian political systems, even precipitating
the fall of the Second World and contributing to building liberal democracies in most
former Soviet countries. In that context, civil society was often theorised as a universalis-
ing, liberal and cosmopolitan project and presented as a sine qua non condition for the
establishment of a democratic and peaceful world (Kaldor 2003; Lidén 2009). Contrary
to this liberal cosmopolitan belief of a global civil society as a constitutive actor of the
liberal peacebuilding project, some criticised the problems of exclusion that these univer-
salising endeavours pose (Chandler 2004). The reality of the non-Western war-torn
societies examined in this article shows how this externally-driven peacebuilding
project might be resisted by local civil society, often deemed by external actors as
‘uncivil society’ (Boyd 2004) or ‘less-civil society’ (Mac Ginty 2011; see also Íñiguez de
Heredia 2012).
In the UN conceptual framework, civil society was introduced during the World Summit
on Social Development in 1995 (UN General Assembly 1995), evolving over time from a
consulting to implementing actor (Shepherd 2015, 904). Most recently, the UN peacebuild-
ing apparatus has led the empowerment of local civil society as a key player in war-torn
societies. The 2015 report ‘The Challenge of Sustaining Peace’ argues that ‘partnering
with (…) the civil society is essential to making peace sustainable’ (AGE 2015, Art. 128).
Similarly, the 2015 final report from the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Oper-
ations (HIPPO) reinforced that UN missions should seek objective feedback from local
and international civil society experts to improve their impact (UN General Assembly
and Security Council 2015).
Since the mid-2000s, the UN has reified these efforts on the ground mostly through the
new PBA. The PBA is composed of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), an intergovern-
mental advisory body which operates with the assistance of the Peacebuilding Support
Office (PBSO) and the Peacebuilding Fund (PBF). According to the national (or local) own-
ership principle, which is an essential feature of UN peacebuilding processes, ‘it is the citi-
zens of the countries where peacebuilding is underway, with support from their
governments, who assume the responsibility for laying the foundations of lasting
peace’ (Peacebuilding Support Office 2010, 5). Therefore, inclusivity and engagement
are at the core of PBA nature. To date, there are six countries in the PBC agenda, including
Sierra Leone, Burundi, Liberia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and the CAR.
In the countries examined in this article, civil society organisations have often ques-
tioned the PBC for failing to comprehensively engage local civil society because it fails
to conceptualise the very nature of this host stakeholder. As stressed in an external
report (Action Aid et al. 2007), the urban and ethnic biases are usually presented by
civil society representatives as well as by critical voices within the UN as the expression
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 7

of this inaccurate conceptualisation (also Iro 2009). For example, in Sierra Leone, the PBF
National Steering Committee’s selection of two civil society representatives, one from the
West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) and another from the Mano River
Women’s Network for Peace, was highly controversial. Some argued that those chosen
were primarily urban-based actors, not representative of the grass-roots level, and that
they had been hand-picked by the Government. In response, civil society agreed to estab-
lish the Civil Society Peacebuilding Engagement Committee, a 19-member committee
responsible for monitoring and evaluating PBF impact. However, as the same report
observes, the methods of this committee of engaging with the PBC remained highly
vague and unclear. Reinforcing the existence of this urban bias, a former MINUSCA
officer (French acronym for United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization
Mission in the Central African Republic) also commented that, beyond Bangui, external
agencies barely exist (Anonymous III. [2016, June 13]. Skype interview). In addition,
some have also critiqued that in Burundi the Tutsi local community was prioritised over
Hutu-led local civil society organisations by the PBA (Action Aid et al. 2007). Therefore,
in these cases, failure to engage partly responds to urban and ethnic biases. In sum, the
UN narrow and biased approach to capture civil society results in the exclusion of a
large part of local civil society from the peacebuilding process including, for example,
rural areas, less organised civil society, undermined ethnic groups, etc. This is a matter
of perceptual ontological limits that cannot transcend a formal barrier.
Civil society is thus perceived by the UN as an isolated stakeholder from the conflict-
affected context that can be targeted and engaged with for the success of the peacebuild-
ing context. Vogel has critically conceptualised this biased picture of local civil society by
international agencies:
Peace-oriented civil society describes the type of civil society that attempts to support an
inclusive settlement of a conflict. International NGOs and donors tend to have ‘peace-
oriented civil society’ in mind when referring to civil society in peacebuilding and conflict
resolution. This group includes, as the name suggests, those citizens that actively engage
in resolving the conflict in a multitude of forms; but it spells out the underlying conjecture
of the peace cause that has been implicit in many assumptions made about ‘civil society’.
(Vogel 2016, 475)

In light of the limited results exposed above, the image of a unique, objectifiable and
homogenous form of civil society seems, at minimum, questionable. A recurring argument,
noticeably inclined towards postcolonial and post-structuralist critiques, reads that the ca-
tegorisation and conceptualisation by external actors such as the UN do not meet the
complexities of peacebuilding contexts. Literally, the head office of a Freetown-based
NGO expressed that the UN failed to identify and address the complex and diverse
nature of local civil society (Anonymous IV. [2016, August 1]. Personal interview. Freetown).
Paffenholz (2015) argues that ‘the external’ and ‘the local’ tend to be inappropriately con-
structed as binary opposites, which oversimplifies the nature of sources of power interact-
ing in the whole peacebuilding spectrum. There is the perspective that this position has
essentialised, and therefore accentuated, the difference and the hierarchy between
Western intervenors and the localised ‘Other’. Beyond this, Sabaratnam (2013) argues
that the externally-led empowerment of local actors reproduces the Western division
between ‘the liberal’ and a culturally different ‘local’.
8 I. TORRENT

