Morgan Brigg

Post-development, Foucault and the colonisation metaphor

Post-development, the most recent radical reaction to the problems of postwar development efforts, has been the focus of both strident criticism and restrained defence in Third World Quarterly . This article shows that addressing post-developments shortcomings is more useful than dismissing or limiting its potential. By using the work of Foucault, one of post-developments theoretical departure points, a clear distinction is drawn between the operation of power in colonial and development eras. This requires a shift away from repressive views of power, ideas that a singular force directs development, and the colonisation metaphor used by some post-development writers. This article then shows that combining Foucaults notion of dispositif with his concept of normalisation is useful for understanding the operation of power in the postwar development project, and for comprehending how power operates through the World Bank. In this way a critical engagement with post-development can improve our understanding and analysis of development.

Autoethnographic International Relations: exploring the self as a source of knowledge

Research is all about a persons engagement with an issue. But most approaches to International Relations actively discourage personal involvement by the researcher. We question the adequacy of this norm and the related scholarly conventions. Instead, we explore how the personal experience of the researcher can be used as a legitimate and potentially important source of insight into politics. But we also note that simply telling the story of the researcher is inadequate. We engage the ensuing dilemmas by discussing how to both appreciate and evaluate autoethnographic insights. Rather than relying on pre-determined criteria, we argue that methodological uses of the self should be judged within knowledge communities and according to their ability to open up new perspectives on political dilemmas. We then advance two related suggestions: one advocates conceptualising research around puzzles; the other explores the methodological implications of recognising that producing knowledge is an inherently relational activity. Copyright

Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as, respectively, biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein Aboriginal people are governed as an ‘included-exclusion’ within the Australian political community. Despite the overall pattern of dominance, this same entwinement offers possibilities for exchange between biopolitics and terrapolitics and, hence, for breaking the recurrent crises of Indigenous affairs.

Conceptualising Culture in Conflict Resolution

Challenges associated with the recent proliferation of cultural claims are exacerbated by the complex heritage and perplexities of the term culture. These difficulties lead those who are called to respond to cultural claims in conflict resolution and other fields to risk either overstating or devaluing human difference. Conflict resolution and culture scholar Kevin Avruch attempts to manage this problem by distinguishing between ‘political’ and ‘scientific’ uses of culture, but this strategy risks disavowing difference through an ethico-political dilemma with roots in European colonialism. Embracing and engaging the ambiguity of culture through Ernesto Laclaus notion of the empty signifier suggests a more complete and self-reflexive way of conceptualising culture. This approach involves valuing ineffable human difference aside from claims to have or know culture, attending to the process of constituting culture, and opening to other ways of knowing human difference.

Culture: Challenges and Possibilities

Culture matters for peace and conflict studies. The ways in which individuals and groups make meaning of their social and physical world, and the values, beliefs and processes that are reproduced through this meaning-making, have implications for how conflicts are waged and resolution pursued, and for the ideas and practices that constitute peace. The starkest examples in recent decades relate to how culture can be mobilised to fuel conflict. Equally, local cultural processes are increasingly recognised as valuable ways to manage conflicts, and to reconcile communities in post-conflict peacebuilding efforts. This recognition of the importance of culture has emerged partly through bitter or practical experience, and partly as a result of persistent and coherent arguments by scholars from a range of disciplines about the significance of culture for peace and conflict studies.

Governance and Susceptibility in Conflict Resolution: Possibilities Beyond Control

Governmentality analysis offers a nuanced critique of informal western conflict resolution by arguing that recently emerged ‘alternatives’ to adversarial court processes both govern subjects and help to constitute rather than challenge formal regulation. However, this analysis neglects possibilities for transforming governance from within conflict resolution that are suggested by Foucault’s contention that there are no relations of power without resistances. To explore this lacuna, I theorize and explore the affective and interpersonal nature of governance in mediation through auto-ethnographic reflection upon mediation practice, and Levinas’s insights about the relatedness of selves. The article argues that two qualitatively different mediator capacities - technical ability and susceptibility - operate in concert to effect liberal governance. Occasionally though, difficulties and failures in mediation practice bring these capacities into tension and reveal the limits of governance. By considering these limits in mediation with Aboriginal Australian people, I argue that the susceptibility of mediator selves contains prospects for mitigating and transforming the very operations of power occurring through conflict resolution. This suggests options for expanded critical thinking about power relations operating through informal processes, and for cultivating a susceptible sensibility to mitigate liberal governance and more ethically respond to difference through conflict resolution.

