Suchergebnisse

Introduction : liberal peace last agony -- The disillusionment with democratisation -- The shifting governance of post-conflict kosovo -- Local ownership and deferral -- Resilience and deferral -- Connolly, critiques and vorarephilia -- Conclusion : uncanny optimism at the end of the liberal peace

The International Relations (IR) literature has strongly criticised the invasive and top-down nature of liberal peace, facilitating a reinterpretation of the practice of international intervention in conflict-affected societies. Today, sustaining peace policy approaches advance longer-term missions, give a secondary role to external practitioners, and increasingly accept risks and failures. What is striking is that even when these policy discourses hold out the promise of liberating peacebuilding from dominant and top-down models of liberal intervention, the mood in the field is one of despair. By drawing on John Dewey's work on pragmatism and interviewing practitioners in Bosnia and Kosovo, the article reflects on the morass practitioners find themselves, diagnoses the source of the frustrations, and anticipates the direction of sustaining peace. Pragmatism adumbrates the idea of 'peacebuilding without peace', encouraging practitioners to experiment, give primacy to their doings and explore this world without hope of success and dreams of otherworldliness.

The International Relations (IR) literature has strongly criticised the invasive and top-down nature of liberal peace, facilitating a reinterpretation of the practice of international intervention in conflict-affected societies. Today, sustaining peace policy approaches advance longer-term missions, give a secondary role to external practitioners, and increasingly accept risks and failures. What is striking is that even when these policy discourses hold out the promise of liberating peacebuilding from dominant and top-down models of liberal intervention, the mood in the field is one of despair. By drawing on John Dewey's work on pragmatism and interviewing practitioners in Bosnia and Kosovo, the article reflects on the morass practitioners find themselves, diagnoses the source of the frustrations, and anticipates the direction of sustaining peace. Pragmatism adumbrates the idea of 'peacebuilding without peace', encouraging practitioners to experiment, give primacy to their doings and explore this world without hope of success and dreams of otherworldliness.

Este artículo quiere entender la evolución de los procesos de consolidación de la paz en los últimos años, a través del análisis de cómo la conceptualización de la alteridad por parte de los organismos internacionales está cambiando. El argumento es que en las intervenciones posbélicas de la década de los noventa y de los primeros años del siglo XXI, los procesos intersubjetivos de las sociedades que salían del conflicto se consideraban un problema a corregir con la creación de instituciones eficientes supervisadas por expertos internacionales. Sin embargo, con la pérdida de confianza en la posibilidad de promover la democracia internacionalmente y con la voluntad de solventar los errores de unas intervenciones excesivamente intrusivas, la alteridad es cada vez más un recurso que puede utilizarse para desarrollar una paz respetuosa con el contexto de cada sociedad. Para analizar cómo la alteridad se ha entendido más positivamente en los últimos años, algo transcendental para explicar cómo organizaciones internacionales entienden la paz actualmente, el artículo se centra en los conceptos de "apropiación local" y "resiliencia". La conclusión es que este cambio positivo para respetar otras culturas también esconde dos potenciales problemas. El primero es que estamos perdiendo la capacidad para teorizar sobre la paz y el segundo es que la autonomía o soberanía nacional de las sociedades posbélicas continua en el limbo ; This article seeks to understand the evolution of the processes of peacebuilding in the past years by analysing how international organisations have recently conceptualised alterity in a different manner. It is argued that throughout the post-war interventions of the 1990s and early years of 2000s, the inter-subjective processes of post-conflict societies were considered a problem to be corrected by the means of creating efficient institutions supervised by international experts. However, the optimism in relation to the promotion of democracy abroad withered away and there was the need to solve the errors of highly intrusive interventions. On these assumptions, alterity is increasingly seen as a resource that can be used to develop a peace project respectful of the context of each society. In order to analyse how alterity is understood more positively in the past years —which is crucial to explain how international organisations currently practice peace— the article will focus on the concepts of "local ownership" and "resilience". The conclusion is that the positive shift to embrace other cultures also hides two potential problems. The first is that we are losing the capacity to theorise about peace and the second is that the autonomy or national sovereignty of post-war societies still remains in limbo

Este artículo quiere entender la evolución de los procesos de consolidación de la paz en los últimos años, a través del análisis de cómo la conceptualización de la alteridad por parte de los organismos internacionales está cambiando. El argumento es que en las intervenciones posbélicas de la década de los noventa y de los primeros años del siglo XXI, los procesos intersubjetivos de las sociedades que salían del conflicto se consideraban un problema a corregir con la creación de instituciones eficientes supervisadas por expertos internacionales. Sin embargo, con la pérdida de confianza en la posibilidad de promover la democracia internacionalmente y con la voluntad de solventar los errores de unas intervenciones excesivamente intrusivas, la alteridad es cada vez más un recurso que puede utilizarse para desarrollar una paz respetuosa con el contexto de cada sociedad. Para analizar cómo la alteridad se ha entendido más positivamente en los últimos años, algo transcendental para explicar cómo organizaciones internacionales entienden la paz actualmente, el artículo se centra en los conceptos de "apropiación local" y "resiliencia". La conclusión es que este cambio positivo para respetar otras culturas también esconde dos potenciales problemas. El primero es que estamos perdiendo la capacidad para teorizar sobre la paz y el segundo es que la autonomía o soberanía nacional de las sociedades posbélicas continua en el limbo.

