The Distinction of Peace

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Chapter 1

Fields, Power, Practices, and Habitus in the Analysis of Peacebuilding aye

What is peacebuilding? Shouldn’t it be the normal requirement for a book on peacebuilding to offer a definition upfront? This certainly is the way most books on peacebuilding open, by setting out a definition with the words “peacebuilding is . . .”—and from there on the researcher proceeds to sort out which activities will count as peacebuilding and who peacebuilders are. In a next step, qualitative criteria may be attached to the definition of peacebuilding and then interrogated to determine whether the peace built is a “good” peace or not. Yet the first challenge in analyzing the patterns and modes that dominate peacebuilding is to question the validity of our analytical categories. Asking what peacebuilding is produces exactly one of those categories of thought that formulates a common-sense understanding of reality, but without questioning which authority has privileged this way of thinking over others. For determining what peace is and how and by whom it has to be achieved is exactly what is at stake in the field of peacebuilding.

Definitions are never neutral, nor are they always benign. They reflect a certain subject position and perspective on the matter to be investigated. It is always necessary to clarify who is advocating which definition, and for what reasons. In this book, peacebuilding is initially understood in a wide and vague sense as any activity that is undertaken by globally acting individuals or organizations in order to establish what they think peace is in a region that they have defined as being at war. The dichotomy between peace and war is at the core of this definition, which leaves it entirely to empirical analysis to determine who says what peace is and what war is. The book is, indeed, an exploration of the “who?” in this definition, and the research rationale is that the definition of peace results from knowing and understanding who is speaking, and on which grounds these persons have gained the authority to speak and to define peacebuilding.

These actors interact in a social field. The definition of peace, war, and peacebuilding is what is at stake in this field, along with what makes these different actors interact in the attempt to gain or assert their authority. The concept of “field” is one of the “thinking tools” borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical toolbox.” Bourdieu did not intend to build a fully fledged sociological theory, and he refused all throughout his voluminous work to unify and streamline his concepts into a consistent theory of society.” This refusal was grounded in an epistemology that rejected the fixing of meaning of our categories of thought. Bourdieu took the very fundamental stance on all sociology (and all sciences for this matter) that such fixing of meaning signifies an uncritical acknowledgment of the power structures that produce this meaning in the first place.’ It is therefore inadequate to treat Bourdieu’s concept of “field” and its relatives, “capital” and “habitus,” as if they are part of a total theory of society. They are not; they are merely tools that allow analysis of exactly those power structures that produce meaning in a given space of social interaction.’ They are what allow the social analysis (and the analysis of power) to be undertaken, and must not be confused with the faits accomplis of the analytical findings or social facts that are investigated.

Hence, it makes little sense to dissociate the dispute over the definition of peacebuilding from the question of who and what kind of activity belongs to the field. Consequently, it is in no way surprising that attempts to count definitions of peacebuilding, or even to nail one down as being the right one, have concluded that there are as many and as differing understandings as there are actors in the field.® An actor, international organization or other, identifies itself with the field and seeks distinction from other actors if it classifies its own activities or that of others as “peacebuilding” or as “humanitarian,” or as something completely different. Who belongs to the field and who does not, and what kind of activity is considered right and good in the field and what is not, are questions that are constantly disputed, in flux, and malleable.’ If we talk of social fields, we are therefore talking of actors who relate to each other in a competitive manner and dispute the essential question of what they are doing and what authority can determine if these are the right things to do. P Fields are established by the weaving of webs of direct and indirect relations between actors in the field, and by their competitive and distinguishing practices; these relational webs form a microcosmos in the larger universe of society.’

