Audra Mitchell

Peacebuilding and Critical Forms of Agency: From Resistance to Subsistence

The dominant paradigm of liberal peacebuilding is often applied in developing states even where such processes of mobilization are practically implausible and intellectually or culturally alien. Inevitably, each peace intervention is contested, resisted, re-shaped/shaped and responded to—hybridized—by local actors and forms of agency that are unique to each setting. This article explores these processes in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Bosnia, Mozambique, Namibia, and Liberia, in order to assess how far “subsistence peacebuilding” agency is able to affect the liberal peacebuilding framework.

Only human? A worldly approach to security

Harm does not happen to humans in isolation, but rather to worlds composed of diverse beings. This article asks how worlds and the conditions of worldliness should be framed as ‘subjects of security’. It explores three possible pathways: rejecting anthropocentrism; expanding existing ethical categories; and adopting ‘new materialist’ ontology and ethics. Ultimately, it argues for a fusion of the key elements of each of these pathways. This offers the basis for a new concept of harm (‘mundicide’) specifically intended to reflect harms to worlds and the conditions of worldliness. The value of this concept is demonstrated in the light of an empirical example: the ‘Rainforest Chernobyl’ case. The article concludes that a worldly approach is necessary if we are to capture the full enormity of the harms confronted by international security.

Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR:

Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.

Peace beyond Process

Post-Cold War peacebuilding is increasingly conflated with the smooth functioning of a range of processes associated with democracy, governance, development and securitisation. However, critiques of these approaches tend to focus on their liberal-democratic norms and to ignore their underlying processual logics. This article problematises two facets of process with regard to peacebuilding: its postulation as a basis for peace grounded in everyday human activity and its construction of violence as anti-process. Its goal is to present the critique of process as a means for understanding the complex relationship between international and local actors in the context of peacebuilding, thus enriching the ‘liberal peace’ debate. Drawing on normative political theory, including that of Arendt and Deleuze and Guattari, the article demonstrates how the problems raised by these two issues can help to explain a range of concerns associated with contemporary peacebuilding and provide starting points for imagining forms of peace that are not so reliant upon processual logics or opposed to those acts which disrupt them, which may in fact be attempts to realise radically different versions of peace. In so doing, it extends and enriches the perspectives offered by existing ‘liberal peace’ critiques.

Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction

Scientific and public discourses on the current mass extinction event tend to focus their attention on the decline of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’. Drawing on insights from the humanities, this article contends that the processes of extinction also produce a diverse range of subjects. Each of these subjects, it argues, raises specific ethical challenges and creates opportunities for cosmopolitical transformation. To explore this argument, the article engages with several subjects of extinction: ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’; ‘humanity’; ‘unloved’ subjects; and absent or non-relational subjects. In each case, it examines how attention to these subjects can highlight the exclusions and inequalities embedded in dominant discourses, and to identify possibilities for plural ethico-political responses to mass extinction.

Peaceful Spaces? “Walking” through the New Liminal Spaces of Peacebuilding and Development in North Belfast

Strategies of international peacebuilding depend on the creation of secure, manageable spaces that embody the norms of intervening actors. This article examines attempts by governmental and international donors to create pockets of “peaceful space” in Belfast’s city center, and their effects on the surrounding neighborhoods of north Belfast. Using the technique of an ethnographic walk, we examine several key sites that reflect how the creation of “peaceful spaces” has also generated distinctive “outsides” shaped by interfaces, enclaves, and complex patterns of conflict. By reframing these spaces as a result rather than solely a precondition of peacebuilding activities, this article challenges the assumption that conflict degrades the spaces in the outside areas of “peaceful space” and that peacebuilding strategies ameliorate them. Instead, we argue that development and peacebuilding strategies have generated deterritorialized spaces whose status and ownership is indeterminate, in which the right of access and use is unclear, and in which the conditions created by constant and always incomplete transformation are used to justify intensive securitization and modes of control.