This article seeks to understand the evolution of the processes of peacebuilding in the past years by analysing how international organisations have recently conceptualised alterity in a different manner. It is argued that throughout the post-war interventions of the 1990s and early years of 2000s, the inter-subjective processes of post-conflict societies were considered a problem to be corrected by the means of creating efficient institutions supervised by international experts. However, the optimism in relation to the promotion of democracy abroad withered away and there was the need to solve the errors of highly intrusive interventions. On these assumptions, alterity is increasingly seen as a resource that can be used to develop a peace project respectful of the context of each society. In order to analyse how alterity is understood more positively in the past years —which is crucial to explain how international organisations currently practice peace— the article will focus on the concepts of "local ownership" and "resilience". The conclusion is that the positive shift to embrace other cultures also hides two potential problems. The first is that we are losing the capacity to theorise about peace and the second is that the autonomy or national sovereignty of post-war societies still remains in limbo. ; Este artículo quiere entender la evolución de los procesos de consolidación de la paz en los últimos años, a través del análisis de cómo la conceptualización de la alteridad por parte de los organismos internacionales está cambiando. El argumento es que en las intervenciones posbélicas de la década de los noventa y de los primeros años del siglo XXI, los procesos intersubjetivos de las sociedades que salían del conflicto se consideraban un problema a corregir con la creación de instituciones eficientes supervisadas por expertos internacionales. Sin embargo, con la pérdida de confianza en la posibilidad de promover la democracia internacionalmente y con la voluntad de solventar los errores de unas intervenciones excesivamente intrusivas, la alteridad es cada vez más un recurso que puede utilizarse para desarrollar una paz respetuosa con el contexto de cada sociedad. Para analizar cómo la alteridad se ha entendido más positivamente en los últimos años, algo transcendental para explicar cómo organizaciones internacionales entienden la paz actualmente, el artículo se centra en los conceptos de "apropiación local" y "resiliencia". La conclusión es que este cambio positivo para respetar otras culturas también esconde dos potenciales problemas. El primero es que estamos perdiendo la capacidad para teorizar sobre la paz y el segundo es que la autonomía o soberanía nacional de las sociedades posbélicas continua en el limbo.

This article analyses how the concept of 'local ownership' has been employed within policy frameworks in the context of peacebuilding since the late 1990s. It identifies the paradox that lies in the increasing willingness to transfer ownership to the local population and the also explicit assumption that self-determination and self-government have to be avoided in democratisation and post-conflict situations. It is argued that it is important to investigate the paradox, the fact that ownership and self-government have opposed connotations within contemporary frameworks of peacebuilding, because in the literature this position is not seen as being contradictory. Far from being seen as a strategy containing an irreconcilable paradox, local ownership is conceptualised so that it resolves at the same time two problems at the core of international governance settings: it limits the international administrators' intrusiveness in national affairs and avoids the risk of giving too much responsibility to local authorities. While it is presented as a progressive strategy on all fronts, the conclusion of this article is that the concept of ownership, as it has been interpreted by the discourses of peacebuilding analysed here, has been of little value to post-conflict societies and, furthermore, it has denied their moral and political autonomy. This denial, disguised as a discourse that promises to embrace difference, is particularly flawed because it seems to permanently defer equality between internationally supervised populations and the rest of sovereign nations.

This article explores the nature of resilience-informed international interventions today by thinking about 'difference'. Up to the 1990s, international interventions were often characterised by a patronising tone in which backward others needed help to develop. Some 20 years later, key lessons learned were that others were so fundamentally different that efforts to assist them invariably failed. This article argues that contemporary approaches seeking to foster resilience are simultaneously propelled by both approaches. They are thus underpinned by two conflicting understandings of difference: the other that is in need and the other that cannot be attended. Even more, we contend that this contradiction is put to productive use in resilience-building: protracted crises today demand practitioners to 'be there', engaged permanently, to speculate, experiment, and affirm radical uncertainty. In order to analyse the novel features of resilience, we draw on Graham Harman's speculative realism and look at policy programming of the Syrian refugee crisis.