From Constructivist To Critical Engageme

Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal
ISSN: 2380-2014 (Print) 2379-9978 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtwt20
From constructivist to critical engagements with

peacebuilding: implications for hybrid peace
Joanne Wallis & Oliver Richmond
To cite this article: Joanne Wallis & Oliver Richmond (2017): From constructivist to critical
engagements with peacebuilding: implications for hybrid peace, Third World Thematics: A TWQ
Journal
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2016.1309990
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Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2016.1309990
From constructivist to critical engagements with

peacebuilding: implications for hybrid peace
Joanne Wallisa and Oliver Richmondb,c,d
a
Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra,
Australia; bDepartment of Politics & Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester,
Manchester, England; cSchool of Global Studies, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea; dCentre for Peace Studies,
University of Tromso, Tromso, Norway
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

From a critical perspective, what might we learn from applying Received 29 November 2016
constructivism to peacebuilding? We analyse a common clash Accepted 20 March 2017
that arises in the context of peacebuilding: between ontological
KEYWORDS
assumptions based on liberal individualism and those based on local Peacebuilding
relatedness. We find that this clash has both epistemological and constructivism
methodological consequences for critical research on peacebuilding, hybrid
which highlights why the shift to more reflexive understandings of critical theory
hybrid peacebuilding provides space for making more complex and ontology
less certain ontological assumptions in conflict-affected societies.
While this raises ethical considerations, this processual position
offers an advance on older, static ‘enlightenment’ approaches to
peacebuilding debates.
From a critical perspective, what might we learn from applying constructivism to peace-
building? Although constructivism is now firmly established as a mainstream theory of
International Relations, there has been surprisingly little attempt to systematically apply it
to an analysis of peacebuilding. This may be partly explained by the fact that constructivism
has primarily focused on inter-state relations, while peacebuilding is largely an intra-state
process. Yet, it is also surprising, given that both constructivism and critical approaches to
peacebuilding share a basis in critical theory, particularly that articulated by the Frankfurt
School. We draw on constructivism to inform our analysis of a common clash that arises in
the context of peacebuilding: between ontological assumptions based on liberal individu-
alism and those based on local relatedness. Liberal individualism is tied in with cosmopolitan
universalism and ultimately the nature of the state, United Nations system, global capital,
donors and INGOs, under post-war, decentralised Western hegemony. Local relatedness in
many conflict-affected contexts is ultimately tied into social and anthropological under-
standings of the state, and connected with a mixture of self-determination, value-pluralism
and debates about alternatives, which have emerged from the G77, the BRICS and other
emerging donors, the G7+ and the NEIO’s more recent iterations. These are partly tied into
the evolution of the liberal peace architecture but also offer challenges to it, representing a
CONTACT Joanne Wallis joanne.wallis@anu.edu.au

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. WALLIS AND O. RICHMOND
post-colonial form of hybrid architecture: relational, driven by unequal power relations, but
also negotiated and aiming at broader legitimacy. We argue that constructivism can assist
in a detailed examination of how ontological assumptions generate the epistemological
and methodological frameworks that underpin disputes about the nature of peacebuilding.
This is useful for critical approaches to peacebuilding and their engagement with practices,
but also carries risks.
It is important to consider a critical, constructivist perspective of peacebuilding now,
given the transition from liberal peace1 to various engagements (and representations of )
hybrid peace2 in both the critical peacebuilding literature and the documentation of inter-
national organisations involved in peacebuilding, including the EU,3 UNDP,4 World Bank5
and OECD.6 This transition has occurred largely as a response to the perceived failure of
peacebuilding guided by the liberal peace, which has overlooked the reality of everyday life
in subject states, including the importance of local socio-political practices and institutions,
often shaped by local relatedness. As peacebuilding guided by the liberal peace has largely
imposed technocratic, elite-led state institutions based on liberal individualism, this has
limited its ability to establish legitimate, enduring peace in many conflict-affected states.
Even the most senior United Nations and international personnel, and many from the donor
and NGO architecture, are calling for a change in ‘mindset’ to achieve peace legitimately and
sustainably, offering oblique glimpses of more critical positions emerging in practice, which
reflect those that have long been circulating in theory.7
The complexity of critical approaches to peacebuilding, including hybrid ones, and the
expanded claims they throw up against the international and the state are difficult for
researchers and policymakers, not least because they are likely to operate based on funda-
mentally different ontological assumptions, and consequently different epistemological and
methodological frameworks, than the populations of conflict-affected societies. This is a
challenge to constructivist models of normative diffusion or norm cascades from a liberal
and metropolitan core to dependent peripheries.8
We begin by outlining how constructivism can be applied to peacebuilding. We then
discuss the shift from liberal to hybrid peacebuilding and analyse how this has led to a clash
between ontological assumptions based on liberal individualism and those based on local
relatedness. We then analyse the consequences of this analysis for knowledge and methods
of peacebuilding, including the ethical considerations that are raised. We conclude by con-
sidering the consequences for critical peacebuilding.
Applying constructivism to peacebuilding

