Peacebuilding in an Entangled World

Abstract

The performance of international peacebuilding is far away from its high ambitions after the end of the Cold War and remains rather bleak. While its underlying concept of the liberal peace has been extensively criticized, an affirmative approach might offer a promising way to overcome various shortcomings of related undertakings. After all, affirming the malaise of peacebuilding translates the circumstances of failure into a reconsidered and non-foundational ontology where entities have no inherent characteristics but are constituted through their infinite entanglements with the human and non-human world. A respective ontological shift not only unveils substantial obstacles to peace-oriented endeavors, but thereby also implies a whole new set of strategies. This paper introduces the debate regarding the issue of peacebuilding within an entangled world. In order to do so, it explains the crisis of peacebuilding ontologically and epistemologically, but at the same time rearticulates it under reconsidered circumstances along a relational concept of peace. On this foundation, the paper contemplates the operational relevance of international actors for peacebuilding.

Keywords: peace, posthuman, complexity, conflict transformation, war, Anthropocene