The Politics of Peacebuilding in a Diverse World: Difference Exposed by Xavier Mathieu & Pol Bargués-Pedreny

Author:Xavier Mathieu & Pol Bargués-Pedreny [Mathieu, Xavier & Bargués-Pedreny, Pol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367729462
Google: eGH9zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-12-18T12:36:51+00:00

Knowing indigenous difference for peacebuilding?

Indigenous difference is difference par excellence for peacebuilding because it is indigenous dispossession which founds the New World and the modern international system, and which nurtures some of the loudest voices for the pursuit of progressive peace (see Byrd 2011). The hierarchical contradictions embedded within identitarian and de-essentializing approaches to difference in contemporary peacebuilding have their very foundation in colonial regimes that cast indigenous peoples, on an ongoing basis, as simultaneously autochthonous (of the land/place) and subject to imported political orders. European-derived engagements with difference and efforts to build peace proceed by simultaneously sustaining and denying the colonial violence of Indigenous dispossession. What would it mean, then, to attempt to reverse dominant patterns of knowing difference in peacebuilding in the colonial heartland of settler–colonial states through the relational–essential frame developed thus far? And what might this suggest for engaging difference more broadly in peacebuilding? This section considers, in an abbreviated overview enumerated in four steps, how a relational–essential approach might be deployed to support engagement with Australian Aboriginal people. Writing about another people’s being is obviously sensitive, and for this reason I aim only to evoke for illustrative purposes (rather than to specify). I also offer a further overall caveat by putting a question mark over this section.

First, responding to difference through a relational–essential frame requires foregrounding not the theoretical frame per se but the act of relating in combination with according difference the respect that comes with viewing it as essential. A relational–essential approach therefore cannot assume an overarching a-priori standing vis-à-vis the world and others, as occurs through the identitarian and de-essentializing approaches which permeate most dominant approaches to peacebuilding and which assume that the international peacebuilder – and the knowledge tradition to which she or he belongs – holds the necessary authority and capacity to know the world over and above the recipients or ‘others’ of peacebuilding. Instead of knowing through and recreating European-derived forms and meanings, the first move in a relational–essential approach thus acknowledges other registers and forms of knowing, which involves demoting the usually ascendant figure of the one who knows by placing him or her into relationships with others.

Taking this step challenges dominant scholarship by placing knowing in the world of interaction rather than over and above the world and the peoples who inhabit it. Doing so is no doubt unsettling for some as it renders knowing, including the very viability of the relational–essential approach that is being brought to bear, contingent upon interaction with the knowledge schemas and ways of being of the peoples encountered through peacebuilding practice. Peacebuilders are not accustomed to having their frames of reference brought into question to this extent; however, they are often familiar with dealing with high levels of uncertainty and contingency in the field, and are capable of negotiating these circumstances in order to undertake programmes and projects that support the conditions for peace. Bringing these capacities to bear suffices to develop shared commitments and processes between international peacebuilders and local peoples.

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