Displaced security? The relationships, routines and rhythms of peacebuilding interveners
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836720954472 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Joanne Wallis |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
954472CAC0010.1177/0010836720954472Cooperation and ConflictWallis
research-article2020
Article
Cooperation and Conflict
2020, Vol. 55(4) 479 –496
Displaced security? The
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
relationships, routines and
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720954472
DOI: 10.1177/0010836720954472
journals.sagepub.com/home/cac
rhythms of peacebuilding
interveners
Joanne Wallis
Abstract
This article considers what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding
work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. This is important because individual
interveners are diverse, embodied agents who can impact the agency, peace and security of
conflict-affected populations. It argues that applying an ontological security lens can provide a
partial explanation for why interveners develop narratives and perform practices, including why
they sometimes identify and behave in counterproductive, and even damaging, ways. The final
section considers why an analytical focus on place is valuable, noting that place-based experiences
and place-identities are formative of ontological security. It argues that treating interveners as a
referent object provides opportunities to rethink the tendency to focus on home as the key site
of emplacement in the ontological security literature. Building on this, it argues that examining
the emplaced security of interveners invites us to examine the political nature and consequences
of interveners’ physical and ontological security-seeking narratives and practices, including their
creation of the material and ideational structures of intervention spaces and places.
Keywords
Everyday, home, ontological security, peacebuilding, place, space
Introduction
The ‘local turn’ in critical peace and conflict scholarship has shifted focus from the geo-
political, normative or operational aspects of peacebuilding interventions at the interna-
tional scale, to the agency and practices of conflict-affected populations subject to them
at the local scale. In this context, scale refers to the ‘vertical organisation of space’ pro-
duced by discourse, practices and power structures (Ide, 2017: 547). Accompanying this
shift has been an increased focus on what ‘space’ as a category of analysis can reveal
Corresponding author:
Joanne Wallis, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Adelaide, Adelaide SA 5005,
Australia.
Email: joanne.wallis@adelaide.edu.au
480
Cooperation and Conflict 55(4)
about the dynamics of peacebuilding at the local scale. Space is understood as ‘the imag-
inary counter-side of material place’, composed of social practices, representations and
principles (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 19; Lefebvre, 1991). This special issue engages
with the spatial turn to consider the importance of security in place, that is, ‘emplaced
security’. Place refers to a fixed location with a material form that is ‘loaded with an
extra significance’ (Thrift, 2006: 552), as it is ‘interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt,
understood, and imagined’ (Gieryn, 2000: 465).
I consider what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding
work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. Through their practices and
representations, interveners create spatial structures which they legitimise by represent-
ing them as intervention spaces where peacebuilding work is performed, within which
they create material intervention places. This ‘peacebuilding work’ encompasses the
‘many individual actions taking place each day between peacekeepers [or in my wider
framing, interveners] and the people they are deployed to help’ purportedly in pursuit of
creating, strengthening or solidifying peace (Rubinstein, 2008: 3).
International interveners – people who have been deployed to intervention spaces to
perform peacebuilding work and who ‘operate according to the principles and standards
set for international interventions’ (Flaspoler, 2016: 235) – are overlooked in much of the
peace and conflict scholarship informed by the local turn. However, a small, but rich,
body of work has analysed the impact of the spatial practices, habits and assumptions of
interveners on peacebuilding (including Autesserre, 2014b; Goetz, 2017; Henry, 2015;
Higate and Henry, 2009; Pingeot, 2018; Pouligny, 2006; Smirl, 2015). To build on this,
Marsha Henry has called for scholars to ask ‘how does what peacekeepers do in their
everyday lives affect peacekeeping, the mission environment, and the peacekeepers
themselves? And how do peacekeepers justify their own, sometimes privileged, posi-
tions in these missions?’ (Henry, 2015: 373).
In response, I propose that using an ontological security lens to study the microprac-
tices and identities of interveners can provide at least partial answers to these questions
by examining and supplementing existing studies. The spatial turn is important for this
analysis, as much of the literature assumes that being emplaced, usually at ‘home’, is an
important source of ontological security. As interveners are dis-emplaced from their resi-
dential homes when they deploy to intervention spaces, this raises the question of whether
they can become emplaced and feel at home in intervention places. This, in turn, raises
the question of whether intervention spaces and places are – at least partly – created by
interveners as a source of ontological security, particularly as they play a role in generat-
ing their peacebuilding identities. These are important questions, because the ontological
security-seeking strategies of interveners can affect the way in which they exercise their
agency, which can in turn impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected
populations in intervention spaces.
I begin by outlining why we should study individual interveners engaged in peace-
building work at the local scale, particularly how their relationships, routines and
rhythms impact and are impacted by their peacebuilding identity. I then consider how to
address the risks and methodological challenges of studying individual interveners at
the local scale. I then build on existing work to analyse why we should study the
Wallis
481
ontological security of interveners. In the final sections, I consider why studying the
emplaced ontological security of interveners offers opportunities to rethink the role
played by ‘home’ and place as sources of ontological security.
Why should we study individual interveners at the local
scale?
Much peace and conflict scholarship has seen the international scale as a space consist-
ing of structures, norms and institutions, which has obscured the diverse nature of the
people that constitute it. The literature frequently refers to a disembodied, homogenous
‘international’ that undertakes interventions, and there is often an implicit assumption
that one international intervener is easily substitutable with another. But, while peace-
building interventions are decided and designed by state governments and international
institutions, interveners are seldom merely conduits of international policy; they instead
exercise individual agency as ‘mediating actors’ to translate, interpret and reinterpret
their mandates in their everyday lives (Hindman and Fechter, 2011: 5; Autesserre, 2014b;
Pouligny, 2006; Rubinstein, 2008).
Interveners are also individual, embodied actors (Henry, 2015; Higate and Henry,
2009; McSorley, 2014; Read, 2018). Consequently, an intersectional analysis (Crenshaw,
1989) invites us to recognise that they come from different national, ethnic, cultural,
linguistic, racial, religious, family and social backgrounds. Studying them as individuals
allows us to interrogate the differences between them and for the ‘implications of the
power relations which provide these differences to be questioned’ (Read, 2018: 305;
Duncanson, 2013; Henry, 2017). It also allows us to recognise the ‘diverse ways in which
the personal is political’ for interveners, and how this can inform their practices and
identities (McLeod, 2015: 52).
As noted, the local turn has highlighted the analytical importance of the local scale,
where conflict-affected populations exercise ‘ordinary agency’ and perform their mun-
dane and habitual micropractices (Mannergren Selimovic, 2019: 132; Acuto, 2014). This
means that analysing the local scale involves recognising the significance of the every-
day and ephemeral, rather than the exceptional, including the power of taken-for-granted
quotidian routines and rhythms in shaping situations (Croft and Vaughan-Williams,
2016; Guillaume and Huysmans, 2019). This reflects the growing shift in the interna-
tional relations literature towards uncovering the links between the local and interna-
tional scales (Davies and Niemann, 2002; Montsion, 2012).
Individual interveners can constitute a link between peacebuilding practices at the
local scale and peacebuilding structures and institutions at the international scale.
Studying interveners at the local scale can help us to understand how the international
is translated, negotiated and domesticated in their everyday micropractices, routines
and rhythms. It also allows us to analyse the ‘inverse causal relationship’ between eve-
ryday practices and international structures and political dynamics, as people incorpo-
rate and reject international frameworks and dynamics in their everyday lives (Acuto,
2014: 353; Mac...
To continue reading
Request your trial