Social actors are embedded in many and multiple relations and, hence, in many and multiple fields. Relations are, in principle, unbounded, and it is therefore the observer’s decision that relations should be regarded in their entirety as fields to be investigated. It is the observer who takes up a certain viewpoint on the field and subsequently develops a specific perspective on it; Bourdieu speaks of a peephole through which the observer looks upon the field." Yet the viewpoint is not chosen arbitrarily. The observer moves back and forth between the empirical observations of the field and her research questions and interests; by and large research consists precisely in mapping out the contours of the field. The viewpoint thus results from a reflective process of empirical research and theoretical questioning over the essence of the field under investigation. As mentioned above, the essence of the field is the debate specific to this field and which distinguishes it from others; it is what is at stake in this field only, and not in others E To put it simply, one knows that a field is a field when one sees it; and those who are in the field recognize it as such and have very clear ideas of who belongs in the field and who shouldn’t. In order to know what a field is the observer needs to consider the discursive claims that actors make about the field and the practices with which they reproduce the conditions of existence for such claims.

By using a field theoretical approach, this research departs in many respects from the commonly used frameworks for the analysis of peacebuilding. As a matter of world politics, most research on peacebuilding is framed within the theoretical debates in the discipline of international relations (IR), and draws mainly on political science models of analysis with their particular focus on institutions and organizational structures.'? Field theory, however, is a sociological theory that privileges the exploration of social relations over the analysis of legal institutions, and focuses on social actors (as broadly understood) rather than on institutional actors.

There are many good reasons to espouse social theory in the study of world political phenomena. Conventional international relations theory is largely insufficient when it comes to analyzing global social phenomena such as transnational social movements, globally and glocally acting nongovernmental organizations, various manifestations of globalized civil society or complex social transformative policies such as development aid, or, precisely, peacebuilding.” On the other hand, adjacent disciplines like sociology, geography, political science, or economics often remain within the tight limits of their respective methodological nationalism and struggle to integrate transnational, international, and global perspectives. Hence, although there has been an increasing body of sociological approaches in the analysis of world politics, many areas still are open to exploration. Peacebuilding is certainly one of them. Peacebuilding is all at once a stately diplomatic affair, a constantly widening policy field of international organizations, and a normative discourse that motivates nongovernmental and transnational social forces to project their activities, norms, and ideas about how the world should be organized on a global and a local level. Each of these aspects could (maybe) be analyzed and explained by realism, institutionalism, and mainstream constructivism, respectively, but every single mainstream IR theory would struggle to cover all aspects. Importantly, the existing realist, institutionalist, and constructivist paradigms are sufficiently mutually exclusionary and contradictory that it would be impossible to establish a coherent analytical framework to grasp peacebuilding’s internal logic and dynamics. This is particularly obvious when it comes to the puzzling question of why peacebuilding continues in quite the same manner since its inception even though the failure to build peace is rather obvious in many cases where peacebuilding is met with, sometimes violent, resistance. Neither mainstream school of international theorizing is able to address the process of inclusion and exclusion that is in the making when peacebuilding missions are deployed in postconflict settings."

Fields

The holistic perspective of field theory allows peacebuilding to be captured to a much larger extent than traditional IR theories do. At its origins in the social theories of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and other founders of sociology, field theory was developed mainly to comprehend the synchronic movement of social differentiation and integration.” As Bernard Lahire points out, “fields have a history and only have meaning in the framework of differentiated societies.”!° Such differentiation concerns mainly the increasing division of labor in modern societies. Contemporary globalization processes can certainly be understood as accelerated processes of global divisions of labor. Historically, the division of labor in the wake of the capitalist and industrial expansion has created new professions, and with this new socio-professional fields. At the same time, the reorganization of political communities in nation-states has led to an increased fragmentation and specialization of governing tasks with ever more differentiated bureaucracies, ministries, and specialized agencies. Similar processes can be observed on the international level and have been analyzed with the framework of field theory.” Peacebuilding combines processes of professional and bureaucratic as well as political differentiation and specialization. Such processes are exactly the topic of this book, for the emergence of peacebuilding as a socio-professional and political field is the result of such differentiations.

