TY - JOUR
AU - Smith,, Sarah
AB - Abstract Peace operations have increasingly sought to demonstrate their legitimacy in the face of critiques that characterize them as top-down impositions with limited impact and which entail a host of unintended consequences. Each book under review explores in depth the institutional consignment and attribution of legitimacy to certain spaces, actors, and bodies, which can serve to confirm and embed hierarchical relations of power. Von Billerbeck delineates the ambivalence with which “local ownership” is deployed in peace operations, closing down knowledge exchange rather than presenting opportunity. Shepherd builds on similar insights and argues that gendered logics and power inform the conceptualization and deployment of “local” and “civil society” and thus the (relative) lack of legitimacy afforded to these spaces. This essay seeks to develop from these insights further, drawing especially on postcolonial and critical race theory to demonstrate how race and racism structure the production and use of such categories, in both peace operation practice and international relations more broadly. legitimacy, peacebuilding, race Introduction Since the expansion of peace operations in the post–Cold War era, the legitimacy of interventions by “outsiders” to enact peace in varied political, social, and economic contexts has been queried. Large missions in the 1990s, such as those in Timor-Leste and Kosovo, faced backlash from host populations who felt alienated from peace operation work. As a result, the United Nations (UN) has endeavored to reframe peace operations and their engagement in host sites to ensure both the continued support of host populations and the effectiveness of their work. Each of the books under review provides timely examinations of how legitimacy is produced within institutional discourses, the epistemologies that underpin the location of legitimacy, and, importantly, how this production most closely aligns with institutional perpetuation, rather than substantive changes to peace “on the ground.” Both texts make policy-level interventions and are concerned with how institutions, especially the UN, structure and circumscribe legitimacy in peacebuilding and peacekeeping practice. As both institutional and academic literature queries which actors can most legitimately build peace and how (AGE 2015; HIPPO 2015; Leonardsson and Rudd 2015; Sabaratnam 2017), these texts demonstrate the productive power inherent in the construction and attribution of legitimacy, and how legitimacy is circumscribed by and reproduces existing relations of power. After providing an overview of the books under review, this essay seeks to engage these insights through the lens of postcolonial and critical race theory. Each book examines how concepts are given meaning and the productive effects of these discursive formations, paying attention to the gaps between the rhetoric of the UN's ambitions, its actual practice, and its effects. In Whose Peace?, Sarah B. K. von Billerbeck (2017) examines the concept of local ownership in both UN discourse and practice. The language of local ownership has appeared in peace operations precisely as a means of generating legitimacy, particularly as the practice of intervention is ostensibly contrary to the UN's principle of self-determination. Von Billerbeck (2017, 4) argues that the discourse of local ownership has been invoked to “paper over” the rupture between the principle of self-determination and the practice of intervention, which requires the efficient delivery of predetermined results. While the discourse of local ownership rhetorically expounds the UN's central principle of self-determination, the actual implementation of local ownership—the handing over of design and delivery control to local actors—is viewed institutionally as an operational obstacle. Local ownership is thus circumscribed conceptually and in practice, utilized by the UN largely to embed its own legitimacy rather than confer it to others. What von Billerbeck highlights then is how peacekeeping discourse constructs the actors of which it speaks and then in turn subordinates them to institutional power. In Gender, UN Peacebuilding and the Politics of Space, Laura J. Shepherd (2017) exposes a similar issue but does so through the lens of critical feminist theory. Shepherd deploys feminist theory in her examination of space (as in “local,” “national,” “international”) in peacebuilding discourse, exposing the gendered logics and relations of power that inform the constellation of actors produced via these discourses. Shepherd (2017, 22) explores subjects (gender, women, and civil society, specifically) as floating signifiers and how they are given content and meaning and invested with relative power or authority—that is, how they are made “meaning-full.” Shepherd finds that despite rhetorical commitments to a gender-just peace, UN peacebuilding fails to take gender seriously, circumscribes women's engagement within peacebuilding, and undermines the rhetorical emphasis on locally owned governance. Taken together then, the texts demonstrate how discursive commitments to certain processes (local ownership and gender mainstreaming, respectively), which were invoked to overcome challenges to peacebuilding practice and legitimacy, continue to be productive of the relations of power that led to such criticisms. Each text provides an excavation of the “common-sense” of peace interventions—what peacebuilding and