How can we then conceptualise local civil society otherwise? Different to post-structur-
alism, ‘new materialism does not politically contest or conceptually problematise human
autonomy and its political artifice of the state or propose network governance as an
alternative; it simply points to reality’ (Schmidt 2013, 181).5 The ‘dehierarchised’ relational
scenario of earthly beings exposed in this first section enables us to approach local civil
society, in Latourian terminology a ‘collective actor’ (Latour 2005), on the basis of its cir-
cumstantial processes, interactions and ex-changes. Contrary to providing static, finite and
limited categorisations, the relational sensibility has been presented above as focusing on
the effects of uncertain and entangled interactions between things. Therefore, as opposed
to ontologically uncovering the essence of local civil society, and of any other actor and
process in a given context, I intend to question the taken for granted ontological assump-
tion that things can be separately framed in fixed categories. Instead, the relational
account unveils the process of becoming of local civil society, and of any other actor, as
the result of unexpected interactions and ex-changes with other actors and processes
such as the UN, which likewise come to existence through their relational condition. In
this regard, the UN peacebuilding apparatus and local civil society are deemed to be
mutually created. In other words, ontologically heterogenous beings and processes
come to existence through the relational conditionality of all things in the world. Accord-
ingly, the very first assumption used to conceptualise local civil society is its non-essentia-
lised character. Because of this, the second assumption invokes the non-objectifiable
nature of this collective actor and therefore the perpetual fruitless effort to externally
engage it in any materialised form. Local civil society cannot be grasped through
modern mechanisms of categorisation. ‘What phenomena [ontologically] are cannot be
reduced to how they appear for any given apparatus of reception, technological or biologi-
cal [for example, the UN]. This is why empiricism can never exhaust the phenomena’
(Grant 2008, 145). Third, in vein with Whitehead and more recently Haraway, relationality
as a constitutive part of ‘things’ indicates that beings, human and non-human, compose
each other (through interaction). Haraway defines ‘com-post’ and ‘becoming-with’ as
concepts that prominently illustrate this relational and entangled conditionality. Inocu-
lated against human exceptionalism, this author identifies the nature of all Earthly critters,
human and not, with compost beings, as they ‘are at stake in each other in every mixing
and turning of the terran compost pile (…). Critters compose and decompose each other,
in every scale and register of time and stuff (…). Critters are in each other’s presence’
(Haraway 2016, 97). Things become-with, not become, as they give each other existence.
In sum, local civil society, as just one more actor in the whole realm of ‘actual entities’, is
presented here as a non-essentialised and non-objectifiable collective actor whose very
nature stems from processual interactions with other processes and actors. What ulti-
mately sets the conceptualisation of local civil society is not a limited ontological
definition, but the nature of the countless, entangled interactions from which it stems.
They include easy-to-figure-out encounters between policy-makers, UN peacebuilders,
governmental officers, non-governmental representatives, fundraisers, local community
members, etc. as well as less imaginable interactions such as the impact produced by
the material environment and the infrastructure which they inhabit, the conditions of
the fungible material used to fulfil their goals, the available resources to unfold their strat-
egies, or even the dominant narratives operating in their societies. All these ex-changes
enable the emergence of local civil society, which becomes the product of these non-
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 9

linear and entangled interactions between actors and processes. The following section
argues that the highly technical and embodied mechanisms through which the UN
seeks to engage local civil society in peacebuilding contexts further illustrates the limits
of the UN’s narrow and static categorisation.

The limits of a technical and materialised form of engagement

The final report of the Panel of Eminent Persons on UN-Civil Society Relations (2000–2004),
known as the Cardoso Report, received harsh criticism from the NGO community, which
claimed an underestimation of the role of civil society in the UN framework (see UN
General Assembly 2004). In the post-Cardoso report context, different stakeholders
stressed in a UN Security Council debate the positive key role which civil society has
played in building peace in countries emerging from conflict (UN Security Council
2004). Appreciating this, the new PBA has attempted to make substantial efforts to
include civil society in the framework of political and peacebuilding post-conflict oper-
ations. In its founding resolutions, the PBC is mandated among other functions, to
serve as a platform to convene all relevant actors within and outside the United Nations,
including (…) civil society in order to provide recommendations and information to
improve their coordination, to develop and share good practices in peacebuilding, including
on institution-building, and to ensure predictable financing to peacebuilding. (UN General
Assembly 2005b, Art. 98)