Bourdieu has developed and specified field theory into a broad framework of analysis that allows dissection of the specific rationales of inclusion and exclusion of such various fields as the literary field, the high bureaucracies, or academia. Rationales of inclusion and exclusion reflect patterns of power and domination that are specific to the field and its stakes. Power relations are woven through the direct and indirect interaction of actors in the field who are positioned at varying distances and positions to each other. Those differences in social positions result from the actors’ capabilities to reproduce the resources that give them access to the field and to specific positions in the field. Bourdieu calls these resources “capital.”

The concept of capital captures the temporal and versatile aspects of these resources: they might have been produced in the past; they can be exchanged and inherited, stored in the present and invested in the future. Bourdieu distinguishes four basic forms of capital; however, these four forms can be conjugated in infinitely diversified and differentiated sub- or alternative forms, as capital is often specific to the field in which it is employed. In its basic forms, one can identify economic (financial), cultural, social, and symbolic capital.

In Bourdieu’s understanding of fields, capital forms are field-specific forms of power. Power is therefore not a resource per se (and it is certainly not a “thing”); any form of capital needs foremost to be recognized as important, crucial, valuable, and influential in the field. For instance, academic educational capital is important in the educational field and in fields that draw on it, for example, the field of liberal professions, yet it is rather irrelevant in the field of sports such as boxing. Or, to take examples from Bourdieu’s own research, economic and financial capital is important in the field of the modern labor market (or any capitalist market field), but it was irrelevant in the field of Kabyle village societies in 1950s Algeria." The temporal and functionally versatile notion of capital allows, furthermore, accounting for a large range of manifestations of capital—educational capital, for instance, is not only expressed in the knowledge a person might have gained in his or her studies, but also, and importantly, in material proof such as certificates, doctorates, and books. Indeed, the imperative of defining fields in terms of their own self-ascribed logics forces the observer to identify in each case what specific kind of capital is important in the observed field. Hence, all fields can be identified as such because they are internally structured by a specific configuration of forms of capital that determine the social hierarchy of the field. The power relations that situate actors in a hierarchical order in a field are expressed through this grammar of field-specific capital configurations.

By extending the concept of capital beyond the category of money, Bourdieu seeks furthermore to emphasize the hegemony that modern utilitarian economic reasoning exercises over the social sciences.'? Social action can be reduced neither to the gain-maximizing rational actor model nor to ideas of utilitarian egoism—both of which Bourdieu labels as being on the lowest level of sociological reflection.” That said, the notion of interest needs to keep its explanatory value, as actors do act in their own interests; yet their interests are much wider, more profound, and more differentiated than simply getting one’s own. More important, the actors’ interests cannot be gauged without taking into consideration the field they are in. Rational choice theory’s assumption of immutable, fixed preferences, which have a value of their own, is a fiction. Value is ascribed by the actors themselves and by the “economy” of the field. Resources and preferences for action are only “capital” if they are considered valuable. Hence, by widening the notion of capital, Bourdieu takes into account the significant variations of the kind of resources actors put to work in order to gain, maintain, or defend specific subject positions within a field.

The concept of field reflects, in part, a structuralist understanding of interaction, but it is different from the understanding that is dominant in international relations realist theory and its variations. The notion of capital is both wider and more differentiated than the notion of capabilities, as is the Bourdieusian notion of interest. Structural realism certainly assumes that actors position themselves with respect to the actions of others 7 Recent reworkings of this basic premise, and the introduction of social constructivist elements like that of “security communities,””

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“communities of practice,”” or “democratic peace,”™ have furthermore tried to explain patterns of distinction and closeness of state behavior over time; yet none of these explanations has abandoned the ontology of states behaving as rational actors in search of exogenously defined national interests (such as preservation of territorial integrity and territorial and judicial sovereignty). Neither have they, for that matter, abandoned statist ontology as such.