peacekeeping is and must achieve. In exposing the productive effects of UN discourse, the texts demonstrate how “logics of space” (Shepherd 2017, 53–54) and the hierarchies therein structure peacebuilding and peacekeeping interventions, working to continually reproduce institutional power. Spatial logics underpin a particular ontology of actors in peacebuilding and inform how constructed categories of actors, such as “local” and “international,” are positioned relationally and hierarchically to each other. When the UN or policy-makers discursively invoke local actors, they are not referencing an objective or neutral category but rather produce and bound that category, attaching to it certain attributes, use-value, and meaning. Shepherd further argues that gendered logics inform the attributes and position given to categories of actors through processes of feminization or valorization and that these same logics work to subordinate both gender programming in peacekeeping as well as those actors labeled “local.” Legitimacy and Space in Peacebuilding Discourse Von Billerbeck examines a central category in these spatial mappings: the use and deployment of the local as a space and body of actors. The concept of local ownership is invoked institutionally to calibrate the practice of intervention with the UN's founding principle of self-determination. As von Billerbeck (2017, 45–46) demonstrates, though, local ownership in the UN system is narrowed to a technical solution, something that can be packaged and implemented, ironically, by exogenous actors. Local ownership becomes a programming tool that ultimately benefits the practice of peacekeeping, to support peace operations in meeting predetermined goals, and confers little actual ownership or authority. Driving this circumscription of local ownership is the rationale of liberal peacebuilding that underpins interventions, wherein the liberalization of the postconflict state is the central goal (von Billerbeck 2017, 58). Thus, local ownership is adapted to the processes and goals of liberal peacebuilding, rather than being a catalyst for rethinking them. According to von Billerbeck (2017, 48), “international actors understand ownership to mean the adoption by national actors of a vision of post-conflict order that conforms to international standards of liberal democratic governance and human rights.” Von Billerbeck demonstrates the rejection of a notion of peacebuilding that deviates from this worldview and shows how practices that might fall outside these boundaries are routinely excised from UN peace operations. For instance, if negotiations need to take place between international and local actors who have opposing views of postconflict restructuring, those negotiations must be consistent “with UN principles and in accordance with what the UN will accept” (von Billerbeck 2017, 71). Much of this is due in part to an assumption that noninternational (nonliberal) means of building peace or politics are illegitimate and counterproductive. While local ownership is espoused in principle, von Billerbeck's (2017, 71) interview participants viewed local forms of peacemaking as inadequate, inappropriate, and potentially, a contributor to conflict in the first place. This institutional conceptualization and implementation of local ownership is in tension with how local ownership is conceived of by national and local actors, which instead view ownership as necessitating their engagement with how peace is articulated from the outset. Ownership from this view only requires international assistance for technical, financial, and material support, and national actors conceive of full ownership as meaning they would delegate the role of the UN, rather than the other way around (von Billerbeck 2017, 66–70). Von Billerbeck provides comprehensive insight into how local ownership is circumscribed, paying attention to how it is operationalized and the actors that take part in this process. Beyond finding implementation largely shallow and ad hoc, von Billerbeck (2017, 79–84) delineates how local ownership is extended to differently placed actors, reinforcing particular hierarchical relations as well as a hierarchy of institutionally defined peacekeeping priorities. The degree to which power is devolved via local ownership maps onto UN peacekeeping priorities, in that those areas invested with significant resources (such as the military sector) are likely to have a narrower implementation of local ownership. This ordering of priorities is further visible in the criteria used to assess which actors constitute the local to which ownership can be passed—an assessment that pays attention to either “values” or “capacity.” Von Billerbeck (2017, 91–112) describes a dual framework of “liberal ownership” that pays attention to values, on the one hand, and “elite ownership” that is attentive to capacity, on the other. Liberal ownership aims for representation while avoiding actors associated with repression and human rights abuses; it emphasizes “non-state actors such as civil society groups, women's and youth groups, [and] refugee associations” (von Billerbeck 2017, 93). Elite ownership focuses on capacity and is offered to partners based on their ability to take-up high-level peacekeeping activities such as those relating to military, political, or economic goals. Capacity here is judged by existing political and/or military experience and is not mediated via an assessment of values such as that of liberal