In addition to this, HIPPO and AGE reports point out the reasons why and how the inclusion
of these civil society actors contributes to peace. First, by bringing civil society closer to the
process, the UN can have a more accurate picture of the local context, strengthening
aspects such as early warning mechanisms. Second, the UN considers that the participation
of local women civil society organisations in post-conflict engagements enhances pro-
cesses such as conflict mitigation and prevention, recovery and reconciliation. Third, the
reports also document that women and religious leaders can play a positive role in counter-
ing the emergence of violent extremism, particularly amongst youth. Finally, civil society
agents can have a positive influence in eradicating peace-disrupting challenges such as
corruption (see AGE 2015; UN General Assembly and Security Council 2015).
To illustrate these efforts, the following lines unpack different mechanisms that the PBC
has designed and operationalised to engage local civil society in Sierra Leone, Burundi and
the Central African Republic. Examining the case of Sierra Leone in detail, there are numer-
ous initiatives the PBA has promoted to incorporate civil society further into the process.
For example, the PBA sought active participation of local civil society in the PBF National
Steering Committee, established to collectively coordinate a national action plan process
and development, as well as the joint progress report on the Government-led Agenda for
Change (2008–2012) and the successor Agenda for Prosperity (2017). Moreover, since
2007, the PBA also supported civil society engagement in the reconciliation process, par-
ticularly in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Bishop Joseph
Humper of the United Methodist Church in Sierra Leone (Bishop Joseph Humper. [2016,
July 23]. Personal interview. Freetown).
In the Burundian case, the top two PBA-supported initiatives which served to bring civil
society closer to the peacebuilding process were the Cadre de Dialogue et Concertation, a
10 I. TORRENT

platform to institutionalise dialogue mechanisms and further unite the Government and
civil society, and the Justice de Proximité, an initiative to bring civil society closer to the
justice system. In addition, the PBA supported the creation of a Tripartite Steering Commit-
tee, a unique platform tasked with addressing the Burundian peacebuilding process, com-
posed of the government, the UN and civil society. The inclusion of civil society in the
design of the new Land Code, the Libre Blanc and the Defence Review was also acknowl-
edged by various commentators. Furthermore, the Partners Coordination Group, estab-
lished in Burundi in 2007 by the government and its partners, consisted of a
mechanism to institutionalise a framework for dialogue. One of the components of this
mechanism was the creation of strategic forums for discussion, which were spaces for
debate which included civil society (UN Peacebuilding Commission 2007). A PBC review
also stressed the impact of a co-promoted ‘naming and shaming’ campaign by BINUB
(French acronym for United Nations Integrated Office in Burundi), the civil society and
the international community in diverting attention from the public on charges of
torture during the elections and afterwards (UN Peacebuilding Commission 2009a). In
an attempt to bridge synergies, the PBC promoted in Sierra Leone and Burundi a south-
south learning process in which Sierra Leonean civil society representatives and election
officials engaged in structured dialogue about the electoral processes with their Burundian
counter-parts, aimed to enhance the electoral contexts of 2007 and 2010, respectively
(Jenkins 2010).
In the case of the CAR, which was the first country in the PBC agenda to include an
‘inclusive approach’ as a prime principle, the Strategic Framework for Peacebuilding
established that the follow-up and coordination committee would be composed,
among other stakeholders, of two civil society representatives (see UN Peacebuilding
Commission 2009b). Another PBA-supported initiative in which civil society was widely
recognised to be involved was the voluntary partnership agreement, created by the Gov-
ernment and the European Union to deal with issues such as forest law enforcement, gov-
ernance and trade timber products.
In light of these examples, it seems that the UN peacebuilding system conceives the
engagement of local civil society as necessarily materialised through formal and technical
spaces and processes, as seen, for instance, in the above mentioned PBF National Steering
Committees, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the C. de Dialogue et Concertation,
Partner Coordination Groups, Strategic Frameworks for Peacebuilding, amongst others.
When these formal channels of interaction cannot be established, engagement
becomes rather unfeasible. In other words, the lack of technical, organisational and
bureaucratic capacity is perceived by the PBA as well as external stakeholders as a hin-
drance for civil society engagement in the peacebuilding process. Supporting this argu-
ment, Graben and Fitz-Gerald (2013) argued that the institutionalisation and
standardisation of spaces or programmes for engagement contribute to the inclusion of
local civil society in the UN-led peacebuilding contexts.
Despite all these policy developments, field efforts in the frame of peacebuilding
engagements led by the UN have had rather limited results in empowering and genuinely
engaging local civil society for the success of peacebuilding processes (see Weiss 2016).
On top of this, conflict has relapsed in UN assisted countries, as the cases of Burundi
and the Central African Republic show. Numerous interviewees shed light on this limit-
ation: the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone,
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 11

Bishop Joseph Humper, highlighted how the PBC failed to make itself attractive to and
inclusive of locals:
The PBC merely used the locals to receive inputs from the field, as a source of information on
the ground level. But they should have involved them in the sense that they are part and
parcel of the peace mission. You cannot just arrive and say: ‘this is the peace commission’.
It seems one more different body, with its own goals, that come and does things its own
way. (Bishop Joseph Humper. [2016, July 23]. Personal interview. Freetown)

This account expresses disappointment in the UN failure to truly consider Sierra Leonean
local civil society as a fundamental aspect in the process. Additionally, the head office of
Fambul Tok, a local NGO, defined the PBC mandate as narrow and not visible, claiming it
dealt mostly with state actors, leaving minimal space for others (Anonymous VIII. [2016,
July 27]. Personal interview. Freetown); the Country Director of Search for Common
Ground highlighted the UN-civil society relationship as still presenting a challenge, as
power relations continue to be uneven (Anonymous XIX. [2016, July 7]. Personal inter-
view. Freetown); a former Burundian Director of Doctors of the World expressed that,
although the PBC tried to engage Burundian civil society, people were ultimately disap-
pointed with the UN as they viewed the organisation as bending under pressure from
the government (Anonymous I. [2016, September 23]. Skype interview); and as an inde-
pendent consultant at the European Centre for Development Policy Management put
it, civil society in the CAR was frustrated due to a lack of influence in decision-making.
She clarified,
In that meeting I attended of the PBC, civil society was quite frustrated because they were
seen as sort of being co-opted just to be informed about decisions. And to sort of say ‘Yes,
we did inform civil society’. They were present in this meeting, to sort of ticking the box.
(Anonymous II. [2016, March 16]. Skype interview)