The question why peacebuilding continues can hardly be answered through such narrowly defined analyses of self-interest. Certainly, much of the persistence of the field is due to hierarchical diplomatic games played among the UN member states, and most notably among the five permanent members of the Security Council (as will be explored in detail in chapter 2). However, as a result of the diplomatic bickering the UN has carved out a specific role for its organization and, over time, as peacebuilding has become a “growth industry,” as former Secretary- General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated, numerous other intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations have entered the field.

In this process, peacebuilding has also gained traction of its own, with a large range of nonstate actors involved. Furthermore, even if such state haggling over authority in the international realm can explain where UN missions are deployed and where they are not, this still does not tell anything about the specific forms and appearance of peacebuilding, for example, its excessive focus on human rights and transitional justice (as discussed in chapter 7).

Such lacunae in classical IR theory are the direct result of its narrow ontology of state behavior, which assumes that states act rationally in a utilitarian sense. In classical IR theory the state is taken for granted, while a critical analysis of world politics requires the scholar to precisely question this “natural” authority of the state to decree values and politics. Far from being “natural,” this authority stems from the state’s monopolization of not only violence capital but of all other forms of capital, too. Most important, the state’s monopolization of cultural and symbolic capital has, historically and currently, profoundly shaped the categories within which we think of the state. Bourdieu’s critical stance goes further than Alexander Wendt’s argument that “anarchy [and by extension, sovereignty] is what states make out of it.”?°

Wendt argues that concepts like anarchy or sovereignty are reproduced in the notions and rules that order interstate diplomacy. Yet he does not provide any explanation for the specific forms of these rules, nor who generated them, or why and how they have been generated in the first place. Authority in and of a political community could have been, and historically has been, asserted in other ways than the currently dominant model of state sovereignty, just as the interaction among political communities could have been, and has been, modeled in quite different ways to the world’s current model of interstate diplomacy.” In the same vein, the question remains unanswerable as to which changes have been initiated by the increasing and diversified transnational flows and spaces in the most recent globalization processes, of which peacebuilding is also part.

Liberal institutionalist IR theory and its avatar of constructivism have proposed more refined models of how ideas, norms, and discourses spread—among others, that of human rights, which informs peacebuilding—yet these approaches are commonly flawed in their incapacity to formulate the relationship between power and ideas. In much of liberal institutionalist and constructivist theories norms and ideas spread because they are persuasive per se.” Or, if they are not inherently “right,” they are adopted because they are part and parcel of institutionalization processes that make actors gain other “right” things. Rather than being imposed by a logic of consequences that presupposes threat and, eventually, force, the norms, rules, and ideas generate and draw on a so-called logic of appropriateness.” In liberal institutionalism, much of this reasoning is still cast in assumptions of rationalist utilitarianism, that is, expressed in the language of economics, where the costs of defection are higher than the costs of participation.*! The theoretical debate between the logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness is over the question of whether such costs are material costs, as realists or some institutionalists would argue, or whether they entail intangible values such as reputation or even identity.

In both cases, the rationalizing of actors’ behavior as a form of utilitarian maximization of (reputational or material) benefits reduces both culture and power to simple and unidimensional variables. Power lies either with the idea or with the actor.” Both are properties of the actor rather than properties of social relations. Such types of constructivist or institutionalist analyses therefore risk overlooking how malleable both are, and how they are produced and reproduced both in infinitely miniscule practices and through huge encompassing contexts. They do not engage with the counterfactual understanding that for any policy promoted there could have been an alternative, because they assume that any policy decision must have an inherent property—either it is a “good” idea or that it is the least costly—which makes it the best choice for the decision maker. Neither does the question come up what “good” actually could or should mean; nor is the question investigated on which grounds the decision makers have the authority (or not) to make those particular policies rather than others. In the case of peacebuilding, this means that the claim is not disputed that peacebuilding is inherently “good”; consequently, this analysis equally neglects the question of what lays at the foundation of these claims.