ownership. This liberal-elite ownership structure reflects Laura Shepherd's (2017) delineation of the logics of gendered space and how these stratify who can do what in peacebuilding. Civil society actors, such as women's and youth organizations, can engage via liberal ownership but are automatically shut out of high-level political and military peacekeeping activities because they are framed as lacking capacity or understood to contribute to “softer” areas. They are engaged on this undervalued side to demonstrate mission alignment with liberal values of inclusivity and human rights. This hierarchy is also reflected and reinforced in terms of who within peace operations engages local actors in elite or liberal ownership. Elite ownership is practiced by more senior segments of peacekeeping missions, whereas liberal ownership is “taken up by more junior staff” who have less authority and command fewer resources (von Billerbeck 2017, 109). Based on this analysis of local ownership, von Billerbeck explores the purpose of local ownership in peacekeeping, engaging extensively with the notion of legitimacy. Espousing a principle of local ownership wards off accusations of imposition and neo-imperialism; it is an act that seeks legitimation (von Billerbeck 2017, 116). Tellingly though, because von Billerbeck argues that the UN has been unsuccessful in convincing local actors of institutional commitments to actual ownership, the policy framework instead serves the purpose of endogenous legitimation; that is, local ownership serves a self-legitimation function, performing UN compliance with its own values and norms, confirming its own purpose. Von Billerbeck (2017, 121) explicitly links endogenous legitimation with the self-image of international personnel who “displayed a strong desire to convince themselves that they were not behaving in a neo-imperialist or imposing way in peace operations.” Shepherd, too, speaks to the distribution of legitimacy within a produced and productive constellation of actors in UN peacebuilding. In unpacking the UN's discourse on peacebuilding, Shepherd finds peacebuilding presented as a teleological process that is complex and multidimensional, thus requiring a diversity of actors. Within this constellation, the authority of the UN, and the Peacebuilding Commission specifically, is confirmed as expert, while at the same time, there is discursive recognition that the process should be “nationally owned” (Shepherd 2017, 53–60). It is in the discourse of national ownership that the logics of space feature most prominently in UN peacebuilding discourse . . . [T]he emphasis on national ownership not only draws attention to the spatial and conceptual limitations of the nation as a political domain and a form of political community, but also obscures the ways in which the nation itself is constituted by and in relation to non-national spaces. (Shepherd 2017, 53) It is through the discourse of national ownership, then, that the international is carved out and positioned, most often as neutral, universal, and expert, with the nation holding a middle ground as “supra ordinate to ‘local’ [and] subordinate to the regional and international” (Shepherd 2017, 57). This, alongside the stated priorities in peacebuilding, defines peacebuilding as a process that constitutes statehood and sovereignty (Shepherd 2017, 61–67). Shepherd exposes the fundamentally gendered nature of this peacebuilding discourse. Since the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325 in 2000, there has been a stated commitment to incorporating both women and a gender dimension into peacebuilding and peacekeeping practice. What actually constitutes the/a gender dimension in peacebuilding remains opaque in the documents under Shepherd's review, but it is nonetheless represented as both essential and a perennial challenge (Shepherd 2017, 69–72, 87–90). Both “gender” and “women” are undermined in the Peacebuilding Commission's discursive practices, either through overt objections, placement at the end of documents (reproducing its position as “non-essential”), or, of course, simply through absence. Moreover, despite significant academic and policy work that dispels the notion that gender is a synonym for women, Shepherd (2017, 163–4) finds that the two remain elided in peacebuilding documents. Framing gender as synonymous with women “circumscribe[s] those ‘bodies’ to whom a ‘gender perspective’ can be said to apply” (Shepherd 2017, 163), and incorporating “a gender dimension” into peacebuilding becomes a practice of consulting with local women's organizations. According to Shepherd, the practice of engaging women's organizations as a means to “do gender” reflects a package of assumptions on what gender is, what kinds of actors exist and constitute civil society, and what it means to build a gender-just peace. Where “women” is used rather than “gender,” Shepherd finds them mostly positioned in association with the local, “reflecting the tendency of actors to associate women with informal political spaces, which are often framed as ‘local’—and assumed to be ‘apolitical’—spaces” (2017, 126). In this way, Shepherd articulates a similar spatialization and hierarchizing of peacebuilding to von Billerbeck but does so in gendered terms: in the process of its construction there is also a feminization of the local. From this view, the local is constituted as different in part through its being differently gendered. The associative links in the conceptual