Suchergebnisse

While agency has become the new buzzword for researchers in the area of peace and conflict studies, it remains a concept that is both under-theorised and contested in terms of how it transforms the disciplines of Politics, International Relations and Peace and Conflict. In this book, Kappler develops a relational and spatial concept of agency, enhancing our understanding of the complex and subtle processes through which peacebuilding actors engage and interact with each other. Using the EU's engagement in peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a primary case study, this book investigates outlines competing discourse clusters in the interplay between the EU and local actors engaged in creative cultural activities. An investigation of the contested nature of agency in its ability to give meaning to peacebuilding highlights the potential of local actors to impact upon and resist institutional discourses. Kappler also conveys the challenges of peacebuilding in Cyprus where there is a lack of connection between local and international discursive spaces, whilst the more limited depth of international intervention in South Africa in turn suggests a more flexible set of actors as well as more dynamic interaction in the emergence of peace-related discourses. This book provides an original discussion of agency in relation to EU peacebuilding, exploring the subtle forms of interaction between actors and framing the analysis in ways that allow for practical application.

AbstractThis article focuses on the ways in which museums perform peri‐urban agency in urban peripheries. The latter are defined as meeting points between rural and urban economies and zones of transition and precariousness, shaped by intersectional inequalities. In South Africa, the experiences of migrant workers include governed (im)mobilities, living on the urban periphery and seeing the continuation of colonial practices in a neoliberal economic environment. A mnemonic reading of the ways in which migrant labour is interpreted and curated by the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum near Cape Town reflects the extent to which the control of mobilities continues to operate in the country's post‐apartheid neoliberal system. The manner in which the museum curates the experience of migrant‐labour casts light on the performance of a particular form of peri‐urban agency as a way of interpreting the experience of migrant labour beyond Cape Town's city centre. Such agency is not free from contestation but instead an articulation of mnemonic agency in a post‐colonial political setting.

Much of the peace and conflict literature sustains the claim that, whilst intervention during war may require military and diplomatic tools, post-conflict peacebuilding intervention enables more locally-led and emancipatory approaches. This article focuses on the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) to ask whether a change in how international actors narratively frame their role vis-à-vis BiH confirms this assumed turning point between the conflict and post-conflict scenario. It first investigates the binary frame of 'local backwardness' and 'international progressiveness', which was promoted by the international community during the war and suggests that local actors were situated in an inferior time zone, in need of external help. Second, it analyses the European Union's post-conflict intervention to find that there is a continued presence of the narrative frame of 'backwardness vs progress'. Suggesting that the discursive framing of local actors as backwards serves as a legitimation of continued intervention, the article concludes that the alleged turning point between conflict and post-conflict situations is not clearly reflected in the interveners' narratives on BiH.

This thesis aims to investigate EU peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina, focusing on the ways in which EU actors engage with local cultural actors and vice versa. Given that, in the liberal peacebuilding tradition, civil society has been considered a key actor in the public sphere, peacebuilding actors have tended to neglect seemingly more marginal actors and their subtle ways of impacting on the peacebuilding process. However, this thesis contends that processes of interaction are not always direct and visible, but centre on discourse clusters, which I frame as imaginary 'spaces of agency'. Through the creation of meanings within a space of agency and its translation into other imaginary spaces, actors develop the power to impact upon the peacebuilding process, often in coded ways and therefore invisible in the public sphere, as peacebuilding actors, including the EU, have created it. A typology of the modes of interaction and possible responses between spaces helps understand the complexities and nuances of peacebuilding interaction. The thesis uses this framework to analyse several exemplary spaces of agency of the EU, rooting them in institutional discourses with specific reference to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Based on this, I investigate a number of responses to those spaces on the part of local cultural actors, as well as how the latter contribute to the emergence of alternative localised spaces, where the EU's spaces fail to connect to the everyday dimensions of peace. I suggest that this represents a way in which local actors try to claim the ownership of peacebuilding back in subtle ways. This also points to the ability of actors that have traditionally been excluded from the peacebuilding project to contextualise abstract and distant processes into what matters locally, as well as their capacity to reject and resist when the EU's spaces remain irrelevant for local peacebuilding imaginations.

Despite the volume of research exploring the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for destructive purposes (terrorism, crime, war propaganda) on the one hand, and development (ICT4D) on the other hand, very little has been said about the role that traditional, and especially new social media, can play for the transformation and prevention of conflicts. This paper recognises ICTs as a tool, thus accepting their multi-level and multi-dimensional potential in the transformation as well as the intransigence and promotion of conflict. The paper seeks to explore: (a) whether ICTs can empower marginalised actors to transcend the peacebuilding and statebuilding processes, and lead to a more locally-owned, more representative transformation of the conflict; (b) whether ICTs can foster more hybrid forms of peace; and (c) whether they can be co-opted as a platform by donors to promote their agendas and impede resistance.