Power

A burgeoning literature has, in the past two decades, critically examined this classical IR theory understanding power as a property. Mainly drawing on Foucault’s work, these analyses have shifted the focus from power as a property (of norms or of actors) to power as discourses. This not only changes the conception of actors, but also of the norms and ideas and how they (or culture more generally) interact with power. Discursive power is understood as generative power that allows for certain actions to take place.** Such an analysis focuses on the effect discourses have on those actors at the receiving end, as well as on those who expound them. Discourses fabricate meaning and give sense to actions and practices; they do not have power per se, but power flows through them because discourses have effects.” Foucault’s understanding of power is very similar to Bourdieu’s inasmuch as both reject the essentialization of power that characterizes those social analyses that see power as a property of actors or institutions.” From that perspective, culture—ideas, norms, values, discourses, narratives, and so forth—are forms of power, and any critique of power needs to pierce and deconstruct its aura of normalcy and common sense.

Yet Bourdieu’s approach of dismantling power’s appearance of being “normal” is again different from Foucault’s.” Foucault’s main interest is that of an archeologist who seeks to excavate the different layers of meaning and show their contingency by resituating them in their historical context and transformed meanings.” Although Bourdieu is, in principle, sympathetic to the critical exercise of such genealogies, he argues that this is not enough to grasp the effects and workings of power. Genealogy, or critical discourse analysis, reveals the arbitrariness and contingency of meaning and, hence, undermines the myth of universality. However, analyzing what is said is not yet analyzing who is saying what. Bourdieu argues that powerful discourses, that is, such discourses that matter, are not only expressed in words and ideas, but are enacted. Some actors have more authority than others to speak; consequently, the power of discourses differs depending on who is speaking. Structures of domination and authority reflect social hierarchies, and these, in turn, shape what can be said, and what is said, by whom. They also reflect the relational positions of the speakers.

Furthermore, discourses cannot be dissociated from their practical contexts. Discourses become relevant and sense-generating because they are recognized as such in those contexts they are speaking to. The meaning of a discourse is hence not only constructed by its content—rather, it is the authority of the speaker that counts; this, in turn, is contingent on the structure of the field, which is formed by the different capital configurations with respect to what is at stake in the field.”

Bourdieu draws on Erving Goffman’s concepts of performance and staging to express that power needs to be presented to an audience as such and that the audience needs to be able to read the performance appropriately.“ Power that is not understood as such by the audience is not power. Performances contain both discourses and practices. They draw, furthermore, on existing knowledge and understanding, which the audience also incorporates in ideas and discourses as well as in practices and behavior. A connoisseur recognizes the value of a performance exactly because she has practical and ideal knowledge and, hence, normative ideas of the matter at stake. The meaning of a discourse is hence not only constructed by its content; rather, it is the authority of the speaker that counts; this, in turn, is contingent on the structure of the field, which is formed by the different capital configurations with respect to what is at stake in the field.’

This explains Bourdieu’s proposal to conceive of discursive power as its own form of capital—namely what he calls “symbolic capital,” whose power has an effect on people, practices, institutions, and culture (again always to be understood in its vague, overarching sense). As these effects shape livelihoods, bodies, and minds, Bourdieu calls the power of symbolic capital “symbolic violence.” * Social positions are recognizable in the way people speak, move their bodies, express their bodies, dress, walk—in short, how they perform and behave. Practices—how things are done—are therefore an essential object of observation if one wants to capture capital configurations in social fields.