construction of “women,” “local,” and “civil society” (most evident in calls to work with local women's organizations as a mechanism of gender mainstreaming) depoliticizes both women and civil society. As Shepherd (2017, 126) describes: “There is a very strong association drawn out in UN peacebuilding discourse that positions women as subjects in, and of, the domain of ‘the local’ . . . which is often reinforced through articulation with civil society.” This process of feminization (see Peterson 2010, 17–19) undermines the authority of those actors, placing and producing civil society as subordinate. This point is reiterated in von Billerbeck's (2017) delineation of liberal ownership (versus elite ownership), whereby civil society actors are selected for their alignment with liberal values, yet in doing so, are structurally positioned against, and excluded from, high-level elite issues such as political and security decision-making. Taking Shepherd's poststructural view, the practice and discourse of peacebuilding and peacekeeping is productive of this hierarchy and exclusion. In this way, Shepherd captures and examines two interrelated dynamics. One is on the actual gender dimension and associated programming within peacebuilding and peacekeeping and, specifically, problematizing how that is produced and its productive effects. The second is the gendered logics that inform the entirety of the practice of peacebuilding—not simply gender policy—in terms of its fundamental rationale and operations, but which can and do include how gender explicitly is incorporated into this process. The structure of ownership, and the construction of a particular hierarchical local space that von Billerbeck evokes, can be argued as also gendered: gendered security logics prioritize militarized peace- and state-building processes and devalue othered actors and forms of peacemaking. Both Shepherd and von Billerbeck speak to the limited conceptualization of civil society in peacebuilding and peacekeeping discourses and how differently placed actors are expected to conform to this view to achieve legitimacy. Civil society, while it appears frequently in peacebuilding discourse as a bearer of specific knowledge that is essential for peacebuilding success, is also simultaneously devalorized and undermined. The legitimacy of civil society is connected to its location in the “local” space and its attachment to “softer,” values-based (rather than strategic) priorities. As well as a bearer of essential knowledge, civil society is articulated as a beneficiary of (international and institutional) knowledge. While civil society actors can bring knowledge on specific local or cultural issues, it is the institution that retains and must disseminate knowledge on peacebuilding and elite politics and security actions more broadly. As Shepherd (2017, 151) explains, “‘local’ knowledge is at once valued (in the process of extraction) and yet subordinated.” Here, Shepherd, like von Billerbeck, identifies an inherent tension in a discourse that continually champions local and civil society partners while also framing these subjects as “marginal to the governance of [peacebuilding] activity” (Shepherd 2017, 151). In their expositions on the construction and maintenance of legitimacy in peace interventions, both texts sit at the forefront of current work on peacekeeping and peacebuilding, which deals not only with how peace can be built and who should have access to peacebuilding (Leonardsson and Rudd 2015) but the productive power of intervention and peacebuilding in international relations (IR) (Sabaratnam 2017; Smith 2019). This literature has increasingly engaged with race and histories of colonialism in their examinations of peacebuilding, and international relations broadly, to demonstrate how the operation of both is guided by particular raced and gendered ontologies, reproducing hierarchies of power (Sabaratnam 2011, 2017; Henderson 2013; Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2015a). Both von Billerbeck and Shepherd problematize the productive effects of peace intervention discourse where liberal, Enlightenment, and hierarchical worldviews are maintained but seek to simply “add” a previously marginalized or overlooked component (the local or gender, respectively). Beyond this, though, both texts read power and effect beyond what is intended or stated in the discourse and point to the continued institution of uneven relations of power through the performance and implementation of these discourses. The remainder of this essay argues that these insights can be taken further, drawing on postcolonial and critical race theory and linking with debates on decolonizing international relations. In short, it is possible to identify how race and racism inform the ontology of difference (Sabaratnam 2013) fundamental to the processes of inclusion/exclusion identified in both texts and, in turn, produce implicitly racialized subjects. In terms of representation, race—as well as gender—informs how subjects and objects become “meaning-full” (Shepherd 2017, 22). Indeed, feminist theorizing has highlighted how gender, race, and class are co-constituted, meaning processes of racialization and gendering intertwine and rely on each other (Crenshaw 1991; Hill Collins 1998): they “are not distinct realms of experience [but] come into existence in and through relation to each other” (McClintock 1995, 5). Intersectional feminist frameworks also bring institutional and structural