In an attempt to make sense of this failure, the former DPA chief in the CAR stated in an
interview:
Civil society in CAR is very difficult to work with, they are very weak (…) because they don’t
have the capacity, because they don’t know what it is to be civil society, they lack the culture
of being an organised civil society (…). They haven’t reached that level of maturity yet, so
there is a lot that needs to be done in terms of capacity building of civil society. (Anonymous
VI. [2017, January 17]. Personal interview. New York City)

Thus, the UN perceives engagement with local civil society as tightly linked to technical
and organisational capacity. In light of the accounts above, one might conclude that,
first, the technical capacity that the UN-led engagement demands could never be met
by an ill-prepared war-torn local civil society and, second, that the PBC never made a
real effort to assist this local civil society in overcoming these technical barriers.
For the PBC, then, local civil society either gets engaged fitting the technical parameters
of the UN peacebuilding system or it does not fit them and remains left out. In this vein,
Action Aid et al. (2007) reported that the PBA-civil society relationship often deteriorates
over time because the PBC announces meetings at very short notice, hindering a wide
consultation with civil society, as they often depend on the timing of projects and there-
fore they do not have the institutional capacity to engage in protracted or periodic policy
discussions. As Does (2013, 7) argues, the UN internal system does not provide sound
12 I. TORRENT

formal mechanisms of engagement such as protocols, guidelines or channels of communi-

cation to consult and consolidate a sound relationship with local peacebuilding actors. The
UN is therefore restricting the engagement of local civil society in the peacebuilding
process to a particular civil society which can fulfil the highly technical requirements
included in their method of engagement. Anything that cannot fulfil these premises is
not engaged with.
The understanding of a materialised form of engagement through technical mechan-
isms illustrates again the narrow conceptualisation of local civil society as an isolated
and objectifiable element that can be externally engaged in an embodied process. The
UN seems to be an inherently exclusive wholeness that has formal requirements for
foreigners to be included in the system. Some authors have elaborated on modern homo-
geneous systems that base their existence on the absorption of external parts that will
have to adapt to the parameters of the whole in order to be engaged. As Haraway
(2007, 8) puts it, the parts are caught by the ‘seductions of the organic wholeness
through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity’. Similarly,
the UN peacebuilding apparatus seeks to absorb and add up in the entirety of its homo-
genised nature any incoming element from the outside.
Any attempt of engagement based on grasping local civil society as an objectified actor
through a technical and materialised form of engagement would result as fruitless. As
Vogel (2016) points out, far from rethinking this ontological limitation, seeking different
forms of seeing these contexts and reconsidering the expectations from interventions
in their engagement with local actors, international interveners tend to reinforce their
top-down approach from below rather than encouraging local alternatives. The following
section critically reflects upon the UN reaction to the limited results of engaging with local
civil society in peacebuilding settings as well as the ontological implications for the future
of actors and processes in war-torn countries.

Totalising the modern episteme through the instrumentalisation of local

civil society
Previous sections have argued that the limited engagement of local civil society in UN-led
peacebuilding settings responds to, first, the UN’s static and narrow conceptualisation of
local civil society and, second, a highly technical and materialised form of engagement.
The UN peacebuilding system, far from reflecting on these limitations and exploring
new forms of thinking about peacebuilding settings, seeks to blame, instrumentalise
and mould this local civil society so that it can eventually be engaged with. This section
illustrates this lack of self-reflection and critically reflects upon this instrumentalization
as a totalising attempt, meaning that the UN, unaware of and disinterested in alternatives,
perpetuates its own narrow, linear and modern perception of conflict affected-societies.
Totalising is thus a process associated with the capacity of an actor to produce a homogen-
ised episteme and supress different forms of knowing, thinking and doing. Wark (2016,
131) recalls on Feyerabend’s criticism towards totalising and controlling discourses. He
defines totality as the result of a top-down causality, countering the bottom-up collabora-
tive understanding of the (human) being in the Anthropocene, which refuses the affirma-
tion of linear and modern causal processes as a valid formula of understanding earthly
encounters.
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 13

The UN tends to delegitimise that part of local civil society which cannot be engaged
with in the peacebuilding setting. The discredit, weakness, division and poor organisation
of local civil society in post-conflict contexts has been repeatedly used by the UN as jus-
tification for its limited results. As the 2015 AGE report (2015, 22) states,
civil society has a critical role to play. But in societies emerging from conflict, civil society is
rarely well organised in its capacity to articulate demands. Indeed, it too may be divided,
diverse and fragile. And it will likely be dominated by elites, either from within diasporas or
from within the country, who are generally more ‘fluent’ in the discourse of international
development and diplomacy. (see also Micinski 2016)

