Talking past each other: Regional and domestic resistance in the Burundian intervention scene
| Author | Stefanie Wodrig,Julia Grauvogel |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836716632559 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Cooperation and Conflict
2016, Vol. 51(3) 272 –290
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836716632559
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Talking past each other:
Regional and domestic
resistance in the Burundian
intervention scene
Stefanie Wodrig and Julia Grauvogel
Abstract
Peacebuilding attempts invoke a considerable amount of friction. In this article we argue that
these frictional encounters can be made visible by focusing on articulations of resistance voiced
by different actors in the intervention scene, including national elites and interveners. Departing
from the discussion of the regionally led facilitation in Burundi, we show that the respective
national elites and African interveners referred to different scales in order to legitimise their
resistance: the Great Lakes Peace Initiative for Burundi resisted sedimented continental practices
as well as international attempts to impose their conceptions of peace, whereas the Burundian
elites repeatedly rejected regionally sponsored ‘solutions’ with reference to the domestic situation.
Drawing on interviews with and statements by diverse national and regional forces, we show how
claims to resist were articulated with respect to different spatial reference points and thereby
explore how regional and domestic actors talked past each other.
Keywords
Burundi, friction, peacebuilding, resistance
Introduction
Peacebuilding is characterised by encounters between multiple external and domestic
forces with different and often conflicting ideas about the intervention and the post-crisis
order. In the previous decade studies on this subject matter tended to make sense of the
complexity of an intervention by focusing on the liberal peace as the hegemonic external
leitmotiv. Lately, they have concentrated on the hybrid peace as the actual manifestation
in the post-crisis context. In contrast, we approach the complexity of an intervention in
Corresponding author:
Stefanie Wodrig, Research Group on International Political Sociology, University of Kiel, Wilhelm-Seelig-
Platz 2, 24118 Kiel, Germany.
Email: wodrig@ips.uni-kiel.de
632559CAC0010.1177/0010836716632559Cooperation and ConflictWodrig and Grauvogel
research-article2016
Article
Wodrig and Grauvogel 273
general and the Burundian peace process in particular by focusing on how a group of
regional forces organised in the Great Lakes Peace Initiative for Burundi (henceforth,
Regional Initiative) interacted with Burundian national elites. In doing so, we follow the
academic trend of abandoning the liberal peace as a framework for analysis (Heathershaw,
2013: 276; Zaum, 2012: 122) without, however, entirely shifting our focus to the micro-
dynamics of peace at the local scale (cf. Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013). Even though
we recognise the importance of a locally owned peace being sustainable (Autesserre,
2009), the encounters between regional interveners and domestic elites also constitute a
crucial site of knowledge production in the intervention scene, which is often underap-
preciated in today’s sociology of intervention.
The case of Burundi is particularly insightful because, on the one hand, the domestic
elites were not simply co-opted by the interveners and their statebuilding efforts but
rather actively renegotiated, reinterpreted and subverted institutions and practices pro-
moted by the interveners (Curtis, 2013: 84). On the other hand, instead of a Western-
dominated so-called international community, the intervention politics were mainly
crafted and carried out by neighbouring states that, while intervening, outlined a new
identity for themselves as agents that are able to shape their own futures (Wodrig, 2014).
Both regional and domestic forces laid claim to actively shaping the Burundian crisis
context, thereby rendering friction almost inevitable.
In a nutshell, we specifically address the encounters between regional forces and
national elites in the Burundian intervention scene.1 This perspective paints a more
nuanced picture of regional interveners, which were either neglected or depicted as con-
forming to international peacebuilding templates in previous research, and national elites
often accused of being co-opted by the international community, as we argue in more
detail below. Most importantly, the article highlights the frictional nature of these other-
wise understudied encounters. Thus, intervention in the Burundian crisis constituted an
essentially political endeavour, during which different interpretations of the crisis as well
as different conceptions of peace and order coexisted against the backdrop of competing
claims to power, both on the national and the regional scale. In this article we argue that
such ‘friction’ (Björkdahl and Höglund, 2013; Tsing, 2005) can be made intelligible by
focusing on the articulations of resistance2 voiced by the domestic elite and regional
interveners on how to build peace, with respect to the conception of the others. Based on
the insight that domination is only discernible when it is questioned and resisted (Daase
and Deitelhoff, 2014: 1), analysing articulations of resistance during the Burundian con-
flict renders visible entangled relations of domination between the different actors. Such
a perspective on the Burundian intervention highlights the co-constitution of domination
and resistance and calls into question the one-sided but widely accepted perspective on
the localisation of domination and resistance, which objectivises not only domestic elites
but also interveners as forces of domination aiming to enforce preset understandings of
liberal peace.
The remainder of this article is organised as follows: based on the notion of interven-
tion as a political process, we first discuss why and how analysing articulations of resist-
ance helps to unravel the frictional encounters between domestic elites and regional
interveners. Drawing on several months of field research in Burundi and Tanzania,3 we
then explore how these two groups articulated their practices as resistance while
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