conditions to the fore, addressing the “larger ideological structures in which subjects, problems, and solutions [are] framed” (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 791). Race and Racism in Peacebuilding Discourse Postcolonial and critical race scholars in IR have highlighted the colonial and racist roots of contemporary international order and the constitutive role of knowledge production and value-attribution in ways that naturalize inequality (Jones 2006; Sabaratnam 2011; Seth 2011). One way that scholars have demonstrated the perpetuation of racism “structuring the logics of world politics” (Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2015, 2) has been to connect historical practices of colonialism and imperialism—justified via the construction of racial difference projected hierarchically—with contemporary understandings of difference and modernity and the practices of intervention these support (Anghie 2006; Jones 2015). Colonialism and imperialism required “systems of thought which specified an ‘ontology of difference’ between Europeans, Indians and Africans . . . in order to differentially rationalise their political subjugation, dispossession and enslavement” (Jones 2015, 65). Enlightenment thinking on modernization and civilization informed this framework, as racially categorized bodies were positioned along a teleological understanding of progress. Thus, a “temporal trajectory of evolution” informed racial hierarchies and the distribution of power therein (Jones 2015, 70). Throughout histories of colonial and imperial intervention, non-European states, cultures, and bodies have been marked as child-like, uncivilized, and incapable of self-government (Anghie 2006; Gruffydd Said 1978; Jones 2015), thus arguably feminized in relation to the rational, masculine, autonomous, white male colonialist. European colonialists set themselves as the standard of development and modernity, justifying intervention into spaces, places, and peoples framed as different/other, in order to set them on the correct development pathway. These narratives of development also provided a humanitarian frame for the significant economic interests in colonized lands, and European states were able to advance their own economic development due to the labor and resources gouged from colonized spaces (McEwan 2009, 84). The discourses examined in the texts under review are part of a package of assumptions about peace that link it with liberal statehood (Shepherd 2017, 61–67). Notions of stable and legitimate statehood are premised on Eurocentric conceptions of the state; departure from this norm is what constitutes state fragility or failure and justifies intervention to assist with “proper” state formation (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, 331; Jones 2015, 64). In this way as well, fragility becomes internally located within failed or conflict-affected states (and peoples), obscuring the role played by longer histories of intervention in previously colonized spaces (Mamdani cited in Shepherd 2017, 6; see also Medie and Kang 2018, 39–40). That it enforces a predetermined set of governance structures has long been a critique of liberal peacebuilding. What Shepherd and von Billerbeck bring to the fore, however, is how the logic of liberal peacebuilding limits policy that is ostensibly enacted to mitigate a centralized design process. Indeed, as von Billerbeck describes, there is broad recognition within the UN that local ownership disrupts the predetermined pathway of peacebuilding and is therefore necessarily restricted: “the UN's approach to local ownership is implicitly to constrain and limit it so that it does not fundamentally contradict its liberal objectives” (2017, 73). Von Billerbeck exposes the institutional anxiety that exists over the actual conferring of authority via local ownership, which suggests a perception that local actors lack capacity and, implicitly and explicitly, hold different/othered moral, ethical, and cultural values. For example, she writes that UN consultations and trainings “are aimed largely at convincing local actors to want and do what the UN wants and wants done . . . As one senior [Department of Peacekeeping Operations] official noted, ‘We are always pushing these transitional governments to our idea of how they should get their act together’” (von Billerbeck 2017, 87). This circumscription of local ownership demonstrates the underlying assumption that the actors within conflict-affected states are in need of reform in order to establish a self-determined and internationally recognized state. While the explicit language of racial difference may be absent in contemporary debates on peacebuilding, statebuilding, and intervention, these practices remain nonetheless premised on the production and maintenance of difference, often between formerly colonized and former colonizers (Sabaratnam 2013). Difference is essential to the structural relations that inform both Shepherd's and von Billerbeck's delineations of peacebuilding and peacekeeping discourses, which reflect an ontological binary of intervener-intervened, or peacekeepers and “peacekept.” Both texts describe the production of categories such as “local,” “national,” and “international” in peacebuilding and peacekeeping discourses under their study and how these are hierarchically ordered. These insights are arguably consistent with postcolonial theorizing on global politics, in which “the vocabulary of race is no longer