Introduction – Towards a Post-Liberal Peace

Peace is not a universal concept that can be transposed identically between different contexts of conflict. Rather, unique forms of peace arise when the strategies, institutions and norms of international, largely liberal–democratic peacebuilding interventions collide with the everyday lives of local actors affected by conflict. At the site of each international peace intervention, an interface forms at which the everyday activities, needs, interests and experiences of local groups and the goals, norms and practices of international policy-makers/implementers overlap. Within this space, a unique range of practices, responses and agencies – including plural forms of acceptance and appropriation, resistance and the exertion of autonomy – emerges and ‘hybridizes’1 the ‘blueprints’2 for peace advanced by international actors. In the process of hybridization, actors (both locally and internationally based) reshape the norms, institutions and activities in question by means of everyday practices such as verbal interaction, organization and even overt conflict.

Is IR going extinct

A global extinction crisis may threaten the survival of most existing life forms. Influential discourses of ‘existential risk’ suggest that human extinction is a real possibility, while several decades of evidence from conservation biology suggests that the Earth may be entering a ‘sixth mass extinction event’. These conditions threaten the possibilities of survival and security that are central to most branches of International Relations. However, this discipline lacks a framework for addressing (mass) extinction. From notions of ‘nuclear winter’ and ‘omnicide’ to contemporary discourses on catastrophe, International Relations thinking has treated extinction as a superlative of death. This is a profound category mistake: extinction needs to be understood not in the ontic terms of life and death, but rather in the ontological context of be(com)ing and negation. Drawing on the work of theorists of the ‘inhuman’ such as Quentin Meillassoux, Claire Colebrook, Ray Brassier, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Nigel Clark, this article provides a pathway for thinking beyond existing horizons of survival and imagines a profound transformation of International Relations. Specifically, it outlines a mode of cosmopolitics that responds to the element of the inhuman and the forces of extinction. Rather than capitulating to narratives of tragedy, this cosmopolitics would make it possible to think beyond the restrictions of existing norms of ‘humanity’ to embrace an ethics of gratitude and to welcome the possibility of new worlds, even in the face of finitude.

Paramilitaries, Peace Processes and the Dilemma of Protection: The Ulster Defence Association's Role in ‘Keeping a Lid on Loyalism’

Paramilitary actors involved in peace processes are expected to contribute to two distinct forms of protection: national-level protection as ‘security’; and local-level security as ‘safety’. Examining the case of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in Northern Ireland, we explain how these two forms of protection have become interlinked in the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement (GF/BA) and the related peace process. Instead of generating a virtuous cycle, this has created a dilemma between providing protection as ‘safety’ and as ‘security’. Drawing on interviews with key UDA-affiliated actors in 2009–10, against the backdrop of increasing ‘dissident Republican’ violence, we assess how they navigated this dilemma, and its potential effects on the unfolding political context, calling for greater attention to the relationship between different conceptions of protection in peace processes.

Revitalizing laws, (re)-making treaties, dismantling violence: Indigenous resurgence against ‘the sixth mass extinction’

ABSTRACT The stories told about ‘extinction’ matter greatly: they embody theories about what is causing the global-scale destruction of plants, animals and other beings, and what might stop it. Dominant Western scientific stories/theories frame this phenomenon as the unintended result of desirable human activities. They prescribe the scientific management of remaining ‘biodiversity’ within structures driven by colonization, extractivism and other violent logics. In contrast, Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Nêhiyaw and many other Indigenous stories/theories that address this issue understand ‘extinction’ as an expression of the breaking of laws, treaties and protocols between particular peoples, plants, animals, land, water and other beings. This relation-breaking violence is embedded in everyday manifestations of colonial violence and in the genocides of humans and nonhuman peoples. Centring Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, Nêhiyaw and critical Western/settler stories/theories, this contribution argues that halting ‘extinction’ means not only dismantling structures of law-breaking and structural violence, but also repairing the relations that those laws, treaties and protocols uphold. It also honours the efforts of Indigenous resurgents doing the crucial work of repairing these relations.