Practices

So-called practice theory has become a new buzzword of critical IR theory and, together with a growing interest in ethnographic methods, has also been applied to the analysis of peacebuilding, for instance in Séverine Autesserre’s book Peaceland.“ In Bourdieu’s work “practice” is one analytical category alongside all others and takes up its full sense only when considered together with the concepts of “capital,” “field,” “habitus,” and “distinction” and serves as tool of analyzing power structures. Most of contemporary research in international relations that prides itself on being inspired by Bourdieu’s “practice theory” ignores most of his other concepts and the way they need to be thought and used together to make sense of the social world. Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, for instance, define “practice” as “socially meaningful patterns of action . . . performed competently.”* Such a definition turns Bourdieu’s research program on its head (and would do the same for this book). By integrating the adjective “competent” into the definition of practice, the authors skip over the crucial question of what makes certain practices appear competent and others not. Practices are indicative of social structures of power because it is through the economic, social, political, and cultural structures that competence is socially gained and recognized. If such conditions of possibility are not analyzed, practices remain simply a more or less noticeable phenomenon but do not tell an awful lot about power.*®

The particularity of Bourdieu’s theory of practice was exactly to go beyond this phenomenological use of the concept, hence transgressing the basic sense given to the term in common language. In a very basic sense “practice” is everything an observed actor does whether he or she is playing piano and doing so for exactly twenty minutes every Friday, or seating country representatives in international conferences in French alphabetical order. But in a sociological sense, and most particularly in Bourdieu’s sociology, practice means more, for it refers to what an actor is doing to other actors and, hence, the social sense of such actions.”

Practices are the enactment and the realization of the actors’ capital configurations in a given social field. Practices are what actors do to affirm their position with respect to others. Practices are therefore neither entirely freely decided actions as imagined in philosophies of individual free will, nor are they mechanistic responses to exogenous incentives or constraints as, for instance, Parsonian functionalism assumes."

Practices are actions that people can do within the limits of the capital they have, their dispositions, their position in the social space, and the constraints imposed by the “other,” for their recognition and acknowledgment is essential for any practice to have a social sense at all.

In the French original, Bourdieu commonly speaks of “agents” rather than actors in order to indicate that individuals, groups, or institutions are embodied social structures (in this book, however, I will follow the more habitual “actors”). Bourdieu calls this interplay between the actors’ interiorization and embodiment of social structures the habitus (more on this later). Looking solely at practices as manifestations of a “real” world disregards this relational web in which actors are embedded and this interiorization of social positions.

Autesserre’s book Peaceland is a case in point. Having spent several years of participant observation, and drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, Autesserre paints a highly detailed and rich picture of the everyday lives of peacebuilders. Her approach stands in the tradition of the anthropology of development, which seeks to produce applied and applicable anthropological research about the “facts of development.”” This research documents, often in much detail, the daily routines of aid workers to expose not only their knowledge but also “the sociality of aid professionals: well knit, class closed, and culturally enclaved in capital cities; globally connected and permanent; but locally isolated and transient.”°!

Autesserre’s focus is deliberately “micro” in order to capture every little way of doing things in the hope that these may reveal ways to improve and adjust peacebuilding to make it more effective.” Despite its richness, the ethnographic approach reduces the notion of practice to daily routines and seeks to find their social sense in the reality of these practices themselves.

To stay within the realm of this study, one has to note for instance that driving a SUV or writing an English e-mail are not, sui generis, unjust actions. Their effect of excluding and discriminating against others— the local population, in most occurrences—is relational and situational. These acts are unjust only because the beneficiaries of aid do not drive SUVs or have computers to write English e-mails on. Practices are manifestations of social structures; they are the enactments of what people can do given their social position, the resources (“capital”) to act they have at their disposition, and the goals they want to achieve.

As this example shows, observing practices alone does not allow the production of knowledge about power and inequality structures in world politics, despite claims to the contrary.” The focus on the microcosmos of aid communities does document how particular types of knowledge are dominant and how they are embedded in structures of unfairness and injustice. However, research needs to dig deeper and more widely over time and space to understand what kind of specific knowledge this precisely is, where it comes from, and why this and not any other has become dominant in peacebuilding circles. Types of knowledge or practices do not become dominant because of their intrinsic value but because they emerge as socially recognized forms of worldviews and behaviors; and commonly this happens through a complex struggle in which dissenting and alternative knowledge forms or practices have been socially deconstructed and discarded.