required in its explicit form largely because [there] has developed an extraordinarily rich and complex vocabulary to represent non-European people in terms that appear natural and uncontroversial” (Anghie 2006, 124). Thus, even absent explicitly racial categorizations, these discourses reproduce an ontology of difference in the language of geographic space. There are other indicators of institutional racism within the UN as well, such as the exclusion of national staff from decision-making, the difference in material conditions provided to staff across the funds and agencies, promotion practices, and that the vast majority of peacekeepers are contributed from Global South countries (Autesserre 2014; Hujale 2019; Weiss and Kuele 2019). Moulid Hujale (2019), a Somali national working for UN agencies for over a decade in Mogadishu, reported on these issues in the Guardian, writing: “The moment I walked into the compound [in Mogadishu], I saw the physical difference of power and influence . . . The offices of the international staff were separate and well furnished, they even got fridges, had their own toilets and other accessories, while those of the Somalis had none and we shared a toilet.” Beyond differences in material conditions, though, and linking with the insights provided by both texts under review, structural racism devalues some knowledge and works to circumscribe possible contributions from those with direct experience of a given conflict context. This highlights an institutional “two-tier” system of knowledge and power, neatly captured in the following vignette from Séverine Autesserre: Michael Losembe, a Congolese businessman, was shocked by the way interveners treated him and other Congolese elites. To him, foreign peacebuilders communicated condescendingly, as though they were saying, “Here is how things work in the rest of the world; don't you realize how far you deviate from that?!” He felt that the expatriates did not listen to the ideas of the Congolese, and they regularly made their Congolese counterparts feel underqualified . . . One day, instead of introducing himself as Congolese, he told the group that he came from Puerto Rico. The result was clear: “The attitude in the meeting” was “completely different.” The interveners listened to his ideas with respect and interest. He found he had much more credibility and influence when he passed as an outsider. (2014, 59) Similarly, Moulid Hujale (2019) described her experience working for UN agencies as follows: “We had no means of contributing to the agenda of the day . . . Every time we joined a teleconference meeting with the Nairobi regional office, we had to just listen to items that were prepared without our knowledge.” This is evidently in stark contrast to von Billerbeck's description of how ownership is viewed by host populations, who conceptualize it as locally led with technical, financial, and material assistance where required—the UN role would be delegated rather than delegator (von Billerbeck 2017, 66–70). Moreover, such practices undermine the potential of interventions and can be the cause of program failure that has not drawn on necessary and relevant knowledge. Autesserre (2014, 4) attributes some program failure to a “standard pattern of international interventions” in which expatriate peacebuilders conceptualize and implement externally financed programs with local input garnered only at the final stages, mainly through subcontracting or as “recipients.” The argument here then is that the construction and representation of local as knowable and visible has the corollary effect of discounting and marginalizing some knowledge and experience or attaching it to less resourced and prioritized issue areas. Rather than suggesting the abandonment of peace operations completely—especially considering they are enacted with host state consent and that populations do report improved security in some respects (Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon 2016; Beber et al. 2019)1—the aim is instead to highlight how some actors, knowledge, and experience are eschewed from peacekeeping and peacebuilding or assumed to be in need of reform. “Gender” and “women” are undermined and delegitimized (Shepherd 2017), while the “local” requires reform and monitoring to ensure predetermined pathways are not disrupted (von Billerbeck 2017). These insights also challenge the conceptualization of local and international as discrete spatial categories that can be objectively mapped onto certain bodies and values, as they demonstrate their produced nature and subjective nature. Moreover, objectiveness is further undone when viewed with respect to histories of colonialism and intervention. This history and postcolonial theorizing demonstrate the co-constitution of local and international; they are mutually constituted rather than discrete (Bhabha 1994; Barakwi and Laffey 2006; Nadarajah and Rampton 2015). Imperialism and colonialism were neither external to Western identity nor were they processes that happened “elsewhere”; instead, “imperialism and the invention of race were fundamental aspects of Western, industrial modernity” (McClintock 1995, 5). Heterogeneous imperial practices intervened in existing indigenous structures to consolidate imperial power and were also fundamental in the formation and development of the economy and identity of those imperial powers. Taking into view longer histories of interaction, and indeed exploitation, troubles easy separations between