The different approaches to constructivism highlight useful tools for our analysis of critical
peacebuilding. Briefly, modernist approaches seek to uncover the causal social mechanisms
and constitutive social relations that make International Relations more intelligible.9
Modernist linguistic approaches highlight the primacy of epistemology and argue that to
understand social reality we must uncover the processes by which social facts are constituted
by language and rules, including ‘speech acts’.10 That is, they stress the role of discourse in
constructing social reality.11 Radical constructivism concentrates on narratives, discourse
and texts as well as the everyday, micropolitics and practices; it argues that nothing can be
done to assess the validity of normative and epistemic claims, that no statements can be
more valid than others and that science is just another hegemonic discourse.12 It points to
THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL 3
everyday, local and social dynamics and their discursive formation of order. Critical construc-
tivism more closely reflects critical theory, as it seeks to understand the mechanisms on
which social and political orders are based with the goal of the emancipation of society.13
These constructivist approaches share two understandings: that knowledge is socially
constructed; and that social reality is constructed.14 Therefore, constructivism is reflexive; it
highlights the importance of interrogating social ontological assumptions and the episte-
mological and methodological consequences they generate, including their role in consti-
tuting social reality.15 An aspect of this interrogation is to question the role of identities,
norms, power and causal understandings in the constitution of interests. Indeed, construc-
tivists share an ontology which sees the social world as ‘intersubjectively and collectively
meaningful structures and processes’.16 Consequently, for constructivists ‘material resources
only acquire meaning for human action through the structure of shared knowledge in which
they are embedded’.17 This marks an important distinction from rationalist theories of
International Relations, such as realism and liberalism, for it implies that the social world
consists of intersubjective understandings, subjective knowledge and material objects.18 In
another important distinction, constructivists argue that social facts exists only because of
human agreement, manifest as collective understanding or discourse.19 They also argue that
individuals think, know and feel with reference to, and in the context of, collective or inter-
subjective understandings, including rules and language.20 They also consider the mutual
constitution of agents and structures to be part of their ontology, and share an epistemology
that stresses interpretation and contingent generalisations.21 Constructivism has borrowed
widely, using a variety of positivist, post-positivist, quantitative and qualitative methods,
including case studies,22 process tracing,23 counterfactuals24 and comparative method.25 It
also uses a range of interpretive methods, such as genealogy,26 ethnography27 and narrative
analysis.28 Much of this is very similar to the methodological and theoretical frameworks
used in critical peace and conflict studies, and indeed with the debates around hybridity
which is more usually taken to draw upon post-colonial studies.
While constructivism has traditionally focused on the agency of states,29 there is debate
about whether this consecrates the existing state system,30 and whether constructivism
should also theorise domestic politics, non-state actors and even consider the possibility of
states ceasing to be the primary actors in world politics. Indeed, it has been argued that
ontologically only individuals can express agency31 and therefore that states are structures
rather than agents.32 While looking beyond states is welcome, the alternative focus on indi-
viduals highlights the ‘liberal agendas’ that most constructivists follow.33 As we argue below,
as liberalism focuses on autonomous individuals it does not necessarily account for the more
relational ways in which many communities in non-Western conflict-affected societies under-
stand themselves and their place in the world. We build on an emerging movement within
International Relations to pay attention to non-Western contexts, cultures, problems, agen-
das and agency.34
Constructivism offers a number of useful tools of analysis that can be applied to peace-
building as it shifts beyond its liberal framing. First, because it considers that intersubjective
ideas and knowledge have constitutive effects on social reality, it can help explain why
people converge around specific identities, norms and understandings, and that this where
interests come from.35 Applying this approach to peacebuilding can explain why liberalism
emerged as the norm that has guided many efforts at peacebuilding over the last 20 years,
as well as scope for examining where the interests behind that emergence came from, as
constructivism ‘advances the notion that interests are ideas; that is, they are ontologically
objective interpretations about, and for, the material world’.36
Second, because constructivism requires us to think about history, which provides the
contexts that constitute social reality, it allows us to think about the possibility of change.
Change may occur in the form of new constitutive rules,37 the evolution and transformation
of new social structures,38 and agent-related origins of social processes. For constructivists
change can come from particular agency, processes, structures and practices.39 Mechanisms
of change can include cognitive evolution, epistemic change, collective learning and the
‘life cycles of norms’.40 Therefore, as ideas can change over time, so can political relations.41
Just as constructivists recognise how the diffusion of norms influences understandings of
what constitutes a legitimate international order,42 we argue that the diffusion of liberal
norms has influenced contemporary peacebuilding. This recognition has transformative
potential, as it provides space to imagine alternative socio-political realities, and conse-
quently different ontological assumptions from which to start an analysis of critical peace-
building, which provides opportunities to challenge hegemonic ideas such as ‘sovereignty’
or ‘liberalism’ and for the diffusion of alternative norms.
Third, because constructivism focuses on the effects of social communication on social
relations, it highlights how discourse, including argumentation, deliberation and compro-
mise, can help to promote shared understandings.43 This allows us to highlight how the
dominant discourses of international peacebuilding have been guided by liberalism,44 which
has in turn influenced the way in which policymakers and peacebuilders think about peace-
building. In addition, although constructivists believe that rationality is critical for explaining
the social and political worlds, they argue that this must be based on reason, communication
and persuasion and contingent on historical, social and normative contexts.45 They also
emphasise the importance of intersubjective understandings, that is, they stress that dis-
courses, narratives, identities and norms can influence actors’ rational choices.46 This provides
scope for challenging the dominant liberal discourse, as it foregrounds how the international
historical, social and normative contexts have shaped the discourse of liberal peacebuilding,
but also how that discourse can be changed by continuous processes of reason, communi-
cation and persuasion.
Finally, constructivists highlight the role of language in social life, since it is the vehicle
by which ideas are diffused and institutionalised. Language is also the medium for the
construction of intersubjective meanings and social reality.47 Constructivists are also increas-
ingly examining the relationship between language and power, observing that ‘if makes us
understand certain problems in certain ways, and pose questions accordingly. It thereby
limits the range of alternative policy options, and it enables us to take on others’.48 For
example, constructivists have applied Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ to show that
liberalism can be interpreted as a particular rationality of governing whose practices and
technologies of power shape subjects’ possible actions.49 This insight is important for our
conception of critical peacebuilding, as it highlights how power underlies the way that
knowledge and the construction of identities can be used to allocate rewards and capacities,
which is evident in the way that liberal ontological assumptions have generated epistemo-
logical and methodological assumptions that have privileged liberal individualism during
peacebuilding.
From liberal to hybrid peacebuilding

The transition from liberal to hybrid peacebuilding reflects how emerging caution within
the United Nations and other international organisations regarding the norm of liberal peace-
building is having constitutive effects on social reality.50 No longer do the international policy
and practitioner communities confidently aspire to institutionalise the liberal peace; their
more modest goals are ‘good enough’ outcomes.51 These good enough outcomes no longer
necessarily come in the form a liberal capitalist democratic state, but may also involve ‘com-
binations of state, private sector, faith-based, traditional, and community structures for ser-
vice delivery’.52 This emerging policy consensus is echoed by a ‘local turn’ in the critical
peacebuilding literature, which mirrors the movement within constructivism to look beyond
the state, and advocates ‘a central role for local people as agents for peace’.53 This has been
described as ‘everyday peace’, that is, the bottom-up methods that populations in conflict-
affected societies use to exercise their local agency and everyday diplomacy to survive.54
This literature focuses on a conceptual analysis of local agency and its resistance to the power
and hegemony of international intervention and simultaneously against the inter-related
power relations which sustain violence.55 This analysis has identified the potential for more
critical versions of peacebuilding to emerge from these interactions, including hybrid peace-
building. Hybrid peacebuilding may be described as an ‘an intersubjective mediation
between local and international scales and norms, institutions, law, right, needs and interests,
depending on both power and legitimacy’.56 Ideally, this will generate a ‘positive hybrid
peace’, ‘rooted in accommodation, reconciliation, emancipation, autonomy, social justice
and a sense of liberation’.57 With their focus on local agency, these critical approaches to
peacebuilding echo similar developments in disciplines such as geography, development
studies and legal studies to focus on more actor-centred, grounded and everyday under-
standings of peacebuilding.
Reflecting the rationalist nature of conservative and liberal approaches, there is ideolog-
ical and methodological opposition to critical approaches to peacebuilding, including hybrid
peacebuilding. There is also opposition from problem-solvers who tend to follow bureau-
cratic, legal or economic rationalities centred on Eurocentric norms and capitals (meaning
political, economic and social epistemological leadership). Hybrid peacebuilding is often
seen as second best (‘good enough’), even though it foregrounds the everyday lived expe-
rience of the conflict-affected subject. Its inversion of agency is a problem for normative and
epistemic conceptions of power, authority and leadership. Local actors may agree that the
state should be the dominant mode of political organisation because it is presently the sole
stage for international status as well as for domestic self-determination, and offers a way of
reigning in violence as Weber and Tilly have explained.58 However, they focus on a different
identity framework and normative basis to international actors, who focus on the state as a
system of checks and balances to promote regional security, trade and liberal norms, drawing
on nineteenth-century American liberalism as framed in the debates in The Federalist Papers.59
Indeed, the academic and policy literature relating to liberal peacebuilding frequently
makes the unacknowledged and unchallenged ontological assumption that liberal principles
provide an accurate description of the nature of peaceful and prosperous social reality (or
at least what social reality should look like).60 But, if we apply constructivism to examine the
ontology – or more aptly ontologies – of peacebuilding we can demonstrate that no analysis
of peacebuilding is ontologically neutral; each is guided by its own history, identities, norms,
interests and politics.61 This is key to critical peacebuilding, as it can help us to take a more
reflexive, less ‘scientific’ or ‘certain’ approach in order to challenge and rethink the tacit onto-
logical assumptions on which analyses of peacebuilding are premised, framed by a post-
colonial sensitivity about the transmission of global power over time and its implications
for the place of peacebuilding in north-south relations.62
If we make more complex and less certain ontological assumptions about peacebuilding,
we can recognise that knowledge is socially constructed, it is relational, situated, practical,
dynamic, positional, unevenly distributed, the product of collective action, rituals, myths,
rumours, stories and everyday practices; often communicated orally or bodily.63 Knowledge
is thus connected to historical and material power, at different levels across the local to
global scale. These scales are not comfortably aligned, and thus need to be mediated. This
recognition has implications for the methods of peacebuilding we advocate. It also mounts
an ontological challenge to the notion that normative universality must underpin peace,
the state and society relations, as well as international norms, where all three levels can be
easily aligned, and can do so without clear and direct material implications. Effectively, this
demonstrates that fixity and universality combined with material inequalities (such as inse-
curity) have obscured the relationality of peace (and its related methods and knowledge)
and the ways in which power circulates, the tenacity and dexterity of the conflict-affected
subject, and the lumbering nature of interventions supposedly designed for peace. This
means that peace systems will tend to be scalar, perhaps fluid and mobile, and represent a
mediation of difference from local to global scales rather than an alignment of similar
frameworks.
The clash between two common ontological assumptions

