Stefanie Kappler

Peacebuilding and culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina Resistance or emancipation

This article investigates problems and pitfalls involved in the EU’s peacebuilding activities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It claims that by romanticizing civil society and selectively reinforcing existing power structures, the European Union has failed to give society a stake in the peace that is being created in that country. Against this background, the article goes on to argue that local responses and forms of resistance have begun to emerge in Bosnia and Herzegovina, challenging the EU’s peacebuilding mission to move towards a more contextualized engagement with local society. Rather than focusing exclusively on the EU’s formal institutional mechanisms, a more contextualized approach would seek to include a wide variety of local agencies and create a space in which Bosnian society might develop alternative versions of peace that relate to people’s everyday lives. The main challenge for the EU, the article concludes, is to take the diversity of Bosnia’s local voices seriously in efforts to promote a hybrid, sustainable peace.

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.

The dynamic local: delocalisation and (re-)localisation in the search for peacebuilding identity

This article challenges the notion of the ‘local’ as a static identity or set position and argues for a processual understanding of localisation, in which constant processes of delocalisation and (re-)localisation serve as tools by which peacebuilding actors position themselves in the political economy and the social landscape of peacebuilding. Peacebuilding agency and -identity are viewed as situated in time and space and subject to constant transformation. Using the cases of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cyprus, I argue that the positionality of local identity is contingent on the ever-changing social context and political economy of peacebuilding. By viewing processes of (re-)localisation and delocalisation as markers of agency, we can overcome the binary between local and international and investigate more subtle forms of agency in a fluid peacebuilding environment. The article identifies the ways in which peacebuilding agency facilitates the creation of a particular set of identities (identification), before investigating the processes of delocalisation and (re-)localisation in detail. The article goes on to argue that, rather than being mutually exclusive, these two processes tend to happen in parallel and thus challenge the seemingly neat binary between local and international peacebuilding identities.

Everyday Legitimacy in Post-Conflict Spaces: The Creation of Social Legitimacy in Bosnia-Herzegovina's Cultural Arenas

Abstract The international community has long been criticized for its lack of social legitimacy in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its creation of a dysfunctional public space in the light of peoples everyday experiences of peace. This article contends that, as a result, legitimacy has been moved from such public spaces to semi-public spaces, wherein the public and the private are interrelated. One example is local cultural arenas, where hopes emerging in peoples everyday lives are projected onto alternative visions of peace and a corresponding social contract. In that sense, cultural agencies have served as alternative social locations of legitimacy due to their closer connection to peoples lives and needs.

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’.

Coping with research: local tactics of resistance against (mis-)representation in academia

Research on fieldwork methods in Peace and Conflict Studies has often tended to examine the tools through which researchers can more easily access information about and from their ‘local subjects’. This article, however, takes into account the ways in which people in conflict/post-conflict societies deal with and resist researchers when they conduct fieldwork. With particular reference to Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Basque Country, the article casts light on the mechanisms the researched upon invent and develop to protect themselves from being misrepresented and/or over-researched. The tactics deployed by a variety of actors in deeply divided societies can be considered complex and subtle in that they often draw on hidden transcripts and parallel narratives. The divergences between formal and informal narratives in turn shed light on the agency of the research subjects to frame the ways in which knowledge is produced and represented. At the same time, this calls into question the abilities of researchers to represent local voices authentically unless research is conducted in a self-reflective and critical manner. Against this background, the article explores ways of conducting fieldwork in ethically responsible ways, which are expected to benefit both researchers and research subjects.

What attachment to peace? Exploring the normative and material dimensions of local ownership in peacebuilding.

The peacebuilding and academic communities are divided over the issue of local ownership between problem-solvers who believe that local ownership can ‘save liberal peacebuilding’ and critical voices claiming that local ownership is purely a rhetorical device to hide the same dynamics of intervention used in more ‘assertive’ interventions. The article challenges these two sets of assumptions to suggest that one has to combine an analysis of the material and normative components of ownership to understand the complex ways in which societies relate to the peace that is being created. Building on the recent scholarship on ‘attachment’, we claim that different modalities of peacebuilding lead to different types of social ‘attachment’ – social-normative and social-material – to the peace being created on the part of its subjects.

Peacebuilding and spatial transformation: Peace, space and place

This book investigates peacebuilding in post-conflict scenarios by analysing the link between peace, space and place. By focusing on the case studies of Cyprus, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Ireland and South Africa, the book provides a spatial reading of agency in peacebuilding contexts. It conceptualises peacebuilding agency in post-conflict landscapes as situated between place (material locality) and space (the imaginary counterpart of place), analysing the ways in which peacebuilding agency can be read as a spatial practice. Investigating a number of post-conflict cases, this book outlines infrastructures of power and agency as they are manifested in spatial practice. It demonstrates how spatial agency can take the form of conflict and exclusion on the one hand, but also of transformation towards peace over time on the other hand. Against this background, the book argues that agency drives place-making and space-making processes. Therefore, transformative processes in post-conflict societies can be understood as materialising through the active use and transformation of space and place. This book will be of interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, human geography and IR in general. (Less)

Divergent Transformation and Centrifugal Peacebuilding: The EU in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article problematizes the EUs approach to conflict transformation in its neighbouring countries, with specific reference to Bosnia and Herzegovina. It claims that the way in which the EU engages with domestic elites differs considerably from its engagement with the grassroots – an interaction that is heavily reliant on cooperation with civil society. This in turn produces a process of divergent transformation, creating further cleavages between elites and citizens. Emerging centrifugal processes obstruct the development of a common political platform for the citizens and represent an obstacle to the creation of a social contract in the peacebuilding context. This undermines the possibility of achieving sustainable peace and results in the transformation of past conflict into new conflict.

Sarajevo’s ambivalent memoryscape: Spatial stories of peace and conflict

This article focuses on Sarajevo’s memoryscape to investigate the ambiguous nature of artefacts of commemoration. Suggesting that memorials impact the ways in which people relate to the past and future, the article suggests that they represent important platforms on which different versions of peace and social justice are implicitly narrated and discussed. Depending on the artist/designer, the location, the shape, the audience and the surrounding socio-political discourses, memorials inspire and transform stories of war and peace. The controversies around the Sarajevo roses or monuments dedicated to the international community in Sarajevo mirror controversial societal debates around the nature and politics of peace(building). Conflict and contestation can thus be read through closer investigation of the maps of meaning underpinning the commemoration of certain events. Due to their ambiguous nature, monuments can be used as a platform for the constant transformation of discourses of peace into conflict, and vice versa.