On more than one occasion, UN peacebuilding officers, including a former PBSO officer and
a former chief of DPA for the CAR, stressed that civil society is often so highly politicised
(Anonymous V. [2016, July 28]. Skype interview) and weak (Anonymous VI. [2017, January
17]. Personal interview. New York City) that, first, it is a difficult actor to work with and,
second, it makes it difficult for the UN to approach it. To the UN, this makes it more likely
for local peacebuilding actors to be manipulated by local elites. The former PBSO officer
for the CAR adds that whenever a civil society-based organisation is strong enough to
engage with the UN, they are often too close to the government and, therefore, too politi-
cised (Anonymous VI. [2017, January 17]. Personal interview. New York City). In turn, this has
key implications for the ability of civil society to exhibit impartiality, independence and to
represent itself when engaging in post-conflict processes. As an expert on Burundi commen-
ted, one of the key reasons for this lack of impartiality is that civil society was motivated by
remuneration (Anonymous VII. [2016, March 14]. Skype interview).
In a report from 2011, the PBC claimed that civil society representatives had expressed
dissatisfaction that their priorities had not been heeded when deciding PBF’s priority pro-
jects in the CAR. However, these complaints were responded to by the UN by highlighting
the fact that they were not organised and lacked capacity to unite their complaints into
one voice (UN Peacebuilding Commission 2011). To the eyes of the organisation, a hier-
archical and exclusive dichotomy then arises: the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ civil society (see
Boyd 2004; Mac Ginty 2011). It seems that, for the UN, there is a sort of civil society that
has inherent elements which prevent it from being part of the UN peacebuilding
system. This limited engagement in peacebuilding settings is conceived of as ‘their’
failure (‘their’ weakness, ‘their’ politicisation, etc.) but never through a reflection on the
perceptual ontological limits constrained by the narrow and static conceptualisation
and formal and materialised form of engagement described above.
As exposed in previous sections, a large part of local civil society does not fit UN
material and embodied conventions precisely because of their non-essentialised and
unobjectifiable nature. The UN, purposely or not, does not pay attention to alternative
forms of knowing and thinking about local civil society. Instead, the UN peacebuilding
apparatus seeks to mould local civil society so that it can eventually be engaged with in
numerous programmes, including the supervision of security-oriented reforms, political
dialogue, electoral processes, good governance, equitable access to justice, transitional
justice mechanisms, promotion of human rights, gender issues, socio-economic recovery
and development. The liberal democratic character of these projects unambiguously
reveals a willingness to perpetuate a modern liberal story in conflict-affected societies.
As Vogel (2016, 473) asserts, ‘international support steers civil society discourses and
14 I. TORRENT

fosters the adoption of global agendas, thus making civil society part of a transnational
governance process rather than a counter-voice to it’. This totalising behaviour of the
UN peacebuilding setting towards local civil society in these war-torn countries resonates
with Morton’s (2013, 19) assumption that ‘modernity banks on certain forms of ontology
and epistemology to secure its coordinates’. The UN peacebuilding apparatus intends to
mould and totalise the complexity of local civil society so that it fits the global agenda and
becomes engaged in a liberal, linear and modern episteme.
This UN totalising practice ultimately prevents alternative stories from coming true. The
ontological limitations for conceptualising of local civil society and the highly technical
processes for engagement, as well as the attempts to instrumentalise local civil society,
reflect the inability and the lack of willingness of the organisation to allow non-modern,
non-liberal and non-linear encounters to emerge. The intention here is not to prescribe
how the UN and policy makers can better engage with local civil society. Instead, I want
to argue for the possibility of freeing peacebuilders from unreachable goal-oriented strat-
egies and deterministic forms of intervention that have resulted in a generalised anxiety
for both external agents and recipients due to stagnation and limited results. In a notor-
ious book reflecting upon new materialist forms of thinking, Grosz (2011, 78) shows in her
reading of Deleuze, that ‘problems -the problem of gravity, of living with others, of mor-
tality, of the weather- have no solutions, only ways of living with problems’. Internalising
the possibility of not having to solve problems and instead thinking ways of living with
them questions the modern understanding of a unique and linear form of progress.
From the exposed relational account above, the goal of the UN peacebuilding apparatus
would never be to engage with local civil society in a materialised form, but to be open to
the complex and uncertain interactions from which local civil society emerges which in the
cases of Sierra Leone, Burundi and the CAR, as in most of conflict-affected societies,
includes affirming non-modern forms of being, such as indigenous beliefs and practices
for example. This argument, which refuses a unique anthropocentric form of progress,
highlights the necessity of imaginative engagements between human, non-human
species and objects of the planet that allow adaptive and durable entanglements. It is
not the object of this article to jump into the specifics of these non-modern forms of
being, but instead to raise awareness of the necessity to rethink them in the current
time of failure. Some scholars have elucidated non-modern frames of being, thinking
and doing, and have explored new forms of story-telling that enable creative liveable
systems radically different to worlds built on modern premises:
We learn over and over that humans are different from the rest of the living world because we
look forward -while other species, which live day to day, are thus dependent on us. As long as
we imagine that humans are made through progress, nonhumans are stuck within an imagi-
native framework too (…). We must reorient our attention (…). Making worlds is not limited to
humans (…). We are contaminated by our encounters (…). Staying alive requires liveable col-
laborations (…). We must look for histories that develop through contamination (…). Contami-
nation makes diversity (…). Why don’t we use these stories in how we know the world? One
reason is that contaminated diversity is complicated, often ugly and humbling (Tsing 2015,
21–33).