Peacebuilding guided by the norm of the liberal peace is necessarily based on ontological
individualism scaled up to liberal institutionalism; that is, the ontological assumption that
individual humans are the sole, unique and ultimate constituents of social reality to which
all else is reducible, including institutions, states and markets. Becoming a liberal citizen is
a necessary part of living under liberal-international and (neo) liberal institutionalist
governance frameworks, as have deepened over the last century. This assumption is essential
for norms of human rights, democratisation and economic liberalisation, and also reduces
the significance of religious, ethnic, nationalist, tribal or other group identities. This is because
individualism side-steps relatedness, belonging, and sheds identity outside of the modern
state and related epistemologies of economics and law. Yet, the failings of liberal peace-
building demonstrate that this is not an accurate reflection of the social reality of conflict-
affected societies. The point is that when such moves are made by conflict-affected citizens
they may then contribute to the sum of global peace architecture and comply with global
governance simultaneously. However, this compliance will only arise – even under
conditionality – when it connects with the political claims made by the conflict affected
citizen where related to rights, identity, material factors or other issues made politically
salient by context and its scalar regional or global connections.
In conflict-affected societies more reflexive, contextual ontological assumptions are
needed which recognise that a wider range of – sometimes hidden – inter-related identities,
individuals, social collectivities, regimes and systems are involved in determining everyday
social reality. These might be termed peace formation processes, which as opposed to state
formation’s focus on mainly negative forms of violence and criminal agency and self-interest,
are also formative of local, state and to a weak degree, global governance.64 If they do not
determine social reality they often challenge or resist dominant power structures, pro-
grammes or practices of intervention, whether state, market or internationally based, which
propose a different understanding. Isaiah Berlin pointed out long ago the homogenising
tendencies of liberal rationality, and instead argued for ‘value-pluralism’ which would try to
understand ‘the standards of others’65 and replace its universalism with agonism, but also
have more chance of bringing together a larger community of consent.66 We are interested
in whether value-pluralism and its corollary of agonism, commonly connected with critical
versions of peacebuilding, go far enough to reach the relational-ontologies that more eth-
nographic work in the area has recently highlighted, whilst also retaining cogency in the
face of external and structural power relations. These are necessary both within communities,
across communities, and in the context of the interventionary programming of peace and
development from external sources, such as the UN system and international donors.
A relational ontology highlights relationships rather than groups or individuals, but does
not claim such relationships are free of power relations. In fact, it shows more clearly which
power relations and actors are obstacles to peace. It does not claim that the group or indi-
vidual are solely subject to law, the state or economic rationality, and shifts our understand-
ing of the state as a free-standing institution to a relational institution. It can then be seen
as a conglomeration of networked and scalar agency, shaped by unequal power relations
from the local to the global, the resolution of which leads to peace in its positive and hybrid
form.67 It highlights the particularity and contingency of social relationships and their role
in the production of human spaces and in the process of inhabiting, appropriating, claiming
and contesting place.68 While social entities may be human, they may also come from the
natural and spiritual worlds. From the spiritual realm, ancestors and religious beliefs, and
from the natural habitat, animals, plants and places can all play a socio-political role. For
example, a key aspect of reconciliation and peacebuilding in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea
is the identification, return and burial of victims’ remains, as until their spirits are settled
reconciliation cannot be achieved. Accordingly, the Autonomous Bougainville Government
is now working with the International Committee of the Red Cross to trace the remains of
people who have been missing since the conflict in order to facilitate reconciliation. Cultural
and social peace praxis tend to incorporate these dimensions, but they are not usually pres-
ent in diplomacy, peacebuilding or statebuilding practices.
The epistemological consequences