Relational and Essential: Theorizing Difference for Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT Engagements with difference in peacebuilding are characterized by interrelated patterns of identitiarian and de-essentializing thought that tend to crystalize or minimize difference. In response, this article theorizes difference as simultaneously relational and essential, and thus as a phenomenon that continually re-forms in the world and is crucial to life itself. A relational-essential approach is sketched by drawing upon ideas from conflict resolution and feminism, and illustrated through a micro-case of peacebuilding intervention in Aboriginal Australia. This way of theorizing difference promises pathways beyond European-derived forms of thinking and into exchange with the world and diverse peoples.

Introduction to the RIS Forum on autoethnography and International Relations

This Forum Section deals with a fundamental puzzle that remains largely unexplored in International Relations scholarship. On the one hand, we as authors are clearly involved in the production of knowledge. We choose a particular topic that is of interest to us. We then decide how to approach this topic and opt for the methodologies best suited to do so. Along the way we make countless choices about how we select, interpret and then present our data. Even if executed meticulously and systematically, this process involves an inherently personal dimension. Authors make different choices, even when engaging the same topic. On the other hand, scholarly conventions in International Relations have it that such personal components of the research process are to be excluded from the research result. The final texts we present to colleagues are supposed to hold up on purely scholarly grounds and be free of personal biases. The Forum Section not only questions the usefulness of this deeply entrenched scholarly assumption, but also goes a step further. It explores how the personal experience of a researcher can be used as a legitimate and potentially important source of insight into International Relations. Best known as autoethnographies, such inquiries explore the rich ground that opens up in the relationship between a scholar and the production of knowledge. While discussed intensely in numerous disciplines, autoethnographies remain almost unknown in International Relations. A few isolated scholars have tried to explore how their own experiences can help them – and their readers – to illuminate key dilemmas in world politics. But such attempts remain rare. Our main aim, then, is to introduce autoethnographic approaches and demonstrate their relevance for International Relations scholarship. We want to show that autoethnographies are not as far-fetched and radical as they might seem at first sight, and that they can, in fact, be employed alongside other methodological approaches. To make this point, and to reach an audience which is likely to be unfamiliar with autoethnography, the texts that follow complement each other in a particular way. The first article, by Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker, is consciously written for a mainstream audience and in a conventional manner. It outlines why authoethnography should be seen as a legitimate method and how the ensuing insights might be evaluated. Doing so is essential in order to separate scholarly significant knowledge from personal story telling. The two subsequent articles, by Oded Löwenheim and Elizabeth Dauphinee, enact autoethography in a more radical manner: they actively draw on the authors’ own experiences to engage particular topics in International Relations. We do not pretend to offer a comprehensive take on autoethnography in International Relations. We see this forum section more as an attempt to start Review of International Studies (2010), 36, 777–778 2010 British International Studies Association doi:10.1017/S0260210510000677

Indigeneity and Peace

Indigenous peoples pre-date the contemporary world system of nation-states, and yet are now bound with this global scheme through asymmetric power relations of colonialism. As colonial exchanges saw the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the concentration of wealth in European hands from 1492, notions of progress, private property and nationhood relied upon Indigenous reference points to conjure the image of a barbaric, romantic or simply earlier past that was ‘naturally’ succeeded in the passage to a modern world.1 The European colonial episode inflicted incredible damage on Indigenous societies, frequently pushing Indigenous peoples to the brink of extinction through genocidal violence, but it also bound Indigenous and European peoples in the generation of European self-understandings that continue to reverberate and dominate in world politics. The asymmetry of many colonial encounters certainly means that many exchanges occurred — and continue to occur — on European terms, but Indigenous peoples have consistently pushed back, troubling and haunting a Eurocentric world order from a marginal position.

Gununa peacemaking: informalism, cultural difference and contemporary Indigenous conflict management

Informal conflict management implicitly claims to value cultural difference and to be able to mediate relations between cultural minorities and states. This article considers this claim in challenging circumstances borne of settler-colonialism by examining the cultural politics of the establishment of a conflict resolution programme in an Australian Aboriginal community. In addition to settler-colonial maligning of Aboriginal capacities to manage conflict, the Gununa community has in recent decades faced the severe attenuation of customary processes and escalating uncontrolled violence. Nonetheless, the Mornington Island Restorative Justice Project involved a spontaneous appropriation of mediation as a customary initiative and an accompanying implicit negotiation between the customary sociolegal order of Mornington Islanders and that of the liberal settler-state. Analysis of these circumstances and relations leads us to argue that informalism can support cultural difference and mediate relations with the state, although it cannot be relied upon to transform the accompanying asymmetric relationship. Nonetheless, informalism may sustain and contribute to the possibilities for transformative change by improving delivery of justice services and through recognition of Indigenous capacities and approaches to sociopolitical order.