Tsing describes collaborative assemblages as open-ended gatherings in a context in

which varied species, human and non-human, survive in an ecological community. The
author remarks on the value of the contaminated diversity that stems from these
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 15

assemblages, yet she also warns that these require non-modern forms of building futures.
The UN perception of a limited engagement with local civil society in peacebuilding pro-
cesses is not a problem to be solved, but the sign of the necessity for allowing non-liberal
stories to emerge. Chandler (2018b) describes ‘hacking’ as a potential form of governance
in the times of the Anthropocene based on the awareness that the embedded relationality
of elements and processes enable the empowerment of communities to creatively turn
problems into new opportunities. This author ‘proposes a shift to 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 “from
the inside”’ (Chandler 2018a).
The policy implications of the above arguments entail the acknowledgment that unfore-
seen changes and disruptions in the field are part of the game as well as the realisation of
the human inability to know the external world as it really is and to construct a linear form of
progress. The question that arises is ‘what to do then’? How can we cope with unavoidable
complex and non-linear effects and emergences that result from processual relations? How
do we supress human suffering and achieve peace? As Richmond and Mac Ginty (2015, 184),
a useful starting point is ‘not knowing’. Beyond this, enumerating a list of prescriptions
would take peacebuilders back to the linearity of the human-centred and liberal top-
down policies. It seems that, in alignment with relational accounts, performances ought
to creatively and constructively enable and facilite the conditions for the emergence of
durable and liveable interactions and, most importantly, learning to live with their effects.

Conclusion
Through questioning and rethinking the limited results of the UN peacebuilding apparatus
in engaging local civil society in war-torn Sierra Leone, Burundi and the Central African
Republic, the article has sought to unveil the tension between a linear, unique, mechanical
and modern conception of the world and the possibility of knowing, thinking and living
differently. In their task to construct new ontological approaches of understanding the
real, Law and Urry (2004) affirm that there is no single world, but only contingent,
context-dependent and emerging realities. In this regard, the relational ontological turn
has been presented in previous sections as a suitable formula to capturing the complexity,
vagueness and uncertainty of the world, described as the result of entangled and ‘dehier-
archised’ interactions and ex-changes between humans, non-humans and objects.
The narrow and static conceptualisation of local civil society as an externally objectifi-
able thing, as well as the highly technical and formal mechanisms used to grasp it and
engage with it in the peacebuilding process, might contribute to explaining the failure
of the UN peacebuilding apparatus in engaging this collective actor. As a breakthrough
in the unmet UN problem-solving logics, this article has elaborated on the potential of con-
ceptualising of local civil society on a new materialist relational basis to meet the complex-
ity of conflict-affected societies. Affirming relationality would entail acknowledging that
actors and processes, human and non-human, in peacebuilding settings, become
through uncertain and entangled interactions and ex-changes between themselves. In
Whiteheadian terms, they are composites of each other. Far from acknowledging
different forms of knowing and thinking about the local civil society and its broader
context, the UN peacebuilding apparatus intends to mould this local stakeholder and
16 I. TORRENT

instrumentalise it so that it can eventually fit the liberal modern parameters of the organ-
isation. This pattern has been described as an attempt by the UN to totalise a modern story
and a unique form of human-centred progress.
By ignoring the potential of thinking about the peacebuilding context as a set of
relations, interactions and ex-changes that compose beings and process in a self-organ-
ised system, the UN peacebuilding apparatus is ultimately annulling different forms of
knowing, imagining and creating. As Brigg suggests (2013, 18), a critical engagement
with the relational sensibility in peacebuilding practice and theory will neither satisfy
those who are looking for new formulas for realising good nor those who see the ontology
underpinning the relational sensibility discourse as having fundamental and unequivocal
implications for our ways of thinking about and practicing peacebuilding. Different to
problem-solving approaches, I have sought to raise awareness of the possibility of
having different expectations from interventions in war-torn processes, not necessarily
linked to clear goals (such as peace), which usually bring about anxiety due to protracted
failure. Instead, seeing these processes as open-ended and continuously transformed by
the relations of actors in them, opens up a different horizon of possibilities that disregards
the final result and emphasises the enablement of these relations in a constructive and
liveable form. This requires abandoning human exceptionalist premises and acknowled-
ging the materialisation of non-linear and non-liberal encounters, such as indigenous
stories for example, which might be more sensitive to the non-human and therefore trou-
bling to the hubristic modern Western episteme.

Notes
1. The report ‘The Challenge of Sustaining Peace’, developed by an Advisory Group of Experts
(AGE) for the 2015 review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture, illustrates the
shift to the acceptance of the complexity of war-torn contexts. Among other aspects, the
report highlights the suitability of non-linear forms of engaging in peacebuilding contexts,
supressing static categorisations of operations based on pre-, ongoing and post-conflict. In
this vein, it claims the necessity for all UN agencies to holistically face the task of sustaining
peace, unveiling the possibility to merge peace-oriented departments such as the Department
of Peacekeeping Operations and the Department of Political Affairs. As one might conclude
from the report, this division fails to meet the complexity of conflict-affected realities (see
AGE 2015).
2. For a literature review of the debate on the so-called ‘local-turn’, see Millar 2016; for a more
general literature review of the critical debate on liberal peace, see Richmond and Mac Ginty
2015.
3. For a more comprehensive contribution on materialism in International Relations see Srineck,
Fotou, and Arghand 2013.
4. For a discussion on the relational account in critical peacebuilding literature, see Chadwick,
Debiel, and Gadinger 2013. For further literature on relationality and entangled ontologies
in International Relations and critical peace and conflict studies, see also Joseph 2018; Rich-
mond 2017; Zanotti 2018.
5. For further discussions on post-structuralism and new materialism see Latour 2005; Morton 2013.