local, national, and international spaces. The policy framework examined by Shepherd (2017) exemplifies this point. The Women, Peace and Security agenda, established with resolution 1325 in 2000, has its roots in the Beijing Platform for Action, and both of these platforms were the product of transnational feminist advocacy. As a policy framework within UN peace operations, Women, Peace and Security is often afforded an international character that is then implemented or adopted by local actors, which can obfuscate this longer and more contentious history of how the agenda came into being and the experiences and contributions that made it (Shepherd 2008). Organizations that work under the banner of 1325 continue work that preceded the adoption of the agenda or undertake work poorly funded, if at all, by the international institutions that champion it, and do so in specific social, political, and economic contexts that constitute the agenda (Basu 2016). Rather than the “local” being a place, or bodies, or values that exist objectively atomized from the/a international, it is a signifier produced and made known through the practice of intervention and which, in turn, is utilized to justify, or is characterized as the recipient of, particular mechanisms of intervention. Such discourses reflect Homi Bhabha's understanding of colonial discourses, which seek “authorization for [their] strategies by the production of knowledges of colonizer and colonized which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated . . . colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (1994, 70–71). Each text demonstrates, then, the necessity of further reform in peacekeeping and peacebuilding practice. While policy frameworks—gender mainstreaming and local ownership—have been enacted over the preceding decade to try and shift the power dynamics of intervention, each author exposes that substantive change has remained elusive. The authors demonstrate how policy enacted without recalibrating relations of power can perpetuate the very issues they were ostensibly designed to eradicate—unequal gendered relations, the undermining of feminized peacebuilding approaches, and the marginalization of noninstitutional bodies and practices from peacebuilding. The practice of constructing and ascribing legitimacy in peacebuilding and peacekeeping practice therefore requires an intersectional view cognizant of overlapping hierarchies of power, and the implication for policy-makers is to decenter their goals, values, and assumptions in designing peace interventions. These insights also hold relevance for IR and peace and conflict studies, where debates on legitimacy in peace interventions have been prevalent. While the local has been invoked in academic literature as a means to recalibrate how legitimacy is conceptualized in peacebuilding (Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck 2015), it nonetheless relies on a binary ontology (see Hameiri and Jones 2018), producing a category that is othered, obfuscating long histories of exchange and exploitation (Sabaratnam 2013; Nadarajah and Rampton 2015). Shepherd and von Billerbeck expose how legitimacy is institutionally determined and discursively produced, reflecting and perpetuating social and political hierarchies. Both texts significantly expand our knowledge of peacekeeping and peacebuilding praxis, while also bringing into question the reliability and ethics of such organizing principles and thus should raise concerns regarding the potential of these same categories as analytic tools in IR and security literature. Footnotes 1 Assessments of whether peacekeeping works for the most part find that it does, with assessments based on whether war resumes between the same parties (Fortna 2008; Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon 2016) or whether missions meet their mandated goals (Howard 2008). Both quantitative and qualitative assessments of these types often exclude gender perspectives and dynamics, meaning that violence, especially nonlethal violence, that continues in postwar moments—such as domestic and familial violence, rape, and sexual abuse by humanitarian workers—are excluded from data sets. Feminist authors have long argued that security, safety, and stability for all equally are not well measured by “war or no war” binaries and have demonstrated linkages between war and postwar violence. The arguments made here are not to detract from the support that peace operations receive or their successes—such as reduction in battle deaths—but instead work from the premise that these successes cannot foreclose continued critical engagement with the practices of intervention in global politics. Notes Laura J. Shepherd. Gender, UN Peacebuilding and the Politics of Space: Locating Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 264 pp., £53 hardback (978-0199982721). Sarah B. K. von Billerbeck. Whose Peace? Local Ownership and United Nations Peacekeeping. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 220 pp., £61 hardback (978-0198755708). References Advisory Group of Experts (AGE) . 2015 . 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TI - The Production of Legitimacy: Race and Gender in Peacebuilding Praxis
JO - International Studies Review
DO - 10.1093/isr/viz054
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-production-of-legitimacy-race-and-gender-in-peacebuilding-praxis-kX0SVRKvBt
SP - 705
VL - 21
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -