Annika Björkdahl

Norm advocacy: a small state strategy to influence the EU

ABSTRACT In June 2001 the European Council adopted the EU Programme for the Prevention of Violent Conflict. The story of how conflict prevention became an integral and legitimate part of EU policy and practice illustrates the influence of powerful ideas and successful norm advocacy of a small state managing to punch above its weight in the EU. The aim of this article is to analyse norm advocacy as a potent addition to traditional strategies of gaining influence in the Union. By tracing the process of Swedish promotion of conflict prevention the article explores norm advocacy strategies, such as framing, agenda-setting, diplomatic tactics and the power of the Presidency. The EU institutional setting also provides ample opportunities for a small state to exert normative power, and in areas where great powers are generally regarded as dominant, such as the CFSP and the ESDP.

Precarious peacebuilding: friction in global–local encounters

How can we understand the processes and outcomes that arise from frictional encounters in peacebuilding? This special issue contributes to ongoing debates on the precariousness of peacebuilding, by introducing the term friction as a way to capture and analyse the conflictual dimensions of global–local encounters. We envisage six responses – compliance, adoption, adaptation, co-option, resistance and rejection – which arise as a result of meetings between actors, ideas and practice in global–local relationships. These responses create new realities as they alter power relations, transform agency and mediate practices related to peacebuilding. Thus, the conceptual framework and insights drawn from the articles in the special issue contribute to a discussion about transforming the boundaries between the international and local, and cast new light on agency in peacebuilding processes while challenging aspects of the hybridisation of peace.

Norms in international relations: some theoretical and methodological reflections

Acknowledging the social constructivist turn in the study of norms, this article offers to demonstrate that the notion of norms is useful as an analytical tool and likely to become a lasting element in international relations theory. Ideational causality and the independent explanatory power of norms are methodological issues that have been debated widely. Despite arguing that norms matter, social constructivism has problems making a successful case for the independent influence of norms. This article explores social constructivism as an approach to understanding international norms and their origins.

The emerging EU peacebuilding framework: confirming or transcending liberal peacebuilding?

The European Union (EU) is now emerging as a major actor in regional and global peacebuilding. Yet its peacebuilding approach and practices are subject to some significant and familiar contradictions. In this article, we identify the basis for what may become an ‘EU peacebuilding framework’ (EUPF), and argue that, while it aspires to a ‘just and durable peace’ including practical tools and a normative framework, these need to be set in critical relief. The EUs nascent approach to building peace is compared and contrasted with the evolving liberal peacebuilding consensus and the much criticized statebuilding project which has recently emerged. This is evaluated against recent research focusing on developing a more sophisticated form of contextually relevant peacebuilding. Finally, we assess how the embryonic EUPF might contribute to the development of a just and durable peace, and ask what sorts of issues and dimensions this raises.

Swedish Norm Entrepreneurship in the UN

Exploring the myth or reality of the powerless small state, this article offers a re-examination of Nordic internationalism by introducing the concepts of Nordic normative power and norm entrepreneurship. A discussion of Swedish norm advocacy within the UN provides an illustration of norm entrepreneurship as a contingent foreign policy approach for small states. By using norm entrepreneurship as a foreign policy strategy, small states may be able to ‘punch above their weight’ in international politics.

Promoting Norms Through Peacekeeping: UNPREDEP and Conflict Prevention

By applying a social constructivist perspective this article investigates whether the preventive peacekeeping mission to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia contributed to altering or sustaining norms of international peacekeeping. In addition, the article is concerned with if and how the UN mission UNPREDEP functioned as a channel of diffusion of international norms pertaining to peaceful conflict resolution to Macedonia. The article suggests that UNPREDEP provided the international community with an opportunity for norm diffusion. Furthermore, by allowing the emerging norm of conflict prevention to guide peacekeeping efforts in Macedonia, the norm was strengthened and the ambitions to promote the norm globally, as well as locally, were supported.

Gendering agency in transitional justice

Mainstream transitional justice and peacebuilding practices tend to re-entrench gendered hierarchies by ignoring women or circumscribing their presence to passive victims in need of protection. As a consequence we have limited knowledge about the multifaceted ways women do justice and build peace. To address this lacuna we conceptualize and unpack the meaning of gendered agency, by identifying its critical elements and by locating it in space and in time. The conceptual work that we undertake is underpinned by empirical mapping of the transitional justice spaces in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, where we point out instances of critical, creative, and transformative agency performed by women that challenge or negotiate patterns of gendered relations of domination. We collect women’s oral narratives and explore new sets of questions to capture women’s unique experiences in doing justice. Such research enables us to engage with the subjects of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice processes directly and in their own spaces. This article thus renders women’s agency visible and attempts to grasp its contributions and consequences for transformations from war to peace.

The 'Field' in the Age of Intervention: Power, Legitimacy, and Authority Versus the 'Local'

This article highlights the semantic and socio-political meaning of the ‘field’ as it is used in both academic research and policy practices: as a geographic and material space related to forms of intervention in International Relations (IR), and not as a disciplinary space. We argue that the notion of the ‘field’ carries colonial baggage in terms of denoting ‘backwardness’ and conflictual practices, as well as legitimising the need for intervention by peacebuilding, statebuilding, and development actors located outside the field. We also show how academic practices have tended to create a semiotic frame in which the inhabitants of the research and intervention space are kept at a distance from the researcher, and discursively stripped of their agency. Along similar lines, policy-practice has reinforced the notion of the field as being in need of intervention, making it subject to external control. This article suggests that the agency of the inhabitants of the field has to be re-cognised and de-colonised so that political legitimacy can be recovered from ‘intervention’.

Translating UNSCR 1325 from the global to the national: protection, representation and participation in the National Action Plans of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda

A decade and a half after the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, gendered peace gaps in post-conflict societies are still wide and deep. This raises pressing questions concerning how UNSCR 1325 and concomitant resolutions on women, peace and security (WPS) constitute women and gender, and how they as particular discursive configurations impact on post-conflict societies. In this article we zoom in on the role of National Action Plans (NAPs) for the implementation of 1325 in national contexts. We undertake a discursive analysis of Bosnia-Herzegovinas and Rwandas NAPs in order to trace how the 1325 agenda of protection, representation and participation is translated into national contexts. We conclude that the NAPs to a large degree perpetuate the status quo and are not used as instruments for greater societal transformation that support womens authentic participation. The article ends with a reflection on how to imagine agency beyond the scripted protection, representation and participation that the NAPs (re)produce and we suggest a possible role for the latest WPS resolution UNSCR 2122 as a vehicle for transformation.

Constructing a Swedish Conflict Prevention Policy Based on a Powerful Idea and Successful Practice

The story of how conflict prevention became an integral and legitimate part of Swedish foreign policy illustrates the relationship between successful practices and powerful ideas. This article suggests that the demonstration of an idea in practice empowers the idea and contributes not only to its selection, but also to its framing and institutionalization within foreign policy. Hence, the article sets out to explore the relationships between practice, ideas and foreign policy. Adopting a social constructivist perspective, the article provides a detailed process-tracing of the construction of a Swedish conflict prevention policy and concludes that conflict prevention was a powerful idea because it was morally appealing and persuasive as well as successfully demonstrated in practice. In fact, preventive practices spearheaded the advancement of the conflict prevention idea. In addition, the idea resonated with the Swedish foreign policy elite, with commonly held values and with the traditional Swedish foreign policy that stressed internationalism and solidarity.