Acknowledgments
I am sincerely thankful to David Chandler and Pol Bargués-Pedreny for their wise and tireless aca-
demic assistance for the development of this article during my post-doctoral visiting fellowship at
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 17

University of Westminster in London (December 2017–February 2018). I also want to express my

gratitude to anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Dr. Ignasi Torrent is an associate lecturer of International Relations at the School of Humanities and
Social Sciences at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. His research interests are framed in the area
of Critical Peace and Conflict Studies, the Anthropocene and new materialisms.

ORCID
Ignasi Torrent http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9253-6133

References
Action Aid, CAFOD and CARE International. 2007. “Consolidating the Peace? Views from Sierra Leone
and Burundi on the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission.” Report. http://www.actionaid.org/
uganda/shared/consolidating-peace-views-sierra-leone-and-burundi-united-nations-peacebuilding-
commis.
AGE. 2015. “The Challenge of Sustaining Peace.” Report. http://www.un.org/en/peacebuilding/pdf/
150630%20Report%20of%20the%20AGE%20on%20the%202015%20Peacebuilding%20Review%
20FINAL.pdf.
Arnault, J. 2014. “Legitimacy and Peace Processes.” Conciliation Resources 25: 21–25.
Bargués-Pedreny, P. 2018. Deferring Peace in International Statebuilding: Difference, Resilience and
Critique. London: Routledge.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Bogost, I. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What’s it Like to be a Thing. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press.
Boyd, R. 2004. Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism. Oxford:
Lexington Books.
Brigg, M. 2013. “Relational Sensibility in Peacebuilding: Emancipation, Tyranny, or Transformation?”,
12–18. In Relational Sensibility and the ‘Turn to the Local’: Prospects for the Future of Peacebuilding.
Global Dialogues 2, edited by W. Chadwick, T. Debiel, and F. Gadinger. Duisburg: Käte Hamburger
Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research.
Brigg, M. 2018. “Relational and Essential: Theorizing Difference for Peacebuilding.” Journal of
Intervention and Statebuilding 12 (3): 352–366.
Bryant, L. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: MPublishing – University of Michigan Library.
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.
Chandler, D. 2004. Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chandler, D. 2018a. “Intervention and Statebuilding Beyond the Human: From the “Black Box” to the
“Great Outdoors”.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12 (1): 80–97.
Chandler, D. 2018b. Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and
Hacking. Oxon: Routledge.
18 I. TORRENT

Clark, A., and D. Haraway. 2018. Making Kin not Population – Reconceiving Generations (Paradigm).
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Connolly, W. 2017. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham
and London: Duke University Press.
Coole, D. 2013. “Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New
Materialisms in the Political Sciences.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41 (3): 451–469.
Crutzen, P. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (23).
Cudworth, E., and S. Hobden. 2015. “The Posthuman Way of War.” Security Dialogue 46 (6): 513–529.
Does, A. 2013. Inclusivity and Local Perspectives in Peacebuilding: Issues, Lessons, Challenges. 8 vols.
New York: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation.
Emirayber, M. 1997. “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 103 (2):
281–317.
Emmanuel, K. 2007. What We Know About Climate Change. Cambridge, MA: Boston Review Books.
Graben, S., and A. Fitz-Gerald. 2013. “Mind the Gap: The Importance of Local Institutional
Development in Peace-building-funded Security Interventions.” Conflict, Security & Development
13 (3): 285–316.
Grant, I. 2008. Philosophies of Nature after Shelling. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Grosz, E. 2011. Becoming Undone. Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Grosz, E. 2017. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Haraway, D. 2007. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press (original ed. 1984).
Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
Harman, G. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology. A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books.
Heidegger, M. 1993. Basic Writings. San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers (original ed. 1976).
Iro, A. 2009. The UN Peacebuilding Commission – Lessons from Sierra Leone. Welt Trends Thesis 6.
Potsdam: University of Potsdam.
Íñiguez de Heredia, M. 2012. “Escaping Statebuilding: Resistance and Civil Society in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 6 (1): 75–89.
Jenkins, R. 2010. Re-engineering the UN Peacebuilding Architecture. Working Papers. Oslo: Norwegian
Institute of International Affairs.
Joseph, J. 2018. “Beyond Relationalism in Peacebuilding.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12
(3): 425–434.
Kaldor, M. 2003. Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press.
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introdution to Actor-network-theory. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
Law, J., and J. Urry. 2004. “Enacting the Social.” Economy and Society 33 (3): 390–410.
Lidén, K. 2009. “‘Building Peace between Global and Local Politics: On the Cosmopolitan Ethics of
Liberal Peacebuilding.” International Peacekeeping 16 (5): 616–634.
Mac Ginty, R. 2011. International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Micinski, N. 2016. “NGO Frequent Flyers: Youth Organizations and the Undermining of Reconciliation
in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 11 (1): 99–104.
Millar, G. 2016. “For Whom Do Local Peace Processes Function? Maintaining Control Through Conflict
Management.” Cooperation and Conflict 1 (16): 293–308.
Morton, T. 2013. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Paffenholz, T. 2015. “Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding: A Critical Assessment Towards on
Agenda for Future Research.” Third World Quarterly 36 (5): 857–874.
Peacebuilding Support Office. 2010. “UN Peacebuilding: An Orientation.” http://www.un.org/en/
peacebuilding/pbso/pdf/peacebuilding_orientation.pdf.
Philipsen, L. 2014. “When Liberal Peacebuilding Fails: Paradoxes of Implementing Ownership and
Accountability in the Integrated Approach.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 8 (1): 42–67.
 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING 19

Randazzo, E. 2017. Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding: A Critical Exploration of the Local Turn. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Richmond, O. 2017. “The Green and the Cool: Hybridity, Relationality and Ethnographic-biographical
Responses to Intervention.” Mediterranean Politics 23 (4): 479–500.
Richmond, O., and R. Mac Ginty. 2015. “Where now for the Critique of the Liberal Peace?” Cooperation
and Conflict 50 (2): 171–189.
Sabaratnam, M. 2013. “Avatars of Eurocentrism in the Critique of the Liberal Peace.” Security Dialogue
44 (3): 259–278.
Schmidt, J. 2013. “The Empirical Falsity of the Human Subject: New Materialism, Climate Change and
the Shared Critique of Artifice.” Resilience 1 (3): 174–192.
Shepherd, L. 2015. “Constructing Civil Society: Gender, Power and Legitimacy in United Nations
Peacebuilding Discourse.” European Journal of International Relations 21 (4): 887–910.
Simil, V. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Srineck, N., M. Fotou, and E. Arghand. 2013. “Materialism and World Politics.” Millenium: Journal of
International Studies, Special Issue, 41 (3): 397–469.
Street, A., H. Mollet, and J. Smith. 2008. “Experiences of the United NationsPeacebuilding
Commission in Sierra Leone and Burundi.” Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 4 (2): 33–46.
Tsing, A. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life In Capitalist Ruins.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tucker, K. 2018. “Unraveling Coloniality in International Relations: Knowledge, Relationality, and
Strategies for Engagement.” International Political Sociology 12 (3): 215–232.
UN General Assembly. 1995. “Report of the World Summit for Social Development.” A/CONF 166/9,
March 6–12. https://undocs.org/A/CONF.166/9.
UN General Assembly. 2004. “Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations-Civil Society
Relations.” Cardoso report, A/58/817, June 11. https://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B8954/
(httpAssets)/09916F545454357BC1256F5C005D4352/$file/A-58-817.pdf.
UN General Assembly. 2005a. “The Peacebuilding Commission.” Resolution A/RES/60/180, December
30. http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%
7D/PBC%20ARES60180.pdf.
UN General Assembly. 2005b. “2005 World Summit Outcome.” Resolution A/RES/60/1, October 24.
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/ods/A-RES-60-1-E.pdf.
UN General Assembly and Security Council. 2000. “Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace
Operations.” Brahimi report, Resolution A/55/305-S/2000/809, August 21. http://www.un.org/en/
ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/55/305.
UN General Assembly and Security Council. 2015. “Report of the High-level Independent Panel on
Peace Operations on Uniting Our Strengths for Peace: Politics, Partnership and People.” HIPPO
report, Resolution A/70/95-S/2015/446, June 17. http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?
symbol=S/2015/446.
UN Peacebuilding Commission. 2007. “Monitoring and Track Mechanism of the Strategic Framework
for Peacebuilding in Burundi.” PBC/2/BDI/4, November 27. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/
613396/files/PBC_2_BDI_4-EN.pdf.
UN Peacebuilding Commission. 2009a. “Review of Progress in the Implementation of the Strategic
Framework for Peacebuilding in Burundi.” PBC/3/BDI/5, July 31. http://www.un.org/ga/search/
view_doc.asp?symbol=PBC/3/BDI/5.
UN Peacebuilding Commission. 2009b. “Strategic Framework for Peacebuilding in the CAR 2009–
2011.” PBC/3/CAF/7, June 9. http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=PBC/3/CAF/7.
UN Peacebuilding Commission. 2011. “Report of the Peacebuilding Commission mission to the
Central African Republic, 10–15 October 2011.” PBC/5/CAF/1, November 4. http://www.un.org/
ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=PBC/5/CAF/1.
UN Security Council. 2004. “Speakers Stress Civil Society’s Important, Expansive Role in Building
Peace in Countries Following Conflict, During Security Council Debate.” Meeting, SC/8128.
https://www.un.org/press/en/2004/sc8128.doc.htm.
Vogel, B. 2016. “Civil Society Capture: Top-down Interventions from Below?” Journal of Intervention
and Statebuilding 10 (4): 472–489.
20 I. TORRENT

Wark, M. 2016. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso.
Weiss, T. 2016. What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix it. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Weizman, E. 2017. Hollow Land. London: Verso.
Whitehead, A. 1985. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press (original ed. 1929).
Williams, D., and T. Young. 2012. “Civil Society and the Liberal Peace Project in Ghana and Sierra
Leone.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 6 (1): 7–22.
Worm, B., E. B. Barbier, N. Beaumont, J. E. Duffy, C. Folke, B. S. Halpern, J. B. C. Jackson, et al. 2006.
“Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystems Services.” Science 314 (5800): 787–790.
Young, C. 1994. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Zanotti, L. 2018. “Reorienting IR: Ontological Entanglement, Agency, and Ethics.” International Studies
Review 19 (3): 362–380.