Description
The crisis of peacebuilding in all its forms and manifestations is widely acknowledged. We have witnessed the challenges to and failed outcomes of negotiations with conflict parties, efforts to democratize and stabilize conflict-ridden societies, or robust military interventions in different global arenas and contexts. In literature and practice, violence and peacebuilding are assumed to be opposing phenomena; it is the violence of conflict actors which hinders peacebuilding, and that peacebuilders try to minimize. The panel offers a different approach to the relationship between peacebuilding and violence, in not asking how violence obstructs peacebuilding, but how peacebuilding is fostering, enabling, creating, or legitimizing very different forms of violence and insecurity. Peacebuilding, despite benevolent mandates and normative obligations to peace, is therefore not separable from violence, but can co-constitute violence. The presentations engage with the multiple forms of this constitutive relationship, in focusing on perceptions of gendered (in)security and violence of citizens in the everyday, the ways peacebuilding has supported violent security institutions, or how peacebuilding has been directly violent in its own right. The goal is not to dismiss peacebuilding per se, but to understand the underlying reasons for the ongoing crisis and reflect upon alternatives.