As liberalism makes the ontological assumption that individual humans are the only entities
that determine the nature of social reality, and the intervention of some humans is necessary
to secure and shape the peace for others,69 this has epistemological consequences for
assumptions about how to gain knowledge of the nature of social reality. As liberalism
assumes that individuals are rational, liberal peacebuilding relies on formal, ‘rational’ knowl-
edge and interventionary procedures, based on the assumption that it is capable of context‐
free, anonymous, calculable, transferable and ‘transparent’ forms of knowing. Many liberal
peacebuilders therefore assume that they do not need to discover local knowledge in
conflict-affected societies, since they assume the normative universality of liberalism. In this
mindset, intervention, broadly defined, is a substitute for local knowledge or legitimacy, or
at least is necessary guide the social towards a more sophisticated political format. To the
extent that liberal peacebuilders seek local knowledge, they often define, reduce or reify
local socio-political practices and institutions as objects onto which Western conceptions
of liberal individualism are projected. For example, liberal peacebuilders commonly assume
that local communities are homogeneous and can be represented by elected or delegated
individuals, in the process creating new local power structures. They also tend to assume
that customary or social systems of governance are open to abuse, reify feudal power struc-
tures or are dominated by irrational and unachievable group aspirations. This produces an
epistemological hierarchy of knowledge systems and related methods. It also obscures the
fact that peacebuilding is an intervention in power structures and society, which is likely to
unsettle local modes of governance, legitimacy and authority, and provoke the fiercest resist-
ance from powerful actors most challenged by its rights and bureaucratic framing.
This can be contrasted to more reflexive ontological assumptions advocated by critical
peacebuilding, which can recognise subaltern positionality and its signals about structural
blockages to peace, including a range of human, natural and spiritual agents (including
collectivities), and therefore draws knowledge from the wider human, natural and spiritual
habitat. Such a contrast implies a reversal of epistemological hierarchies, which we appreciate
is unlikely. Positionality at its most subaltern, post-Gramsci and post-colonial, interrogates
the state and the international through scales and networks of hidden agency, many of
which depend on mobility. It also exposes the power relations within research processes,
suggesting at the very least that knowledge production needs to revolve around and attempt
to mitigate asymmetric partnerships, the tracing of power relations and processes of
transformation.
Recognising subaltern positionality can help us to recognise the power dynamics inherent
in liberal peacebuilding, by highlighting the fact that ‘not only is knowledge power, but
power is knowledge as well’.70 While liberal peacebuilding privileges the ‘experiences, inter-
ests, and contemporary dilemmas’ of the international interveners who conduct it,71 this
overlooks the experiences, interests and dilemmas of populations in conflict-affected states,
as well as the value (and power) of their local knowledge. Local knowledge is dynamic,
contingent, flexible and hidden, and is influenced by habits, preferences, duties and virtues
that stem from its social nature. This local knowledge is also deeply political and suffused
with local power dynamics, as is it the product of continuous formal and informal contesta-
tion. In many ways it is also an obstacle to modernisation and its economic and legal ration-
alities under liberal and neoliberal forms of global governance. This local knowledge cannot
be discovered, neatly registered and codified into a ‘rational’, bureaucratic, econometric,
legal, universal and formal framework. Instead, it has to be read between the lines of everyday
practices, recognising the social particularities of place, including modes of local rule, the
influence of systems of power and exchange and the unequal relationships involved in social
survival. This means it is also related to questions of self-governance, self-determination and
historical and distributive justice, pointing to material, temporal and structural forms of
relationality rather than hierarchy. Indeed, attempts to ‘rationalise’ or ‘formalise’ this knowl-
edge can lead to misrecognition, suppression and obscuring power dynamics and divisions.
Modernisation, liberal peace and neoliberal states focus on specific top-down relationalities,
connected to reformers, external trustees and global capital, which limit the more complex
relationalities that everyday praxis suggests. As a result, they are based on incomplete knowl-
edge of the reality in the societies in which they operate, generating often misleading and
counterproductive conclusions and, consequently, approaches to peacebuilding.72 Indeed,

it must be recognised that local knowledge has evolved as a result of its contact with external
forces, from missionaries and colonisers, through to transnational corporations, INGOs and
international peacebuilders. Local actors have responded by reinterpreting and reimaging
much of their local knowledge to reflect their awareness of their connections across spatial
dimensions. All of this is not an easy task, but it is necessary if local legitimacy is to accrue
to any post-conflict polity. Understanding the contextual nexus of relationality spanning
society, the state, the international, time and space, helps us better understand the nature
of legitimate political authority, from local to global scales, in fact.
Issues on which a more contextualised, critical examination of the epistemological frame-
works of peacebuilding might focus include:
• The extent of the causal and/or constitutive role of ideas in determining the outcomes
of peacebuilding.
• The nature of the political subjects and their behavioural motivations during
peacebuilding.
• The relationship between structure and agency.
• Power relations, hierarchy and inequality and their relationships with peace knowledge
and praxis.
• Whether peacebuilding dynamics are culturally/contextually specific or generalisable.
• Whether intervention, broadly understood to make peace, engineers its own failure by
not taking sufficient care about the above issues.
The methodological consequences

Liberal peacebuilding assumes that individuals are autonomous, rational and self-maximising
individuals. It therefore seeks to create institutions, norms and laws which respect that auton-
omy and allow individuals as much freedom as possible to seek to self-maximise without
infringing on the freedom of other individuals. It does so within the confines of the modern
liberal/Weberian state, with a view to membership in the broader international community
of institutions organisations, within the law. As knowledge derived from liberal ontological
assumptions purports to be rational and universally-applicable it adopts a highly techno-
cratic and bureaucratised approach to peacebuilding partly as a consequence of the sheer
scale of this overall project, which seeks to build institutions of governance and justice that
extend the governmental and biopolitical reach of the state to contain, transform and assim-
ilate local populations and their socio-political practices and institutions into a viable national
community aligned with the core liberal international community.73
In contrast, more reflexive ontological assumptions draw knowledge from the wider
human, natural and spiritual habitat to recognise that liberal ontological assumptions do
not necessarily resonate in conflict-affected societies. Furthermore, they problematise the
widely held utilitarian notion (and aspiration) that local polities can be aligned with the state
and liberal/neoliberal international order. Effectively this notion side-steps the casual factors
of the conflict, instead focusing on modernisation and institutional reform. This suggests
that more reflexive, dynamic, contingent and flexible methods of peacebuilding are needed,
which find a way of dealing with causal factors across the complete scale of analysis – local
to global – whilst also relating the emerging polity to the states-system, the international
architecture and global governance. For example, in Timor-Leste liberal peacebuilders are
frequently frustrated by the fact that deceased people remain on the electoral roll. Yet, for
many Timorese their ancestors continue to play an important socio-political role, so their
inclusion on the electoral roll as political actors makes sense in the light of a customary,
religious and social perspective.74 Similarly, in Timor-Leste liberal peacebuilders were flum-
moxed why their ‘human rights’-based campaign to ‘stop domestic violence’ was initially
unsuccessful. It was only after they sought local advice that they realised the concept of
‘domestic violence’ did not resonate in Timor-Leste, where there is no neat public/private
(domestic) division and the concept of ‘human rights’ remained alien. Their Timorese inter-
locutors instead advised them to rephrase their campaign ‘women give life; you should
respect them; they guarantee your fertility and prosperity’, which resonated with local
spiritual beliefs relating to the link between women and the fertility of land.75 For ‘modern’
governance and peace praxis, such phenomena are insignificant or require uprooting
because they prevent modernisation, which includes creating a common and hegemonic
discursive framework for global governance, often against the will of subjects who cling to
older forms of legitimate authority. Indeed, the oldest debate in political theory, dating back
to Plato and Aristotle amongst others, revolves around this question of where viable and
effective legitimate authority states from: society or leadership.76 The solution liberalism
provides follows Cicero and later Locke – a social contract based on rights, including property
rights, and checks and balances against despotism and social dysfunction. One might say
that current debates on peace, order and intervention continue to replay these debates,
which as in Timor-Leste span time and space in controversial ways. Historical legitimate
authority cannot be expunged to produce modern liberal subjects without violence and
while valorising democracy: the dynamics of conflict cannot be localised in a geopolitical
manner as has become the norm, because of the salience of lifeworlds and in a different way
because of the global nature of capital, arms, norms such as self-determination or non-
discrimination and gender equality. Timor-Leste shows the complexity of what happens
when these different forces, dynamics, aspirations and norms meet geographically in the
locale of a new state now named Timor-Leste. An ideal state is not the outcome, rather an
awkward an agonistic local to global, scalar hybrid, in which notions of space, time and
governance related to the liberal peace have collapsed, literally and figuratively.77
Such an example plays out in different ways: in Cyprus, patriarchy, identity and religion
and nationalism have driven politics in the Republic since Independence, making it extremely
difficult to frame a progressive statement that might contribute to peace. But there are hybrid
openings, as Constantinou has outlined.78 The current peace process appears to be a for-
malisation of partition with informal and social relations much improved, but political rela-
tions are blocked: they are configured as a result of communal ethno-nationalism and the
institutions which support it. This points to the importance of a third discourse around which
peace might be built. This is liberalism and its legal and rights-based rationality in this case,
but also increasingly, the rationality of capital. This latter approach is even more extreme in
the current Colombian peace process where democracy and capital are somewhat contrarily
determining a peace which needs to resolve land, poverty and ideological issues.79 In
Sri Lanka, liberal discourses of human rights have long been seen by civil society as the way
out of the implacable, communal hostility incurred by the clash of Sinhala nationalism and
Tamil separatism – even there is no longer a formal peace process after Rajapaksa’s victory
over the LTTE.80 However, in Kosovo an ethnicised, semi-recognised state has emerged out
of the peacebuilding process which has increasingly been driven by Kosovo Albanians seek-
ing a state rather than peace. Local rationalities may offer a partial script for aspects of
peacemaking, but often they also may seek to establish an exclusive rationality of peace,
which requires a mediating function or concept often from the outside.81 This raises some
issues about the balance of forces, norms, identity, rights, custom, structure and materiality,
in the context of an interventionary system, for notions of hybrid peace.
Liberal peacebuilders are likely to dismiss the more reflexive approach on the basis that
it is too uncertain or abstract to guide their preferred ‘rational’ or concrete methods of peace-
building, or their preferred liberal ontology. They simultaneously need to defend the United
Nations, IFIs, donor and post-cold war order (including the dominant concept of the state)
as well as to extend its reach, whilst maintaining its geopolitical and economic viability and
also its social legitimacy. Their external mediating function, despite its ontological and epis-
temological mismatches with locally legitimate authority, is elevated to a higher level, often
by its connection with the West. Ultimately, their version leaks legitimacy, as a result of both
liberal peace’s limits in practice, and its limited social legitimacy when in contact with alterity,
and so it has achieved limited authority and efficiency. However, starting from more reflexive
ontological assumptions does not necessarily imply that the knowledge that guides peace-
building should be entirely emptied of liberalism, because there are clearly aspirations and
commonalities that liberalism connects with (beyond its historical and theoretical baggage).
Instead, it highlights why critical peacebuilding, which is capable of recognising local posi-
tionality and its attendant complexity in different context across the local to global scale,
and bringing it into conversation with liberalism, offers the most credible method of artic-
ulating more legitimate forms of democracy, rights, identity and political authority in
conflict-affected societies.
However, at the same time neoliberal versions of peace make this more difficult because
they drain the liberal peace of its social legitimacy by limiting the social role of the state in
providing public goods and services, not to mention material equalisation across identity,
gender and class groups. Local articulations of legitimacy, even when mediated by outside
actors, programmes and organisations, also have to face the more predatory forces of
regional militarism, nationalism and global capital. This raises the matter of how locally
driven hybrid peace may be, when power is mainly captured by national and global elites.
Ethical considerations
Critical peacebuilding raises its own challenges. To date, most critical peacebuilding scholars
are from the West, or are at least located in Western universities. The same can be said for
peacebuilding practitioners who attempt to engage in a more critical, reflexive approach.
The positionality of these scholars (ourselves included) and practitioners means that most
(whether consciously or unconsciously) operate within the liberal individualist ontological
framework we have described above. This raises challenges when we try to engage with
populations in conflict-affected societies, particularly when we seek local knowledge, which
is often premised on very different, relational ontological assumptions. It raises questions
concerning whether we can ever really ‘know’ local knowledge, and what impact this has
on our epistemological and methodological frameworks of intervention, peacebuilding,
statebuilding and development, as well as related soft forms of engagement. It also raises
ethical considerations; if Western scholars or practitioners seek to uncover or learn local
knowledge, can we accurately represent how local populations understand that knowledge,
since our ontological assumptions mean that we learn, or at least translate, that knowledge
based on our inherent liberal individualist ontological framework? What impact can this
process of the translation of local knowledge have on that knowledge? And what conse-
quences might this have for critical peacebuilding, if that translated local knowledge is used
to shape the policies or practices of peacebuilders? Language will influence how these ques-
tions are answered, since language is the medium for the construction of intersubjective
meanings and social reality, yet seldom do Western scholars and practitioners speak the
language of populations in conflict-affected societies, which adds another dimension to the
process of translation of local knowledge. This raises questions about the ethics of seeking
local knowledge from populations in conflict-affected societies,82 if that local knowledge is
then translated (and probably transformed) for the instrumental purposes of critical
peacebuilding.
We therefore suggest that scholars and peacebuilders to pay greater attention to inter-
pretive praxis, that is, the hermeneutics or methodology, by which they interpret the lan-
guage and knowledge that guides peacebuilding.83 While hermeneutics is traditionally
focused on interpreting texts, as much local knowledge is oral, pictorial, representational or
performative, we argue that interpretation should extend to all forms in which knowledge
is recorded or communicated. In this regard, constructivist cautions regarding the socially
constructed nature of ideas must be acknowledged; just as local knowledge reflects the
identities, interests and cultural environment in which it is generated, the knowledge that
guides peacebuilders reflects similar factors. When interpreting knowledge, be it local or
‘international’, scholars and practitioners should avoid taking meanings for granted, but
instead analyse by whom, why, when, where and how it was generated, which occurs at
both the ontological and epistemological levels. Interpretation also needs to be holistic, so
that knowledge is interpreted in its context, be that historical, cultural, geographical or
otherwise. In particular, scholars and practitioners need to be conscious that the language
in which knowledge is recorded or communicated will influence their interpretation, as
different languages ‘possess markedly different conceptual resources’.84 In this regard, schol-
ars and practitioners also need to be aware of the effect of their own positionality affects;
in their efforts to read between the lines of everyday practices, their ontological assumptions
will influence their interpretation of knowledge.
Indeed, it must be recognised that attempts to uncover and often codify local knowledge
involve relations of power and interest, particularly if there is a perception that there is
something to be lost or gained. Therefore, local knowledge as understood by Western schol-
ars and practitioners is ‘by definition generated in an unequal, tension-ridden, and contin-
gent event of social interaction’.85 This reality is frequently overlooked in the shift towards
the ‘participation’ of local communities implied by the critical peacebuilding literature and
increasingly expressed in international peacebuilding praxis.86 Many liberal peacebuilders
assume that people in conflict-affected societies are enabled to participate in public pro-
cesses,87 and indeed have a duty to participate,88 with non-participation regarded as ‘some-
how irresponsible or feckless’.89 As a result, they fail to recognise that there are usually
structural barriers to participation, such as discriminatory laws, lack of opportunity or an
unstable security situation, and that participation in peacebuilding often involves accepting
liberal ontological assumptions and the Western bureaucratic norms they dictate.90 Indeed,
in many conflict-affected societies subsistence lifestyles mean that peoples’ daily lives are
occupied by more immediate concerns, with onerous expectations of participation giving

rise to potential ‘tyranny’.91 When participation does occur there is the risk that it is intended
primarily to achieve the cooperation of local actors in order to facilitate the implementation
of policies defined and designed elsewhere. This raises ethical questions concerning the
legitimacy of this participation and may create circumstances in which a return to conflict
is more likely, particularly if it involves the ‘manipulation of custom’,92 as has occurred in the
Solomon Islands and Bougainville, where international peacebuilders have funded recon-
ciliation, but by introducing cash payments into these processes have created incentives for
combatants to keep conflict alive.93
Similarly, the movement within the peacebuilding literature and praxis to advocate the
‘resilience’ of local communities as a ‘cure-all status’94 highlights the potential danger of
critical peacebuilders seeking to uncover and codify local knowledge in order to legitimate
their actions. The mantra of resilience might unwittingly transfer responsibility to local com-
munities and absolve or justify the actions of the state and/or peacebuilders. In this regard,
there is the suggestion that peacebuilders may instrumentally embrace local knowledge
because it ‘lessens the burden on the state and donors and lessens the burden on reform
processes’.95 There is evidence of this in Timor-Leste where, with international encourage-
ment, the state has drawn on local knowledge to transfer responsibility for much public
goods provision to the local level. Yet, this transfer has not been supported by adequate
oversight, resources, capacity development or opportunities to influence the central gov-
ernment.96 Indeed, one member of Timorese civil society observed that the concept of local
resilience ‘suits the central government, which doesn’t need to expend a lot of money’,97
because it has used the cloak of empowering local agency in order neglect the rural popu-
lation, as local leaders perform many functions commonly expected to be performed by an
effective state. However, it must be acknowledged that local actors are sometimes able to
either ‘benefit from international intervention, or to resist intentional intervention, while
enacting oppressions of their own’.98
Another challenge arises from the potential for Western scholars and practitioners to
unwittingly overlook or misunderstand ‘everyday forms of resistance’99 when they seek to
uncover and understand local knowledge. As Scott has cautioned, the absence of open and
organised resistance does not necessarily mean that dissent or alternative moral perceptions
are absent; there is often a distinction between ‘public and hidden transcripts’ of local knowl-
edge.100 These hidden transcripts of resistance can play an important role in repoliticising
the often technocratic approaches to peacebuilding shaped by liberal ontological assump-
tions. Yet, the ‘capacity, resistance and agency’ of local actors should also not be
romanticised.101
It seems to us that, given the complex, contingent and highly situated nature of local
knowledge, one way to help mitigate these concerns during critical peacebuilding is for
Western scholars and practitioners to work with local research partners when attempting
to uncover local knowledge and to use that knowledge to describe or prescribe hybrid
peacebuilding. We recognise that this proposal raises its own ethical considerations, par-
ticularly as structural barriers such as the financial constraints of modern universities and
the monolinguism of much academic publishing, often impose their own power dynamics
on these attempts at collaboration. Another partial solution would be to utilise anthropo-
logical methods, such as fieldwork, participant observation, ethnographic interviews, local
histories and archives, as more appropriate methods for discovering local knowledge for
the purposes of peacebuilding.102 These methods also involve ethical challenges, although
if they are conducted with an awareness of the positionality and ontological assumptions
of the researchers or practitioners and an accompanying attempt at contextualisation and
reflexivity they seem to offer the best chance of mitigating some of these concerns.
Consequences for critical peacebuilding

A consideration of how ontological assumptions generate the epistemological and meth-
odological assumptions that underpin disputes about the nature of peacebuilding informed
by constructivism has consequences for critical research on peacebuilding.
One consequence should be the rethinking of concepts such as ‘social justice’ or ‘eman-
cipation’ which are frequently cited as goals of peacebuilding, but which have not yet been
critically examined in any detail (outside of critical theory work carried out by Laclau and
others).103 Acknowledging that the critical peacebuilding literature has for the most part
been created by scholars who operate with liberal ontological assumptions allows us to
recognise that their understanding of these concepts may carry the attendant liberal assump-
tions. Yet, as we have described above, in conflict-affected societies in which people operate
with ontological assumptions based on relatedness, understandings of what constitute social
justice or emancipation may be very different. While Western scholars assume that emanci-
pation involves individual freedom and autonomy,104 in many conflict-affected societies
emancipation will be understood as prioritising collective wellbeing over that of the indi-
vidual. For example, while Western peacebuilders would view rape as a wrong against the
individual that should be punished, in some conflict-affected societies rape is viewed as a
wrong against the community and to preserve community harmony the local solution is for
the perpetrator to marry the victim.105 Although, it should be noted that many reported
cases of rape involve situations where there has been consensual pre-marital sex, but the
man has reneged on his promise to marry the woman.106
Another consequence arises from highlighting subaltern positionality, which is crucial
for the emergence of more fully legitimate forms of political authority, which will necessarily
be hybrid, scalar, agential, multi-vertical as well as lateral. This inverts more traditional under-
standings of International Relations and politics, problematises their understandings of
concepts such as power, agency, the state, citizenship, liberalism, identity, etc. Subaltern
positionality elucidates clear claims about peace and politics that participatory forms of
democracy, new conceptions of rights, identity and so on might be framed around. Hybridity
is a process that emerges from this encounter between entrenched power, structures, insti-
tutions and previous conceptions of norms, rights, law, etc., and the subaltern. It (perhaps
only tentatively) challenges power pragmatism on the theoretical and empirical side (mean-
ing geopolitics and geoeconomics) and it also begins to highlight their hierarchies.
Furthermore, it helps to unpack epistemic hierarchies, north-south and between disciplines
(economics and politics over sociology and anthropology and the arts, for example). It
emphasises discursive and structural privilege across time and space, history and modernity,
pointing to scales, networks, issues of legitimacy, authority and distribution.
Yet, we must be aware of the fact that the hybrid approach to critical peacebuilding has
been conceptualised in three ways: descriptively, instrumentally or critically, each of which
has its own methodological and ethical implications. Descriptive approaches merely seek
to uncover the processes and effects of encounters from the local to the global scale, and
the workings of power and ethics through these scales, as a way of avoiding both local and
international politicisation or bias. Instrumental versions apply to the international engi-
neering of conflict affected states and societies in order to bring about a local-liberal syn-
thesis, in which the liberal is dominant or at best expedient.107 This requires a Whiggish view
of history, which led to the liberal state/international architecture emerging post-war/cold
war under benign Anglo-American hegemony. Critical versions, such as that outlined in the
introduction to this special issue, apply to the sociological and ethnographic attempt to
recover peace and justice in specific contexts, perhaps using uncontaminated international
resources, and cognisant of ethical and normative best practices and standards. This is
post-colonial, multi-centred and suspicious of any hints of metropolitan power.
However, hybrid peacebuilding bridges rationalities and normative systems rather than
merging them (neoliberalism, liberalism, pluralism, human rights, self-determination, iden-
tity, religion, custom, culture). It has been seen to essentialise the relationship between a
vague local and international,108 but hybrid peacebuilding actually opens up a much more
complex perspective of power, identity, relationality and intervention than some of the more
prescriptive literature has allowed. This potentially critical form of peacebuilding highlights
relationality and the power relations that affect and co-implicate the subaltern and the
metropolitan, meaning it has structural value rather than merely being therapeutic in the
face of power politics, or idealistic, as with descriptive versions. Critical or radical forms of
hybridity, either in liberal or post-liberal form, have offered and may offer in the future the
possibility of a more radical analysis of conflict, agency, peace, justice and ultimately, order,
through scale, after the collapse of geopolitical distance and power as legitimate modes of
analysis, through mobility, networks and circulation of people, resources and ideas, and
range of other transgressions of liberal or realist concepts. They may offer new understand-
ings of social justice and emancipation, social contracts, institutions, norms of law, ultimately
pointing to the need for scalar forms of governance to deal with historical and distributive
forms of justice in the context of environmental sustainability. Politics thus shifts from how
material resources are distributed according to power relations and institutions as prelude
to negative peace, to the attainment of justice as the prelude to positive hybrid peace,
security and order.
Hybrid peacebuilding also shifts the way we think about direct intervention and softer
programming associated with peace, development, stabilisation, etc. It helps unpack and
perhaps resolve binaries (though it is often accused of maintaining binaries from a
problem-solving perspective109). Hybrid peacebuilding is a way of partially reconciling the
apparently unreconciliable (agonistically), though structural differences may remain, and
governance cannot be excused from dealing with them via an appeal to hybridity as a form
of resilience.
Hybrid peacebuilding also implies that multilateral notions of the international need to
be complemented by the ‘multi-vertical’, transversal, scalar, as well as the more traditional
frameworks of trans-national civil society. It offers the possibility of mediating but not erad-
icating alterity in the context of difference groups within society, and between societies,
different types of state, different economic systems, different forms of legitimate authority
outside of Western formal rational-legal and econometric rationalities. It reminds us of the
post-colonial sensitivity about identity justice and autonomy, as well as the feminist concerns
with justice, class, identity and empathy.110 Such mediation helps us understand intervention
in its many broad forms in a much more nuanced fashion that the old-fashioned toolkits of
peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding and the various institutional programming tools

