Description
The local turn in critical peacebuilding has drawn on a wide variety of postcolonial theories, concepts, and thinkers, such as Foucault’s resistance, Bhabha’s hybridity, de Certeau’s the everyday, and Scott’s hidden transcript. Yet, there has not been a substantive engagement with the writings of the postcolonial author and activist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Spivak criticized the way that the concept of the subaltern is employed to mean any marginalized group whilst stating unequivocally that the subaltern cannot speak. What else can be learnt from an engagement with Spivak? I engaged with some of Spivak’s most influential works and argue that three theoretical insights are relevant for critical peacebuilding. First, Spivak’s discussion of Foucault’s nexus of power/knowledge (pouvoir/savoir) places an epistemological limit on resistance as a viable respond to liberal peacebuilding so that ‘resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relations to power’. Second, Spivak’s notion of strategic essentialism, being congruent with the practice of reflexivity, helps to overcome the local-international binary deadlock. Finally, following from Spivak’s discussion of subalternity and the politics of representation, the paper problematizes the methodology of studying the local. Recognizing that the subaltern cannot speak, critical peacebuilding scholars need to be mindful of inadvertent instrumental representation of the local in theorizing and policy-recommendations.
Keywords: Peacebuilding, postcolonialism, subalternity, resistance, reflexivity, politics of representation.
