Description
Research on international peacebuilding is characterised by two understandings of violence. Within an instrumentalist understanding of violence, violence is seen as a means for conflict parties to achieve their goals. In contrast, a structuralist understanding points to the structural causes of violent conflicts. As an alternative to this, the paper aims to formulate an affect-theoretical understanding of violence. This is intended to theoretically account for an experience frequently expressed by those affected by prolonged violence: that violence is something that is felt and shapes the social environment even when it is not directly carried out. Thus, following the affective turn, violence is understood as atmospheric, i.e. as something that surrounds us and is effective as a "potential" (Massumi), i.e. as a kind of threat that is constantly in the air.
Following this, UN peacebuilding will be examined as something that is embedded in such atmospheres of violence, for example after protracted civil wars. Two UN peacebuilding missions (UNTAC in Cambodia and UNTAET in East Timor) will be used to show how peacebuilding practices shape such atmospheres of violence and attempt to transform them on the one hand, but on the other run the risk of becoming part of atmospheric violence themselves. The empirical material for this will be documents, reports, pictures and video material from the missions. On the basis of the two case studies, consequences will then be drawn for future peacebuilding.