(development, DDR, SSR, rule of law, etc.). It points to politics after liberalism (a post-liberal
peace?) which maintains aspects of local legitimacy and international legitimacy where they
both pertain to positive and hybrid forms of peace, but in which local forms of authority
become executors rather than servants.
Conclusion
Our application of constructivism in order to examine how ontological assumptions generate
the epistemological and methodological frameworks that underpin disputes about the
nature of peacebuilding highlights why the shift to more reflexive understandings of hybrid
peacebuilding in both the critical peacebuilding literature and in international policy and
praxis (although understood in different ways), provides space for making more complex
and less certain ontological assumptions in conflict-affected societies. It suggests that we
should disaggregate the disorders that challenge attempts to make peace, into hybrid polit-
ical, social, economic, cultural and gendered orders. This no longer is merely a simplistic
denotation of outside–inside, local–international, but of the relationality of the various pro-
jects, programmes, interventions and practices connected to peacemaking, building and
thinking. Power relations and mediated situatedness determine political objectives in a scalar
and relational, mobile and networked, rather than geopolitical/geo-economic work of fixed
ontologies, territorial sovereignty and static international architectures and programming.
Critical hybridity as opposed to instrumental hybridity (as a form of trusteeship connected
to native administration) portrays the world, power, norms, culture, values, society, institu-
tions, the economy and so on as experienced from a subaltern positionality (an everyday,
conflict affected, insecure, developmental subject). This view raises acute questions of his-
torical and distributive justice (and injustice), as well as of alterity and commonality. How
would these be mitigated, mediated and dealt with by power in the modern world, whether
in view of the state, formal institutions, transnational actors or markets? It denotes a truly
multi-disciplinary conversation, rather than an aspiration, in which disciplinary concepts
and language, though not common, are being more broadly comprehended and contextu-
ally mediated and expanded. Sites of legitimacy and related authority are thus
interrogated.
It also means a rethink of donor, regional and international architectures, into new hybrid
institutions, which connect localised belief systems and related hybrid systems of legitimate
political order with global justice. This would be a step forward from the approach of the
last 25 years which has tended to try to cajole conflict affected populations and governments
into liberalisation in the context of a predatory global economic environment with uncertain
regional security, thus undermining the external attempt to reconstruct political authority
from the top-down. Critical approaches to peacebuilding would focus not on installing a
blueprint style peace and state, but instead on developing a just and sustainable polity from
a mixture of localised systems of legitimate authority, from the modern and varied state
form, and a increasingly more inclusive international peacebuilding architecture, which
would need enhanced capacity to engage with matters of historical and distributive forms
of justice. Critical perspectives of hybrid peacebuilding point to the necessity of expanded
rights systems, to engage with different cultural systems, geographical locations, material
needs, institutional and legal designs. This means finding ways of reconciling local forms of
legitimate political authority with forms of state more competently able to address social
justice issues and bridge deep political cleavages. It demands that the international com-
munity abandons its dominant blue print standard operating procedures, and instead work
in close collaboration with local political authorities in determining how policy, donor assis-
tance and the emergent state framework can reach goals which balance social justice, iden-
tity, custom, with human rights standards, and the material resources available in context
and from donors.
This is a process as opposed to a fixed debate, which is still emerging, and which strikes
us as being a major advance on older, static ‘enlightenment’ approaches to theory, agency
and structure, such as in critical, cosmopolitan, liberal and now neoliberal debates. This is
because hybrid peacebuilding engages with fluid material and ideational realities of every-
day life under the power relations inherent in the state, international order, under global
capital, as well as socio-historical orders, as critical versions of constructivism connote. It
also points to an emerging world in which these previous historical, political and epistemic
layers may be shifting or fading, and possibly be replaced by more networked, subaltern
and mobile versions of peace, assuming the validity of subaltern justice claims. But as impor-
tantly, through mixed and relational methods and partnership approaches, it captures the
fluidity and dilemmas of political, social and cultural transitions in a complex world, and
without romanticising or dichotomising tries to avoid the methodological violence com-
mitted through a dependence upon reductionism at the intellectual level, nationalism (or
any ism) at the political and social levels and bureaucratic, econometric or legalistic ration-
alities at the international levels.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP160104692].
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the organisers of, and participants at, the writers’ workshop on ‘Hybridity: History,
Power and Scale’ held at the Australian National University in December 2016. Joanne acknowledges
the support of Australian Research Council Discovery Project 160104692, ‘Doing State-building better?
Practising Hybridity in Melanesia’.
Notes on contributors
Joanne Wallis is a senior lecturer in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian
National University. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2012. Her first book
was Constitution Making during State Building (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and her latest book
is Pacific Power? Australia’s Strategy in the Pacific Islands (Melbourne University Press, 2017). Joanne’s
current research focuses on peacebuilding, security and strategy in the Pacific Islands, supported by
two Australian Research Council Discovery Project grants.
Oliver Richmond is a professor of International Relations in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response
Institute at the University of Manchester. His primary area of expertise is in peace and conflict theory,
and in particular its inter-linkages with IR theory. He is currently working on a book on Peace and
Intervention in the 21st Century. His most recent work has been on peace formation and its relation
to state formation, statebuilding and peacebuilding (Failed Statebuilding and Peace Formation, Yale
University Press 2014 & Peace Formation and Political Order, Oxford University Press, 2016). This area
of interest has grown out of his work on local forms of critical agency and resistance, and their role in
constructing hybrid or post-liberal forms of peace and states (see A Post-Liberal Peace, Routledge, 2011),
as well as earlier conflict resolution and conflict management debates in IR, including international
mediation, peacekeeping and state formation debates. He has also recently published a Very Short
Introduction to Peace (Oxford University Press, 2014), which offers an overview of the development of
related concepts, theory and practices.
Notes
1. Doyle, “Three Pillars.”
2. Richmond, “Becoming Liberal”; and Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace.”
3. Human Security Study Group, “From Hybrid Peace.”
4. UNDP, Governance for Peace.
5. World Bank. World Development Report 2011. See also recent interviews in the UN system,
especially, UNPBC, DPKO and the World Bank by co-author, February 2015 and March 2016.
6. OECD, Supporting Statebuilding.
7. UN News Centre, “At UN Peace Operations Review”; and Boulding, Cultures of Peace.
8. Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics.”
9. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity; Finnemore, National Interests; Finnemore, The Purpose of
Intervention; Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security; and Wendt, Social Theory.
10. Onuf, “Constructivism: A User’s Manual,” 66; and Kratchowil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions.
11. Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose; and Hopf, Social Construction.
12. Ashley, “The Geopolitics”; Campbell, Writing Security; and Zehfuss, Constructivism in International
Relations.
13. Linklater, The Transformation; Cox, “Social Forces”; and Gramsci, Selections.
14. Guzzini, “A Reconstruction.”
15. Adler, “Constructivism.”
16. Ibid., 121.
17. Wendt, “Constructing International Politics,” 73.
18. Popper, The Open Universe.
19. Searle, The Construction.
20. Gould, “What is at Stake.”
22. Klotz, Norms in International Relations.
23. Sikkink, “The Power of Principled Ideas.”
24. Checkel, “Why Comply?”
25. Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose.
26. Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo.
27. Zabusky, Launching Space.
28. Barnett, Dialogues.
29. Wendt, Social Theory.
30. Guzzini and Leander, Constructivism.
31. Wight, “The Shoot Dead Horses.”
32. Wight, Agents, Structures.
33. Adler, “Constructivism,” 134.
34. Barkawi and Laffey, “The Postcolonial Moment”; Ayoob, “Inequality and Theorizing”; and Tickner,
“Seeing IR Differently.”
35. Finnemore, National Interests; and Legro, Rethinking the World.
36. Adler, “Constructivism,” 123; and Weldes, Constructing National Interests.
37. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity.

38. Dessler, “What’s at Stake.”
40. Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics.”
41. Wendt, “Anarchy.”
42. Barnett and Finnemore, “The Politics, Power.”
43. Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’”; and Kornprobst, Irredentism in European Politics.
44. United Nations General Assembly, An Agenda for Peace.
45. March and Olsen, “The Institutional Dynamics”; and Finnemore, National Interests.
47. Kratochwil, Rules, Norms; and Waever, “Securitization and Desecuritization.”
48. Diez, “Speaking ‘Europe’,” 603.
49. Neumann and Sending, “‘The International’.”
50. Advisory Group of Experts on the Review of the Peacebuilding Architecture, Challenge of
Sustaining Peace.
51. World Bank, World Development Report 2011.
52. Ibid., 106.
53. Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn,” 857; and Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace.”
54. Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace.”
55. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn.”
56. Richmond, “The Dilemmas,” 51.
57. Ibid., 60.
58. Weber, “Science as a Vocation”; and Tilly, Coercion, Capital.
59. Publius, The Federalist Papers.
60. United Nations General Assembly, An Agenda for Peace.
61. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
62. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South.
63. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice; and Sillitoe, “The Development.”
64. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding.
65. Berlin, Four Essay, 103.
66. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 179; and Honig, Political Theory.
67. Barnett, “Social Constructivism.”
68. Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
69. Chandler, “Reconceptualising.”
70. Ayoob, “Inequality and Theorizing,” 29.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Nadarajah and Rampton, “The Limits of Hybridity.”
74. Grenfell, “Rethinking Governance.”
75. Interview with a Timorese intellectual and government advisor, 12 May 2010.
76. Boucher and Kelly, “Introduction,” 10.
77. Richmond and Franks, “Liberal Peacebuilding”; and Trindade, “Reconciling Conflicting
Paradigms.”
78. Constantinou, “Aporias of Identity.”
79. Castañeda, The European Approach.
80. Interview with a Confidential Civil Society Source, Colombo, 15 November 2015.
81. Visoka, “Three Levels of Hybridisation.”
82. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.
83. Forster, “Hermeneutics.”
84. Forster, “Hermeneutics,” 33.
85. Kalb, “Uses of Local Knowledge.”
86. Cooke and Kothari, Participation.
87. Rawls, A Theory of Justice.
88. Starr, Freedom’s Power.
89. Mac Ginty, “Between Resistance,” 170; and Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley, Citizenship in Britain.
90. Mac Ginty, “Between Resistance,” 171.
91. Cooke and Kothari, “The Case for Participation as Tyranny,” 3.
92. Fraenkel, The Manipulation of Custom.
93. Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent, “The Dark Side of Hybridity.”
94. Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace,” 559; and Chandler, “Resilience and the ‘Everyday’.”
95. Richmond and Mitchell, “Peacebuilding and Critical Forms,” 334.
96. Wallis, “Is ‘Good Enough’ Peacebuilding Good Enough?”
97. Interview with a member of Timorese civil society, 17 July 2013.
98. Hughes, Ojendal, and Schierenbeck, “The Struggle,” 820.
99. Scott, Domination.
100. Ibid.
101. Richmond, “Resistance,” 669.
102. Kalb, “Uses of Local Knowledge.”
103. Laclau, Emancipation(s).
104. Horkheimer, Critical Theory.
105. Hohe and Nixon, Reconciling Justice; and Howely, Breaking Spears.
106. Chopra, Ranheim, and Nixon, “Local-level Justice.”
107. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity.”
108. Peterson, “A Conceptual Unpacking.”
109. Björkdahl and Hoglund, “Precarious Peacebuilding.”
110. Porter, Peacebuilding, 62.
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From Constructivist To Critical Engageme

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Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal

ISSN: 2380-2014 (Print) 2379-9978 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtwt20

From constructivist to critical engagements with

Joanne Wallis & Oliver Richmond

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From constructivist to critical engagements with

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

CONTACT Joanne Wallis joanne.wallis@anu.edu.au

Applying constructivism to peacebuilding

From liberal to hybrid peacebuilding

The clash between two common ontological assumptions

The epistemological consequences

counterproductive conclusions and, consequently, approaches to peacebuilding.72 Indeed,

The methodological consequences

occupied by more immediate concerns, with onerous expectations of participation giving

Consequences for critical peacebuilding

peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding and the various institutional programming tools

37. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity.

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37. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity.