The Distinction of Peace

“Peacebuilding” serves as a catch-all term to describe efforts by an array of international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and even agencies of foreign states to restore or construct a peaceful society in the wake—or even in the midst—of conflict. Despite this variety, practitioners consider themselves members of a global profession. In this study, Catherine Goetze investigates the genesis of peacebuilding as a professional field of expertise since the 1960s, its increasing influence, and the ways in which it reflects global power structures.

Step-by-step, Goetze describes how the peacebuilding field came into being, how it defines who belongs to it and who does not, and what kind of group culture it has generated. Using an innovative and original methodology, she investigates the motivations of individuals who become peacebuilders, their professional trajectories and networks, and the “good peacebuilder” as an ideal. For many, working in peacebuilding in various ways—as an aid worker on the ground, as a lawyer at the United Nations, or as an academic in a think tank—has become not merely a livelihood but also a form of participation in world politics. As a field, peacebuilding has developed its techniques for incorporating and training new members, yet its internal politics also create the conditions of exclusion that often result in practical failures of the peacebuilding enterprise.

By providing a critical account of the social mechanisms that make up the peacebuilding field, Goetze offers deep insights into the workings of Western domination and global inequalities.

Catherine Goetze is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Tasmania.

The Distinction of Peace

A Social Analysis of Peacebuilding

Catherine Goetze

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2017 by Catherine Goetze

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-0-472-07341-2 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-472-05341-4 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-472-12268-4 (e-book)

Meiner Mutter

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Pierre Bourdieu’s Toolbox: Fields, Power, Practices, and Habitus in the Analysis of Peacebuilding

The Field

2. The Peacebuilding Field as Default Space

3. “There Are No Neutral Men”: The Sociological Structure of Peacebuilding

4. Boundaries of the Field: The Peacebuilder, the Businessman, and the Scholar-Expert

The Habitus

5. Peacebuilding Sensibilities

6. Narratives of Intervention: Leadership, Liberalism, and Social Justice

7. The Nomos of the Field: The Fatalism of Saving Lives

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

BNUB United Nations Office in Burundi

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CIC Center on International Cooperation

CSCE Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe

DPKO Department of Peacekeeping Operations

EC European Communities

ICVA International Council of Voluntary Agencies

IMF International Monetary Fund

IR International Relations

KFOR Kosovo Force

KPI key performance indicators

MINURSO United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara

MINUSCA United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic

MINUSMA United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali

MINUSTAH United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti

MONUC United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

MONUSCO United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NGO nongovernmental organization

OAS Organization of American States

OCHA Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

ONUB United Nations Operation in Burundi

ONUC Opération des Nations Unies au Congo/United Nations Operation in the Congo (1960–64)

OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

P5 Five permanent members of the Security Council

SFOR Stabilization Force

SWOT strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats

UN United Nations

UNAMA United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan

UNAMI United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq

UNAMID African Union/United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur

UNDP United Nations Development Programme

UNFICYP United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus

UNHCHR United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNIOBGIS United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau

UNMIK United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo

UNMIL United Nations Mission in Liberia

UNMISS United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan

UNMOGIP United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan

UNOCI United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire

UNPROFOR United Nations Protection Force

UNSCOL United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon

UNSMIL United Nations Support Mission in Libya

UNSOA UN Support Office for African Union Mission in Somalia

Acknowledgments

It took seven years to do the research for this book and write it. That is a long time. And yet I would not have been able to achieve this had I not been privileged to get so much support from all sides. My biggest thanks go to to all the friends with whom I had discussed my experiences as consultant to the German Red Cross in the early 2000s: Vanessa and Mladen Pupavac, Uta Bronner, Dejan Guzina, David Chandler, Roland Albert, Wolf-Dieter Eberwein.

The grant application that was born out of these discussions, “Who Governs? A Social Analysis of UNMIK,” was successful, and without the generous support of the British Academy I would not have started working on this topic. Luckily, I had a brilliant research assistant who not only led all the interviews in Kosovo much better than I would have been able to do, but who also subsequently became a great friend and coauthor. Thank you, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, for accompanying this project and all the support.

For most of of the time working on this book I have been Head of the School of International Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. I have to thank the University of Nottingham and in particular Richard Aldrich and Roger Woods for this great opportunity. Yet the wonders of discovering China and the enigma of university management drained a lot of time and energy from this project, and without the most wonderful support from my colleagues David Kiwuwa, May Tan-Mullins and Teresa Wang I would never have been able to even dream of writing this book. Xiexie! Rosaria Franco, Joseph Askew, Anna Greenwood, Gernot Klantschnig, Ivaylo Gatev, and Raffaela Puggioni, too, have done all they could to keep my back free. Thank you! At UNNC I also benefited from the research support of Rob Avery-Phipps, Mesach Ampwera, Li Kanzhen, Hong Shuning, Huang Antian, Hu Mengyao, Le Tian, Liu Haoran, Liu Xianan, Li Xiaochen, Li Yunze, Ren Yujia, Wang Danyan, Wang Zhou, You Yue, Zhang Naitong, Zhang Yifan, Zheng Xiaojie, Dong Jacob, and Chini Okorie. Thank you all, you did a great job!

Many colleagues and friends have read parts of this book, or early drafts, discussed essential ideas with me, or simply made me think with their excellent work. I need to thank them all for their inspiration (in no particular order): Anna Leander, David Swartz, Séverine Autesserre, Nathalie Duclos, Cécile Jouhanneau, Grégory Daho, Sandrine Lefranc, Susan Woodward, Roland Kostic, Jacob Mundy, Audra Mitchell, Didier Bigo, Klaus Schlichte, Ole Jacob Sending, Morten Bøås, Marie-Joelle Zahar, Najib Hourani, Laurent Bonelli, Catherine Gegout, Louiza Odysseos, Charlotte Epstein, Stefano Guzzini, Jan Selby, Shelley Deane, Ivaylo Gatev, Mie Nakachi, John Heathershaw, Daniel Philpott, and many more who have remained anonymous in conferences or workshops.

Of course, this book would not have been possible without all the wonderful people at the UN, OSCE and other organizations who were willing to talk to me and who gave advice and help. Thank you all, you know who you are! Jeremy Lowe and Denny Arar did a brilliant job in proofreading.

Finally, I have to thank my family for their support and love. This book is dedicated to my mother. I wish she could have read it and I hope she would have been proud of it.

Introduction

This book is not about peace. This book is about the social structures of power in globalization processes. Peacebuilding is a globalization process, and an extremely important one, as it provides the fundamental raison d’être of the United Nations system. The people, organizations, institutions, and agencies that claim to build peace in foreign lands exist and act on the grounds of specific patterns of power and domination in the world. Knowing of and about peace, doing peace, and building peace are practices of distinction in global processes. This book dissects how these power patterns shape a social interaction field, namely peacebuilding. I argue that peacebuilding exists because it has become for a sufficiently large number of people and institutions with sufficiently important authority an unquestioned way of political action in the world and, on a more individual level, a way of making a living (in the full sense of the word).

Peacebuilding has no proper definition, as the term is shorthand for many different activities conducted in countries and societies riddled by violent conflict, including humanitarian assistance, demilitarization and demobilization, human rights education, police force training, administration, and rights. It is often indistinctively used as synonym for statebuilding, democratization, humanitarian intervention, or peacemaking—peacebuilding’s definition all too often depends on the contexts and actors. In this book I focus particularly on those contexts where the United Nations (UN) has been, or still is, leading military and civilian peace missions. However, even in this restricted sense peacebuilding comprises a large variety of activities and is realized by many diverse actors, and not only by the UN itself. Peacebuilding is, therefore, a notoriously unbounded phenomenon that takes very different practical and visible forms in various environments. While peacebuilding in one context can be particularly characterized by humanitarian activities, it might be the judicial and legal reconstruction efforts that mark out peacebuilding in another.

For the purposes of this book, these differences do not really matter sui generis, but they do matter enormously for the field itself. In practice, they differentiate actors from one another, and they create boundaries of distinction. The title of the book draws these two phenomena—distinction and peace—together as I presume that the way actors aim to build peace is an important matter of distinction. Clearly, the key conflict in the peacebuilding field is over the authority to define what peace is and how it should be built. Engaging in this quarrel in one way or the other makes an actor part of the peacebuilding field; and actors engage by taking part in a competitive, and sometimes conflictual, struggle over authority in the field.

Power can be gauged by the recognition and authority actors have in devising their ways of building peace. The configuration of actors in the field reflects global patterns of domination. This book investigates those patterns and how they play out in the field of peacebuilding. They stem from various sources and not only from the peacebuilding activity per se. The book takes a sociological approach by investigating particularly who the people actually are who do peacebuilding: What are their socioeconomic backgrounds, their education, and their networks? Not everybody can become a peacebuilder, and not everybody wants to become a peacebuilder. Those who do so will have followed (and are still following) a personal and professional trajectory that is particular to peacebuilding and global governance. Their trajectories shape the peacebuilding field, and their individual and policy choices are, in turn, shaped by the field’s structures of opportunity and power.

The notion of field is borrowed from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu whose concepts have guided the research of this book. “Field” is an empirical tool of analysis, not a theoretical concept. Fields are spanned by the relations between agents that build up if they interact over an important stake; who, when, where, how, why they do so, all these questions need to be assessed empirically. Approaching peacebuilding from the perspective of looking at fields is very different from an institutionalist perspective. If peacebuilding is considered to be a field, institutions, like the UN, are considered as agents that interact with other agents. This interaction and the relationship, direct and indirect, that they form constitute the agents. They are positioned with respect to each other in a wider web of relations. The field perspective shifts the observation’s view from the units to the relations and the relational web they form. This allows capturing how agents live, as they are understood in their dynamics of acting and reacting to each other.

Institutions of global governance—the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, development agencies, and so forth—are not neutral bundles of rules, norms, and decision-making procedures, as many institutionalist theorists in international relations argue. On the contrary, institutions are filled with real people who have real ideas, interests, tastes, likes, and dislikes, and who work together to achieve not only abstract, institutional goals but also their own personal goals, furthering their own professional careers. They are “distinguished” people, too, and building peace is a way of situating themselves in the world and in the wider social group they are part of. Peacebuilding has thus developed its own dynamics, similar to other socio-professional fields, by generating its own career paths and conditions, and by being populated by a growing number of people for whom peacebuilding is a way of life.

As missions, finances, and personnel deployed to postconflict zones have expanded over the past two decades, peacebuilding has become a major area of research in international studies. A substantial body of literature shows clearly, even though not unanimously, that international peace interventions have an ambiguous effect on so-called postconflict societies. Even if they succeed in reducing armed violence or ending war, interventions often perpetuate or even reinforce the social cleavages on the ground. Peacebuilding propels these countries into bizarre states of global dependencies and suspends them in neither-nor states where conflicts are not outright violent but have not stopped tearing up society.[1] Even if they end war, peace missions rarely build definitive peace.

A wide variety of practical factors have been identified as being responsible for the mixed balance sheet of peacebuilding, from local resistance to organizational contradictions, which build up to form serious stumbling blocks to peacebuilding. The literature ranges from principally supportive analyses, which tend to place blame for peacebuilding’s successes or failures on factors external to the UN or peacebuilders more generally,[2] to highly critical accounts, which disparage peacebuilding as a new form of global social engineering and an international way of disciplining unruly territories and populations.[3] Many authors propose different and (putatively) better ways to build peace, such as by integrating local forces more deeply[4] or seeking to improve the internal functioning of all or certain aspects of the organizations that undertake peacebuilding, most notably the UN.[5]

The question of the efficiency and success of peacebuilding is a question of the problem-solving type, to take up the differentiation Robert Cox introduced more than thirty years ago between problem solving and critical thinking about world politics.[6] He noted that these two perspectives differ substantially in their epistemological and political aims as well as in their ontology of world politics. While the problem-solving perspective

takes [the world] as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized as the given framework for action . . . the critical approach leads towards the construction of a larger picture of the whole and seeks to understand . . . processes of change.[7]

The largest part of research into peacebuilding is concerned with its efficacy and question of whether there are not better ways to build peace than those currently deployed. This literature by and large accepts (a) that peacebuilding is, indeed, legitimate to build peace in foreign lands, and (b) that its failure to do so is due to some form of technical or organizational dysfunction that can be fixed by some twists and tweaks. The question is to find the right screws to turn, and peacebuilding will build peace.

Recently, this research has taken a “local turn” and has proposed to look for those screws at the interface between peacebuilders and local populations. This research is inscribed in a large variety of methodological traditions, from classical political science theorizing about rational actor’s bargaining to the anthropology of development and humanitarian assistance. The closure of the peacebuilding field has rarely been overlooked, and a long row of analysts have pointed out that peacebuilders are perceived as arrogant and ineffective by the local population,[8] that their policies and projects are one-size-fits-all and little adapted to their local environment,[9] that local social forces integrate international forces into their power brokering and haggling,[10] and that the ways peacebuilders behave and act on the ground are often inappropriate and counterproductive.[11] The recommendations of this research commonly propose to identify the “right” locals to work with whereby debates are still going on to know who the “right” locals are and where to find them.[12]

This research is highly sensitive to the various expressions of inequalities and injustices between international peacebuilders and the local populations. They astutely point out the many instances of unfair treatment and document their systemic character. However, due to their focus on problem-solving, these analyses fail to investigate the economic, social, and political conditions that make the unequal relationships between internationals and locals possible, relationships that sustain themselves over time and despite efforts to the contrary.

Much of the research on the local-international interface remains unsatisfactory for normative and empirical reasons. Normatively, the “local turn” echoes the paradox which Tania Li had analyzed for development projects, which tend to empower in a participatory way local communities: “Community is assumed to be natural, yet it needs to be improved.”[13]

In the case of peacebuilding, war and violence are, on the one hand, seen as indicators that local communities are broken, hence, requiring external intervention; on the other hand, such an external intervention should draw on local forces, which are either interpreted as having eluded the general anarchy by some miracle or having moved on into the peacebuilding mode that had been imagined for them. In any case, the local turn presupposes that local communities, or some people in those local communities, are not defunct and able to overcome the brokenness of the war. Yet, if there are such people, why they would need external assistance?

Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s metaphor of the colonial “waiting room of history,”[14] Li retraces how this fundamental contradiction has elicited the response of “permanent deferral” from colonial times until today. For a never-ending row of reasons, local populations were and are simply never entirely ready and continue to need external intervention. Just as in colonial times, when “intervention was needed to teach (or oblige) natives to be truly themselves,”[15] contemporary development and peacebuilding programs continue to seek to improve the fate of local communities by assisting them in “addressing the underlying causes of conflict, repairing damaged relationships and dealing with psychological trauma at the individual level,” as the institutionalized global discourse of peacebuilding often claims.[16]

The “permanent referral” is closely associated with claims that an expert regime is needed to change this particular situation of underdevelopment or conflict. As Li demonstrates in her book The Will to Improve, international agencies (governmental and nongovernmental) frame their projects as technical tasks: the outsiders only contribute specific expertise, which does not exist on the local level. This way they are not contesting local authority but only supplementing it. Interveners are nothing else than the doctors we call upon to overcome specific moments of crisis (in its ancient Greek meaning of a potentially lethal disease). Yet the supplementing remains entirely oblivious of the fundamental economic, social, and political structures, which shape not only the local but also the intervention; experts, and academic experts included, are, rather often, unmindful of the negative ways they reproduce exactly those structures.

Peacebuilding, and in particular locally oriented peacebuilding, is often presented in a similar way to development aid as “the will to improve,” and the problem-solving debates turn mostly around the question of which type of intervention is more participatory or emancipatory. Peacebuilding and particularly its local interactions are represented mainly as a technical task that can be done well or not.

This is particularly obvious in the quest for alternative projects, local hybridizations, and “heterotopias,” although this research seeks to be particularly critical of international efforts of building peace.[17] These analyses similarly struggle with conceptualizing the dynamics of power and domination that are at work in the local-international encounter. Research on hybrid forms of peace explicitly draw on concepts that are supposed to bring in an antiliberal sharp edge such as those developed by Michel Foucault.[18]

Foucault’s ideas of contingent, moving, and contextually and suddenly changing knowledge formations have spread over the last years. Based on Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s conceptualization of “friction,”[19] research on the ground has identified numerous cases of local situations of peace in which local social forces have engaged with international global peacebuilding prescriptions.[20] This research provides a critical lens through which the claims of universality, which underscore humanist projects in general and peacebuilding in particular, can be empirically relativized. They notably show how local forces interact with the peace imposed and how new forms of political community and interaction emerge creatively and contingently (even though not always with the emancipatory effect hoped for).

Yet this research merely illustrates and documents the dynamics of power and domination that play out in the local-international encounter, but it does not provide an analysis of their conditions of possibility. The critique of liberal peacebuilding formulated by these approaches is directed against the top-down imposition of liberal peace, and it is highly sensitive toward the inherent unfairness of the local-international relationship. However, it does not analyze the dynamics by which international peacebuilding generates its authority, domination, and power.

This book turns the perspective around and investigates the conditions of possibility of international peacebuilding’s specific forms of domination. The creation of specific professions of peacebuilding, the institutionalization of peacebuilding careers, their normalization through educational institutions and nomothetic discourses, the work ethics and narratives associated with peacebuilding, the networks and personal interconnections in the past and present are all important building blocks in the edifice of domination of this particular type of Western, liberal peacebuilding. By retracing how peacebuilding emerged and stabilized as a professional field, this book analyzes its particular expert regime, and from there onward how its politics are shaped.

To analyze the emergence and maintenance of peacebuilding’s structural inequality one needs, in the words of Robert Cox, to “stand(s) apart from the prevailing order of the world and ask(s) how that order came about.”[21] It is the aim of this book to scrutinize the world order that makes peacebuilding in its current form possible. The question looming large behind this book is: What global power structure is peacebuilding the imprint of?

Power in global politics is all too often understood as the sum of material power resources such as financial or military resources. My understanding of power here is at once larger and more differentiated. Power is not a resource, although it does find material expressions. Power is, rather, a quality of social relations, and as such encompasses instances of authority, domination, violence, leadership, and, at the same time, submission, subjugation, consent, adherence, following, and admiration. The ontology of power is hence not only material but also social and ideational.[22]

The motivation to interrogate power through a sociology of peacebuilding arises out of a major dissatisfaction with existing institutionalist and constructivist approaches to power analysis in world politics. Political science in general, and international relations in particular, usually bases its analysis on the assumption that institutions regulate political behavior. Institutions standardize, rationalize, and formalize behavior, allowing interactions to take place according to set rules and by shaping expectations.

Institutions and the rules that regulate them are ascribed an agency of their own, just as the norms that are reproduced in these institutions are thought to carry intrinsic value. Norms such as human rights or humanitarian intervention are often considered to have an inherent force that actors then can use to persuade others to “do the right thing.”[23] When ascribing intrinsic value to certain norms, the power struggles that make some norms more successful than others in public and lawmaking discourses are reduced to contests between the varying capacities of the actors to mobilize this or that set of resources in favor of “good” norms.[24] The question of who has the authority to designate this or that norm as “good” disappears from sight.

Such an approach to institutions, which takes the existing norms positively for granted, is not very helpful in identifying, circumscribing, or understanding the quality of power relations. Institutions must not only be seen as set frames for the processing of decisions, but also as social spaces in which actors—individuals, groups of individuals, other institutions, and so forth—seek to influence each other in order to obtain their respective goals.[25] Rules, procedures, and agreed-upon behaviors are conventions that serve the purpose of allowing such negotiations, yet they are also at the same time objects of negotiation. These kinds of conventions and agreements, or conflicts and disagreements, arise out of the interactions and relations between the various actors.

In this book I, therefore, do not assume that peacebuilding is, per se, legitimate and the right thing to do; neither do I assume that it is wrong and just another expression of neocolonial empire building. Peacebuilding as it is practiced now is an expression of a particular global power structure, and it would certainly be different if that global power structure were different. However, it is impossible to tell how it would be different and, if it were different, whether it would be a difference for the better. Peacebuilding as it is practiced now excludes many actors from the field and discards many alternative narratives; if the power structure were different, it would exclude different types of actors and discard other alternative ways of action. It is not up to my analysis to judge which form of exclusion/inclusion is better or worse; and this book does not analyze who and what has been excluded. Hence, it does not make any assertion about what a better peace could be and does not participate in the debates over local ownership or “hybrid peace.”

The sociological approach employed here moves between a holistic view of the field of peacebuilding and a specific view of its agents. The image of a social field is deliberately modeled on the idea of electrical fields, which are made up from the pushing and pulling forces of differently charged elements. In order to understand the tensions running through the field and how these structure the relationships of the agents to one another, it is necessary to tease out their specific ways of constituting their respective social positions. These are, by definition, particular.

Such an attempt at “provincializing peacebuilding” (to paraphrase Chakrabarty) is in open contradiction to the universalism with which peacebuilding projects claim to save lives and do good. I do not take this universalism for granted but rather as a starting point to deconstruct the claim that peacebuilding is common moral sense. The assertion that peacebuilding is, of course, good because it obviously saves lives is interpreted in this book as a strategy to gain legitimacy and authority for those who proclaim such. The ultimate power struggle in the peacebuilding field requires all actors to seek to impose their specific answers to conflict and violence; and to do so by presenting them as the morally right and the commonsensical solutions to the social conflicts in peacebuilding countries. Inversely, those whose vision of peace is the generally recognized and most legitimized are also those who hold prime authority in the field. This authority is, however, not only based on the persuasiveness of the vision of peace proposed, but more largely on a specific configuration of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “capital.” Capital very largely designates the resources actors produce, reproduce, and put into action to gain and defend their respective social positions. Actors in a field not only orient their visions toward the dominant one, they also adapt their behavior to gauge their social positions to the dominant one; this may mean contesting dominant capital configurations, or assimilating to their dominance. Both competition and assimilation are inscribed in the realms of the field, and largely follow what could be called the rules of the game; radical contention or difference excludes actors from the field.

Of course, in the process practices and politics change, and new forms of capital configuration appear as older ones shift in their hierarchical position. Research on local hybridization processes in peacebuilding shows how such movements take place; it shows in particular that such movements are peripheral, incremental, and often without major effect on the larger field. It is the aim of the analysis in this book to understand on which grounds the peacebuilding field remains stable and resistant to change due to its internal mode of reproduction.

Yet the book does not go so far as to analyze the order and hierarchy of fields of the entire globalization process. The focus remains on the peacebuilding field. Rather, I will draw on existing research on globalization and its contemporary neoliberal character in order to contextualize my observations of the peacebuilding field. Globalization is understood here as complex process that has taken various political, economic, social, and cultural forms in history even though the term globalization is of much more recent origin.[26] This process is neither directed nor one-dimensional; it is also not only powered by economic forces, which draw the world together into one global production chain and consumer market. Yet neoliberal capitalism is the dominant force of globalization for its power to shape the economics, politics, societies, and cultures in different corners of the world is clearly higher than that of alternative projects. As Tsing notes:

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, capitalism was transformed by the establishment of new international rules of trade that offered tremendous advantages for the world’s most powerful corporations. Capital whizzed around the globe. Free-trade zones and new technologies of communication encouraged companies to spread their operations to ever-cheaper locations. Transnational specializations—such as currency traders, energy traders—flourished. Privatization initiatives and free-trade regulations dismantled national economies, making once-public resources available for private appropriation.[27]

Neoliberal politics have privatized (and still do) what was public, particularly by disassembling state-led mechanisms of solidarity in the welfare state, and neoliberal economics and politics have socialized the costs of economic crisis and failure. Part of this process was and is the privatization of risks associated with wage labor and employment, and the fundamental changes this has brought around the globe to industrial relations and organization on the one hand and to existential livelihoods on the other hand. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue in their seminal work on the “new spirit of capitalism,” flexibilization of work and just-in-time production have been enabled by global networks of real-time communication; this has led to changing management practices in which work and the workplace became increasingly financialized, and social life progressively commodified.[28] Government policies, which promote and protect financial interests at the expense of social projects, have furthered the paradigm of what the German sociologist Ulrich Bröckling calls “the entrepreneurial self” (alluding to the German governmental policy of remodeling unemployment benefits as subsidies for self-employed enterprises, the so-called “I Inc.’s” [“Ich AG”]).[29]

As this book shows, the peacebuilding field has followed this transformation from the nineteenth-century bourgeois spirit of the middle classes to the late twentieth-century new spirit of capitalism, yet these changes have taken place mainly in its professional practices; in the meantime, the humanist and bourgeois discourse of peace has been preserved. In their discourse, peacebuilding offers a refuge for bourgeois sentiments, lending meaning to work and life, for it defines peacebuilding as the ultimate form of doing good, namely saving lives. It also continues to claim discursively a work ethic, which is modeled on the spirit of capitalism as Max Weber originally had analyzed it. These transformations of the theory and practice of the “good peacebuilder” are (re)produced in the specific habitus of the field.

Habitus is another concept borrowed from Bourdieu. As the notion of field encompasses the relations between agents, it is crucial to analyze their behavior as mutually perceived and represented in order to understand the dynamics of the field. The ways fields are structured allow for certain behaviors and dismiss or look down on others. For the actors, distinction, that is, the tentative to show a distinctive and distinguished behavior, is an important strategy of positioning in the field. When actively employing such strategies, agents become actors. Bourdieu’s toolbox of concepts allows for moving between the analyses of the structure (the field) and the actor (the habitus). Both shape each other and are contingent upon each other. Chapter 1 of this book sets out the analytical tools that are borrowed from Bourdieu’s sociology. It specifically explains in more detail the notion of fields and habitus and how they are constituted by specific capital configurations.

The book is then further divided into two large parts. First, chapters 2 to 4 are dedicated to the concept of peacebuilding as a social and professional field, and, hence, analyze its sociology. Chapter 2 discusses the world political conditions that have made the emergence of the field possible. While the field is self-generating now, after it was first established it needed a cluster of external “birth helpers.” The peacebuilding field emerged over the past five decades mainly as a field of default activities to compensate for the lack of effective peacekeeping. Chapter 2 retraces how the UN has been incapable, from the Congo crisis in 1960 until today, of effectively pacifying the countries and societies in which it intervened. The poor results of interventions were due to a large number of factors, most of which were out of control of the UN Secretariat General. Yet, in order to maintain the UN’s authority in peace matters, and despite its near incapacity to effectively stop any fighting, the Secretariat General has, with the support of many member states, and in increasing cooperation with other international agencies, engaged in many other, subsidiary activities, for example, humanitarian assistance. Peacebuilding has hence emerged as a default space of activity.

Chapter 3 analyzes how this default space has been filled with real people and real activities. It delves into the core of the peacebuilding field by providing an analysis of the social profile of people working on UN missions and in other organizations associated with peacebuilding. The analysis shows a hierarchical, three-tier structure of the peacebuilding field, each of which represents a particular horizontal career network. The main distinction between the three tiers derives from the educational background and the professional networks of the peacebuilders. Overall, peacebuilders represent the social type of what is called in German the Bildungsbürger, that is, the bourgeois or middle-class man (or woman) whose main capital is their (distinguished and distinctive) education. National origins do play a role in the access that individuals have to professional positions in the peacebuilding field, but do so in ways other than is commonly assumed. Whereas social origins and networks are of much higher importance in gaining access to positions in the two top tiers, nationality and the related lesser educational opportunities in the global South, as well as visa restrictions, effectively block mobility from the third tier in the peacebuilding field to the upper stages.

Chapter 4 develops the sociological analysis of the field further by focusing particularly on its boundaries. The peacebuilding field overlaps with other socio-professional fields such as nongovernmental organization (NGO) or charity work. People move in their careers both into and out of the peacebuilding field, and from and to those adjacent fields. They do so because they are able to convert their field-specific capital, for example, their educational capital, into capital that is valuable in other fields. These conversions are, in turn, possible because the peacebuilding field and these other fields follow processes of isomorphism and homologation, as I argue in this chapter. Such processes result from the overall hierarchy among fields, which is, similar to the internal structures of fields, determined by the capacity of actors to dispose of different types of capital in order to impose their “right” view of the world. Chapter 4 shows that the peacebuilding field hangs suspended in an exchange of ideas and people with other adjacent or overlapping fields such as strategic management consulting or law in the United States, but that it does not at all (or only very marginally) relate to fields at the local level of peacebuilding.

Chapters 5 to 7 form the second section of this book, which explores the effects that the sociology of peacebuilding has on the way peacebuilders see themselves, the world, and peace. Bourdieu called the internalized and incorporated images of oneself and the social world that go along with specific types of capital configurations, and social positions, habitus. This complex concept is explained in the prologue of the second section. Generally speaking, the habitus can be explained as being the subjective structure of a field, that is, the perception and identity of an individual with respect to the field in which she or he is situated. As I explain in the prologue to this section an individual is perceived to be “at the right place” in a social field exactly because she or he meets the social expectations of precisely the social position he or she is in.

Chapter 5 probes further the argument already put forward in the preceding chapters that the dominant habitus of the peacebuilding field is strikingly similar to the habitus of the well-educated European middle classes of the nineteenth century. Peacebuilders not only display similar sensibilities, they are also driven by an urge to professionalize their occupation in order to make peacebuilding a distinctively independent and education-based occupation. This resembles in many ways the middle classes’ drive for liberal professions in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 6 scrutinizes the political worldviews that result from the peacebuilders’ social positioning. Although they are not heterogenous, the political worldviews of peacebuilders remain firmly within the narrow realm of traditional European political thought. They cluster around three preoccupations—elite leadership, freedom, and social justice—that are discussed with reference to emblematic literatures. These three preoccupations provide, both alone and altogether, a complex discourse of justification for international intervention in crisis situations. They converge in a liberal and cosmopolitan core of values that put tolerance, merit, individual liberty, and fairness very high above others. These values not only underscore perfectly well the “liberal peace” of peacebuilding, but also reflect most astutely the Eurocentric middle-class socialization of peacebuilders discussed in the first section of the book.

Finally, chapter 7 examines more deeply the nomos of the field. The nomos describes the basic “norm” of the field. Here, norm is not understood in a reductive sense of ethical instruction for action, but in a more fundamental sense, as a principle of inclusion in and exclusion from the field. The nomos translates as the very ethics of the field itself, its ultimate and definite moral boundary, which allows for the authority of the actors in the field and, at the same time, for the exclusion of all others who do not subscribe to the field’s deontology. In the case of peacebuilding, this nomos can be described as the “fatalism of saving lives,” that is, the absolute and absolutely indisputable claim that peacebuilding is about only, entirely, and, at least in principle, effectively saving lives. This claim is reproduced in a number of nomothetic and dogmatic stories about personalities, historical events, and historical lessons, which are presented and discussed in this chapter.

Given that this book is not about a better peace we could build, it does not conclude on any policy recommendations. There are certainly ways in which attentive readers can draw out practical lessons from my analysis, in particular in the ways peacebuilding work is organizationally structured or how education affects peacebuilding. I hope that this is done with the same critical intention as I have written this book. Yet such policy advice is not the goal of this book. Rather, I would like to imagine opening up the debate about the social reproduction of power structures in globalization processes and encouraging more questioning of neoliberal governance’s concrete economic, social, and political conditions of possibility.

Chapter 1

Pierre Bourdieu’s Toolbox

Fields, Power, Practices, and Habitus in the Analysis of Peacebuilding

What is peacebuilding? Shouldn’t it be the normal requirement for a book on peacebuilding to offer a definition upfront? This certainly is the way most books on peacebuilding open, by setting out a definition with the words “peacebuilding is . . .”—and from there on the researcher proceeds to sort out which activities will count as peacebuilding and who peacebuilders are. In a next step, qualitative criteria may be attached to the definition of peacebuilding and then interrogated to determine whether the peace built is a “good” peace or not. Yet the first challenge in analyzing the patterns and modes that dominate peacebuilding is to question the validity of our analytical categories.[1] Asking what peacebuilding is produces exactly one of those categories of thought that formulates a common-sense understanding of reality, but without questioning which authority has privileged this way of thinking over others. For determining what peace is and how and by whom it has to be achieved is exactly what is at stake in the field of peacebuilding.

Definitions are never neutral, nor are they always benign. They reflect a certain subject position and perspective on the matter to be investigated. It is always necessary to clarify who is advocating which definition, and for what reasons. In this book, peacebuilding is initially understood in a wide and vague sense as any activity that is undertaken by globally acting individuals or organizations in order to establish what they think peace is in a region that they have defined as being at war. The dichotomy between peace and war is at the core of this definition, which leaves it entirely to empirical analysis to determine who says what peace is and what war is. The book is, indeed, an exploration of the “who?” in this definition, and the research rationale is that the definition of peace results from knowing and understanding who is speaking, and on which grounds these persons have gained the authority to speak and to define peacebuilding.

These actors interact in a social field. The definition of peace, war, and peacebuilding is what is at stake in this field, along with what makes these different actors interact in the attempt to gain or assert their authority. The concept of “field” is one of the “thinking tools” borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical toolbox.[2] Bourdieu did not intend to build a fully fledged sociological theory, and he refused all throughout his voluminous work to unify and streamline his concepts into a consistent theory of society.[3] This refusal was grounded in an epistemology that rejected the fixing of meaning of our categories of thought. Bourdieu took the very fundamental stance on all sociology (and all sciences for this matter) that such fixing of meaning signifies an uncritical acknowledgment of the power structures that produce this meaning in the first place.[4] It is therefore inadequate to treat Bourdieu’s concept of “field” and its relatives, “capital” and “habitus,” as if they are part of a total theory of society. They are not; they are merely tools that allow analysis of exactly those power structures that produce meaning in a given space of social interaction.[5] They are what allow the social analysis (and the analysis of power) to be undertaken, and must not be confused with the faits accomplis of the analytical findings or social facts that are investigated.

Hence, it makes little sense to dissociate the dispute over the definition of peacebuilding from the question of who and what kind of activity belongs to the field. Consequently, it is in no way surprising that attempts to count definitions of peacebuilding, or even to nail one down as being the right one, have concluded that there are as many and as differing understandings as there are actors in the field.[6] An actor, international organization or other, identifies itself with the field and seeks distinction from other actors if it classifies its own activities or that of others as “peacebuilding” or as “humanitarian,” or as something completely different. Who belongs to the field and who does not, and what kind of activity is considered right and good in the field and what is not, are questions that are constantly disputed, in flux, and malleable.[7] If we talk of social fields, we are therefore talking of actors who relate to each other in a competitive manner and dispute the essential question of what they are doing and what authority can determine if these are the right things to do.[8] Fields are established by the weaving of webs of direct and indirect relations between actors in the field, and by their competitive and distinguishing practices; these relational webs form a microcosmos in the larger universe of society.[9]

Social actors are embedded in many and multiple relations and, hence, in many and multiple fields. Relations are, in principle, unbounded, and it is therefore the observer’s decision that relations should be regarded in their entirety as fields to be investigated. It is the observer who takes up a certain viewpoint on the field and subsequently develops a specific perspective on it; Bourdieu speaks of a peephole through which the observer looks upon the field.[10] Yet the viewpoint is not chosen arbitrarily. The observer moves back and forth between the empirical observations of the field and her research questions and interests; by and large research consists precisely in mapping out the contours of the field. The viewpoint thus results from a reflective process of empirical research and theoretical questioning over the essence of the field under investigation. As mentioned above, the essence of the field is the debate specific to this field and which distinguishes it from others; it is what is at stake in this field only, and not in others.[11] To put it simply, one knows that a field is a field when one sees it; and those who are in the field recognize it as such and have very clear ideas of who belongs in the field and who shouldn’t. In order to know what a field is the observer needs to consider the discursive claims that actors make about the field and the practices with which they reproduce the conditions of existence for such claims.

By using a field theoretical approach, this research departs in many respects from the commonly used frameworks for the analysis of peacebuilding. As a matter of world politics, most research on peacebuilding is framed within the theoretical debates in the discipline of international relations (IR), and draws mainly on political science models of analysis with their particular focus on institutions and organizational structures.[12] Field theory, however, is a sociological theory that privileges the exploration of social relations over the analysis of legal institutions, and focuses on social actors (as broadly understood) rather than on institutional actors.

There are many good reasons to espouse social theory in the study of world political phenomena. Conventional international relations theory is largely insufficient when it comes to analyzing global social phenomena such as transnational social movements, globally and glocally acting nongovernmental organizations, various manifestations of globalized civil society or complex social transformative policies such as development aid, or, precisely, peacebuilding.[13] On the other hand, adjacent disciplines like sociology, geography, political science, or economics often remain within the tight limits of their respective methodological nationalism and struggle to integrate transnational, international, and global perspectives. Hence, although there has been an increasing body of sociological approaches in the analysis of world politics, many areas still are open to exploration. Peacebuilding is certainly one of them.

Peacebuilding is all at once a stately diplomatic affair, a constantly widening policy field of international organizations, and a normative discourse that motivates nongovernmental and transnational social forces to project their activities, norms, and ideas about how the world should be organized on a global and a local level. Each of these aspects could (maybe) be analyzed and explained by realism, institutionalism, and mainstream constructivism, respectively, but every single mainstream IR theory would struggle to cover all aspects. Importantly, the existing realist, institutionalist, and constructivist paradigms are sufficiently mutually exclusionary and contradictory that it would be impossible to establish a coherent analytical framework to grasp peacebuilding’s internal logic and dynamics. This is particularly obvious when it comes to the puzzling question of why peacebuilding continues in quite the same manner since its inception even though the failure to build peace is rather obvious in many cases where peacebuilding is met with, sometimes violent, resistance. Neither mainstream school of international theorizing is able to address the process of inclusion and exclusion that is in the making when peacebuilding missions are deployed in postconflict settings.[14]

Fields

The holistic perspective of field theory allows peacebuilding to be captured to a much larger extent than traditional IR theories do. At its origins in the social theories of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and other founders of sociology, field theory was developed mainly to comprehend the synchronic movement of social differentiation and integration.[15] As Bernard Lahire points out, “fields have a history and only have meaning in the framework of differentiated societies.”[16] Such differentiation concerns mainly the increasing division of labor in modern societies. Contemporary globalization processes can certainly be understood as accelerated processes of global divisions of labor. Historically, the division of labor in the wake of the capitalist and industrial expansion has created new professions, and with this new socio-professional fields. At the same time, the reorganization of political communities in nation-states has led to an increased fragmentation and specialization of governing tasks with ever more differentiated bureaucracies, ministries, and specialized agencies. Similar processes can be observed on the international level and have been analyzed with the framework of field theory.[17] Peacebuilding combines processes of professional and bureaucratic as well as political differentiation and specialization. Such processes are exactly the topic of this book, for the emergence of peacebuilding as a socio-professional and political field is the result of such differentiations.

Bourdieu has developed and specified field theory into a broad framework of analysis that allows dissection of the specific rationales of inclusion and exclusion of such various fields as the literary field, the high bureaucracies, or academia. Rationales of inclusion and exclusion reflect patterns of power and domination that are specific to the field and its stakes. Power relations are woven through the direct and indirect interaction of actors in the field who are positioned at varying distances and positions to each other. Those differences in social positions result from the actors’ capabilities to reproduce the resources that give them access to the field and to specific positions in the field. Bourdieu calls these resources “capital.”

The concept of capital captures the temporal and versatile aspects of these resources: they might have been produced in the past; they can be exchanged and inherited, stored in the present and invested in the future. Bourdieu distinguishes four basic forms of capital; however, these four forms can be conjugated in infinitely diversified and differentiated sub- or alternative forms, as capital is often specific to the field in which it is employed. In its basic forms, one can identify economic (financial), cultural, social, and symbolic capital.

In Bourdieu’s understanding of fields, capital forms are field-specific forms of power. Power is therefore not a resource per se (and it is certainly not a “thing”); any form of capital needs foremost to be recognized as important, crucial, valuable, and influential in the field. For instance, academic educational capital is important in the educational field and in fields that draw on it, for example, the field of liberal professions, yet it is rather irrelevant in the field of sports such as boxing. Or, to take examples from Bourdieu’s own research, economic and financial capital is important in the field of the modern labor market (or any capitalist market field), but it was irrelevant in the field of Kabyle village societies in 1950s Algeria.[18] The temporal and functionally versatile notion of capital allows, furthermore, accounting for a large range of manifestations of capital—educational capital, for instance, is not only expressed in the knowledge a person might have gained in his or her studies, but also, and importantly, in material proof such as certificates, doctorates, and books. Indeed, the imperative of defining fields in terms of their own self-ascribed logics forces the observer to identify in each case what specific kind of capital is important in the observed field. Hence, all fields can be identified as such because they are internally structured by a specific configuration of forms of capital that determine the social hierarchy of the field. The power relations that situate actors in a hierarchical order in a field are expressed through this grammar of field-specific capital configurations.

By extending the concept of capital beyond the category of money, Bourdieu seeks furthermore to emphasize the hegemony that modern utilitarian economic reasoning exercises over the social sciences.[19] Social action can be reduced neither to the gain-maximizing rational actor model nor to ideas of utilitarian egoism—both of which Bourdieu labels as being on the lowest level of sociological reflection.[20] That said, the notion of interest needs to keep its explanatory value, as actors do act in their own interests; yet their interests are much wider, more profound, and more differentiated than simply getting one’s own. More important, the actors’ interests cannot be gauged without taking into consideration the field they are in. Rational choice theory’s assumption of immutable, fixed preferences, which have a value of their own, is a fiction. Value is ascribed by the actors themselves and by the “economy” of the field. Resources and preferences for action are only “capital” if they are considered valuable. Hence, by widening the notion of capital, Bourdieu takes into account the significant variations of the kind of resources actors put to work in order to gain, maintain, or defend specific subject positions within a field.

The concept of field reflects, in part, a structuralist understanding of interaction, but it is different from the understanding that is dominant in international relations realist theory and its variations. The notion of capital is both wider and more differentiated than the notion of capabilities, as is the Bourdieusian notion of interest. Structural realism certainly assumes that actors position themselves with respect to the actions of others.[21] Recent reworkings of this basic premise, and the introduction of social constructivist elements like that of “security communities,”[22] “communities of practice,”[23] or “democratic peace,”[24] have furthermore tried to explain patterns of distinction and closeness of state behavior over time; yet none of these explanations has abandoned the ontology of states behaving as rational actors in search of exogenously defined national interests (such as preservation of territorial integrity and territorial and judicial sovereignty). Neither have they, for that matter, abandoned statist ontology as such.

The question why peacebuilding continues can hardly be answered through such narrowly defined analyses of self-interest. Certainly, much of the persistence of the field is due to hierarchical diplomatic games played among the UN member states, and most notably among the five permanent members of the Security Council (as will be explored in detail in chapter 2).[25] However, as a result of the diplomatic bickering the UN has carved out a specific role for its organization and, over time, as peacebuilding has become a “growth industry,” as former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated, numerous other intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations have entered the field.

In this process, peacebuilding has also gained traction of its own, with a large range of nonstate actors involved. Furthermore, even if such state haggling over authority in the international realm can explain where UN missions are deployed and where they are not, this still does not tell anything about the specific forms and appearance of peacebuilding, for example, its excessive focus on human rights and transitional justice (as discussed in chapter 7).

Such lacunae in classical IR theory are the direct result of its narrow ontology of state behavior, which assumes that states act rationally in a utilitarian sense. In classical IR theory the state is taken for granted, while a critical analysis of world politics requires the scholar to precisely question this “natural” authority of the state to decree values and politics. Far from being “natural,” this authority stems from the state’s monopolization of not only violence capital but of all other forms of capital, too. Most important, the state’s monopolization of cultural and symbolic capital has, historically and currently, profoundly shaped the categories within which we think of the state. Bourdieu’s critical stance goes further than Alexander Wendt’s argument that “anarchy [and by extension, sovereignty] is what states make out of it.”[26] Wendt argues that concepts like anarchy or sovereignty are reproduced in the notions and rules that order interstate diplomacy. Yet he does not provide any explanation for the specific forms of these rules, nor who generated them, or why and how they have been generated in the first place. Authority in and of a political community could have been, and historically has been, asserted in other ways than the currently dominant model of state sovereignty, just as the interaction among political communities could have been, and has been, modeled in quite different ways to the world’s current model of interstate diplomacy.[27] In the same vein, the question remains unanswerable as to which changes have been initiated by the increasing and diversified transnational flows and spaces in the most recent globalization processes, of which peacebuilding is also part.

Liberal institutionalist IR theory and its avatar of constructivism have proposed more refined models of how ideas, norms, and discourses spread—among others, that of human rights, which informs peacebuilding—yet these approaches are commonly flawed in their incapacity to formulate the relationship between power and ideas. In much of liberal institutionalist and constructivist theories norms and ideas spread because they are persuasive per se.[28] Or, if they are not inherently “right,” they are adopted because they are part and parcel of institutionalization processes that make actors gain other “right” things.[29] Rather than being imposed by a logic of consequences that presupposes threat and, eventually, force, the norms, rules, and ideas generate and draw on a so-called logic of appropriateness.[30] In liberal institutionalism, much of this reasoning is still cast in assumptions of rationalist utilitarianism, that is, expressed in the language of economics, where the costs of defection are higher than the costs of participation.[31] The theoretical debate between the logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness is over the question of whether such costs are material costs, as realists or some institutionalists would argue, or whether they entail intangible values such as reputation or even identity.

In both cases, the rationalizing of actors’ behavior as a form of utilitarian maximization of (reputational or material) benefits reduces both culture and power to simple and unidimensional variables. Power lies either with the idea or with the actor.[32] Both are properties of the actor rather than properties of social relations. Such types of constructivist or institutionalist analyses therefore risk overlooking how malleable both are, and how they are produced and reproduced both in infinitely miniscule practices and through huge encompassing contexts. They do not engage with the counterfactual understanding that for any policy promoted there could have been an alternative, because they assume that any policy decision must have an inherent property—either it is a “good” idea or that it is the least costly—which makes it the best choice for the decision maker. Neither does the question come up what “good” actually could or should mean; nor is the question investigated on which grounds the decision makers have the authority (or not) to make those particular policies rather than others. In the case of peacebuilding, this means that the claim is not disputed that peacebuilding is inherently “good”; consequently, this analysis equally neglects the question of what lays at the foundation of these claims.

Power

A burgeoning literature has, in the past two decades, critically examined this classical IR theory understanding power as a property. Mainly drawing on Foucault’s work, these analyses have shifted the focus from power as a property (of norms or of actors) to power as discourses.[33] This not only changes the conception of actors, but also of the norms and ideas and how they (or culture more generally) interact with power. Discursive power is understood as generative power that allows for certain actions to take place.[34] Such an analysis focuses on the effect discourses have on those actors at the receiving end, as well as on those who expound them. Discourses fabricate meaning and give sense to actions and practices; they do not have power per se, but power flows through them because discourses have effects.[35] Foucault’s understanding of power is very similar to Bourdieu’s inasmuch as both reject the essentialization of power that characterizes those social analyses that see power as a property of actors or institutions.[36] From that perspective, culture—ideas, norms, values, discourses, narratives, and so forth—are forms of power, and any critique of power needs to pierce and deconstruct its aura of normalcy and common sense.

Yet Bourdieu’s approach of dismantling power’s appearance of being “normal” is again different from Foucault’s.[37] Foucault’s main interest is that of an archeologist who seeks to excavate the different layers of meaning and show their contingency by resituating them in their historical context and transformed meanings.[38] Although Bourdieu is, in principle, sympathetic to the critical exercise of such genealogies, he argues that this is not enough to grasp the effects and workings of power. Genealogy, or critical discourse analysis, reveals the arbitrariness and contingency of meaning and, hence, undermines the myth of universality. However, analyzing what is said is not yet analyzing who is saying what. Bourdieu argues that powerful discourses, that is, such discourses that matter, are not only expressed in words and ideas, but are enacted. Some actors have more authority than others to speak; consequently, the power of discourses differs depending on who is speaking. Structures of domination and authority reflect social hierarchies, and these, in turn, shape what can be said, and what is said, by whom. They also reflect the relational positions of the speakers.

Furthermore, discourses cannot be dissociated from their practical contexts. Discourses become relevant and sense-generating because they are recognized as such in those contexts they are speaking to. The meaning of a discourse is hence not only constructed by its content—rather, it is the authority of the speaker that counts; this, in turn, is contingent on the structure of the field, which is formed by the different capital configurations with respect to what is at stake in the field.[39]

Bourdieu draws on Erving Goffman’s concepts of performance and staging to express that power needs to be presented to an audience as such and that the audience needs to be able to read the performance appropriately.[40] Power that is not understood as such by the audience is not power. Performances contain both discourses and practices. They draw, furthermore, on existing knowledge and understanding, which the audience also incorporates in ideas and discourses as well as in practices and behavior. A connoisseur recognizes the value of a performance exactly because she has practical and ideal knowledge and, hence, normative ideas of the matter at stake. The meaning of a discourse is hence not only constructed by its content; rather, it is the authority of the speaker that counts; this, in turn, is contingent on the structure of the field, which is formed by the different capital configurations with respect to what is at stake in the field.[41]

This explains Bourdieu’s proposal to conceive of discursive power as its own form of capital—namely what he calls “symbolic capital,” whose power has an effect on people, practices, institutions, and culture (again always to be understood in its vague, overarching sense).[42] As these effects shape livelihoods, bodies, and minds, Bourdieu calls the power of symbolic capital “symbolic violence.” [43] Social positions are recognizable in the way people speak, move their bodies, express their bodies, dress, walk—in short, how they perform and behave. Practices—how things are done—are therefore an essential object of observation if one wants to capture capital configurations in social fields.

Practices

So-called practice theory has become a new buzzword of critical IR theory and, together with a growing interest in ethnographic methods, has also been applied to the analysis of peacebuilding, for instance in Séverine Autesserre’s book Peaceland.[44] In Bourdieu’s work “practice” is one analytical category alongside all others and takes up its full sense only when considered together with the concepts of “capital,” “field,” “habitus,” and “distinction” and serves as tool of analyzing power structures. Most of contemporary research in international relations that prides itself on being inspired by Bourdieu’s “practice theory” ignores most of his other concepts and the way they need to be thought and used together to make sense of the social world. Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, for instance, define “practice” as “socially meaningful patterns of action . . . performed competently.”[45] Such a definition turns Bourdieu’s research program on its head (and would do the same for this book). By integrating the adjective “competent” into the definition of practice, the authors skip over the crucial question of what makes certain practices appear competent and others not. Practices are indicative of social structures of power because it is through the economic, social, political, and cultural structures that competence is socially gained and recognized. If such conditions of possibility are not analyzed, practices remain simply a more or less noticeable phenomenon but do not tell an awful lot about power.[46]

The particularity of Bourdieu’s theory of practice was exactly to go beyond this phenomenological use of the concept, hence transgressing the basic sense given to the term in common language. In a very basic sense “practice” is everything an observed actor does whether he or she is playing piano and doing so for exactly twenty minutes every Friday, or seating country representatives in international conferences in French alphabetical order. But in a sociological sense, and most particularly in Bourdieu’s sociology, practice means more, for it refers to what an actor is doing to other actors and, hence, the social sense of such actions.[47]

Practices are the enactment and the realization of the actors’ capital configurations in a given social field. Practices are what actors do to affirm their position with respect to others. Practices are therefore neither entirely freely decided actions as imagined in philosophies of individual free will, nor are they mechanistic responses to exogenous incentives or constraints as, for instance, Parsonian functionalism assumes.[48] Practices are actions that people can do within the limits of the capital they have, their dispositions, their position in the social space, and the constraints imposed by the “other,” for their recognition and acknowledgment is essential for any practice to have a social sense at all.

In the French original, Bourdieu commonly speaks of “agents” rather than actors in order to indicate that individuals, groups, or institutions are embodied social structures (in this book, however, I will follow the more habitual “actors”). Bourdieu calls this interplay between the actors’ interiorization and embodiment of social structures the habitus (more on this later).[49] Looking solely at practices as manifestations of a “real” world disregards this relational web in which actors are embedded and this interiorization of social positions.

Autesserre’s book Peaceland is a case in point. Having spent several years of participant observation, and drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, Autesserre paints a highly detailed and rich picture of the everyday lives of peacebuilders. Her approach stands in the tradition of the anthropology of development, which seeks to produce applied and applicable anthropological research about the “facts of development.”[50] This research documents, often in much detail, the daily routines of aid workers to expose not only their knowledge but also “the sociality of aid professionals: well knit, class closed, and culturally enclaved in capital cities; globally connected and permanent; but locally isolated and transient.”[51]

Autesserre’s focus is deliberately “micro” in order to capture every little way of doing things in the hope that these may reveal ways to improve and adjust peacebuilding to make it more effective.[52] Despite its richness, the ethnographic approach reduces the notion of practice to daily routines and seeks to find their social sense in the reality of these practices themselves.

To stay within the realm of this study, one has to note for instance that driving a SUV or writing an English e-mail are not, sui generis, unjust actions. Their effect of excluding and discriminating against others—the local population, in most occurrences—is relational and situational. These acts are unjust only because the beneficiaries of aid do not drive SUVs or have computers to write English e-mails on. Practices are manifestations of social structures; they are the enactments of what people can do given their social position, the resources (“capital”) to act they have at their disposition, and the goals they want to achieve.

As this example shows, observing practices alone does not allow the production of knowledge about power and inequality structures in world politics, despite claims to the contrary.[53] The focus on the microcosmos of aid communities does document how particular types of knowledge are dominant and how they are embedded in structures of unfairness and injustice. However, research needs to dig deeper and more widely over time and space to understand what kind of specific knowledge this precisely is, where it comes from, and why this and not any other has become dominant in peacebuilding circles. Types of knowledge or practices do not become dominant because of their intrinsic value but because they emerge as socially recognized forms of worldviews and behaviors; and commonly this happens through a complex struggle in which dissenting and alternative knowledge forms or practices have been socially deconstructed and discarded.

The most important argument, hence, against such reduced understandings of “practice” is that simply noting that an actor does something like this or like that does not tell us how this practice has come into being and why it is perpetuated. This latter point remains particularly striking if certain practices are met with resistance, protest, or even violence, or if the practitioners themselves do not want to produce inequality and injustice, as it is often the case in development aid, humanitarian assistance, and peacebuilding. Hence, Autesserre (and others like Lisa Smirl, Béatrice Pouligny, David Chandler, Ole Jacob Sending, and many more[54]) recount how often and regularly peacebuilders develop denigrating attitudes toward local populations, including local staff, and that these attitudes provoke often violent reactions from the local populations, hence creating vicious circles of animosity. She also reports that many peacebuilders and many “locals” she talked to were conscious of the negativity of such vicious circles.[55] Thus, what remains puzzling is why such behavior is not changed.

Habitus

The particular force of social fields is to keep all actors inside the field through their interiorization of the “rules of the game.” This interiorization, the dispositions that make actors act in a manner that is appropriate to their position in the field and to the field itself, is called habitus. Hence, the reason why peacebuilders do not change their behavior is simply that practices, habits, and behavior do not change easily once they are normalized as habitus. It is the social function of the habitus to provide a stability of behavior that allows the entire field to act in a concerted and mutually understanding manner, according to Bourdieu:

A field can only work if there are sufficient individuals who are predisposed to act as sensible actors in the field, who will employ their money, their time, sometimes their honor or their lives, to keep the game going, only for the little gain they might reap and that might appear, from a different perspective, as illusionary. . . . The motivation for action is not rooted in the material or symbolic utility of action as the mechanistic view says. The motivation for action is rooted in the connection between habitus and field, of the kind that the habitus determines all that it is determined by.[56]

Capital configurations bring about specific behaviors (or specific behaviors bring about specific capital configurations). They shape an actor’s habitus. Capital links conceptually the structure of a field to the habitus. The habitus is a “structuring structure” inasmuch as it expresses, on the one hand, actors’ ways of thinking and behaving as the result of their position in larger social structures, and, on the other hand, actors’ reproduction of these structures in the ways they behave, act, and think. The habitus concept allows arguing that not only is the world a “world of our making” (to take up the title of an IR constructivist classic), but that we are of the world’s making.

The concept of habitus, however, is based on the assumption of a sociological circularity but not on an assumption of logical circularity. Habitus and field evolve over time and their reproductive dynamics are spread over a large variety of actors whose respective positions allow for ever more and new conjunctures. In his elaboration of the concept in his afterword to Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Bourdieu specifies that the notion of a commonly shared culture that underlies the concept of “habitus” does not assume the unity and homogeneity of culture. On the contrary, culture must be understood as an infinity of variations over socially constructed and interiorized schemes.[57]

A habitus is the “modus operandi” of culture, that is, it is the foundational principle by which cultural expressions, whether in language (including literature and poetry), discourse, practices, or material forms (e.g., architecture), are generated. The habitus is a general disposition, which may have an infinite number of phenomenal expressions.[58] In fact, it necessarily will have many different forms of social realization as every actor’s social position is a different one in the field, and these distinctions play out in an endless row of social interactions. Bourdieu defines the habitus as an actor’s and society’s “embodied history”;[59] it is, hence, as infinitely variable as the ways individuals move within their numerous fields and social contexts.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is not as rigid as most concepts of identity (in fact, he never uses the concept of identity); he noticeably avoids referring to psychological or psychosocial vocabulary when talking about habitus.[60] The habitus must not to be confounded with the person itself; rather, it might be perceived as a capacity of the agent to act and react in a given situation in an appropriate way. In this sense, the habitus should be compared to a language, which on the one hand follows socially constituted rules and meanings yet on the other hand can be individually and creatively crafted to fit given social situations (or not).[61] The habitus describes ways of behavior as they are socially constituted and have become the expected and appropriate behavior in any given field or social situation. And this can also apply to situations that are new or radically different from former experiences—the capacity of any one agent to react and navigate (or not) shocks or situations, which are entirely new, is part of the person’s habitus.

Hence, some people are better placed than others to defend, maintain, or advance their social positions in certain fields or changing environments. Importantly, some people are better placed to communicate their capacity to deal with new situations in a way that others in the same field would expect them to do. Actors in the same field, and more generally in the same culture, share the same habitus even if they express themselves very differently, and, as it might be, in a contradictory manner. As a habitus must be understood as modus operandi, it generates across a field similar, and because of this similarity, recognizable, and acknowledgeable discourses and practices. This does not preclude conflict, dissent, and protest, but such will happen within the limits of the “rules of the game.”

The concept of habitus also must not be confounded with the concept of “social roles.” Roles are defined by the functional requirements of the social system they are attributed to and are in need of “filling.” The concept of habitus describes, on the other hand, the actor’s manner of molding and morphing themselves into the social and cultural fabric of their environment. The habitus is the product of particular socialization and education processes. Acting according to a habitus is rarely a conscious behavior, even though it does reflect subjective strategies of maintaining specific social positions. As such the concept of habitus is an answer to the conundrum of all sociological analysis, namely how to understand the objectively recognizable reproduction of social structures without the subjective intention of individuals to do so. The concepts of habitus and field elude the ontological problems of functionalist or other structuralist and deterministic accounts of behavior. Bourdieu, hence, proposes a solution to the agency-structure problem that has puzzled the social sciences. Both concepts, field and habitus, are, at the same time, structured and structuring, plastic in the light of the actions taking place and malleable according to the way the agents in the field are disposed to interact. They must not be understood as substitutes for “agency” or “structure,” respectively. Fields do not exist without being constituted through the acts and interplay of the agents, their discourses and practices; habitus doesn’t exist without being embedded in a field and arising out of its expectations and formations. One is, at once, the history, the context, and the condition of possibility of the other.[62]

The Empirics—Fielding Methods of Field Theory

This constant mutual ontological conditioning of field and habitus is expressed in the dialogues and struggles over the practical, institutional, organizational, discursive, and normative forms that the field and habitus should take. These commonly concern the questions of the right thing to do, to say, or the right manner to do or say. Yet these struggles and dialogues are rarely intentional and conscious strategic interactions. Rather, they have to be seen as naturalized, social, and relational processes of tuning into each other within the realms of a social field.

In the case of peacebuilding, for instance, this struggle takes place over the overtly political debate on intervention, peace, justice, and so forth, and, at the same time, in the organizational struggles over careers, appointments, mandates, financial and human resources, and so on. The encounter of habitus and field materializes, for instance, in recruitment processes where the applicant’s habitus meets the field’s expectations or not. In this interplay, field and habitus accord themselves almost naturally. Only such people who share the habitus of the field will consider entering the field and will be considered to have some legitimacy to do so; only such webs of social interaction that are successfully selective in constructing their membership can constitute themselves as distinct fields.

When investigating fields and habitus, it is therefore necessary to identify these conjunctures and their conditions of possibility, that is, those capital configurations that are specific to the field and which the agents seek to reproduce for themselves and to control for others. The key to understanding fields and habitus lies therefore in understanding the genesis of those capital configurations, and how they practically and discursively play out.

Constructing the Research Object

It is important to understand that both “field” and “habitus” are schemes of social order, sense, and behavior that only appear because the researcher’s analysis makes them emerge. They do not exist as hard facts, and actors are rarely aware of the structuring and ordering effects of their behavior. Whatever we do, we rarely act with the explicit intention of reproducing a social system. A prima facie analysis that takes the actors’ own justifications for action at face value can hardly reveal the underlying dynamics and schemes. Every analysis of a social reality is necessarily based on assumptions and interpretations of what this reality should be.

The difficulty in accounting for the construction of the research object does not lie, therefore, in the analysis per se but in the critical reflection of the construction process. The research object is, indeed, an object in the grammatical sense of the term: it exists only because the observer’s observation acts upon it, and the research objects’ status is determined by the relation between observer and observandum. Hence, “fields” and “habitus” exist because the observer has constructed them as analytical objects.

Yet this construction process is not arbitrary or illusionary. Social facts are facts after all. People do talk, act, think, behave; socially constructed norms, ideas, and practices do shape bodies and minds. The constellations in which social actors find themselves positioned with respect to each other, and the resources they dispose of, have real effects on their lives and the lives of others. And many of these constellations are materialized and can, in fact, be measured, noted, documented, and captured through various data collection methods.

The difficulty lies, however, in the construction process itself. On the one hand, the categories, concepts, and notions, with which the analytical model is created, are already socially constructed and prestructure the research object in certain ways. On the other hand, research objects themselves are not without agency and will—especially in situations in which they can influence the observers, for instance, interviews—try to manipulate the data they reveal. Social sciences need to take into account both the social construction of the social world and of its observation. This happens mainly in two processes: on the one hand, fields need to be reconstructed as contexts that produce their own meaning for the actors involved; on the other hand, discourses and practices have to be understood exactly in such contexts and with respect to the historicity of the social field in which they are embedded. Keeping in mind the relational and processual, that is, the historical character of fields and habitus, such an analysis is not circular. Rather, such an analysis enters into dialogue with the history, practices, and texts that make up the field and habitus.

The history of fields can be reconstructed by critically using data that reflect the materialization of capital such as income, professional status, educational achievements, parents’ occupation, and so forth, but also more fundamentally through age, gender, and so on. However, such an analysis always has to take into account the social construction of these categories themselves, that is, a reflective understanding that any categorization reflects symbolic struggles in the field.

For instance, in the case of peacebuilding, the creation of a job description and position such as an under-secretary general for peacekeeping tells at least as much about the need to affirm the authority of the United Nations Secretariat General in peacekeeping as it tells about the increased importance of peacekeeping in world politics. Attached to such positions are explicitly and implicitly formulated expectations of the officeholder’s education, background, ideas, and ways of speaking and presenting herself that again reflect the history of the field as well as of the habitus displayed in the field.

Using sociological categories for the analysis of fields therefore requires a reflective and genealogical approach to the categories used for the construction of data categories, echoing the structuring structures of the field. In the peacebuilding field, the following chapters will reveal, for instance, an important divide between those who have gained their university degree and professional training in a high-income country, and within those countries at some universities in particular, and those who have received their professional training in a middle- or low-income country. There is also a further gap to be observed between the family-inherited economic capital between those peacebuilders who originated from a former colony, or what is now often called the global South, and those who originated from a high-income Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country. Both gaps would be accepted without further reflection if the dominance of European and North American elite universities were not questioned. If, however, this finding is set against an awareness of just how much the dominant position of elite universities are constructed through the internal rules of the academic and educational field, it becomes clear that any person born and residing in the global South will need much more economic capital to allow them to study in the global North. Education in English, a secondary school education of a quality that allows university entrance in the North, the economic capacity to sustain visa applications[63] and allow for oversea studies, and so forth, all come at a very high price in the global South, and hence they are only accessible to a small minority of citizens. Data on the educational background of peacebuilders show, therefore, not only the conditions of possibility of their individual careers and lifestyles; they also reflect the global structuring of the educational field with its patterns of socioeconomic dominance among and within countries.

Sociological data hence allow the mapping of actors’ capital configurations and situating the actors within fields. Analyzing the respective importance of various capital types furthermore provides indications as to what is at stake in the field and how symbolic capital is created. Yet the sociological data about peacebuilders is extremely difficult to come by. In the national contexts of most sociological research, samples can be relatively easily drawn from population data provided by national statistical agencies. Some high-income countries like Germany or the United Kingdom have additionally developed high-quality data in recent decades on the socioeconomic living conditions of their populations that allow refinements to the national statistics in categories such as household income and expenses.[64] These datasets also include a range of survey questions on attitudes and political behavior.

Internationally, however, such data do not exist, and particularly not for the purpose of studying the field of peacebuilding. As noted above, the field of peacebuilding contains an indeterminate and unbounded population, contrary to national populations, where each birth and death of a citizen and everything in between these two life events is statistically reported. Cross-national comparisons of datasets cannot provide the scope or quality of data required, either, as statistical reliability varies enormously among countries, undermining the reliability of the data. Importantly, however, cross-national data gathering would not allow delimiting the transnational population of the peacebuilding field. A further difficulty facing the peacebuilding field is that it is not only unclear which organizations and activities belong to the field and which do not, but that peacebuilders also move in and out of the field, as we will see in chapter 4. Even if it were epistemologically unproblematic to establish a stochastic sample, it would be impossible in the case of peacebuilders because the size and structure of the base population is simply unknown. This has up to now seriously impeded social analyses of peacebuilding in particular, and of the world of transnational governance more generally.

The Research Process

A reflective approach to research refutes the assumption that there is some kind of ready-made data out there that we only need to piece together properly. With such an approach, the identification and finding of data becomes the research process in itself, and there is little distinction between the hermeneutic, exploratory, and final data analysis for one is a refinement and in-depth exploration of the other. Proponents of nonlinear, hermeneutic research have proposed a number of ways to describe such processes: as back and forth, as double hermeneutics,[65] as spirals,[66] as grounding theory,[67] and so forth. All these labels imply a refusal to see and practice the research process as a linear, planned in advance, and predictable procedure that leads the researcher from a hypothesis to an operationalized model to indicators to data and finally to the testing of hypotheses and reliable results. Contrary to its claims of linear reasoning, such an approach to research risks being circular as every single element can fit into the chain only if it is preconceived and standardized to fit in. Said the other way around, such observations will enter the analytical frame only if they fit its inherent definitions and categories, or, as Abraham Maslow so precisely said: “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”[68]

Rather, a research process must be understood as a broad and multiform process where various elements of a larger picture are pieced together. Like with a painting coming into being, the research process starts with a rough sketch, and is then elaborated in more and more detail. The process is neither linear nor circular but rather a turbulent falling into place of various pieces.

The aim is to develop a coherent narrative in which single aspects and pieces of knowledge come together in a systematic exploration, yet the way pieces of knowledge are identified and found does not follow a checklist strategy. Rather, single aspects and perspectives are explored as they emerge in the process of research itself. The systematic quality of the process results from the consistent referral to the original research-guiding question. The guiding question that ties all single investigative steps together is how the social relations of peacebuilders are shaped and how this shape influences their discourses and practices of peace. Hence, the research process is not arbitrary in the selection of the data and information it seeks, but it is consistently guided by the question whether and what exactly information, data, and knowledge is needed to answer these questions.

One critique that could be formulated, however, is that the data sought out could be heavily biased to fit a preexisting idea of peacebuilding as a social field. Such a critique assumes that nonbiased research is possible and that there are, for instance, means to assure a reliable representativity of data. Although the critique as such is legitimate—there is a risk of bias—both inverse assumptions about representativity and squeezing data into the model need to be refuted here. Both arguments refer, again, to a linear model of research in which a model, once defined, cannot be altered, and where a known and bounded population can be gauged by using fixed and unquestionable categories of measurement. Even if such an epistemology were at the basis of the research presented here, it would be impossible to establish a stochastically representative sample because the base population is simply unknown. The population of peacebuilders is unbound, and the essence of the social field plays out exactly through disputes of who is in and who is out, that is, in those fuzzy boundaries and gray zones.

But more fundamentally the epistemology of the research presented here is very different. The process of acquiring knowledge is not thought of as a process of confirming or refuting a predefined model and hypotheses, but should rather be seen as a learning process. Knowledge is stepwise added together, partly refuted when learned to be wrong or corrected when needed. The “model” can be, and even has to be, altered in the process. This means that “bias” is embraced and taken into account throughout the process—it is hardly the social reality that is wrong; if data, information, or knowledge pieces do not fit, it is very likely that the model is wrong and requires correction. The concepts used here—field, habitus, capital—are empty with respect to the specific types, forms, and characteristics of the social relations under investigation. Consequently the research process is guided not by the wish to confirm preformulated hypotheses but to question and critically revise the picture of peacebuilding as it emerges in the process of building knowledge about it. A reflective and critical epistemology, in fact, requires critically investigating every newly acquired element of knowledge in order to check not only its plausibility but also to control for its potential to act as bias in further research.

In this case, the research process started with a rough sketch of the sociological profile of the peacebuilders. A first questionnaire survey was undertaken in 2008 with the aim of establishing a profile of the civil staff in the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) through a census survey. However, an initial authorization by the UN was withdrawn just a couple of weeks before the census survey was to have taken place. One can speculate about the reasons for the UN’s refusal, but as a matter of fact no one has yet gained access to human resource data at the UN, not even researchers who are much better connected than I am. Consequently, the 2008 survey was undertaken with a selection of former staff of UNMIK. Many of these former staff members were working for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) so that unintentionally the scope of the survey became larger than UNMIK itself and opened up the perspective on peacebuilding as a field.

The survey questionnaire consisted of three parts: a first section inquiring about fundamental social indicators such as origins, education, income, and marital status. The second section asked broad questions about political values and worldviews. The third section, finally, delved into the everyday working lives of the peacebuilders. While the aim of the first section was to capture a sociological image of the “typical” peacebuilder, the two other sections were designed to seize the perceptions that peacebuilders have of their own activity.

A common critique of survey research consists in bemoaning that survey data will rarely show what respondents “really” think. For a large variety of reasons, respondents are likely to give “wrong” answers, because memories are vague and often embellished, because respondents have various reasons to make them want to manipulate their self-image, or because respondents give answers they believe are socially acceptable. In the research for this book, such a response bias was, however, not problematic as it was exactly the self-representation of peacebuilding that was at stake in the questionnaires. It does not really matter, for instance, whether respondents have really read the authors they cited in the questionnaire section on “favorite political readings.” What does matter is that these readings are those which peacebuilders think should be those they should cite. And, indeed, it is astounding how coherent the picture is of ideal readings, ideal heroes, and ideal historical narratives that emerged from the questionnaire (always keeping in mind that most of these questions were open ended). There certainly was respondent bias (does anyone really have Plato’s Republic on his or her nightstand?), but the aim of the questionnaire was precisely to draw out this ideal image that peacebuilders hold of themselves.

In order to control for a potential regional bias in the 2008 survey and in order to check whether the coherence of this self-representation might be due to the fact that all respondents had a shared experience in UNMIK, I undertook a second wave of the survey in 2012. For this survey, I contacted people who had worked or were working in other countries where UN peacebuilding missions were taking place. Using the professional network site LinkedIn I contacted about 300 staffers, of which 146 took the survey (a response rate of roughly 50 percent). The sociological profile of this wave was different with respect to the age range of respondents and their geographic origins. However, the narratives of political values and worldviews, as well as of their daily working lives, were very similar to the findings from the first wave.

Both surveys, as well as a small number of in-depth interviews, pointed to the importance of education in the career choice and development of peacebuilders. They also pushed me to look more closely at the daily work lives and especially at the continuities and discontinuities of careers in peacebuilding. For both interests, I undertook a prosopographic analysis, again using the professional network site LinkedIn. This site allows users to upload their resumes and to describe their professional experience for all other users to see. Using the UN peacebuilding missions as search words, I collected about 600 resumes, of which about 550 provided sufficient data to be part of a larger N analysis of educational and professional trajectories in the field.

The prosopographic analysis and again a number of in-depth interviews showed a very closed network structure of careers. In order to better grasp this network structure, I undertook, on the one hand, a historical analysis of the first UN mission in the Congo, and, on the other hand, extensive research in newspaper archives and on the internet in order to retrace the career trajectories of higher echelons of the peacebuilding field.

The first peacebuilding mission in UN history, the mission to the Congo from 1960 to 1964, was also extremely instructive about the terms in which peacebuilders see themselves. Through access to foreign office records in the United States, Belgium, the Soviet Union, and other countries, several historians have been able to retrace in much more detail the events of this first mission and first failure of peacebuilding.[69] On the background of such a detailed event analysis, a deep analysis of the biographies and memoirs allowed me to reconstruct how the peacebuilders themselves understood what they were doing in the Congo, and, on the other hand, how they judged what other actors, for example, local actors, were doing for peace. Unwittingly, those memoirs were compiling criteria and describing what the authors saw as “good” peace or not, who they considered to be a peacebuilder or not, and what a “good” peacebuilder should be like. These findings could be usefully compared to the findings of the two surveys and the in-depth interviews that had informed the construction of the questionnaire.

The numerous memoirs, furthermore, allowed a network analysis in order to explore how careers developed in peacebuilding at this early stage, and it provided insights into the question of how the field had been institutionalized in legal and organizational terms. The network analysis was extended to present times, using the prosopographic data extracted from the LinkedIn resumes, and the biography data collected through newspapers and the internet. The present-day analysis allowed an appraisal of the contours of the field, its adjacency and overlaps with other socio-professional fields, and its internal structuring.

Bourdieu’s preferred method for retracing capital configurations and the way they structure the field was the correspondence analysis. For a variety of reasons (not least money and time), such a correspondence analysis could not be undertaken for this book. However, using the visualization of network analysis has the same effect of showing concentrations of specific capital configurations and well serves the purpose of illustrating the argument made in the first section of this book about the structure of the field.

Neither analysis, of field or habitus, stands alone, but every data analysis informed in one way or the other the conclusions drawn in this book. Another extremely valuable source was, it needs to be pointed out, prior and similar work undertaken by colleagues. Séverine Autesserre’s, Lisa Smirl’s, Kai Koddenbrock’s, and Béatrice Pouligny’s in-depth exploration of the interaction between peacebuilders and local populations;[70] Berit Bliesemann de Guevara’s, David Chandler’s, Vanessa Pupavac’s, Mark Duffield’s, and others who have explored the peacebuilding imaginary universe;[71] Thomas Weiss’s, Michael Lipson’s, Wolfgang Seibel’s, and Ole Jacob Sending’s investigation into the bureaucracy and organization of peacebuilding and the UN—all these are only some of the excellent examples of research alongside numerous single case studies that have hugely informed this book.[72]

Conclusion

This book does not offer a universal definition of peacebuilding as it is not assuming that peacebuilding exists outside the experience of the people seeking to define the field from the inside. Peacebuilding is conceived as a social field in which the question of what constitutes peace and how to build it is the essential dispute that allows actors to position themselves with respect to each other. The concepts of field and habitus have guided and shaped the research for this book. The research object has been constructed with reference to these two concepts because they allow particularly well to capture the power relations that are enacted and incorporated in the peacebuilding field. Bourdieu’s concepts of social relations allow analyzing both the actors’ behaviors and their social conditions of possibility. In international relations such a sociological analysis is seriously handicapped by the difficult access to crucial sociological data. The analysis draws therefore on several different types of data: two waves of survey data, a prosopographic analysis, in-depth interviews, extensive biographical research, and a network analysis.

In the following, the first section of the book will retrace the emergence of peacebuilding as a socio-professional field and investigate the social networks and “classes” that make up the field. It will particularly carve out the social origins of peacebuilders and analyze how this shapes the symbolic capital in the field. The second section will delve deeper into the peacebuilder habitus by analyzing the discourse, imaginary, norms, and rules of the peacebuilding field.

The Field

Chapter 2

The Peacebuilding Field as Default Space

In June 1960, Patrice Lumumba, the newly elected prime minister of the Congo, wrote to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, requesting military aid to reestablish law and order in the country, which had just become independent. The Congo was a mess. Belgium had quickly and rather unexpectedly granted independence following student riots in 1959. The independence ceremony on June 1, 1960, saw an abrasive verbal exchange between Lumumba and King Baudouin of Belgium. Baudouin’s paternalistic speech praised his grandfather King Leopold II, whose reign had left half of the Congo’s population dead.[1] Lumumba responded harshly, condemning the blood, sweat, and tears of colonialism.[2]

The heated argument reflected the high tensions running through the country. Almost everywhere, white elites hung on to positions and power after June 1960. They did so particularly in the army. Consequently, black soldiers mutinied against their white officers in the first week of July 1960. Within hours, the country descended into chaos, and highly exaggerated rumors of violence and rape led white communities to leave the country in panic.

Belgian paratroopers were quickly shipped in and (re)occupied the Congo. In the course of these tumultuous events, the southern province of Katanga, the industrial and economic powerhouse of the country, seceded. The secession was officially declared by the Congolese politician Moïse Tshombé, but among the Congolese little doubt existed that it had been planned, supported, and financed by the long arms of white elites in Katanga, and most particularly by the powerful Belgian mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga.[3]

By appealing to the UN, Lumumba hoped to receive decisive support to end the Katangan secession, to rid the country of Belgian troops, and to integrate the Congo into a larger, pan-African unit. By responding positively to his appeal, Hammarskjöld hoped to keep the Congo out of Cold War rivalries and to confirm the UN’s role as global arbitrator. The two men’s goals proved incompatible. The Congo mission would turn into a disaster. Both Hammarskjöld and Lumumba would lose their lives in the Congo crisis.[4] The country descended into years of civil war that ended with Mobutu Sese Seko’s thirty-year dictatorship.

The Congo conflict threw the UN into a deep financial and legitimacy crisis; Security Council members subsequently excluded the Secretary-General from all major decisions on peace and war in the world. Yet the Congo mission was foundational for the peacebuilding field. The mission’s aims and practices went far beyond the separation of warring parties that had been the goal of former peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and in the Sinai. The objective in the Congo was to reestablish public order and to establish a substitute for, at least for some time, the country’s failing administration and public services. The mission included large civilian and humanitarian platforms, and interfered deeply in the politics of the country. It anticipated the state failure discourse that has justified most interventions since the 1990s (and which sometimes simply replaces the notion of “peacebuilding” with the notion of “statebuilding”).[5] It also created the discourse of the UN’s neutrality in peacekeeping and of the international civil servant.

Because of its foundational character, this chapter will begin with a deeper analysis of the Congo mission and subsequent chapters will again and again come back to 1960, to Hammarskjöld and his “Congo Club” (as his closest advisers were known), and to what the UN (and others) did in the Congo from 1960 to 1964.

This chapter will explore how peacebuilding developed as a field by default. It will argue that those activities that are presently counted into the field (e.g., humanitarian assistance, refugee assistance, demobilization and security sector reform, administration and governance, human rights and rule of law) have been initiated and undertaken by the UN and other international organizations because effective peacemaking was and is not in their capacity. The activities involved in peacebuilding were and still are initiated precisely because international actors cannot intervene quickly, as with a surgical strike, to stop violence and reestablish a status quo of self-government.

Such a narrative of peacebuilding’s emergence is at odds with the Whig history advocated by the agencies themselves. According to the actors themselves peacebuilding is constantly if uneasily progressing through a series of lessons learned.[6] Indeed, peacebuilding is progressing if measured in its steady increase in numbers of missions, troops on the ground, and declarations of success. Peacebuilding has become a very popular, almost banal policy instrument in the past twenty years.[7] However, although in some cases UN intervention did end violence (e.g., in Timor-Leste),[8] or at least replace outright war with criminal violence and occasional communal strife, most missions have failed to create conditions for durable peace and development. Some missions even seem to have produced more violence than they have stopped.[9] Even more important, politics and most notably democratic politics have remained suspended, and the institutions the peace missions build are inappropriate, inadequate, inoperational, and productive of seemingly endless repetitions of mission cycles. Despite the growing emphasis on local ownership, a close look at interventions shows that states remain underdeveloped or suspended in a large web of international agencies, donors, third-party governments, and other social forces.[10] Even when interventions stop direct bloodshed, they fail to eliminate the cleavages and fault lines that conflicts clearly mark out.[11] Worse still, peace missions often provide resources, discursive frames, and opportunities to continue these conflicts either without violence, or with violence just under the threshold of open war.[12]

If the findings of local case studies on the effects of peacebuilding missions on the ground are taken into account, and set in the context of the larger quandaries of the “high politics” of peace in the UN Security Council and among the states involved in contemporary wars, the story of constant progress of peace is hardly tenable. Every single crisis that has been negotiated in the UN Security Council or as a matter of international peace efforts in other forums (e.g., the Contact Group for the Balkans or the Munich Negotiations for Syria) illustrates the extreme complexity of peacebuilding. The story told in this chapter about peacebuilding emphasizes its haphazard character. Activities that are undertaken in the field, policies that frame and guide peacebuilding and the actors’ initiatives, do not follow consequentially out of premeditated or functionally rational plans but have to be seen as the result of historical conjunctures.

Actors in the world political field create the peacebuilding field by interacting with one another in a constant struggle over relative power positions. The resulting politics are shaped by this jockeying over resources, alliances, prestige, and recognition in handling a specific type of political problem. Such politics are, therefore, not inherently rational or, in any predefined way, the best politics for a given situation. They are the politics that are possible with a given constellation of actors and under the circumstances of their interaction. Whatever coherence and rationales exist in these actions, these do not result from policy planning but from the inherent dynamics of peacebuilding as a socio-professional and, by extension, sociopolitical field. Discourses of peace, plans and projects of peacebuilding activities, or specific policies and political initiative all exist as responses to a given set of actions, discourses, initiatives, and policies of other actors in the field. The peacebuilding field exists in its current form exactly because the rational and planned construction of peace by an international community is a chimera; yet people, organizations, and social forces do certain things they call peacebuilding, and this doing, and being, shapes the field.

In order to capture the conjunctural construction of the peacebuilding field, the chapter will discuss three moments: the foundation of the field with the Congo mission of 1960, the dialectic movement of expansion and retraction of the field in the 1990s through the failed mission in former Yugoslavia, and the field’s consolidation through its codification in the fifteen years from the Agenda for Peace to the responsibility to protect doctrines. These three moments are not arbitrarily chosen, but they could have been replaced with other events. Yet in this narrative these three moments are useful to discuss the social construction of peacebuilding as a socio-professional and sociopolitical field.

The Congo: The Foundation of the Peacebuilding Field

The matter at stake in the Congo crisis was nothing less than the definition of—and the authority to establish—peace. In this foundational situation, all actors positioned themselves in a power struggle to define and impose their concept of peace. At the core of this was the question of who the peacemaker should be, and more precisely whether the UN under the leadership of its Secretary-General should be the central authority to define and make peace. Although the actors’ positions have changed over time, peacebuilding remains a field of competitive claims precisely over this authority to define and defend peace, and because of the material and ideational resources that go hand in hand with such an authority.

Actors base their claims on various resources. During the Congo mission, the United Nations, as represented by Secretary-General Hammarskjöld, drew mainly on the legal capital of the UN Charter, and on the symbolic capital procured by past peacekeeping missions as well as Hammarskjöld’s personal stature. Indeed, the timing of the Congo crisis and mission was propitious for UN action in several respects. In the wake of the Korea disaster, the organization’s reputation for acting to promote world peace had been credibly reestablished by its inventive solution to the Suez crisis. The invasion of Sinai that Israel, France, and Great Britain had staged against Egypt in order to regain control of the Suez Canal and remove Gamal Abdel Nasser from power provided an excellent opportunity for the entrepreneurial Hammarskjöld, then new to his job, to set up the UN as a neutral mediator and buffer between the Cold War opponents; as a broker in territorial and other conflicts between states; and as the fair defender of weak newcomers (such as Egypt) to the international system.

The concept of peacekeeping was simple and straightforward: establish a military buffer zone between warring parties, and keep them apart until a political solution could be found. States contributing troops to the mission were not to be involved in the conflict, and the troops were to be under the command of the UN. A geographical space was delimited in which fighting stopped, and no actor interfered in any way in any other actor’s sovereignty. The warring states remained fully responsible and in charge of their armies and their domestic politics. Peacekeeping was an exercise in inter-national politics, law, and military diplomacy. State borders remained political boundaries.

The problem with peacekeeping in this view was that the UN’s material capital—financial and military—remained poor, and intentionally so. The UN relies largely on the willingness of state actors, in this case its member states, to lend finances and military means. The states’ willingness to give the UN a helping hand, however, is determined by the stakes of the wider world-political field and, hence, is contingent on strategies and tactics of bargaining in other fields such as the world economy, trade, development, and security.

During the Congo crisis, several struggles defined the context of the mission: first, the rivalry between the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union; second, the struggle between the government of the Congo and Secretary-General Hammarskjöld, who defended a paternalistic view of trusteeship; and, third, the struggle between colonial powers and newly independent states over decolonization. In this three-faceted struggle all actors sought to position themselves at a clearly definable distance to each other. Tensions between the actors restricted their respective scope of action.

This was most particularly true for the United Nations. The UN was born out of the temporary alliance of the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, during World War II. Its life, however, was mostly determined by their rivalry.[13] From World War II through the Cold War, the UN understood peace as the avoidance of armed conflict between states, and given the threat of nuclear attack, mainly as avoidance of a superpower clash. It is doubtful that Hammarskjöld would have engaged the UN in a large-scale mission like the Congo if it had not been for this interpretation of the UN’s role in preserving world peace. The foremost goal of the UN mission, therefore, was to keep the Cold War rivalry out of Africa.

Yet, in practice, the Congo mission first and foremost kept out the Soviet Union but not the United States. Only after the ouster of the Soviet Union had been clearly achieved (at the price of a military coup and the life of Patrice Lumumba) did the mission focus on the Katangan secession. From the Congolese point of view, however, the secession had been at the core of the conflict: Lumumba’s interpretation of peace had been to rid the country of Belgian troops and foreign mercenaries who were protecting European economic interests concentrated in Katanga. For Lumumba, the security problem in the Congo was not indigenous, but the result of external intrusion dating back to colonial times. He particularly argued that Belgium did not intervene to restore order (the position of Hammarskjöld and his advisers, the Congo Club) but to recolonize the country through the puppet regime in Katanga.

Lumumba’s and Hammarskjöld’s views clashed spectacularly in their letter exchange of August 1960.[14] In his letters, Lumumba argued that all UN troops should be placed under the command of the Congolese government. His understanding of exclusive sovereignty included a strong view, among others, on the central government’s right to use force and the rejection of any other commander of force. It was, put simply, a traditional, conservative, nineteenth-century understanding of territorial sovereignty and monopoly of violence, clad in the language of anticolonial nationalism and fervent advocacy of self-determination. Yet Hammarskjöld and the Congo Club interpreted it as defiance of the UN’s supreme authority to define peace.

For these UN senior officials, Lumumba’s nationalism was a challenge because it was based on an exclusive concept of sovereignty that defied the notion of the UN as an organization superior to state authority, just as it defied the paternalistic intrusion of Belgium. The delicate, because it was paradoxical, point Hammarskjöld was forced to make in response was that the Congo was indeed sovereign, and that no external powers should intervene in the Congo . . . except for the UN. Even though state sovereignty was the basis of international law, the UN, as the guardian of international law, was free to interpret the meaning of sovereignty.

Already Hammarskjöld was laboring hard, as would international lawyers forty years later, on scholastic hairsplitting arguments about what type of sovereignty should be respected and what type should not. His clutching at straws was that the UN had no interests of its own in intervention; the UN was intervening on the authority of a Security Council resolution. Hammarskjöld and his supporters defined their mission as preserving world peace, and this moral objective had the prerogative over political goals as formulated by sovereign politics by simply assuming and insinuating that local Congolese elites were fundamentally incapable of governing an independent country—a justificatory pattern that would be repeated in the peacebuilding missions of the 1990s and 2000s with similar stories about state failure and “peace spoilers” as soon as local actors’ ideas of peace became contrary to the UN’s.[15]

Opposition to Lumumba’s view of the conflict led increasingly to distrust and conflict between Lumumba and the UN. This deteriorating relationship was accompanied by several skirmishes on the ground between UN troops and Congolese soldiers. The row culminated in special envoy Andrew Cordier’s highly controversial support of President Joseph Kasavubu in his unconstitutional ouster of Lumumba as prime minister in September 1960, which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also supported.[16] As Cordier and Kasavubu had agreed beforehand, UN troops closed down the airport and radio station immediately after Kasavubu’s announcement of Lumumba’s dismissal, which effectively prevented him from mobilizing his supporters or leaving the country.[17] The UN also stood by in silence when, some weeks later, the young Colonel Mobutu, with the active support of the CIA,[18] led a coup d’état and had Lumumba arrested.[19]

For Hammarskjöld and the Congo Club, Kasavubu’s dismissal of Lumumba and Mobutu’s putsch were positive steps toward peace. They viewed Lumumba as immature, foolish, and dangerous—and as such, typical of young African leaders who were unprepared for independence.[20] Without irony, their dismissal of African nationalists like Lumumba, Ahmed Sékou Touré, or Kwame Nkrumah was entirely consistent with their critical stance toward colonialism. In his doctoral dissertation on French trusteeship in Togo, Ralph Bunche, who had been Hammarskjöld’s envoy to the Congo from May to August 1960, had argued that colonialism did not prepare local elites for independence. As head of the UN’s Trusteeship Council since its inception in 1948, Bunche contended that the world’s colonies would be in much better hands as trusteeship territories of the UN. The violence that followed Congo’s independence confirmed the view of Bunche, Hammarskjöld, and their collaborators that Africans in general, and Congolese in particular, needed the UN’s help to govern.[21] They attributed the country’s violence and insecurity to the lack of a functioning state administration, hence anticipating what would become in the 1990s the failed state discourse that justified armed interventions and the responsibility to protect doctrine, which was inscribed in the UN World Summit Declaration of 2006. [22]

Hammarskjöld and the Congo Club quickly adopted the view that Belgium had only intervened to restore order and to help reconstruct the country. In the view of the Belgian government, the troops in the Congo were simply protecting Belgians and other Europeans in areas where law and order had broken down. Hence, the Belgian government did not feel the least bit targeted by the UN resolutions. In Belgian eyes, the Congo’s sole problem was Lumumba’s anticolonial nationalism, not the well-intended presence of Belgian military personnel and so-called “advisors.” After all, the former colonial power knew best what was good for the colony, independent or not. Belgium’s European allies and the United States supported this view, and on these grounds Belgium steadily, if not openly, disputed the UN’s prerogative to reestablish law and order as formulated in UN Resolution 142.[23] France and Great Britain particularly did not wish to see the Congo mission establish a precedent for UN-led decolonization.[24] By adopting a similarly paternalistic view of the Congo, UN officials gave in to the liberal discourse of protecting law and order, private property, and lives. They, hence, defended a specific view of the events in the Congo that gave more weight to U.S. interests than to the communist world.[25]

The Soviet Union did not fail to notice the decidedly liberal tone of the UN intervention. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev took it on himself to vigorously attack Hammarskjöld as a “lackey” of the United States, and to initiate a radical proposal for reform of the UN Secretariat during the 1960 General Assembly session.[26] Instead of one Secretary-General, the Secretariat should be staffed with three secretaries: one from the Soviet sphere of influence, one from the West, and one from the nonaligned states. The proposal cited the Congo mission as living proof that “there are no neutral men,” and that therefore the diversity of views on what constituted world peace or a breach of world peace should be institutionalized within the UN. Hammarskjöld replied to the troika proposal by arguing that the Secretary-General is neutral by the very definition of his function as the first civil servant of the UN and, consequently, acts in the interest of humanity and not in the interest of a particular state. Hammarskjöld repeated this argument three times: once in a direct reply to Khrushchev the day following his proposal in the General Assembly, a second time in December 1960 in front of the Security Council, and a third time in a public lecture at the University of Oxford in May 1961.[27]

The discourse of international civil service and neutrality can be seen as attempts to forge a standpoint equidistant to all three fronts. It drew on the Secretary-General’s main capital, namely the legal capital created by the UN Charter, which gave the Secretary-General a slim space of autonomy, primarily through Articles 99 and 100. Hammarskjöld’s civil servant concept widened this space to include a much larger authority to make decisions about peacekeeping and peacebuilding practices. In this way, Hammarskjöld steered the debate away from questions of how peace should be defined in a political sense, who should have political responsibility for keeping and building peace, and who would be involved in such peace, to the question of how and by whom peacekeeping should be practically executed. The political questions raised by the Congo mission were replaced by the practical question of how missions should be organized and managed, without acknowledging any political quality to this management. The stakes of the peacebuilding field hence changed from being about the question of peace, sui generis, to the question of peace administration, with the understanding that administration by itself was politically neutral.

Finding a Place for the UN in Carved-Up World Politics

The Congo mission continued despite the refusal of the Soviet Union and later France to support it financially because, for a while at least, the United States had decided to use the UN as its spearhead in Africa.[28] When, in October 1960, the CIA-friendly Special Envoy Andrew Cordier was replaced by the Third World–minded Rajeshwar Dayal, and the UN proceeded to remove foreigners (mainly white mercenaries who had been hired by the Katangese) from the Congo and Katanga in 1961, the United States withdrew its support, too. Dayal became the subject of a vicious media campaign, and Hammarskjöld had to replace him only months after he took office;[29] one year later, a similar fate awaited Special Envoy Conor Cruise O’Brien, who continued to expel foreign advisers to the Katangan government.[30]

The Congo mission made it unmistakably clear that no UN mission would succeed without U.S. support. The de facto power of the United States to steer UN missions fundamentally undermined their legitimacy, and for decades to come the Security Council did not create a mission as large as the Congo mission.[31] Up until the 1980s, the UN was not called on to intervene in any major Cold War situation, whether related to decolonization (e.g., the Algerian war) or to superpower politics (e.g., the U.S. war in Vietnam or the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan). Even the peaceful reordering of Europe at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s happened without any UN contribution. The UN was involved in neither the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, nor in the process of Germany’s unification—even if, as a sign of the Soviet Union’s good will under Mikhail Gorbachev, UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuellar mediated the Soviet departure from Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s.

The Cold War hiatus in the UN Security Council’s haggling over what constitutes the Secretariat’s rightful authority to administer peace reduced opportunities to practically claim the peacebuilding field. Peacebuilding shrank back to small, clearly defined military peacekeeping operations—that is, the physical separation of warring parties and the military monitoring of geographical separation boundaries, in theaters that were either of no interest to either of the Cold War parties (Cyprus, for example) or which were, indeed, so complex and dangerous that both superpowers shied away from obvious and decisive involvement (including most Middle East crises).[32]

Although Gorbachev’s cooperative stance on multilateralism, the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and, finally, the end of the Soviet Union brought fresh opportunities to involve the UN with peace and war in the world, the enabling and disabling power of the United States did not diminish in the 1990s, as Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali would learn some thirty-odd years after the Congo crisis.

Frequently, images of peacebuilding as a sleeping beauty rising from a thirty-year sleep are used to explain the sudden and extraordinary growth of peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions between 1985 and 1995. The tacit implication of this representation is that peacebuilding today is a functionally appropriate solution to conflict situations in the world, and that it is evolving or even learning—the current emphasis on human rights being, all other things being equal, the normatively best answer to conflicts.[33]

Yet the continuity of the peacebuilding field was and is only partial. The basic mechanisms that created the field in the first place—namely, states quibbling over the right interpretation of peace and the practical appropriation of a peacebuilding space by the UN, its affiliated agencies, and other peacebuilders—have indeed remained the same. However, the motivations for the wrangling, the discourses of justification and rationalization, as well as the strategies of positioning, have changed, pushing and shoving peacebuilders in various directions.

Yugoslavia as Playing Field for a New Division of Labor

When Yugoslavia was about to break up in the late 1980s and 1990s, the world was a very different place than it had been during the 1960 Congo crisis. Most notably, the positions of central state actors had changed: Europe had risen in power and made this abundantly clear in claiming a prerogative to resolve the Yugoslav crises. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, had rapidly been losing its status as a superpower and no longer rivaled the United States; the United States was grappling with its new position as hyperpower (as former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine dubbed the Cold War victor); and most nonaligned countries (with the notable exception of regional rising powers such as India, Nigeria, or Brazil) were now nothing more than poor.

In this new constellation, the UN was reduced to being one actor among many, and many more than in 1960; Hammarskjöld’s spearhead argument that the UN could be a neutral force between rival powers had lost its entire foundation. Although rejected at the time by the Soviet Union and, less violently, by France, and met with caution by Great Britain, Hammarskjöld’s neutral civil service discourse had allowed the UN to keep its symbolic capital of being an international law-based organization somewhere in-between Cold War opponents. The international civil service discourse in particular had allowed so-called small states, including the Nordic countries and Canada, and the Non-Aligned Movement to rally around the UN Secretariat in quarrels with the five permanent members of the Security Council. Newly independent states had most notably drawn on this discourse to claim the UN as a neutral space, and to keep the Cold War superpowers and former colonial powers in check, at least verbally.[34]

Politically marginalized and with reduced legitimacy as a neutral actor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the UN had to find a new justificatory discourse on which to base its authority to define and defend world peace. In the Yugoslav crisis, its most formidable competitors would be the emerging European Union, a revived North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United States, each of which sought, albeit in contradictory back and forth positioning, to establish themselves as central authors of peace in the world.

Narratives of the Yugoslav implosion and how it was (mis)managed by external actors abound. The aim of this section is neither to discuss these often hugely contradictory stories nor to add new arguments.[35] Rather, the section will take a different perspective on the Yugoslav wars in order to examine how conflict resolution management in the 1990s, or its failure, shaped the peacebuilding field. As with the Congo conflict, the argument will be that the peacebuilding field emerged and became consolidated in the Yugoslav case as a default space of action. This default space was opened up not by cooperation between third actors—what is often euphemistically referred to as “the international community”—but rather by the distances these actors built between each other in the world political space. “Distance” does not have to mean “antagonism,” but if world politics occur in a power relational space, actors seek to establish their position relative to that of other actors.

Configurations in the Early 1990s

The Yugoslav case is in many respects different from the Congo case, but the stakes for peacebuilders were the same—namely, the authority to define not only what world peace is but also, and maybe even more important, the ways and means of maintaining it as well as identifying its legitimate guardians. The most important difference with the world political situation in 1960 was the greater complexity of the larger world-political field, as many more actors had become involved after the Cold War. In the Congo crisis, the UN Secretary-General could quite easily justify the Secretariat’s role as central coordinator, buffer, mediator, and scapegoat for Cold War rivalries, on the one hand, and decolonization conflicts, on the other. In the case of the Yugoslav wars, the UN Secretariat General faced competition from a large number of intergovernmental bodies, including the European Communities (EC), NATO, and the OSCE (the successor of the 1970s Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe). The simplistic bipolar force of the Cold War had given way to a multipolar world, which, additionally, was complicated by local and regional state rivalries, for instance, between EC member states. The distribution of economic, financial, military, legal, and symbolic capital between these various actors was extremely uneven, creating a situation of complex mutual interdependence.

While the expansion of peacekeeping operations, the successful implementation of the UN’s first Chapter VII mission in Iraq, and the subsequent humanitarian assistance to the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, had strengthened enormously the UN’s legal and symbolic capital as central keeper of world peace, it had left the organization in debt to the economic and military power of the United States, France, and Great Britain. This dependence became shockingly apparent when the 1992 humanitarian intervention in Somalia failed due to enormous strategic mistakes by U.S. forces, but the UN were left to take the blame for this fiasco. The Gulf War had particularly raised the military capital of the United States, and the UN’s failure to fend off the scapegoating of the Somalia disaster upheld the strong position of the United States. Because of its strength NATO, too, rose from its ashes in the early 1990s at the same moment when it should have been rapidly losing symbolic capital with the reunification of Germany and the loss of the Soviet threat to western Europe.

The peaceful unification of Germany and the boost to the European integration process strengthened not only the symbolic capital of the EC and the four World War II allies (and permanent members of the Security Council), it also strengthened hopes for greater economic and financial capital to be gained from deeper integration. The organization that gained the most in terms of economic and symbolic capital, however, had been the OSCE, which had been transformed from an informal and irregular meeting of heads of state into a formal organization with buildings, budget, and mandate.

Initially, nothing in the buildup to the Yugoslav wars begged external intervention, and certainly not the kind of intervention that eventually occurred. Prima facie, the Yugoslav crisis of the end of the 1980s was the failure of its federal system to cope with economic pressures and internal political changes. Yugoslavia’s internal problems became a security issue as part of Europe’s reordering after Germany’s unification, the end of the Warsaw Pact, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. These three events equipped some actors, such as Germany, with new resources; deprived others, such as Russia, of resources they had held before; and allowed completely new players, including the OSCE, to get on board. The way external actors dealt with the Yugoslav crisis and its wars needs to be seen in the greater picture of how these actors eventually negotiated their respective positions in world politics.

All throughout the period that started with Yugoslavia’s financial and federal crisis in the late 1980s and eventually ended with the bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999 and the subsequent deployment of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) and the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), the UN was marginalized. Neither Pérez de Cuellar (until 1991), Boutros-Ghali (1992–97) nor Kofi Annan (from 1997 on) referred to Article 99 of the UN Charter, which allows the Secretary-General to bring a matter of world peace to the attention of the Security Council. Despite its central position as the sole legally authorized peace enforcer in the world, the UN was effectively sidelined in all major decision-making moments from the beginning to the end of the Yugoslav wars.[36]

In 1991, when the federal crisis in Yugoslavia escalated into wars in Slovenia and Croatia, the UN already had its hands full with peacekeeping, peace-brokering, and peacebuilding missions in Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq, Namibia, Angola, El Salvador, Western Sahara, and Nicaragua. These missions were draining financial, military, and other personnel resources from the United Nations as well as the contributing states. However, they also represented a beacon of hope for a new golden age of peace following the Cold War. The UN of the early 1990s did not lack confidence that it had a crucial role to play in the new world order; on the contrary, it was very confident of its new importance, and yet it was overstretched. Marrack Goulding, the under-secretary of what would become the Department for Peacekeeping Operations, was particularly opposed to any further engagements by UN peacekeepers.[37] Yugoslavia not only appeared to be peripheral to the UN’s main geographical foci in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—Boutros-Ghali would denounce the Yugoslav wars as “white men’s wars”—it also looked like a European problem that should properly be dealt with by Europeans.[38] Boutros-Ghali’s reaction to requests for UN peacekeeping was therefore to avoid serious commitments. Instead of proactively countering the sidelining of the UN, notably the indecision of the UN Security Council, by proposing actions and legal documents that would strengthen the Secretariat’s autonomy (as Hammarskjöld had done in the 1950s), Boutros-Ghali retreated into narrow definitions of conditions that needed to be met for peacekeeping (“peace to keep”), and bitterly complained when the Security Council imposed further demands for action on the Secretariat.[39]

Yet Boutros-Ghali’s circumspection was not unfounded, as the Security Council members were particularly stingy with their contributions. It had already been difficult if not impossible to sufficiently staff ongoing UN missions in Africa and Asia. In the case of Yugoslavia, however, the restraint of other UN members, which usually sent, financed, and equipped UN peacekeeping, was particularly strong. For non-European contributors such as India, Yugoslavia was not a top priority. Hence, Western countries, including France, Great Britain, and other non-Security Council members such as Canada, provided the majority of troops for the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR)—yet they considered these to be a high price to pay for their ability to have a say in the debates over what would be called the “new European security architecture.” The United States, on the other hand, was determined never to send any ground troops to Yugoslavia in order to avoid another debacle like Somalia, which had left the first Bush administration badly battered by hostile domestic public opinion.[40]

Boutros-Ghali’s restraint in insisting on the UN’s central role in peacemaking and the struggle over defining the who, how, and what of European security left space for the active engagement of other organizations and foreign policies, most notably the OSCE and NATO. In the confusion of the early 1990s, the Yugoslav wars had great potential to unify European states, Russia, and the United States over the interpretation of security risks, as it had the great potential to tear them apart over the question of how to respond to them.

All state actors developed a narrative of the reasons for the Yugoslav disaster, which had as a subtext the preservation of so-called European values, whatever these might be.[41] All agreed that the wars resulted from ancient ethnic hatred, and either Serbian aggression, a point of view particularly defended by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,[42] or, in Russian public opinion, Serbian assertiveness.[43]

The economic and financial crisis that underscored the implosion of Yugoslavia’s federal structure was, in political circles, never seriously discussed as the cause of the wars, for good reason.[44] In post–Cold War Europe, any doubts about the moral and political superiority of market liberalism, financial liberalization, privatization, and democratic governance were ideologically inadmissible. Whether in Russia or Croatia, Germany or France, Europeans strived to outdo one another in praising the neoliberal restructuring of their economies, deflating real wages, reducing public debt, privatizing whatever public services could be privatized, and administering shock therapies of market liberalization and financial liberalization to former state-managed industries. While the liberal outlook of the Congo mission in the 1960s was the Secretary-General’s ideological choice, the liberalism of the 1990s was a global consensus.[45]

The triumph of liberalism was not the only reason why the UN’s thinking about peace or war was destitute of all economic critique. Since the failure of its new economic policy in the 1970s but clearly since the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, the UN had lost its capacity to compete with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in disputes over global economic policies. Compared to the financial capital of these two organizations and the backing they received from major state actors—for instance, through intergovernmental fora such as the G7, G8, or G20 summits—the UN had abandoned any meaningful economic engagement.

Hence, the framing of the Yugoslav conflict as ethnic conflict in the 1990s constituted the common reference and shared narrative of all involved actors, whether states or the UN. This excluded from the outset a number of possible conflict resolution pathways and definitions of peace, particularly those that would have had an impact on the economic or political structure of Yugoslavia and its republics and their place in the world economy.[46] Instead, conflict analyses of the time and proposals for conflict resolution concentrated on the question of the territorial integrity and unity of Yugoslavia, its borders, and the self-determination of its people, thereby often accelerating the federal disintegration and even the violence.[47]

Hammarskjöld’s legacy of insisting on sovereignty as the territorial principle and indisputable basis of peacekeeping fit this new discourse as well as a square peg fits a round hole. Everything that Hammarskjöld (and his successors, and all former colonies in the General Assembly) had declared inviolable during the Congo crisis and similar incidents that followed––sovereignty, borders, territorial unity, noninterference in constitutional matters––was now at stake in the Yugoslav conflict. And the UN––Secretariat, Security Council, and General Assembly alike––had to deal with them. The definition of the conflict as being about ethnicity and self-determination––or rather the acceptance of this definition by key actors in Yugoslavia—raised an array of questions that could be answered in many different ways. Should a state be allowed to break up? Who could define the new borders of a broken-up state, and on which grounds and how? What constituted a legitimate claim of self-determination? What was a people, and how much national unity was needed to allow secession? What were appropriate majority-minority relations and how should they be formulated—legally, politically, institutionally, culturally, and so forth? There were many more detailed questions relating to those mentioned here, and the list is, obviously, not exhaustive. The range of possible answers is equally diverse and daunting, and they constituted a formidable source for diplomatic discussions that would allow every single actor involved to take a position distinct from all others, and even to change their discourse over the course of the decade without losing anything in distinctiveness.

Public Opinions Pushing National Governments

Such vagaries were necessary for a large variety of reasons, very few of which had anything to do with the question of Yugoslavia itself. The democratic states involved were under pressure from the media and public opinion[48] to “do something,” and they all experienced watershed elections during the Yugoslav wars: in 1992 George W. Bush lost the U.S. presidential election to Bill Clinton; in 1994 John Major lost the British election to New Labour under the leadership of Tony Blair; and, that same year, conservative Jacques Chirac became president of France, ending thirteen years of socialist presidencies.

German, French, U.S., Italian, Russian, and British governments, political parties, and media were furthermore subject to intense lobbying. All Yugoslav actors had developed excellent lobbying capacities through their diaspora communities, some of them even using commercial public relations firms.[49] However, the diaspora communities were not equally represented in all countries: while Croatian diasporas exerted substantial pressure on Germany, Austria, and the United States, Serbian groups lobbied much more forcefully in Russia, and in France the Bosnian-Muslim pressure of Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegović was particularly successful in mobilizing public opinion. These groups played masterfully with the various narratives of ancient hatred, the impossibility of interethnic peace, and Cold War schemes of democratic forces vs. communists.[50]

Russia, too, underwent fundamental and deep changes to its political, economic, and social constitution with the failed putsch of August 1991, the election of Boris Yeltsin as president, and the end of the Soviet Union. In all these domestic power struggles, the Yugoslav question became a placeholder for debates over global order politics and security. Bosnia became a symbolic measure of Russia’s power status in Europe and the world, and the more the United States and some European countries pressed for an exclusive role for NATO, the more Russia opposed them.[51] Consequently, the United States in particular but also France and Great Britain sought to keep discussions over enforcement measures out of the Security Council once NATO had been designated to monitor the no-fly zones in June 1993 and, hence, been given de facto leadership in UNPROFOR.

Jockeying International Institutions

Questions about global order politics and security could not be answered without also discussing and manipulating the international institutions that should order and guarantee peace: the European Community, NATO, and organizations such as the CSCE (later to become the OSCE), the Council of Europe, or the West European Union, which had been conceived as the EC’s military arm and was now being revived in the process of deepening and widening European integration (only to be finally dissolved in 2009). The survival of NATO and, if possible, the CSCE remained a constant of U.S. foreign policy from the first President Bush to President Clinton, whereas France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy were largely preoccupied with various plans and projects intended to strengthen the role of the EC, and, consequently, its core member states—yet without always strengthening all member states to the same degree.[52]

As a result of these widely differing agendas, most major actors involved proposed different ways of solving the Yugoslav conflict, with, at times, two or even three mediators at work. Only one of these was sent by the UN and, invariably, the UN envoy had been summoned to work with the EC or U.S. representative. Given all this pulling and shoving, the UN had very little space. The General Assembly was largely and successfully avoided by all major state actors, and the Security Council was usually used to provide an a posteriori blessing over decisions taken elsewhere. Most important, the Security Council successfully avoided having the mission in the former Yugoslavia set a precedent for discussion over who should be in charge of UN peace enforcement. The resolutions that increased the capacity of UNPROFOR did so only in order to ensure the free delivery of humanitarian assistance. No resolution gave the mission the power to enforce the various cease-fires or peace agreements that were signed and routinely broken during the war.[53]

In sum, in the process of pushing and shoving over Bosnia the UN neither defined the armed conflict there as a military threat to world peace nor did it even define the situation as requiring peacekeeping. Bosnia (as Croatia before it) was defined as a humanitarian space that needed protection, but not as a war zone that needed muscular peace enforcement.

This definition effectively excluded the UN from military intervention and left the armed conflict to be solved by others—by powerful states such as the United States and international military organizations such as NATO. The Contact Group, an informal meeting of the United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Russia, emerged as a powerful competitor to the UN Security Council, further demonstrating the gap that had widened between the UN Secretariat and powerful states.[54] Eventually, with the Dayton peace agreement, the UN was kept out of Bosnia entirely, deprived of a role in both the military protection force (SFOR, or Stabilization Force) and the civil administration of the country through the Office of the High Representative, which had been established and staffed by the Contact Group.[55]

Peacebuilding as Default Space

In early 1999, the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia seeking to force the withdrawal of Serbian police and paramilitary troops from Kosovo made clear the extent to which institutions such as the Contact Group, the OSCE, and NATO had replaced the UN. The UN Security Council and Secretariat were not involved in any major decision concerning this military campaign. The bombing took place without a Security Council resolution. In the strict sense of international law, the NATO bombing of Serbia was a war of aggression against a sovereign state—exactly the sort of event that the UN, according to its Charter, was supposed to prevent.[56]

With the military side of maintaining world peace taken out of the hands of the UN, the organization defended its role in the global ordering of peace mainly through activities that ran parallel to military security. Humanitarian assistance played a lead role in these, with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) being the lead agency. The UNHCR, pushed by its own agenda and strategies, itself seized the opportunity to expand its role, mandate, and operations substantially. Shortly after the Dayton peace agreement, the UN also took over other peacebuilding roles that gave it a substantial presence on the ground, including policing, law enforcement, and, together with the OSCE, preparation for elections. The same would happen after the NATO bombing of Serbia where the UN’s multiple peacebuilding roles, ranging from humanitarian assistance to the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the reorganization of public services such as public health and schooling, would be institutionalized in the interim administration set up by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo.

Narratives and Canonization

If the Yugoslav wars were the most long-lasting tragedy of peacekeeping, the most dramatic and shameful episode of the UN’s peacekeeping failures was the blatant denial of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.[57] In March 1999, UN Secretary-General Annan commissioned an independent panel to investigate the UN’s role in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.[58] The timing of the UN inquiry was not incidental. By 1999 the UN effectively had been deprived of any prospect for militarily living up to peacekeeping expectations. The conflicts in which the UN intervened did not allow for peacekeeping in the narrow sense of a geographical separation between warring parties, and the missions that were deployed were obviously understaffed, underequipped (despite the huge increases in expenditures), and ill-mandated as UN Security Council resolutions reflected a strict minimum consensus among the permanent five members of the Security Council (the P5), and not visionary plans for peace. In Srebrenica and Rwanda at least, the signals UN peacekeepers gave appear to have encouraged the warring parties to believe they could commit war crimes and genocidal acts with impunity. The default space of peacebuilding, consisting of humanitarian assistance, maintaining law and order, and additional civil administrative tasks, set up the façade of UN and international community action,[59] but by 1999 the UN had ceded its position as world peacemaker to NATO, a couple of powerful states (notably the United States), and regional organizations like the European Communities/European Union.

The UN Secretary-General was in all these cases sidelined by the five permanent members of the Security Council, and in particular by the United States. Neither Boutros-Ghali nor Annan were able (or willing) to imitate Hammarskjöld’s proactive politics of steering the Security Council through preemptive resolutions and coalitions of small states. However, they did seek to preserve the UN’s symbolic capital by repossessing the legitimating discourses of the de facto interventions. As the UN’s legitimization remains a fundamental ingredient of intervention for all actors involved, the Secretariat’s urge to put justifications into writing was widely supported by Security Council members. They not only supported the Secretary-General’s initiative to launch an independent inquiry into the role of the UN in the Rwanda tragedy[60] but also sponsored the General Assembly resolution brought by Bosnia and Herzegovina for an inquiry into the role of the UN in the fall of Srebrenica.[61] In the context of seeking legitimacy for the illegal bombings of Serbia, both reports provide a forceful argument for humanitarian intervention, underscoring Annan’s assertion that the Kosovo war was illegal but legitimate.[62]

These two reports were important milestones in a long series of reports and commissions that would reflect on the peacebuilding space and how it could and should be filled by the UN, its affiliated organizations, and civil society in its wake. From Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace in 1992 to the 2005 report “In Larger Freedom,” which would form the basis of the World Summit Declaration of the UN’s sixtieth anniversary, these reports seek to establish a rational and functional history of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding.[63] They allowed for redesigning peacebuilding and redrawing the vision of humanitarian intervention according to political realities.[64] The post-1999 reports draw up the lists of legal tasks and practical challenges, enumerating long lists of “lessons learnt” or “lessons to be learnt” and “challenges ahead.”[65] These lists complement other writings, namely the many proposals to reform the UN, and set the foundation for the institutionalization of peacebuilding with the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission in 2005. They represent a form of canonization of the peacebuilding space.[66] They not only emphasize routinely the need for peacebuilding, they also define the areas that make up peacebuilding: the rule of law, the protection of women and children, humanitarian assistance, and policing and order politics. They designate the legitimate actors and, most obviously with the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission, the best mechanisms for coordinating them.

In these highly ritualized reports peacebuilding becomes an activity that is fundamentally unproblematic and only suffers from an array of practical failures due mainly to a lack of resources, or, if resources are available, to the resistance of local enemies (spoilers). Creating peace can only be what it is—namely, the provision of humanitarian assistance and the protection of vulnerable groups. The central question of peacebuilding has become the identification of such vulnerable groups, and these reports are embedded in a much larger body of literature on ethnic and identity conflicts, democratization problems, economic motives for civil wars, state failure and fragile states, and terrorism. This nexus of peacebuilding and academic debate is discussed in more detail in chapter 4 on the boundaries and overlaps of the peacebuilding field. Here, suffice it to say that UN reports since the Agenda for Peace in 1992 have established a powerful narrative of peacebuilding as legitimate and the only reasonably and rationally conceivable solution to conflicts.

Conclusion

Since Khrushchev’s troika proposal, peacebuilding has, in the UN, never been discussed in political and ideological terms (who should have the legitimate authority to decide over peace?), but in practical and administrative terms. It is in this area that the Secretariat has its widest authority and, consequently, its widest scope for action. In the Congo crisis already, the deeply political debate over the Congo’s form of government and national unity had been replaced by questions of material infrastructure (roads), humanitarian assistance (how to get medicine and food to remote villages), and other technically and administratively manageable matters such as inoculation, water and sanitation, or the construction of refugee camps.[67] In this respect, the peacebuilding field becomes also tangibly visible in jeeps, compounds, food parcels, containers, and so forth.[68] Because peacekeeping’s buffer zone concept remains politically impossible to realize, boundaries for the practical and discursive space of peacebuilding in complex situations like the Congo or former Yugoslavia are defined by highly mobile yet nevertheless highly visible signposts.

The peacebuilding space exists relative (even though not proportionally relative) to the political space of other actors in world politics. Paradoxically, this means that during the Cold War the peacekeeping space was quite clear-cut: wherever the political and military space of the superpowers was diminished, the UN could impose its peacekeeping. This was the case in crises that were of no interest to the superpowers (Cyprus, for example); or, to the contrary, of such burning interest that they risked enflaming the entire world (e.g., the Middle East); or which had burned down to status-quo wars (the Cold War proxy wars in Latin America, in Africa, and Asia in the 1980s such as Angola or Mozambique). If interventions happened, then it was possible to physically separate warring parties, to set up green lines and demilitarized zones, and to create a space in which the UN or UN-mandated mediators could negotiate peace agreements and truces during which further peace negotiations could take place (or where at least the truce could be frozen).

However, after the Cold War ended with only one hyperpower left, the UN’s political space in general and the peacekeeping space in particular contracted substantially. The UN was effectively pushed out of the space in which peace negotiations would take place or where the physical separation of warring parties would be possible. Instead, the United States decided, alone or in alliance with its partners, on military deployments and policing in the world. The fact that this ultimately led to an increase in the number of UN peace missions is only paradoxical on its surface. Although the United States had the financial, military, and, in some respects, symbolic capital to enforce its vision of peace in the world, it did not possess the legal capital nor sufficient symbolic capital to do so. The UN furthermore offered an excellent opportunity to mobilize social capital, that is, the largest support possible from other states in the world—to justify military action anywhere in the world. As mighty and powerful as the United States may be, it still needed the UN, first of all to provide the legal and legitimate framework for military interventions. The UN, therefore, needed to be involved.

The Congo mission was the first in which effective peacekeeping was replaced by other activities such as maintaining law and order, providing humanitarian assistance, education and training, managing civil administration, and so on. The wars in Yugoslavia, and especially the lack of peacekeeping in places such as Srebrenica or Rwanda, led to a consolidation of these activities as a “Potemkin village of care,” in Michael Barnett’s words.[69] The involvement of more and more actors, such as the OSCE or the UNHCR, additionally expanded the realm of these substitute activities to the point where even soft military aspects such as removing land mines or demobilization of troops are now routinely part of the peacebuilding portfolio.

The peacebuilding space is born out of this necessity of involving the UN. It is a default space that substitutes for the lack of the UN’s actual peacekeeping capacity. Yet in sociological terms it is positively filled with certain social groups. Peacebuilding activities such as humanitarianism, the rule of law and justice, reconciliation, and policing are consistent with these social groups and their respective capital configuration. The next chapter therefore will look at the social component of peacebuilding.

Chapter 3

“There Are No Neutral Men”

The Sociological Structure of Peacebuilding

In 1961, International Herald Tribune columnist Walter Lippmann, a great admirer of Hammarskjöld and a stern believer in the UN’s global mission, interviewed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at his Black Sea dacha. In discussing the current world situation and particularly the state of world peace, Khrushchev repeated his attack on the role of Secretary-General that had already dominated his proposal for a troika in September 1960. “While there are neutral countries, there are no neutral men,” Khrushchev told Lippmann.[1]

Of course, Lippmann thought that the international civil servant was undoubtedly neutral. Yet, as briefly discussed in chapter 2, the worldview of peacebuilders did, in fact, get in the way of their dealings with local politics and was anything but neutral in its effects on the way the peace missions were (and still are) carried out. Certainly, many people working for the UN or other peacebuilding institutions see themselves as neutral, and some strive hard to be, at least, impartial on the ground. Yet, social upbringing, socioeconomic standing, education, and the resulting worldviews and mind frames do not suddenly become irrelevant when a person becomes a peacebuilder. On the contrary, the lack of standardization of the field, its largely decentralized and diffuse organization, as well as its potential for highly politicized disputes over even minor details, make tacit understandings and underlying forms of shared culture even more important in forging the ideas and practices of peacebuilding.[2]

The preceding chapter has shown that peacebuilding emerged as a default space in which the UN and other international agencies and NGOs compensate for the failure of peacekeeping. Peacebuilding appears where the effective physical separation of warring parties is not possible but external pressures of various kinds (e.g., from the media, public opinion, diplomacy) demand some kind of intervention. In response to the dilemma of having to establish peace where it cannot be externally imposed, the UN and other international agencies as well as NGOs engage in a multitude of activities, which are presented by the UN and other organization as promoting “peace” in one way or another. We will see in later chapters which ideas motivate these practices. In this chapter the analysis will delve deeper into the constitution of the peacebuilding field.

The default space of peacebuilding is filled with a specific “class” of people. Not everyone can become a peacebuilder, and in the absence of a clearly defined vocational training profile, peacebuilders are more easily identified by social characteristics such as economic or cultural capital than by their profession. The notion of class must be understood in a large sense as a wide category of people who exhibit similar sociological characteristics. The boundaries of classes are fluid and fuzzy, and similarity must not be confused with sameness. The trees in a pine forest provide a useful analogy: they may differ in shape, size, and appearance, but they are all still pine trees. In the same fashion, the space of peacebuilding is populated by individuals who in their individual outlook are all different, but who, when considered as a group, share an important number of commonalities, most notably with respect to social origins, education, and their related value structure.

Over the course of decades, the peacebuilding field has widely expanded to include not only more individuals within the UN missions but also more affiliated organizations and other actors in the field. However, the sociological outlook has remained strikingly consistent, as has the geographical distribution, that is, the world regions peacebuilders come from. Other studies have noticed the preponderant presence of Westerners in international organizations, be it the UN,[3] the UNHCR,[4] other international agencies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund,[5] and in nongovernmental organizations.[6] These studies of civil servants in the UN or other international organizations commonly assume that national origins matter in the way that staff will understand the issues at stake (framing) and develop responses to challenges.

The sociological analysis in this and later chapters will show a more nuanced picture. Geographical origin is actually of little importance to the way people see their own role, mission, function, and value in peacebuilding. Geographical origin does play a major role in very visible positions that are subject to state diplomatic haggling over influence and recognition, but in what I will call the second and third tiers, nationality is not, per se, a good indicator of difference. However, educational background and family background are decisive in a person’s access to positions in the peacebuilding field. Hence, nationality does have a selective function for the career paths that are open to peacebuilders, through the very unequal distribution of educational and economic capital across countries.

This chapter will expose the sociological commonalities of those working in peacebuilding and analyze how all these individuals converge, particularly with respect to their social origins, education, and professional careers. Bourdieu’s notion of capital is helpful in capturing these similarities, as capital designates not only the investment and stock an individual has to build on in educational, professional, social, or economic terms, but also his or her opportunities, networks, and boundaries of social development.

A detailed analysis of the first UN mission in the Congo, 1960–64, will first explore these sociological characteristics (in Bourdieu’s terms, the capital configuration). In the second section of this chapter I will extend this analysis to the broader field as it represents itself nowadays. It will become evident that national origins, indeed, are less important than the sociological homogeneity of the field. The sociological constitution of the field has, over the decades, changed only slightly.

A Social Analysis of the Congo Mission

The Congo mission, Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC), established the field of peacebuilding not only institutionally but also socially. A closer sociological analysis of the men in the Congo mission reveals that they constituted a relatively homogenous group in terms of their socioeconomic origins, educational capital, and political value structures, although an important distinction has to be made between those who remained in the UN and those who had been seconded by their home country to the Congo mission.

Table 1 gives a very short overview of the top executive layer of ONUC over the four years.[7] The table distinguishes the person’s economic, educational, and social capital. The evaluation “high” to “low” is given with respect to the standards of the country of origin; these have been established by comparison with contemporary literature and classifications, and expert advice.

As this table shows, the permanent officeholders shared characteristics closer to those of civil service officeholders in the United States or West European countries than to other professional fields or cultural realms. Their social background was in many respects very similar, yet two clear distinctions stand out: Hammarskjöld’s overall higher capital configuration, and the comparatively lower family economic capital of U.S. officeholders relative to those from the global South. Most of these UN senior staff’s families had suffered from a major shock, commonly through the loss of the main breadwinner of the family through war (e.g., India-Pakistan’s partition war), disease, or accident.

Despite the very modest financial situations in which many grew up, all came from families that emphasized the importance of education. All for which there are records had educators in prior generations in their family. Often these educators had been pioneers in their fields. Ralph Bunche’s great-grandfather had set up evening schools for former slaves and freed slaves. Robert Gardiner’s grandmother had been the first woman principal in an English school in the Gold Coast. Mahmoud Khiari pioneered professional education in preindependence Tunisia, and his wife was director of a professional college after independence. Mekki Abbas had worked for fourteen years in Sudan’s Ministry of Education and had gained a PhD from Oxford University. Max H. Dorsinville’s father founded the first literary review in Haiti, and his brother became a renowned writer. For all, education was the prime capital on which their careers and sometimes even the survival of their families was built; for example, with his UN salary Bombay-born Syed Habib Ahmed supported those family members who had survived the partition in Pakistan.

The strong family emphasis on education probably influenced the choice of study subjects, in which classical education dominated. All had studied a subject in social sciences or humanities; a large number had studied public or colonial administration in Oxford. An important number also read classics and European philosophy either in high school or at the university level. Some pursued their interest in history and philosophy throughout their lives, commonly through an active career as a writer. More than half of the staff listed below have written autobiographies and other books. Some have also written personal accounts of the events in the Congo; some have contributed to scholarly research on the topic of the Congo mission, or more largely to peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and the UN role. Others wrote more literary works during and after their time at the UN.

Hence, generally speaking, all officeholders had higher cultural than economic capital, but with sufficiently high economic capital to allow the acquisition of education and culture (sometimes at the expense of other relatives). This configuration locates the majority of them in the (admittedly broad) category of the educated middle classes, as it clearly distinguishes them from social classes of manual labor or rural, agricultural classes, on the one hand, and landed or otherwise rent-consuming upper classes (except for Galo Plaza Lasso), on the other. With respect to upper-class origins, the complete absence of families who gained wealth through manufacturing or industrial activities is equally remarkable; any family wealth came from trade, civil service, or other government service.

Table 1 also shows a very irregular pattern of geographic origin. Not one single executive staff member was recruited from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, or any other country with communist sympathies. Certainly, candidates from socialist countries would have been sternly opposed by the United States and the former European colonial powers. Given the realities of the Cold War, the safest recruitment zones were African or Asian nonaligned countries. However, the geographic distribution obscures the very similar endowments in educational and family-transmitted economic capital, namely the very similar social class origins of the UN staff.

The Tasks of Middle-Class Men

It was, in fact, this social homogeneity that the Congolese and the Soviets perceived as partiality when Khrushchev attacked the mission in 1960 as “partial” and when he called Hammarskjöld a “lackey” of U.S. interests (see chapter 2). Bunche wrote in a letter to his son that even he, a black American and great-grandson of slaves, was considered and threatened as a “white” in the Congo.[8] Skin color was, in the Congo of 1960, not automatically a social category, and in the postcolonial context Bunche was clearly perceived as American first and only then as black.

Indeed, Bunche was the great-grandson of a freed slave and became a prime example of an American and liberal success story. He was an alumni of two of America’s finest universities, the University of California at Los Angeles and Harvard, where he had been admitted on scholarships. He had been in the U.S. diplomatic service before entering the UN, and Dean Rusk, the secretary of state under the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations and the architect of much of their Cold War policies, considered Bunche a lifelong friend.[9]

Table 1. Capital configuration of ONUC executives

Family’s economic capital

Family’s educational capital

Family’s social capital

Actor’s educational capital

Actor’s economic capital when working for ONUC

Ralph Bunche

Very low but ascending (grandson of freeman)

Grandfather teacher, high disposition for education

Large as well integrated in neighborhoods and church communities

Very high

UCLA

Harvard, PhD

Upper middle

Andrew Cordier

Very low

(U.S. Midwest farming family)

Low

Unknown

Very high

University of Chicago

Geneva Institute for International Studies

Upper middle

Heinz Wieschhoff

Low

(mother widower)

Middle

Unknown but probably low as mother widower

Very high

University of Frankfurt

PhD, Institute for African Studies

Upper middle

Brian Urquhart

Low and declining (divorce)

High, many teachers in family, father artist

High

Very high

Westminister School

University of Cambridge

Upper middle

F. T. Liu

Middle (divorce but continued support by father)

High, father renowned artist from wealthy Shanghai family who took F. T. Liu to France

High

High

Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques

Upper middle

Sture Linnér

Middle to high

High

High

Very High

University of Uppsala,

PhD in classics

Upper middle

Rajeshwar Dayal

High

High

High

High

University of Allahabad

University of Oxford

Upper midlle

Ian Berendsen

High (father diplomat)

High

High

Unknown

Unknown

Oscar Schachter

Middle to low (born in Brooklyn)

Unknown

Unknown

Very high

Columbia University

Upper middle class

General I. J. Rikhye

High (father military doctor in British Indian Army)

High

High

High

Upper middle class

Chakravarthi Narasimhan

High

Unknown

Unknown

High

University of Madras

University of Oxford

Upper middle class

Francis Nwokedi

Unknown

Unknown

High (appointed by British to work on independence; later adviser to General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi)

Unknown

Unknown

Mekki Abbas

Unknown

Probably high as English education

High

High

Gordon Memorial College, Khartoum

Postgraduate (Rhodes Scholarship) at University of Oxford

High (later became General-Secretary of the United Nations Council for Africa)

Robert Gardiner

Very high, trade business that allowed all seven children to study in England despite father’s early death

High, grandmother first woman principal in Gold Coast, grand-uncles Methodist ministers, one uncle surveyor of British Gold coast

High

Very high

University of Cambridge

London School of Economics

University of Oxford

Unknown

Mahmoud Khiari

Low

Unknown

Unknown

Middle (professional training, later studies, labor union activist)

Unknown

Syed Habib Ahmed

High but declining due to father’s death and partition of India

High

High

High

Univesity of Oxford

Upper middle class

Conor Cruise O’Brien

Middle to low

High

High

High

Trinity College Dublin

Unknown

Galo Plaza Lasso

Very high (father had been president of Ecuador)

Very high

Very high

Very high

University of Maryland

University of California Berkeley

Georgetown University

High

Bibiano F. Osorio-Tafall

Middle (born in small Galician town)

Unknown

Unknown

High

Professor at Colegio de México

Upper middle class

Max H. Dorsinville

Low

Very high

High (father editor of first Haitian literary review)

High

Upper middle class

Bunche’s family background was typical for the European and American men (only men held executive positions) who worked in the Congo mission: most of Hammarskjöld’s Western collaborators grew up in very modest, if not outright poor, households. The original Congo Club members in particular—Ralph Bunche, Andrew Cordier, and Heinz Wieschhoff—had very similar life stories. Wieschhoff, a native German, also came from a very modest family background. He had achieved his high-ranking UN position thanks to his considerable educational capital. Wieschhoff’s father, a post office clerk, died young, and his mother married an elderly widower in order to support her five children. Economic hardship forced Wieschhoff out of school early to become a miner in Bönen, Westphalia. After a serious mining accident, Wieschhoff returned to school and won a university scholarship that allowed him to study African culture with Germany’s founding father of modern anthropology, Leo Fröbenius. Fleeing the Nazis, who closed down the Frankfurt Institute for African Studies, Wieschhoff in 1936 settled in the United States where he became a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Now a U.S. citizen, he was called upon to participate in the creation of the United Nations Trusteeship Council after having served as an Africa expert in the U.S. Army during World War II.[10] At the Trusteeship Council he met Bunche and quickly rose in the UN system.

Cordier was born, raised, and educated in the American Midwest, where he also started his career as college teacher. He came from a poor farming family and started doing chores on his parents’ farm at the age of five. He financed his university and postgraduate studies through scholarships and his own work as a Latin and mathematics instructor. In 1944, he joined the State Department and served with the U.S. delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. He became executive assistant to the first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, in 1947. All through his UN career he remained close to his State Department colleagues. During the Cuban missile crisis Cordier played a crucial role as informal messenger between President Kennedy and UN Secretary-General U Thant.[11]

For Cordier, Wieschhoff, and Bunche, the United Nations represented a unique opportunity for a career in diplomacy and high-ranking civil service. Sociologically, none of them originated from the upper class, which traditionally provided their own country’s and international economic and political elites.[12] All three had been working in academia before joining the UN. All three continued to pursue their academic interests while working for the UN. Cordier later left the UN to become first dean of the School of International Studies at Columbia University, and later president of Columbia. Wieschhoff continued throughout his UN years to occasionally teach at the University of Pennsylvania, and for a long time Bunche played with the idea of again taking up his professorial status at Howard University after his retirement from the UN, before his ill health prevented him from doing so.

In many ways, all three represent perfectly the postwar rise of the middle class in Western democracies. The English language to this day lacks a term equivalent to the German Bürgertum or the French bourgeoisie for this rather amorphous social group of what was called in the nineteenth century “middling men”; all three terms—middle class, Bürgertum, middling men—emphasize different aspects of the emergence and phenomenon of this social group. In the context here I will use all three notions for reasons to be explained.

The characteristics of the peacebuilders are similar to the social history, composition, and values of the European middle classes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and most particularly to what is called in German Bildungs- und Beamtenbürgertum. The German language allows differentiating the Bürgertum almost endlessly beyond the simple hierarchization of upper, middle, and lower classes, by adding a qualifying noun—the Bildungsbürgertum, the Beamtenbürgertum, the Wirtschaftsbürgertum, the Industriebürgertum, and so forth. Hence, variations in the middle classes’ capital configurations, which result in varying social field structures, are more easily traceable.[13]

The conceptual advantage of the English phrase, however, is that it expresses the key idea of this particular social group being situated in the middle—that is, between the worker and proletarian class, on the one hand, and the aristocracy, landed or wealthy, on the other.[14] It expresses the relational constitution of the group as being different from the others, notably as a result of having to earn a living with their professional work, as opposed to the rent income of the upper classes or the physical labor of the working classes.[15] The notion of middle classes was and has remained a clearly comparative and distinguishing term. In England, it became collapsed with the ideas of liberalism when the House of Commons opened up to larger circles than the landed aristocracy. Through its emphasis on merit, private ownership, and hard work, liberalism became the political discourse used to justify the middle classes’ entrance into the House of Commons at the expense of the lower classes.[16]

The German and French terms, on the other hand, place the stress on how this group is united and distinguished at once by culture, values, and material reproduction modes that originated in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the political changes that transformed Europe between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries.[17] The Bürgertum is not simply the other, whether the proletariat’s or the aristocrat’s other; they are a social group of their own, yet one with internal differentiations, particularities, and variations of commonly shared cultural themes. The term Bürgertum recognizes as well the particularity of this social class as different from others, and its related term Bürgerlichkeit, which will be further discussed in the second section of this book, designates an entire set of cultural, moral, political, and economic characteristics that underlie the novelty and difference of the Bürgertum as compared to other social classes.

These distinctive evolutions of the concepts of Bürgertum in Germany, middle classes in England, and bourgeoisie in France are, according to Reinhart Koselleck, the result of the different social-political histories of these countries.[18] Historically, the Bürgertum, bourgeoisie, or middle classes dialectically built their self-description around the reasons why they should be considered different from the nobility and the poor, and why this difference should give them a greater weight in political decisions.

Given this background, the usage of middle classes in a globalized context may, at first sight, appear odd. Yet, as the following discussion of peacebuilding as a social field will show, the twentieth century saw a globalization of the middle classes’ claims of liberal normality. Academic research, as well as politics, still lacks a clear concept for designating this new, globally emerging social group—most probably because its emergence is not (yet) associated with a social relational positioning on a global level that would in any way resemble the emergence of the middle classes in nineteenth-century Europe.

The terms “global citizens,” “world citizens,” or “cosmopolitans” are commonly used but still desperately lack clear definitions and are ideologically imbued in claims of a liberal legacy—a problem discussed in more detail in chapter 5.[19] Alternatively, Leslie Sklair’s, Bastiaan van Appeldoorn’s and Naná de Graaff’s, or Kees van der Pijl’s critical notion of the “transnational classes” derives from a focus on professions and maintains a clear Marxist ring (which tends to reify social groups).[20] Postmodern notions of “vagabonds and tourists” are deliberately free from ideological references, yet throw out the baby with the bathwater when they avoid altogether the question of the social, political, and economic positioning of the emerging transnational social groups in world society and politics.[21] For the purposes of this study, I will stick with the term middle classes as it nicely encapsulates the relational logic of distinction. Furthermore, its inherent etymological lack of political meaning allows for the moment the exploration of the exact political significance of peacebuilders as global middle classes. Its manifold usage also makes it difficult to reify the middle class a priori; rather, the middle needs to be situated empirically.[22]

The first group of peacebuilders surrounding Hammarskjöld display in a most remarkable way characteristics of the European middle classes: wage income generated through professional merit and achievement; social positions built on education and expert knowledge; a high value attached to self-education and self-promotion; a declared distance from the lower classes; and a value orientation toward “statist” governance.

Bunche’s life and career are a particularly good example for the observation that social positioning is a complex and dynamic process of creating, maintaining, and reducing social distances in a given social and political space. For Bunche, this game had to be played on several levels. As a black man he had to position himself with respect to the dominant white U.S. society; as an educated Negro he had to position himself with respect to the wider black community in the still racially segregated United States of the 1930s to the 1960s. As an American black man and Africanist he had to position himself with respect to worldwide racial and colonial relations.[23] As an educated man who would work throughout his life in public service he had to position himself in a classical middle-class manner as distinct from the working class and distinct from a privilege-based upper class. Finally, as a liberal he had to distinguish himself in a world of raging ideological doctrines. These various processes of distinction came together in his self-positioning as a radically unpretentious middle-class man, assimilated into the dominant white American and liberal modern society.

Already as a student at UCLA, Bunche appeared in public with a moderate discourse on black advancement through education. His political views on overcoming racial segregation in the United States became more radical in the 1930s when he became an assistant professor at Howard University and staged a Young Turk revolt in the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the oldest and for a long time the most powerful political organization of blacks in the United States). At this time, he defended Marxist, yet integrationist, views in a losing attempt to overthrow the NAACP’s leadership and in a fierce attack on the pioneer of black consciousness, W. E. B. Du Bois.[24] Bunche’s Marxism all but disappeared at the end of the 1930s when he came into close contact with the social-democrat Gunnar Myrdal, when extreme ideologies rose to the fore during World War II, and when in 1941 he found employment as an Africanist in the newly created Office of Strategic Services, a wartime intelligence agency that was the predecessor of the CIA.

However, he remained a fervent lifelong opponent of black nationalism, whether in the United States or abroad, and much of his antagonism to the anticolonial nationalist Patrice Lumumba in the Congo stemmed from his visceral dislike of all forms of celebration of négritude. Fundamentally, Bunche would argue throughout his life that the Negro was no different, ethnically, culturally, or racially, from any other American or, for that matter, any other human being in the world.[25] After the Second World War in particular, Bunche would argue that the advancement of the American Negro had to be based not only on equal and open access to education and to the country’s political and economic spheres, but also on each individual’s own efforts, hard work, and sense of achievement. In a strictly liberal train of thought, Bunche considered civil rights as an indispensable yet sufficient condition to solve the race problem—a turnaround from earlier, much more radical positions that distanced him even further from the black political leadership of the time. Du Bois’s scathing comment that “Ralph Bunche is getting to be a white folks’ nigger’’ is just one telling example of this estrangement.[26]

A loyal civil servant of the U.S. State Department, Bunche participated in the founding conferences of the United Nations as an Africa expert. Ever since the war, he had pursued in his rare public speeches a discourse of defending democracy and advocating social engineering. Notwithstanding his own prewar observations of the greater racial intermingling in Paris and London, Bunche developed a patriotic discourse of the superiority of American democracy over continental democracies because of the U.S.’s lack of colonies. His fervent attacks on colonialism and his steady pleas for a mandate system eventually earned him his post as chair of the Trusteeship Council, his ticket to the newly founded UN, where he would remain until his death in 1971.

Bunche’s trajectory was largely determined by his huge capacity for work but also by his ardent ambition to gain positions in society, which he thought hard work would earn him. His rejection of black nationalism was entirely consistent with his self-conscious rise into leading positions within the civil service and politics where he made occasional appearances in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. For Bunche, having been poor or having been born black were not particular reasons to be fundamentally different; they were simply obstacles to overcome in order to be “normal”—in order to live, earn an income, and work the same as any white, middle-class American.[27]

Brian Urquhart chose well the title of the biography he wrote about his former boss—Ralph Bunche: An American Life. As much as Hammarskjöld or Bunche himself might have pleaded national neutrality in the UN and particularly during the Congo crisis, Bunche is remembered today as a hero of the postwar American middle-class dream.[28]

Networks and Social Capital

Social capital, understood as the wealth of private and professional connections a person can mobilize, is particularly important for the professional trajectory of individuals, as recruitment into missions was and, as will be shown below, still is highly dependent on the good will of the Secretary-General, on the one hand, and the involved states, on the other hand. No one is appointed a special representative or any other professional position in a UN mission on his or her professional merits alone. The candidate also needs to have sufficient credibility and trust from all involved actors. Nationality can, again, play a role here in the sense that candidates from neutral or noninvolved states are naturally considered more trustworthy. At the same time, certain missions and positions also represent national preserves. For instance, the under-secretary-general for political affairs had been throughout the Cold War a Soviet diplomat; the position had been, indeed, created by Hammarskjöld for the express purpose of allowing the Soviet Union to hold a key position in the Secretariat General.

Again, the Congo mission is a good starting point for understanding the closely knit, yet hierarchically differentiated, network structures of the peacebuilding field, as figure 1 shows. In terms of social capital, it is important to emphasize that all those who were appointed to senior positions subsequent to Khrushchev’s September attacks had already been working for the UN either as full-time or occasionally seconded staff from other countries. Most, if not all, were personally known to Hammarskjöld, and later to his successor, U Thant. In order to calm Soviet indignation, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru suggested a couple of candidates to Hammarskjöld in October 1960.[29] He was supported in this initiative by Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. One of the people recommended was Rajeshwar Dayal, with whom Hammarskjöld had had friendly relations since his own arrival at the UN in 1954 when Dayal was a member of India’s permanent mission to the UN.[30]

Fig. 1. Network analysis of the Congo mission

Legend: The figure shows a network representation of the first peacebuilding mission in the Congo with a number of central personalities: the UN Secretary-General and senior UN officials, the heads of mission and their closest collaborators, and politicians (Mongi Slim, Jawaharlal Nehru) involved in their selection (nodes). The links represent the information flow (who informed whom). The figure clearly shows Dag Hammarskjöld’s central position as well as the centrality of Ralph Bunche and Brian Urquhart. It also shows peripheral networks, for example, between Max Dorsinville, Bibiano Osario-Tafall, and Galo Plaza Lasso, who worked together again in Cyprus.

The head of the Tunisian permanent mission to the UN and later foreign minister of Tunisia, Mongi Slim, had also been instrumental in making staffing proposals that strengthened the nonaligned contingent of the UN in the Congo. In the tense atmosphere of mutual suspicion and accusations, the Secretary-General, too, was careful to appoint only staff of whose loyalty he could be reassured. If not based on his own experience with loyal service, he relied on references he trusted. Slim had been working with Hammarskjöld since 1957 when he was part of the special commission set up by the Secretary-General to investigate the 1956 uprising against the Soviets in Hungary.[31]

In some cases Hammarskjöld’s references could be as extraordinary as a book he liked. Conor Cruise O’Brien reports having been recruited as special representative to Elisabethville in the Congo because Hammarskjöld had been an enthusiastic reader of his analysis of Catholic writers, Maria Cross.[32] However, Hammarskjöld might also have been impressed by O’Brien’s record as head of the Irish permanent mission to the UN.

Although new to the Congo mission, very few staffers were, in fact, new to the UN. Sture Linnér, Hammarskjöld’s classmate and his brother’s business partner, was a notable exception to this rule. Indeed, many of the later Congo staff had worked with and under Bunche in the trusteeship council. Rajeshwar Dayal and Galo Plaza Lasso had formed with Hammarskjöld the directorship of the UN observation mission in Lebanon. Later on, too, the staff from the Congo mission came together in various other contexts to form new teams. Bibiano Osorio-Tafall and Max Dorsinville would work together again in the UN mission in Cyprus (UNFICYP). Urquhart, F. T. Liu, General Indar Jit Rikhye, and Robert Gardiner would continue to work in various functions for Bunche, who became under-secretary-general for special political affairs from 1961 until his death ten years later.

Hammarskjöld thus initiated a practice in the UN of appointing his own cabinet, which gave the appearance of reflecting the political and geographical diversity of the UN, yet which was, in reality, based on a close-knit network. At a minimum, personal acquaintance and ties ensured that staff would remain loyal to the Secretariat. In times of high pressure on the Secretariat, when missions were disputed (as was the case in 1960s), the mission could only be upheld through this network.[33]

Hammarskjöld was the driver of peacekeeping and peacebuilding, so it is necessary to quickly analyze his special status, which was due not only to his thinking and initiatives (which will be explored in more detail in chapter 5) but also to his outstanding economic, educational, and social capital. Every subsequent Secretary-General (but most particularly Annan) referred to this overwhelming figure as an inspiration and as a guide for the UN’s peace politics. The veneration accorded to Hammarskjöld is well documented in Urquhart’s and, more recently, Manuel Fröhlich’s biographies.[34] Hammarskjöld’s persona had shaped this particular network and in a much larger sense the field of peacebuilding in a much more profound way than simply being the chief of the UN administration. He was also the “patrician” of this first small group of peacebuilders and an example of what I will discuss below as the first tier of the peacebuilding field.

Hammarskjöld was born into a family of civil servants and high-ranking politicians. His father had been prime minister of Sweden and governor of Uppsala. The king of Sweden gave the family the name Hammarskjöld, which means “hammer and shield” in Swedish, in the nineteenth century for their loyal service. Dag Hammarskjöld’s two brothers became a minister and a successful businessman, and when Hammarskjöld was invited to become Secretary-General of the United Nations he had already had a long career as a senior civil servant and minister in Sweden (he was minister of finance when appointed). Contrary to most other members of the Congo mission, Hammarskjöld held much higher economic and social capital, thanks to his family origins.

A Multitier Social Network Structure

Overall, the first Congo mission reflects a multitier structure, with the individual with the highest concentration of economic, educational, and social capital—Hammarskjöld—at the top, followed by a very small and closed circle of senior officials—Bunche, Cordier, Wieschhoff, and on the brink, Urquhart—which rests on a further circle of senior administrators (e.g., Liu or Osorio-Tafall). Below them is a large pool of professionals who also circulate in horizontal networks.

The Top Tier of Special Representatives

This kind of multitier structure of the peacebuilding field would be reproduced in later missions and is clearly visible in today’s UN and peacebuilding organizations. The Secretary-General and his special representatives remain in a class of their own, while civilian staff in UN missions, and later on in other peacebuilding organizations and institutions, circulate rather independently from this top tier and from each other. The networking structure of UN missions and the political bargaining around key positions such as special representatives have established a system in which high-level executives circulate in horizontal networks and vertical access from lower ranks within the UN or from within the larger peacebuilding field is very limited.

The number of special representatives of the Secretary-General of the United Nations has sharply increased since the 1980s. Yet the group of individuals who act as special representatives remains rather small, and many group members serve as head of mission or special representative in several missions. As in a large game of musical chairs, they move from one mission to the other. The more the mission is in the (mostly Western) public eye, and the more prestigious it is, the smaller the group of potential candidates for the post of head of mission and special representative of the Secretary-General.[35]

Figure 2 and table 2 show the carousel of a selection of special representatives.[36] They only show the current special representative’s former function, but they do indicate how positions rotate among a selected few. Very few special representatives have come out of the UN career path. The common entrance to the special representative track is a national political, civil service, or diplomatic career. A large number of those listed have occupied political offices in their home country; some have even been heads of state or of government who find new employment after losing an election or are otherwise removed from power. Current examples include Nikolay Mladenov of Bulgaria, who is at the time of this writing special representative for Iraq and was formerly foreign minister of Bulgaria (2010–13). The conversion of the former president of East Timor, José Ramos-Horta, leader of the resistance movement in the 1980s and 1990s and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, into head of the UN mission in Guinea-Bissau after losing the election of 2012 exemplifies this trajectory.

Many special representatives previously have been permanent representatives of their home states at the UN. Many switch back and forth between national politics or civil service and senior postings in the UN. Bert Koenders’s career is a good example: the Dutch minister of foreign affairs (at the time of this writing) was, until October 2014, head of mission of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), which was established in 2013. Before that, Koenders headed the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire after having been minister for cooperation and a member of the Dutch parliament where he sat on the Defense Committee. In this function he participated in the parliamentary hearings on the role of the Dutch UNPROFOR battalion in the events in Srebrenica in 1995 and also served on other committees and commissions dealing with peacekeeping, postconflict reconstruction, and foreign affairs and defense. He had studied political science at the Free University of Amsterdam and earned a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Since then his career has developed in the politico-diplomatic circles of the Netherlands; in European institutions including the NATO parliamentary assembly; and in high-ranking UN positions. Koenders moves in the network of domestic politics and senior positions in the UN, not in the network of international agencies and the civil servant circuit that Hammarskjöld had argued for in his advocacy of the international civil servant.[37]

Table 2. Special Representatives (as of December 2014)

Mission

Current head of mission/Special representative (as of December 2014)

Previous positions of head of mission^1

Predecessors at current mission

MONUSCO (Congo)

Martin Kobler (Germany)

UNAMI, 2011–12

UNAMA (Deputy Special Representative), 2009–11

Roger Meece (USA), 2011–12

Alan Doss (UK), 2007–10

William Lacy Swing (USA), 2003–7

Amos Namanga Ngongi (Cameroon), 2001–2

Kamel Morjane (Tunisia), 1999–2000

MINUSMA (Mali)

Albert Gerard (Bert) Koenders (Netherlands)

UNOCI, 2011–12

n.a.

UNSOA (Somalia)

Augustine P. Mahiga (Tanzania)

Tanzania’s permanent representative at UN

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah (Mauritania), 2007–9

Winston A. Tubman (Liberia), 2002–6

UNAMID (Darfur), joint African Union-UN misison

Abiodun Oluremi Bashua (Nigeria)

Head of Office of Joint Support and Coordination Mechanism of UNAMID

Mohamed Ibn Chambas (Ghana), 2012–13

Ibrahim Gambari (Nigeria), 2010–11

Rodolphe Adada (Congo-Brazzaville), 2009

Jan Eliasson (Sweden), 2007–8

UNMISS (South Sudan)

Ellen Margrethe Løj (Denmark)

UNMIL, 2008–12

Hilde Frafjord Johnson (Norway), 2011–13

MINUSTAH (Haiti)

Sandra Honoré (Trinidad and Tobago)

Ambassador, Chief of Staff of Secretary General of OAS, 2000–2005

Mario Fernandez Amunategui (Chile), 2012–13

Edmond Mulet (Guatemala), 2011–12

Hedi Annabi (Tunisia), 2007–10

Juan Gabriel Valdés (Chile), 2004–6

UNOCI (Cote d’Ivoire)

Aïchatou Mindaoudou (Niger)

Deputy Joint Special Representative (Political) and Acting Head for the African Union–United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID), 2012–13

Albert Gerard (Bert) Koenders, 2011–12

UNMIL (Liberia)

Karin Lindgren (Sweden)

Representative of the Secretary-General to Nepal, 2011–12

Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Burundi and Head of the United Nations Mission in Burundi (BNUB)

Ellen Margrethe Løj (Denmark), 2009–11

Alan Doss (UK), 2005–7

Jacques P. Klein (USA), 2003–5

MINUSCA (BINUCA) (Central African Republic)

Babacar Gaye (Senegal)

Assistant Secretary General and Military Adviser for Peacekeeping Operations

Margaret Vogt (Nigeria), 2011–13

UNAMA (Afghanistan)

Jan Kubiš (Slovakia)

Foreign Minister of Slovakia, 2006–9

Staffan de Mistura (Italy/Sweden), 2009–11

Kai Eide (Norway), 2007–8

Tom Koenigs (Germany), 2006

Jean Arnault (France), 2004–5

Lakhdar Brahimi (Algeria), 2002–3

UNAMI (Iraq)

Nikolay Mladenov (Bulgaria)

Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2010–13

Martin Kobler (Germany), 2011–12

Ad Melkert (Netherlands), 2009–11

Staffan de Mistura (Sweden), 2007–8

Lakhdar Brahimi (Algeria), 2004

Sergio Vieira de Mello (Brazil), 2003

UNFICYP (Cyprus)

Espen Barth Eide (Norway)

Foreign Minister, 2013–14

Lisa M. Buttenheim (USA), 2011–14

Tayé-Brook Zerihoun (Ethopia), 2008–10

Alexander Downer (Australia) (special envoy), 2010–14

Elisabeth Spehar (Canada), 2008

Michael Møller (Denmark), 2006–8

Zbigniew Włosowicz (Poland), 2004–5

Alvaro de Soto (Peru), 2001–6 (special adviser)

James Holger (Chile), 1999–2000

Dame Ann Hercus (New Zealand), 2000

Diego Cordovez (Ecuador), 1997–98 (special adviser)

Han Sung-Joo (Korea), 1996–98

Gustave Feissel (USA), 1994–96

Joe Clark (Canada), 1993–96

Oscar Camilión (Argentina), 1988–93

James Holger (Chile), 1984–88

Hugo Gobbi (Argentina), 1980–84

Reynaldo Galindo Pohl (El Salvador), 1978–80

Remy George (Switzerland), 1977–78

Javier Pérez de Cuellar (Peru), 1975–77

Luis Weckmann-Muñoz (Mexico), 1974–75

Bibiano Osorio-Tafall (Spain), 1967–74

Pier P. Spinelli (Italy), 1967

Carlos Bernardes (Brazil), 1965–67

Galo Plaza Lasso (Ecuador), 1965

Sakari Tuomioja (Finland), 1964

MINURSO (Western Sahara)

Kim Bolduc (Canada)

United Nations Resident Coordinator and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative in Panama, 2010–14

Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General/Humanitarian Coordinator for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), 2010

Wolfgang Weisbrod-Weber (Germany), 2012–14

Julian Harston (Kenya), 2009–11

UNMIK (Kosovo)

Farid Zarif (Afghanistan)

Director of the Europe and Latin America Division at DPKO

Lamberto Zannier (Italy), 2009–11

Joachim Rücker (Germany), 2007–8

Maarti Ahtissari (Finland) (special envoy), 2008

Søren Jessen-Petersen (Denmark), 2006

Harri Hermanni Holkeri (Finland), 2004–5

Kai Eide (Norway) (special envoy), 2005

Michael Steiner (Germany), 2003

Hans Haekerup (Denmark), 2001–2

Bernard Kouchner (France), 1999–2000

Sergio Vieira de Mello (Brazil) (special representative), 1994–99

UNSMIL (Libya)

Bernardino Léon (Spain)

European Union Special Representative for Libya and European Union Special Representative for the Southern Mediterranean, 2011–14

Tarek Mitri (Lebanon), 2012–14

BNUB (Burundi)

Parfait Onanga-Anyanga (Gabon)

Director of the Office of the Deputy Secretary General, 2007–12

Karin Lindgren (Sweden), 2011–12

Charles Petrie (UK), 2010

Youssef Mahmoud (Tunisia), 2007–10

UNIOGBIS (Guinea-Bissau)

José Ramos-Horta (Timor Leste)

President of Timor Leste, 2007–12

n.a.

UNSCOL (Lebanon, political mission)

Derek Plumbly (UK)

UK’s Ambassador to Egypt, 2003–7

Michael Williams (UK), 2009–11

1Generally, only the last former function is mentioned except in cases where the person has had several successive UN functions in the peacebuilding area that do not show in the third column.

Coming from an international organization, the most likely springboards into a special representative role are the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), or UNHCR. Conversely, former special representatives often become senior executives in international development or humanitarian organizations. For example, William Lacy Swing, a former special representative for Western Sahara and for the Congo, is now director general of the International Organization for Migration. Another pathway exists between other international organizations and the UN, most notably the OSCE, the African Union, or the Organization of American States. Senior executives of these regional organizations may be appointed special representatives, most commonly in hybrid missions; or, vice versa, they move from their field mission to regional organizations. Lamberto Zannier, for instance, became secretary-general of the OSCE after having been special representative for UNMIK.

Many also move on to the UN headquarters in New York or its regional offices (Geneva, Nairobi, and so forth). For example, the following have all held senior positions in field missions: Jan Eliasson, at the time of writing deputy secretary-general; Zainab Hawa Bangura, special representative on sexual violence in conflict; Ameerah Haq, under-secretary-general for field support; Leila Zerrougui, special representative for children in armed conflict; and Sahle-Work Zewde, director-general of the United Nations Office in Nairobi.

It is this separation from the UN and international agency career path that distinguishes the position of the high representative from the second tier of senior officials. It is also a strong indicator of the highly politicized role of the special representative. As the face of the mission, they have a different diplomatic value. Their nationality is more easily subject to dispute. For states, the capacity to negotiate over the position of the special representative shows the degree of their influence over UN politics. Consequently, the posts of the high representatives, of heads of mission, and of under-secretary-generals are much more prone than other positions to become national fiefdoms. The more visible the post, the higher the salience of the occupant’s geographic provenance.[38] As Paul Novosad and Eric Werker have pointedly observed in their study of UN senior officials, the very top positions tend to be occupied by people from a very limited number of states, and some countries, including China and Russia, have historically been consistently and significantly underrepresented.[39] Other countries that are more actively engaged in the UN have, on the other hand, effectively locked down specific positions. Since the mid-1990s, for instance, the position of the under-secretary-general for peacekeeping has been continuously held by a Frenchman, whereas the position of chef de cabinet (chief of staff) has remained occupied since Chakravarthi Narasimhan’s time by a representative of a UN member from the global South.

Fig. 2. UN missions network structure

Legend: The graph shows the network structure of UN missions (selected missions as of fall 2014). Missions are connected to each other through the person of their head of mission. The network centers around the UN Secretariat General and is relatively dense around missions that are important to Security Council members and are very much in the public eye, for example, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria. Heads of mission move from one high-profile mission to the next or between the UN Secretary-General and other missions. Missions at the periphery are personally less connected to New York as they are either regionally embedded, for example, Kosovo, or of lesser importance to UN member states, the Security Council, and public opinion in powerful states, for example, Central Africa. Heads of mission in these missions tend to move in and out of the field but not to UN headquarters in New York.

With respect to their sociological outlook, the special representatives reproduce the pattern established early on with the first mission in the Congo. The heads of mission or special representatives from Western states are commonly from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds, while those from the global South clearly come from wealthy and upper-class backgrounds. For example, Winston A. Tubman, the special representative to Somalia from 2002 to 2007, is the nephew of Liberia’s longest-serving president, William Tubman.[40] Exceptions exist, but they remain exceptions—for example, Ismat Kittani, the former Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Somalia and chef de cabinet under Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, is said to have seen electrical light for the first time only at the age of twelve.[41]

The key to understanding these differences in economic family background lies in access to higher education. Education in the Northern Hemisphere and if possible in a global top-ten institution like Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard remains the minimal requirement for securing a leading UN position. Hence, almost all top-tier senior officials have studied in one of the world’s top universities. Again, exceptions exist and most particularly those senior officials who are seconded by regional organizations are more often locally educated. But, generally speaking, a top-ten university diploma remains an entry ticket to this upper circle of senior officials. Yet, in order to study in such an institution, a person from a global South country must have access to greater financial capital than a person from Europe or North America (or Japan for that matter). This starts with the family’s ability to provide for an English-language education good enough to prepare the student for university entrance exams. Without scholarships, families also have to provide for much higher tuition fees, accommodation, and travel costs for their children who study abroad. Consequently, graduates from the global South are commonly from wealthier families than their OECD counterparts. The few special representatives who, like Kittani, originate from poor backgrounds studied with scholarships in universities in the Northern Hemisphere (just like Urquhart or Bunche).

In terms of educational capital and culture it is obvious that all senior officials have benefited from the same type of higher education, which should become a commonly shared marker not only with respect to the knowledge and epistemology acquired but also in the so-called soft skills of researching information, writing reports, and communicating, as well as more general views of what is worthy to be known, understood, and processed within the realm of their jobs. However, remarkably, the humanities and classics studies that dominated the educational background of senior staff in the 1960s have given way to the social sciences—particularly economics and law, but also political science. Natural sciences are, nevertheless, still not represented.

The group of senior officials does, indeed, represent a specific social class. Their careers and social backgrounds are rather similar, and most notably their socialization path is most similar with a shared educational background and a shared career experience. This results, unsurprisingly, in quite close networks, which allow Koenders and others to move between national politics and the UN.

Nationality does play a role, but more as a political bargaining chip. Even seconded senior officials will not, in all cases, act as spokesperson for their home country or in the explicit interest of this country; however, as Novosad and Werker also conclude from their study, it is likely that their worldviews, perceptions, ideational frames, and policy choices are much closer to those of people who share their domestic politics background than to those of the local population or even a broader international agency arena.[42] Yet, it also very likely that the commonly shared educational background, the tightness of the professional network, and the dominance of the humanist globalization discourse (which will be discussed in more detail in later chapters) also lead to a high degree of ideological affinity. This does not include serious conflict over practicalities or execution. Yet it is unlikely that anyone in a senior position in the peacebuilding field will largely depart from a broadly defined doxa (to be discussed in the second section of this book).

The International Agency Network

Below and next to the circuit of the special representatives is the career track of high senior officials of the rank of directors of specific services or project managers. Here, much greater mobility between positions and between agencies can be observed. These positions are less visible than the head of mission or special representative posts; they allow for greater flexibility; and they are seldom the object of strenuous bargaining between the Secretariat General and involved states. Consequently, nationality plays a less important role and career paths resemble more the conventional senior executive manager model than do those of the special representatives—although here, too, the range of countries from which peacebuilders originate is limited. Large countries like Russia and China are, nevertheless, frequently underrepresented, as are most countries of the global South.

Novosad and Werker find in their study that citizens from Western countries held over 45 percent of the senior positions in the UN Secretariat General in 2007. This confirms the finding of the great weight of nationals from high-income countries in the field of peacebuilding, most notably in the UN. The 2012 survey for this book, which captured not only UN but also other peacebuilding staff, included all salary categories modeled on the salary scale of the UN, from technical and administrative staff to professionals and directors, but respondents came from only fifty-three countries. Respondents from the salary range, which required at least a basic university-level degree, came from an ever more restricted range of countries—specifically, forty-two countries.

Even though not representative per se, this number indicates that only a small number of all UN member states provide professionals with university degrees to the peacebuilding field.[43] Of those, high-income countries are again disproportionately represented. In this sample, more than seventy of the university graduate professionals come from industrialized high-income countries and none come from low-income countries.[44] Importantly, the family origin of most respondents reflected the huge disproportion between the geographic representation in peacebuilding and in the world. While more than two-thirds of the respondents’ parents were born in Europe or North America, only some 10 percent of the peacebuilders’ parents were born in Asia, the most populated continent. South America was even less represented in this sample. Again, it has to be kept in mind that this sample is not stochastically representative; yet these figures match up well with the findings of Novosad and Werker on the preponderance of a small number of nations.

Again, the tacit requirement of a university degree from a top university of a Northern industrialized high-income country seems to be a significant marker for peacebuilders in the top range. The prosopographic analysis shows that almost 94 percent of the staff surveyed earned their postgraduate degree from a university in an industrialized, high-income country.[45] Given that more than 60 percent (and more than 80 percent of the professional) of respondents have a postgraduate degree, this means that the passage through an educational institution in an industrialized high-income country is almost obligatory. Within this category of postgraduates, about a third graduated from fifteen elite universities: the London School of Economics, Columbia University, the University of Oxford, New York University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Tufts University, King’s College London, School of Oriental and Asian Studies, George Washington University, Princeton University, Georgetown University, the Graduate Institute of Geneva, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (better known as Sciences Po), and the University of Cambridge.

University education is furthermore hereditary, at least in both survey waves (2008 and 2012) of this book: the large majority of peacebuilders come from families where one if not both parents graduated from a university. About 60 percent of the respondents’ fathers graduated from university; however, only about 40 percent of their mothers were graduates. The most common household constellation was a father who was/is an engineer, teacher, or working in a liberal profession (accountant, lawyer, doctor, and so forth) and a mother who was/is a housewife, nurse, or school teacher. Roughly 10 percent of the survey subjects’ parents had no degree at all; an even lower percentage of respondents indicated that their parents had worked/work in low-skilled occupations.

There also seems to be a relationship between the parents’ education and the peacebuilders’ current position, although the sample is too small to establish valid correlations. However, in the group of professionals above P2 pay level, the percentage of fathers who graduated from a university is higher and the percentage of fathers who have no degree drops below 10.

Fig. 3. Highest university degree

The effect is even stronger in the case of the mothers’ education. If only the group of professionals is considered, the percentage of mothers with at least a high school degree rises from roughly 50 percent to over 60 percent. The family constellation also changes markedly in the smaller sample of only professionals: mothers work more, for the category of housewives is less represented, and most work as nurses or teachers. In the range of fathers’ occupations, business and management become much more prominent than engineering or teaching. Consequently, one can conclude that this group of peacebuilders comes predominantly from families that are economically at ease if not overly wealthy. These people grew up in households where education was/is cherished and where mothers often dedicated their time to the family and, most probably, to their children’s education in and outside of school.

The implications of this short sociological survey are multifold as they allow inferences on social class and social mobility. Bourdieu’s own work, notably his study on schooling and educational achievement with Jean-Claude Passeron,[46] has elaborated how closely related education choices are with socioeconomic background and social class origins.[47] Analyzing the achievements of French school pupils, notably in their final exams and university entrance exams, the two sociologists found a close relationship between the parents’ income and education and their children’s success in school. They notably elaborated that the rigid examination system of French schools did not promote equality, but, on the contrary, allowed children with substantial cultural and social capital inherited from their families to excel while discriminating against children who did not have access to high levels of cultural capital and income (expressed, for instance, in the number of books in the home or the frequency of theater or museum visits).[48] Subsequent studies have shown that, indeed, there is a strong link between achievement and cultural capital as well as family support.[49] Children who achieve well in school and who obtain high-paying jobs later on are more likely to be from families with a higher socioeconomic status that highly value education and, additionally, transmit specific cultural capital. This does not mean that socioeconomic status per se is a predictor of educational success (and some studies indicate that it is not), yet the family background and notably a “scholarly culture”—that is, the promotion of curiosity, reading books, and solving problems—strongly influence educational success, independently from national educational cultures, grade in school, or the pedagogic methods employed in schools.[50]

In the case of peacebuilders, their (minimum) bilingualism is also a strong indicator for a relatively wealthy family background in which education is highly important. All survey respondents say that English is the language they use the most in their daily lives; 67 percent indicate that this is the language they speak most often. However, only some 19 percent of the sample are nationals of English-speaking countries. Of course, the dominance of English as a lingua franca is not surprising in international organizations. Yet this points to the high frequency of bilingualism, or even multilingualism. As a common language, English is followed by French (13 percent) and other European languages (German, Spanish, Russian, and so forth). In total, more than 95 percent of the most common languages peacebuilders used in daily life are European languages.

However, when asked which languages apart from English they speak, survey respondents mention more than forty-five additional languages, including numerous African languages (e.g., Swahili, Yoruba, Fula, and Wolof) and languages of mission sites (e.g., Albanian, Tetun, and Tadjik). This means that the large majority of peacebuilders in this survey have not only learned English (or French) as a second language, they have also, most frequently, learned a third or even fourth language, if from a non-English speaking country, or have made the effort to become immersed in the local language, or both.

Yet language education in schools is very uneven across the world. In all countries, second or third language acquisition is highly dependent on the schooling system, on national language policies, and on the country’s position in the world. While smaller countries and former colonies often actively and successfully promote multilingualism, second language acquisition in U.S. or U.K. schools is a clear marker of elite education as very few public school pupils learn foreign languages to a high standard.[51] European states also actively promote the acquisition of a second language, usually English, and further languages, usually other European languages such as French, German, Spanish, Russian, or, most recently, languages of states that are considered important for world politics or the world economy, such as Mandarin Chinese or Arabic. Languages of former colonies or of smaller states are rarely or not at all taught in schools in bigger states or former colonial states (while English is the second official language of India, there is not one single state school in England teaching Hindi). However, former colonies are often the states in which peacebuilding interventions take place. Consequently, you’re much more likely to find English or French speakers among the local staff than to find, for instance, a Fula-speaking foreign peacebuilder.

In developing countries, learning English (and to a lesser extent French) at a level that allows postgraduate studies in an Anglophone (or Francophone) university (as most peacebuilders have completed) requires access to high-quality schools. In countries with low literacy and schooling rates, such institutions are commonly available only in major cities, usually in the capital city, and only with sufficient family support. In some countries quality education is not available at all, and affluent parents send their children to boarding schools abroad. This, too, explains why peacebuilders from developing countries with the same educational capital and job positioning are often from families with higher economic capital than their colleagues from industrialized countries.

For the peacebuilding field this indicates that the middle-class, high educational culture environment to which Bunche and his like aspired in their own lives and that of their children[52] has become the standard culture of the field. Only a very small minority of the peacebuilders in the sample for this book come from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, and even in these cases it is likely that the respondents’ families strongly emphasized school success and adopted education as their own value.[53]

The middle-class background of peacebuilders finds further expression in their leisure behavior as well as their travels. Peacebuilders’ leisure activities are first of all characterized as travel light, that is, they require little equipment and are practiced quite universally (soccer, jogging, yoga). Asked how they spend their spare time, the respondents answered overwhelmingly that they read newspapers, novels, and journals, listen to music, and . . . travel. Many peacebuilders regularly play sports, yet, here, too, they prefer sports that don’t require travel, that can be practiced alone, and that require little equipment (running, swimming, yoga). Expensive sports such as skiing and scuba diving are also on the list, as are other high-culture activities such as going to the movies or visiting museums. Typically, popular culture activities, most notably crafts, collecting, or other do-it-yourself endeavors, are entirely absent.

The internationality of the peacebuilders’ lives, which is manifest even before they enter the field, is probably the most distinctive feature of this social group. Apart from the multilingualism discussed above, it is also worth mentioning that a large group are married to or live with partners of a different nationality.[54] Almost all spent time abroad before working in the peacebuilding field, either during their studies or in the time between their studies and their first job. Many survey respondents said that being part of an international community, and being able to travel and discover foreign countries and people, were some of their prime motivations to work in the peacebuilding field.

The Third Tier: Technical and Administrative Staff, or the Locals

This interest in travel is ideally shared by the third tier of peacebuilding staff, the technical and administrative staff of field missions. Yet, practically, this staff is the least likely to have traveled. Technical and administrative staffers are commonly recruited locally, and despite their qualities and qualifications are much less mobile than professional staff. These job categories comprise financial and accounting services, logistics and warehouse management, maintenance, building, repair, and basic information services, as well as clerical jobs. These job categories are the least specialized and specific to a peacebuilding mission; they are therefore more likely to be nationally protected job categories, which makes it difficult to justify visa applications to bring in foreign nationals. Additionally, the wage difference between countries is likely to be very large in these job categories, which makes it attractive for organizations to recruit locally rather than to expatriate staff. Consequently, visa restrictions and limited career opportunities reduce enormously the mobility of this category of staff. Given the high importance of university degrees, local staff are also less competitive in applying for more highly valued and paid jobs when their degrees are from local universities or their professions do not require a degree at all. Hence, this category of staff is likely to move in horizontal networks that are geographically limited. They might move geographically in limited zones, for example, from one African conflict zone to another, but they are very unlikely to move from the mission grounds to headquarters, or to move into Northern-based organizations.

The staffers in this group tend to see themselves differently from the professional staff of the second tier. In interviews, members of this group spoke about their feeling of being set apart and being different; some even felt that their employer discriminated against them by emphasizing specific types of educational degrees, knowledge, and skills that ignored the technical staff’s abilities. Commonly these staff members saw themselves as more deeply rooted in the host society and more attuned to the problems on the ground. They consider localism as a resource to which the international staffers have no access, or, at least, not the same access they have. Interviewees employed outside their home country expressed this feeling of being more connected to the “real world” by sharing experiences of relative poverty and deprivation, or origins in a Third World country.

Interviewees in this category who did manage the jump from the local to the international level, for example, by working in headquarters in New York, Geneva, or other central cities of the development and aid world, emphasized the cost of this move. All interviewed had gained additional qualifications in order to obtain some professional expertise that would allow them to overcome visa restrictions. Once successfully moved to a high-income country, many sought to settle by bringing in their families, and employment with the international agency became twice as existential—their own stay not only depended on their continued employment but also that of their families. They followed a common pattern of high-skilled migration as they were subject to the same constraints as other high-skilled migrants. The fact that they were working for international organizations or nongovernmental organizations had far less impact on their geographical and professional mobility than it had on the first and second tier, in large part due to their lack of educational capital.

Conclusion

The Congo mission set out a specific sociological profile of the peacebuilder as Bildungsbürger or Beamtenbürger, even though for first-generation peacebuilders such as Bunche or Urquhart this social position had to be gained through scholarships and educational success. By now, this profile has become the standard in the peacebuilding field. Roughly speaking, most peacebuilders at the professional level come from middle-income and upper-income families and have enjoyed a very high level of education. They are in every aspect cosmopolitan: they are polyglots, have frequently traveled, and are highly educated, independent, and mobile in their leisure activities and social networks.

The field is marked by an internal hierarchy of three horizontal professional network systems that allow little passage between them. At the top, the high elite of special representatives and heads of mission consists of a small circle of senior officials from international organizations, national diplomatic services, or national politics. This group has, generally speaking and with some exceptions, higher economic and educational capital than the second tier, but, more important, they also have different social capital. Their social capital draws on connections to other senior position holders in the UN, in international organizations, and in national politics—and it is these connections that allow them to be considered for such high-ranking positions in the first place. Opportunities for newcomers in this top tier are scarce. Rather, positions rotate through a set of persons who meet the highly selective criteria of the politicized bargaining in the global governance system.

In the second tier, rotation in the job is also highly dependent on networks, as will be discussed in chapter 4. The group of peacebuilders in this tier is also highly homogenous in terms of sociological characteristics, particularly family backgrounds. Similar to those in the top-tier group, they can safely be called “cosmopolitan” as they are polyglots, widely traveled, and highly educated. Their mobility and their education in a select number of universities in industrialized OECD countries distinguishes this group from the third tier of technical and administrative support staff. This group, although equally multilingual, is less mobile and more locally rooted. They see themselves as distinct from the professionals.

The professional and income stratification of the peacebuilding field reflects similar developments in labor markets in Western liberal market economies over the past thirty years. Large corporations have developed new models of management in which the decentralizing and delayering of management structures has led to more independent horizontal career paths with fewer vertical trajectories.[55] This has been accompanied by rising job insecurity and increased flexibility through the use of contract labor, developments also observed in the peacebuilding field with its high employment fragmentation. Tight networks can be seen as a response to growing job insecurity and the increasing diversity of the labor market, which reduces visibility for recruitment (hence, a greater reliance on known values like elite university education) and increases the mutual dependence of employees (hence, greater opportunity hoarding). This in turn reduces opportunities for vertical career trajectories and reinforces the layered structure of the peacebuilding field.

This hierarchical structure and its sociological characteristics point to the boundaries of the field. The key to any position in the peacebuilding field is access to higher education and, here, to top institutions. Yet the acquisition of the educational capital that allows such studies is not equally distributed. On the contrary, it is highly dependent on preexisting social structures and economic production structures. The constitution of the core of the peacebuilding field closely follows the evolution of societies in Western liberal democracies. While the first generation of peacebuilders represented a group of socially mobile individuals who typically achieved high-ranking positions through their educational and work merit, later generations are rather heirs of their parents’ middle-class or upper-class status, which allows them access to top-ten universities and, through them, access to jobs in the peacebuilding field.

This trajectory is similar to careers in Western liberal democracies. In-depth studies in the United Kingdom and the United States have found that social mobility hinges enormously on education and family background.[56] Not surprisingly, given the high value of education, social mobility is contingent on equal access to high-quality education.[57] Countries with high inequality in access to quality education have accordingly lower levels of social mobility, which in the case of the United States and the United Kingdom also correlates with high levels of income inequality.[58]

This configuration is mirrored in world society. Access to quality education is extremely unequal around the world, and it is almost impossible for a resident of a country in the global South to compete with residents in the global North. By all standard indicators—books and libraries per inhabitant, university rankings, school instruction in English, or simply books available in native languages—the educational offerings of countries in the global South lag tremendously behind those in advanced, industrialized high-income countries.[59] If access to top universities is already heavily restricted for lower social classes in these countries, it is entirely out of reach for lower social classes in the global South.

Chapter 4

Boundaries of the Field

The Peacebuilder, the Businessman, and the Scholar-Expert

The boundaries of a social field are fuzzy and ill-defined, as they overlap with other fields. Fields are analytical categories. What makes a field is the common focus of actors that drives their direct or indirect interaction, whether in comparative, assimilative, isomorphic, or competitive form. Chapter 2 defined peacebuilding in terms of world-political bargaining and the resources world-political actors put to work in order to define a range of activities the UN and other organizations and actors can undertake to pursue a goal called “peace”; yet the question of what is to be called peace is subject of debate and contestation. Chapter 3 defined the peacebuilding field in terms of the social commonalities of the people working and practicing in the field. This chapter will look at peacebuilding from the perspective of professional overlaps between those who, by their practice and discourse, have the job of building peace, and those same people who pursue professional careers in fields that do not primarily focus on peacebuilding.

These overlaps constitute the professional and, to some extent, social and political boundaries of the peacebuilding field. Boundaries are determined relationally and comparatively by overlapping gray zones between different social fields. Whether people or activities belong to one social field, and not to another, or whether they belong partly to this one or to another one, can be stated only in relative, not in absolute, terms; the distance to the core and the comparison to other fields is decisive. This is most obvious in military peacebuilding, where members of national armies move in or out of their national security apparatus into peacebuilding activities for determined times; however, it is also obvious from other “expertise” required of the peacebuilders. As this book focuses on civilian peacebuilding, the military field will not be further analyzed. Five other adjacent fields, however, are of central importance for delimiting this field, as the preceding chapter has already indicated: the field of international organizations; the field of governmental politics; the field of NGO activities; the field of business corporations; and the field of scholarly research, expert advice, and think-tank consultancies. These five are the main recruitment pools for peacebuilding, and they are also the areas in which peacebuilders continue to pursue their professional careers, as figure 4 shows.

Fig. 4. Other employment of civilian peacebuilding staff

The common ground where these adjacent fields overlap are the requirements of a university education and a professional focus on self-directed work based on skills such as report writing, project management, presentation, and communication skills. The particular overlaps of these fields emerge out of the network structures of the peacebuilding field. Through its specific institutional emphasis on an education in top Western universities, peacebuilding recruits from the same pool as the business world, civil services, and many political circles. Additionally, its discursive and normative insertion in world politics, notably in human rights, humanitarianism, development, and security discourses, pushes the peacebuilding field into close vicinity with think tanks, government, and nongovernmental sectors.

Peacebuilding is a constantly and highly disputed activity. It produces a continuous flow of verbal justifications and discontents that are expressed in the endless flow of reports, evaluations, memoranda, and other type of publications that assess, evaluate, legitimize, criticize, or discuss what peacebuilders are doing, how they are doing it, and with what degree of success or failure. The professional skills necessary to produce and consume this mass of writing and talking comprise the specific educational capital that peacebuilders gain in their education and polish in their work in the field or at the headquarters of their respective organizations. It is also a kind of capital that can be converted into a rather limited number of other occupations. This chapter will first discuss the common ground of peacebuilding and other such occupations. It will then take a closer look at the five overlapping fields of international organizations, governmental politics, NGO activities, business corporations, and academia. The distinctions between the peacebuilding field and these other fields, and between these fields themselves, are vague precisely because the resources necessary to sustain a career in one field can be translated into a career in another field. On the other hand, these other fields also reach out further than peacebuilding, for example, because their professional rules and methods are applied to areas other than peacebuilding, or because that part of the field that overlaps with peacebuilding is a particular spin-off of the larger field, and its compatibility with peacebuilding is due to the isomorphism of the fields. As will be discussed further below, the gray zone between the business field and peacebuilding is a case in point. Organizations and institutions in the peacebuilding field have increasingly embraced business-like models of organization and ideas of efficiency, whereas, at the same time, business corporations have gradually adopted the decentralized decision-making structures and subsidiary team-managed projectism of the NGO world.

Boundaries between the fields cannot be nailed down precisely and definitively. They are moving targets with multiple overlays; the question whether one activity, organization, or person belongs to one field or another can be answered only from a given point of view, as all interconnections are relational. In this chapter the standpoint remains the UN-organized peacebuilding field. Other fields are identified and described by their relation to UN peacebuilding.

Common Ground: Distinguished University Education

Recruitment selection criteria at the UN and other organizations do not explicitly require a degree from a top university; neither do all these institutions offer specialized courses in an area of peacebuilding. Rather, peacebuilders graduate in general courses such as political science, international relations, or law. The heavy weight carried by the leading universities mentioned in the preceding chapter has to be explained instead by their reputation, and therefore correlates with their ranking in university league tables. This confirms findings from other institutional contexts in which clear hierarchies of educational institutions inform recruiters’ choices.[1] The likelihood is higher that recruiters will refer to the university’s overall reputation rather than to the candidate’s qualities, as recruitment to many of the positions in peacebuilding is highly competitive and long-distance, which makes it necessary to preselect on paper or on an online basis before candidates can be invited for interviews or assessment talks.

The qualities looked for in candidates to positions in peacebuilding (and in international agencies more generally) are seldom technically circumscribed. Particularly in the field of peacebuilding, the professional profile is very loose and based on soft skill descriptors. The generic job profile of the UN entry level (P2) for officers in political affairs or peacekeeping, for instance, is largely articulated around soft skills such as researching, analyzing, and presenting information on countries in conflict (both in oral and written form), being a good team worker, taking responsibility for projects, staying abreast of technological developments, and being a good planner and organizer. The language with which these skills are described is the generic management jargon, hailing efficiency, autonomy, teamwork, strategic vision, communication skills, and client orientation. In terms of organization and planning, for instance, one job description tells us that a successful candidate will be someone who

develops clear goals that are consistent with agreed strategies; identifies priority activities and assignments; adjusts priorities as required; allocates appropriate amount of time and resources for completing work; forsees risks and allows for contingencies when planning; monitors and adjusts plans and actions as necessary; uses time efficiently.[2]

None of this requires either specific technical training or knowledge that could be assessed by practical means. Nothing allows a recruiter to assess a candidate’s soft skills of researching, synthesizing, writing and communicating knowledge, conducting analysis, and gathering information without testing these capabilities directly—a major problem if organizations like the UN receive several thousand applications every week. Yet it is mainly in social science degrees that such soft skills are taught. Social science skills need to be assessed differently than skills in the technical professions, where the use of technologies is commonly associated with much more formalized and often quantitative forms of reasoning and documentation. Consequently, in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects the graduate’s capability in using specific techniques, procedures, methods, or materials can be more easily monitored externally by future employers through tests and exams; hence, uncertainty over recruitment is reduced and it is less necessary to refer to the university’s preselection function in the recruitment process (although the university’s or college’s reputation also plays a major role in the assessment of how well technologies and techniques are taught).

In jobs that mainly require soft skills, however, university rankings and league tables function as preselection grids, the reflection being that “if this candidate can write essays that achieve an ‘A’ at LSE, then this candidate is certainly capable of fulfilling our criteria.” The highly competitive nature of admission to elite institutions is taken as a gauge of the candidate’s qualities, and allows, in the context of a highly diverse, decentralized, dispersed, and distant recruitment process, one common factor to be set as decisively selective. It is the university’s reputation that reduces uncertainty over the potential peacebuilder’s qualifications; hence, it is the single most important career entrance factor. This shows the full extent of the importance of the quality of educational capital. A university degree is a minimum requirement; obtaining a job, however, requires a distinguished education, and this is granted by the name of a prestigious institution.

Another way of overcoming the uncertainty of recruiting on the basis of soft skills is through personal networks and references. Here, too, the alma mater of the peacebuilders is important as a pool for making essential contacts at the UN, the OSCE, international agencies, and NGOs. It is no coincidence that half of the top universities mentioned above are located in those global cities that are central to the international agency circuit (New York, London, Geneva). Peacebuilders often return to their educational institutions to teach peacebuilding, conflict resolution, development, and other aspects of UN work. Students of these institutions thus also have significantly more access to talks, seminars, workshops, and other types of interaction with high-ranking UN or international agency officials.

This informal entry into the peacebuilding field is particularly important given the circumstances that peacebuilding is a very loosely codified and regulated beginner labor market. As the field has no clear, standardized professional boundaries, and as it is populated by a large variety of organizations, there are no standardized entry procedures, like the entrance exams to many national diplomatic services or the general UN entrance exam. In fact, the vast large majority of the peacebuilders analyzed in the prosopographic sample (N = 557) started their careers on short-term contracts, either in field missions, as UN or other volunteers (e.g., Peace Corps), as electoral observers, or as interns at headquarters. Typically, a peacebuilder will spend the first couple of years on short-term contracts of one to eighteen months on various missions around the world before obtaining a long-term or even permanent contract with one organization. This accumulation of fixed-term positions, and the hopping from mission to mission, from project to project, is probably the furthest one can get from the old civil service ideal of a permanent job from graduation to retirement.

On average, the peacebuilders of the prosopographic sample have held seven jobs in their careers; over a third have switched jobs at least five times but fewer than ten times. An impressive 19 percent have switched jobs more than ten times, and another 3 percent have switched jobs more than fifteen times. However, the data also show that contract duration is of very unequal length. Most switches happen at the beginning of the career and at the end, usually when people take up electoral observation or similar missions after retirement from their regular job; this is especially the case for personnel working in security sector reform, as these are former military or law enforcement officers who have retired early from their regular security force jobs. Figure 5 shows a simple “Fragmentation Index,” which represents the ratio of the average duration of one contract to the total length of the work life of the analyzed staff (N = 530, excluding the missing). The index shows that the one-job-for-life career is very rare in peacebuilding. Careers are instead fragmented by frequent changes of contract and by relatively short contracts (compared to the overall length of a person’s work life).

Some organizations, such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, have, in fact, institutionalized this short-termism. The maximum duration of one OSCE contract is two years in a field mission and three years in the Secretariat in Vienna or the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw. The maximum duration someone can work for the OSCE overall is ten years; afterwards, those peacebuilders move on to other agencies and organizations or out of the field. Some continue as self-employed consultants on OSCE projects, but the majority tries to get hold of a permanent contract in another organization. As a consequence, many peacebuilders go back and forth between a number of organizations. There is no regular pattern, but rather a number of trajectories that pass through a core of the most popular organizations, such as the UN and its family organizations (UNDP, UNHCR, and so forth), the OSCE, and a succession of NGOs. Some start their career in national civil services, for example, a national development agency, which leads them to an international organization, and from there back to a regional organization. Others start with international organization work and then go back to national civil services. Others will alternate missions for the UN or the OSCE with work in NGOs. Only for those who obtain a permanent contract at the UN or with a regional organization such as the European Union Commission does the career pattern stabilize; even then, people will frequently change jobs within the organization, either by alternating services within the organization or by switching from field missions to headquarters and back. The UN remains at the center of peacebuilding, for it is the organization that serves as the umbrella for all international agencies that make up a mission; it is also one of the rare organizations to offer long-term or permanent contracts in this area. Unsurprisingly, after a number of contracts people typically either remain at the UN or move out of the field entirely.

Fig. 5. Fragmentation of peacebuilders’ work lives

Figures 6 and 7 show the entry and exit of staff into field missions (based on 557 curricula vitae). The results clearly show that for many of these people field missions are only a temporary job—this is partly due to the nature of field missions, which are designed for the short term, but it is also characteristic of the project-centeredness of careers. The short-term character of the missions, their urgency, and their hardship locations are the most important factors that make such placements highly unattractive for people who already have a permanent job or a high-ranking (and better paid) role in an international organization; on the other hand, the comparatively high entrance salary and the promise of a future career in the peacebuilding field make field missions attractive as entry level positions.

The Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the inner core of the UN, rarely recruits anyone on a first UN contract. Rather, staff at the DPKO come through a career within the organization into their current positions. Yet a large number stay with the UN after the end of their initial contract, as figure 7 shows. They move on to other missions or into the headquarters, and from there through the departments. In the interviews, a small number said they had taken the national entrance exams after their field experience, yet a much larger number seem to be hanging on from short-term contract to short-term contract until the legal requirement for receiving a long-term contract is met.

The overlap with the national civil services and international organizations has already been partly discussed in the preceding chapter. The affinities between the fields and the manner in which “capital” can be converted from one field to another are rather obvious. Many international organizations, most notably the World Bank, UNDP, UNHCR, or the World Food Program, work in areas closely related to peacebuilding, namely in development, assistance to refugees, and emergency aid. Some of these organizations participate actively in the peacebuilding field by sending their own missions and setting up projects financed by their own funds; as mentioned in chapter 2, the UNHCR, for instance, was actually the lead agency in humanitarian and emergency relief during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But even if they do not have their own mission on the ground, these organizations often sponsor activities of the UN or other organizations in the peacebuilding field.

Similarly, the trajectories between national civil services and the peacebuilding field are direct and straightforward. National civil servants are seconded to missions, particularly in areas of special expertise such as the security sector, the rule of law, or specific aspects of public administration. Or, they might participate in the decision-making processes of peacebuilding at the headquarters of international organizations. The upper tier of the peacebuilding field, in which senior officials rotate frequently between positions in the UN and national administrations or politics, has clearly shown the close networks that make up the peacebuilding field at this level.

Fig. 6. Where first UN mission contract staff have worked before

The Nongovernmental Sector

At the lower level of programs, or among lower-level project directors, however, national civil services are unlikely to be associated with peacebuilding missions; hence, they play a lesser role as recruitment pools. International organizations and nongovernmental organizations, on the other hand, are much more important. The presence of NGOs in the peacebuilding sector is particularly remarkable. NGOs constitute a huge recruitment pool for UN or OSCE field missions, and many former OSCE or UN staff continue their career in NGOs. As figure 4 shows, NGOs comprise the second largest employer in the peacebuilding field after the UN.

Fig. 7. Sectors of further employment

Yet, at a closer look, the three-tier structure of the peacebuilding field (discussed in chapter 3) clearly fashions the relations between the peacebuilding field and the other fields; it does so particularly in the passageways between fields. Hence, there is little passage between the peacebuilding’s top-tier senior official roles and NGOs—with a few notable exceptions, such as Jan Egeland, who became secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and deputy director of Human Rights Watch after having been under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the United Nations. This is probably due to the much more politicized character of visible senior roles; filling these positions requires much more diplomatic haggling between states, and the token “neutrality” of national civil servants is a bargaining chip that NGO directors rarely have.

Such sensitivity does not apply to the same extent to second-tier positions, where so-called professional criteria come to the forefront. Professional criteria are not only the role-holder’s capacity for analyzing complex political and bureaucratic processes, but also, at later stages of their careers, as in director positions, their capacity to manage projects, and their practical knowledge of the funding and implementation conditions of specific postconflict regions.[3] At this level, individuals who have experience in implementing and managing projects in specific local contexts have opportunities to translate this experience into other jobs in the peacebuilding field.

Fig. 8. Frequency of moving in and out of peace operations

The field of international NGOs is huge, and the peacebuilding field only intersects with the areas of humanitarian assistance, human rights, conflict resolution, and development. Yet, although this subsection of the international NGO field is large, with many thousands of NGOs working in different crisis spots around the world, the prosopographic analysis shows that only a significantly smaller number of NGOs are on the career trajectory of peacebuilders.

NGOs are essential actors in the peacebuilding field, where they fulfill a wide range of functions, from implementing donor projects to advocating for specific issue areas. The NGO field is in itself highly diversified: NGOs vary in their activities, their funding sources, their staff, their capacities, and their objectives. Conflict situations and postconflict environments lead to a mushrooming of NGOs, particularly if the crises are in the eye of public opinion and, consequently, highly funded. According to an evaluation report by the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) on NGOs in Kosovo, there were only eleven NGOs in Kosovo in January 1999, but over four hundred at the end of the year, six months after the highly mediatized NATO strikes against Serbia; and these were the NGOs that ICVA has counted.[4] There probably were many more that ICVA did not take account of. The diffuse proliferation of NGOs or their efficiency cannot be discussed here.[5] However, it is important to note that the NGO field has developed its own dynamics, which, in the field of peacebuilding, create multiple relations; substantial amounts of money and personnel flow between international agencies.

Despite the impression of great diffuseness and decentralization, the NGO field has a number of essential characteristics. Most notably, one can distinguish between ephemeral NGOs, created to respond to one specific crisis, and professionalized NGOs. The large majority of the more than four hundred NGOs ICVA counted in the Kosovo conflict at the end of 1999 probably do not exist anymore. The big players in the NGO sector have large staff numbers, professionalized executive boards, illustrious advisory councils, and a financial turnover of several million U.S. dollars per annum. They engage in activities in a large variety of settings, and in different areas of development or emergency aid, conflict prevention, or reconciliation. In many Western countries their acronyms are household names, and they manage to derive funding from a large, diversified set of resources (private donations, a large variety of public donors, international agencies, and so forth). The difference between professionalized and impermanent NGOs often, but not always, corresponds to the distinction between international and local NGOs, as the latter often stand and fall with specific projects. They have far fewer, less professionalized, and poorer paid staff, and have a high and therefore risky dependence on donors. They tend to vanish as soon as the funding caravan moves on or their projects are finished.[6]

NGOs can further be distinguished by the importance of their international activity. Some organizations are purpose-built to contribute to specific crises; for others, international peace activities constitute only a small part of their much broader platforms. Hence, faith-based organizations like Caritas Internationalis, for instance, define their activities within a broader framework of serving God in daily life, conversion, and community service. Organizations like workers’ unions or politically inspired foundations see their practical projects in peacebuilding as contributions to wider goals of democratization, the strengthening of social forces, or support for other specific groups.

Furthermore, NGOs can be distinguished by the kind of staff they employ in peacebuilding activities. Some NGOs, like the early Doctors without Borders, are largely volunteer-based, with a very small full-time employed staff or even none at all. Other NGOs have a large base in their home countries, maybe as third-sector organizations (e.g., the Red Cross or Red Crescent national societies), or as membership organizations (e.g., Greenpeace or Amnesty International), in which professionals and volunteers work together at many different levels. Again, other NGOs have strongly professionalized their international services (e.g., the water-and-sanitation portfolio of Oxfam), or even transformed part of their activities into for-profit businesses.

The specific position of each organization determines the relationships it will sustain with other actors in the peacebuilding field. These differences can be traced through prosopographic research. Looking into the details of NGO recruitment, it appears that about three hundred passages between the UN and NGOs effectively came from fewer than one hundred organizations, and of these considerably fewer were local and small NGOs; more than two-thirds of all NGOs were among the big players in the field like Oxfam, Save the Children, International Alert, or the International Bar Association.

Among all NGOs, a handful stood out for having provided and recruited UN staff more frequently than others. People working in these organizations are either more likely to apply for positions at the UN, or the UN recruiters consider these NGOs more trustworthy, or both. Most important, however, these people’s experience corresponds with the UN missions’ central activities. As figure 9 shows, most peacebuilders come from and find employment with humanitarian/development aid or human rights NGOs, which reflect the humanitarian and rule of law approach to peacebuilding prevalent today. Table 3 gives an overview of the most frequently cited NGOs. It is also noticeable that a small but steady number of peacebuilders have entered the fields of development aid, humanitarian assistance, or peacebuilding through volunteering in national services, for instance in the American Peace Corps, in the British Voluntary Service Overseas, or as UN volunteers. This hints at the precarious nature of work contracts in the NGO sector, which is structurally similar to the UN field mission sector. However, the strong presence of big, transnational, and multitask NGOs also indicates that longer-lasting careers in the peacebuilding field are contingent on big organizations. Even though the NGO field consists of many thousands of NGOs, only a very small number provide conditions that allow staff to develop their activities toward pursuing a long-term professional career. It is noteworthy in particular that all these NGOs are Northern, in the sense that their headquarters are based in the global North; they are also largely Northern financed, often working with the largest donor institutions.

Fig. 9. Types of NGOs that employ peacebuilders

Just as the UN sector of the peacebuilding field is stratified into three tiers, there is a remarkable and noteworthy difference between executive staff in home-countries’ headquarters and field staff as far as recruitment by NGOs is concerned. Those NGOs that have a strong basis in their home countries, for example, as third sector organizations such as the Red Cross or Caritas Internationalis, tend to have their own recruitment circuit for executive staff in home headquarters; executive staff tend to have come up to senior positions through the third sector route, for instance as managers of service institutions (e.g., hospitals, ambulance services, soup kitchens) or as technical experts (e.g., lawyers, accountants, human resources). The wider spread of the organization’s activities and its broader agenda, of which peacebuilding is just one facet and probably not the most important one in terms of the organization’s mission and survival, privilege other recruitment routes. Staff are neither recruited from the peacebuilding field nor the UN; nor are many staff recruited into the peacebuilding field and into the UN.

However, in such NGOs for which peacebuilding is a core activity, or, at least, a very important part of their portfolio, headquarters executives are very likely to have gained experience in a UN field mission or a peacebuilding institution (UN, UN agency, OSCE, or similar), or to have been associated with peacebuilding through UN or international-agency-funded projects. Staff from these organizations gain specific professional capital, which they can more easily translate into jobs in a UN (or, for that matter, OSCE or UNHCR or any other international agency) mission and vice versa; and they have built their professional networks in those missions and through projects across the NGO field. Staff from these organizations circulate mainly in the NGO circuit, and usually only serve short stints in UN field missions, or on specific projects, such as, for instance, the Millennium Development Goals campaign. This is particularly true for those projects that make a clear distinction between professional staff, who are usually based at the headquarters or in regional offices, and voluntary staff, whether they are active in the peacebuilding field or not. For example, all members of the 2014 executive team of CARE UK have worked for other NGOs before; the same is true for Save the Children and Oxfam.[7] NGO work has undoubtedly become a profession over the past decades, with chief executive director posts and a range of management positions that mirror those in business corporations, for instance, finance and accounting, marketing, communications, or human resources, as well as organizational development directors. Hence, NGOs also offer further employment opportunities to staff in the third tier, where local administrative and technical support staff will move from one organization to another, and in and out of the UN or international agency missions.

Table 3. Most commonly mentioned NGOs by activity sector

Humanitarian

Human rights

Law and justice

Religious

Conflict resolution and reconciliation

Save the Children

Tearfund

Oxfam

CARE Internationala

Human Rights Watch

Amnesty International

Lawyers without Borders

International Bar Association

Transparency International

International Centre for Transitional Justice

World Vision

Caritas Internationalis/ Catholic Rescue Service

Pax Christi

Search for Common Ground

Reconciliation Resources

Outward Bound Peacebuilding

Saferworld

International Alert

aAs a coding decision CARE was counted as a humanitarian NGO. Even though CARE’s foundation is in the Quaker movement, its primary objective is humanitarian assistance, and not service to the Christian community.

Yet they rarely move definitively from a global South country to an OECD country. While so-called field cred is an important argument for career advancement for NGO workers from industrialized countries, being a local from a conflict country does not provide any advantages in the aid labor market.[8] Similar to the constitution of the UN sector in the peacebuilding field, it is a university degree that serves as a distinct career element. Executive positions in NGOs, particularly the larger ones, tend to be occupied by graduates of top universities (e.g., Columbia University, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics), just like directorial positions in the UN. A degree from an OECD university and bilingualism for nonnative English speakers are minimum criteria. Third-tier positions, on the other hand, go predominantly to graduates from universities located in the global South.

It is also through NGOs that the peacebuilding field overlaps with national development aid. It is common for NGO staff to move into national development agencies or vice versa. Most executive boards of larger organizations boast at least one former member of national development agencies (e.g., Department for International Development, Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, Danish International Development Agency). Some organizations have invited representatives of national development agencies onto their advisory boards. This interconnection has become deeper ever since many OECD governments have pushed for delegating state functions to private and so-called civil society actors.[9] The subsequently created networks allow for an intensified circulation of staff, projects and funding, and ideas and practices. Access to information and project planning is crucial for NGOs in a highly competitive funding environment; reassurance of the reliability of investments is, on the other hand, highly valuable for donors when distributing closely monitored public funds. Another effect of the increasing embedding of the voluntary sector in the professional and public sector is the further professionalization of and insider recruitment within the voluntary sector through ever more entrenched networks.[10]

The career of Nick Thomson epitomizes such a career: a graduate of a Russell Group university[11] in the United Kingdom, he was recruited as chief executive officer into the humanitarian NGO Children’s Aid Direct, yet had to manage the organization’s bankruptcy. He spent the following years as an adviser on humanitarian and development aid in Brussels until he “received a call from a friend,” asking him if he wanted to move to Freetown, Sierra Leone,[12] where he became first the program director and then CEO of the Africa Governance Initiative, a consultancy NGO that had been founded by former British prime minister Tony Blair. The friend who had called was Kate Gross, former private secretary of Tony Blair. She and Liz Lloyd, Blair’s vice chief of staff and CEO of Chartered Bank in Tanzania, became, with Blair himself, official founders and CEOs of this organization, which aims at helping African governments to govern. Gross and Lloyd were part of a larger group of “Blair’s babes”: young, ambitious advisers at 10 Downing Street in the late phase of the last Labour government, and who included, among others, Labour’s candidate for 2015, Ed Miliband; his brother David Miliband, the former foreign secretary and now CEO of the International Rescue Committee; and a couple of members of Ed’s shadow cabinet.[13]

Phone calls from friends are common recruitment paths into startup organizations, missions, and projects. All interviewees agreed that they had been at least once, if not most of the time, recruited into a UN mission or other occupation, either in an NGO or consultancy, through personal contacts. Personal networks essentially enable circulation of information on vacancies and on a candidate’s qualities. They are also essential for the realization of projects and missions. As Rosalind Eyben emphasizes, donor policies requesting more coordination have additionally reinforced expatriate networking in mission sites.[14]

The Business Consultant

The blurriness of the boundary between peacebuilding and the NGO sector, which also intermeshes with the gray zone that has emerged between national development agencies and NGOs, is replicated in the increasingly fuzzy line between the private (third) nonprofit sector and the for-profit business world. The business field has a very different focus from NGOs in general, and the peacebuilding field in particular. The American distinction between for-profit businesses and not-for-profit organizations (which, in the United Kingdom, are also called charities, and in many European countries civil society organizations) suggests that two very different logics of action are at work. The logic of capitalism, which rules the business field, requires most fundamentally the production of surplus value (profit), which allows reinvestment into production and opens up opportunities for innovation and creativity. The necessity of generating profit requires businesses to perceive and conceive of the world on the grounds of cost-benefit calculations, and to seek to minimize costs in order to increase benefits. The question of how this can be done in the most efficient and productive way is, in the logic of the field, a competitive struggle over the ownership of resources on the one hand, and over the authority to shape the meaning of “benefit” on the other.[15]

The nonprofit field, on the other hand, is not subject to the profit constraint, yet in many ways is still dependent on the for-profit sector. The focus of the aid organizations is the assistance they can provide to people who are considered to be unable, for various reasons, to live their lives to their full potential, or even, in the case of humanitarian assistance, to live their lives at all. Although the logic of production, and profit-making for further production, does not apply directly to NGOs, they are nevertheless under the constraint of funding their activities and of surviving as organizations. The question of how much of the business world’s efficiency mechanisms and cost-benefit analysis must or must not penetrate the NGO field has specifically become a major area of dispute.

Yet many NGOs that work in peacebuilding, both commonly and institutionally, entertain close relationships with business corporations. Representatives of business corporations are invited to sit on advisory boards; business corporations, on the other hand, regularly offer pro-bono projects to NGOs. Corporate business also represents a recruitment pool for UN field missions, and, in return, an exit option for peacebuilders, although it is less important than NGOs.

The peacebuilding field overlaps, however, with only a very limited number of business sectors. Most prominent among them are strategic management consulting and legal advice or auditing. A disproportionately high number of peacebuilders have thus been recruited from or into one of the big four auditing firms (Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernest & Young, KPMG) or strategic management consultancies (Accenture, Mercer, and so forth). Again, it is likely that a graduate certificate from elite universities in the United States or Europe plays a more important role in this career trajectory than service to the peacebuilding field. Yet, for certain NGOs, consulting firms also allow the conversion of experience and knowledge gained in the field or in an international organization into commercial services.

Big audit firms and strategic management consultancies, which constitute the major link with the peacebuilding field, understand themselves as knowledge management firms. The capacity to verbally synthesize social processes and present knowledge in oral and written form according to given standards is essential in this profession—and it is a shared requirement with the peacebuilding field. Similarly, the peacebuilding field has integrated a variety of management concepts that originated in the consultancy world, from stakeholder approaches to SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis and KPI (key performance indicators).[16]

The peacebuilding and business fields also share the need for the creation of projects: the capturing of funds to finance these projects and their management. Peacebuilding as well as business consultancy are built on the premises that those actors involved in the actual processes—warring parties, African governments, or failing businesses, for example—are themselves unable to identify the causes for their problems, and that they are in need of external advice and consultation to manage change that will save the business from bankruptcy or the country from war.

These projects are concrete undertakings that are limited in time and with a priori identified targets, timelines, budgets, and people, and with benchmarking indicators of success and accountability. Swapping projects from peacebuilding to management consulting appears technically unproblematic, as the key skills of a consultant are the capacity to administer procedures of analysis, to synthesize information, and to make recommendations according to guidelines that have been established elsewhere. After all, the key idea of projectism is that people can be flexibly combined into any kind of work team as long as the objectives of the project are clearly set, the means and processes well defined and timed, the benchmarks and expectations laid down in guidelines, and the team members have the knowledge and culture to methodically work through their tasks.[17] The high visibility of organizations such as the UN tends to serve as a signal to employers that individuals have gained relevant project management experience, just as their top-university degrees signal successful training in the methods of project management. The connections between business consultancy and peacebuilding are in this respect enabled through the relatively easy translations of educational and professional capital from one occupation to the other.

Another kind of business-peacebuilding field connection exists through the peacebuilders isomorphism of the business world and the wish (or maybe, in the eyes of some, the need) of entertaining good relationships with corporate businesses. Over the past twenty years, there has been a proliferation of business-like discourses in aid organizations.[18] The drive for professionalization is partly self-induced as a great movement of organizational isomorphism as neoliberal practices of management became globalized.[19] Yet the popularity of new public management approaches is also motivated by the organizations’ donor dependency. Increased outsourcing of development and humanitarian aid to nongovernmental organizations requires, in the framework of new public management, reinforced procedures of accountability, evaluation, and standardization that allow so-called quality assurance. As organizations fashion themselves more on managerial and entrepreneurial models, their distance from the business world vanishes.

This attention paid by peacebuilders to the business world is replicated in some businesses’ interest in sharing the symbolic capital of “good governance” or, simply, “peace,” as these ideas are conveyed by peacebuilders. In the name of “corporate social responsibility,” some industries, notably extractive industries, have also engaged in partnerships with NGOs to reduce conflicts that have emerged locally at the sites of exploitation.[20]

The connections between business and NGOs are usually looser than those created by the passage of individuals from one occupation to another. They are established if representatives of big business (e.g., banks, extractive industry companies, investment companies, big manufacturers, and retailer chains) are invited to sit on advisory boards, take over patronage of specific projects, or become goodwill ambassadors. Such interweaving of business corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and international organizations reflects the general consensus underlying peacebuilding that the liberal market structure of world politics is, essentially, unproblematic, and the underlying conflict analysis that, whatever other reasons lead to civil strife and war, it is not the liberal world economy. On the contrary, the association of global businesses bears witness to the belief that they can make a positive contribution to peace.

The Scholar-Expert

Many NGOs take on a double role in the peacebuilding field. They not only realize donor projects and constitute the humanitarian, development, human rights, or otherwise third-sector platform of peacebuilding; they also serve as advocacy organizations, research institutes, purveyors of information and data, and opinion shapers. In short, many NGOs also act as think tanks in the peacebuilding field. They join the ranks of a row of nonuniversity research and training institutes and of a growing number of university departments that have set up research and graduate centers in peace and conflict research, and in peacebuilding and its related areas. As figure 4 above shows, for peacebuilders, universities and think tanks are central institutions in their work lives. Many return to think tanks, research centers, universities, and NGOs as researchers or for further study. Equally, many academics join peacebuilding institutions as consultants or on secondment, or are commissioned to undertake studies by donor agencies, NGOs, or international organizations.

In the 1990s, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called peacekeeping a “growth industry,” and the field of international relations scholarship and expertise has clearly grown with the expansion of the peacebuilding field.[21] Universities all over the world offer more than three hundred graduate degrees in conflict management, conflict resolution, and peace studies, or in development and reconstruction in conflicts.[22] The large majority of these programs are at U.S. universities. They are commonly hosted by either the social science departments (and within those departments usually in the schools of international affairs, or, rarely, in the schools of public health and social work), the law school, or religious studies; this means that peacebuilding is either seen as part of international politics, as a legal problem or technique, or as an issue of people’s beliefs and well-being. As will be discussed in the following section, the interconnections between peacebuilding and scholarly fields (universities and think tanks) are fashioned differently according to the differences in academic rules that exist within countries, and between different academic departments.

The Subfield of Social Sciences

Among the very large number of think tanks, advocacy NGOs, and universities, only a few stand out as being connected with the UN peacebuilding field. Furthermore, because the peacebuilding field’s three-tier structure is built on an economy of prestige generated by educational degrees, the scholarly field is intimately intertwined with the peacebuilding field.

A handful of institutions (universities, think tanks, and NGOs) are situated at the top tier, with frequent exchanges between UN senior advisory or special representative roles, on the one hand, and senior positions in these institutions, on the other. The prestige market works formidably at this level—senior officials from the UN or other international organizations bring in the prestige gained as heads of mission, special representatives, or advisers to the Secretary-General. They offer occasional lectures or short courses to students of prestigious educational institutions, and legitimize research in these institutions through their practitioners’ blessing. On the other hand, university academics or researchers at top universities and think tanks bring specific knowledge, eloquence, and legitimacy to policies on the grounds of their scientific achievements. Annan, who in his time as Secretary-General frequently made use of the appointment of university academics and other experts, explained:

I have appointed high-level panels, composed of men and women of great experience and international repute, representing different countries and regions, to consider specific topics and to advance the agenda. Such people often find it easier to agree when working together as individuals, in a small group, than they would in their official capacities. And once they have done so, their names lend credibility to an idea which might otherwise have appeared utopian or fanciful. The Secretary-General can then put it before member states with greater authority and confidence than if it had been simply his own.[23]

The symbolic capital of these individuals translates particularly well into their membership on panels, commissions, or other ad-hoc networks, which are called upon to reflect on specific questions of peace and war in the world. These various groups come together, part, and then reunite in various settings. “The Elders” is probably the most exclusive of such clubs. The group was founded by Nelson Mandela, his wife Graça Machel, and Desmond Tutu, at the initiative of the billionaire and CEO of Virgin Group, Richard Branson, and the pop musician Peter Gabriel. The group consists of only thirteen personalities, all of whom have been in some way or other associated with questions of peace and war. At the time of the writing, the group was chaired by Annan, the former Secretary-General, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for UN peacekeeping in 2001; before this, the group was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. A third of the group have received the Nobel Peace Prize at some point in their career, and all have worked for the United Nations in some capacity, usually as special representatives or envoys on specific issues.

Hence, José Ramos-Horta has a good chance of joining The Elders in the future. He was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his resistance to Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste. In October 2014 he was appointed chair of the newly created United Nation’s High-Level Panel on Peace Operations. Up until 2014 he was the special representative of the Secretary-General for Guinea-Bissau, a position to which he was appointed after having lost the 2012 presidential election in Timor-Leste. He had been president of Timor-Leste since 2006, and had held various high political positions following the country’s independence in 2000. The panel’s remit is to follow up on Lakhdar Brahimi’s report of 2000. Brahimi, who had several roles as special representative and special envoy, is currently a member of The Elders group.

Like other high-level panels before it, this panel was composed of a dozen personalities from all countries that have a permanent seat on the Security Council, and from the new emerging powers in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. It submitted its report in June 2015.[24] These panels also commonly include one or two scholars of international affairs; the same or other scholars also participate in the preparatory process of such commissions, or are invited as advisers and experts. One of the panel’s scholarly experts was Bruce Jones, who since 2014 has been deputy director of the foreign affairs program at the Brookings Institution, and formerly was director of the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University. His successor from January 2015 at the CIC was Sarah Cliffe, who was assistant secretary-general for the UN Civilian Capacities Team before her appointment to CIC. Before her stint at the UN, Cliffe had led the World Bank team that prepared the World Development report on “Conflict, Security and Development” of 2011; the World Bank research group was (at the time of writing) led by Betty Bigombe, who worked with Paul Collier from the University of Oxford and Nicholas Sambanis from Yale University. Both Collier and Sambanis have produced a number of reports for the World Bank linking conflict with “greed” and the looting of natural resources in the 2000s (which have been highly disputed and to a large extent refuted in academic research).[25] To come back to Jones, at Brookings he joined Jean-Marie Guéhenno (son of the French writer and “Académicien” Jean Guéhenno) as international affairs expert. In the fall of 2014, Guéhenno, who was under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations from 2008 to 2012, replaced Gareth Evans, former chair of the Commission on the Responsibility to Protect, and director of the same-named research center, as chief executive officer of the International Crisis Group.

Such a game of revolving doors at the higher levels of think tanks, academic institutions, and the UN is not exceptional. People move in horizontal spirals through directorship positions rather than vertically in careers from the bottom of an organization to its top. Particularly in the United States, where the idea of policy relevance and impact is an important resource for academic careers, academics are likely to move from a university institution to an international organization, NGO, think tank, or other policy institution in order to further their academic careers. Notable examples are Michael W. Doyle from Columbia University, special adviser to Annan from 2001 to 2003, recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award “in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist” in 2012, and author with Nicholas Sambanis from the World Bank and Yale University of Making War and Building Peace; John G. Ruggie, international relations scholar, whose five-year stint as special adviser to Annan allowed him to make the jump from Stanford to Harvard; Michael Ignatieff, the political philosopher of humanitarian intervention, academic expert on the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, unsuccessful candidate to the post of Canadian prime minister, and now Edward A. Morrow Professor of Practice at Harvard University; Anne-Marie Slaughter, international lawyer and vocal advocate of U.S. and UN interventions in the world, formerly Bert G. Kerstetter ‘66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, director of policy planning in the State Department under Hillary Clinton, and now CEO of the New America Foundation; Jennifer Welsh, equally vocal on the need to rebuild failing states, professor in international relations at the University of Oxford, codirector of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, special adviser at the assistant secretary-general level on the responsibility to protect in 2013, and since 2014 a chair in international politics at the European University Institute. These personalities are only a few examples of the top-tier academia-peacebuilding carousel.

It is characteristic of the nexus of the peacebuilding field with the social science field that these revolving doors are made for individual careers. They do not represent epistemic communities or advocacy coalitions in the sense that the individuals in them share a common knowledge or an advocacy issue on which they work collectively. Rather, every scholar translates the credentials and achievements of their field (academia) into an individual advisory position; and the structure of the academic field, notably in the United States, allows retranslating their experience at an international institution or policy institution into academic credentials. Personal networks allow the flow of communication and ideas, not organized lobbying. Yet the passage from one institution to the other requires the minimum compatibility of ideas and only some general consensus on basic values, however vaguely they might be defined. The frequency with which those scholars who advocate humanitarian intervention in particular, and who stress the responsibility to protect and idea that failed states need to be rebuilt in general, move between advisory roles in the peacebuilding field and the academic field is not coincidental. The “culture of peacebuilding” will be discussed in more detail in the second section of this book, but suffice to say that this consensus comprises first of all ideological support for the liberal outlook of peacebuilding and a corresponding backing for ideas like the rule of law, the dominance of human rights, or the idea of protection for vulnerable groups. This basic consensus means that the scholars in the top tier of the carousel are unlikely to produce deeply critical views of peacebuilding or the UN. Indeed, the main contribution of the above-mentioned scholars to the field is the degree to which their prior research supports multilateralism, peacebuilding, and UN intervention in conflicts. It is exactly the apparent scientific rigor of the scholars’ research that lends credibility and legitimacy to these world-ordering policies.

Unsurprisingly, then, the first tier of the academia-peacebuilding border zone is highly self-referential and prone to legend building. UN senior officials like to write about their work and about each other. As they often have exclusive access to UN archives and other documents, their writings are an invaluable source for researchers, yet the writings are not exposed to counterchecks and academic review or discussion. Equally, researchers who focus on the top tier write about the UN and peacebuilders with often uncritical reference to their own writings. The number of biographies of Hammarskjöld might well reach into the hundreds, yet the 1972 biography written by Urquhart, who was at the time secretary to Bunche, certainly stands out. Urquhart had exclusive access to the family’s archives and the UN archives, and also to personal conversations and documents held by other individuals. Clearly he was also well placed to write a biography of Bunche. Up to today, only those documents of Bunche’s work and life that Urquhart carefully selected are accessible in Bunche’s personal archives at the library of the University of California at Los Angeles. Similarly, Samantha Power has risen to the top tier as U.S. ambassador to the UN via writing biographies of personalities who have become heroes of peacebuilding.

The generalized support for peacebuilding is a major distinction to the second tier. The second tier of interaction between the peacebuilding field and scholarship exists at the level of universities that have a good and solid reputation, measurable in university rank (e.g., the Times Higher Education Supplement annual rankings), a noticeably high publication output, and a strong presence in academic debates. Yet these institutions are not part of the top ten or twenty universities and do not provide the same symbolic capital. Scholars of the second tier will not be called upon simply because of the prestige of the institution they represent.

As the academic positions in this tier are removed from the prestige economy of peacebuilding, they allow critical investigations into peacebuilding activities and practices. Many peacebuilders return to academia in this tier to reflect upon their experiences, systematize their impressions, and investigate the causes of what they have seen as the weaknesses or (less often) the strengths of their missions. They expect further training in specific technical areas or seek to investigate in their own research, for example, in doctoral work, specific aspects of the peacebuilding field. Much of the critical literature on peacebuilding has hence been produced by former peacebuilders: for example, the work of Mark Duffield,[26] Béatrice Pouligny,[27] Laura Zanotti,[28] Lisa Smirl,[29] or Séverine Autesserre,[30] to cite just a few.

The distinction between social science scholars and peacebuilders remains sharper in the second tier, where peacebuilders appear first of all as students, and where scholars are less likely to enter peacebuilding institutions; if they do so, they are more likely to be involved in shorter, practical missions (e.g., electoral observation missions) rather than long-term advisory roles.

To come back to the revolving doors: these do exist in the second tier, in the social sciences (international affairs), but to a lesser degree, and they turn at a much slower speed than in the first tier. As people tend to be younger in this tier it is very likely that the different structure of early or midcareer research makes the conversion of academic credentials into the practical peacebuilding field more difficult. Academics first struggle for recognition in their own field, and in particular for tenure or long-term faculty contracts, and can only then liberate the resources, time, and energy needed to engage with the practical peacebuilding field. Additionally, their research does not bring in the same symbolic value of legitimizing peacebuilding, even if positive in its results, as it is not yet fully recognized by the rituals of the academic field such as degrees from top universities, publications and citations in highly competitive, peer-reviewed journals, or prizes and awards from academic institutions and associations.

This is particularly true for countries whose academic fields appreciate public engagement by university scholars much less than do American or British academia. In such countries—for example, in France, Japan, or Italy, where academic careers are sharply separated from the public policy sphere—scholars who take leave to join a peacebuilding mission or think tank are far less likely to be positively rewarded in their career. Hence, incentives to do so are low; and inversely, because their research is often much more analytical, self-referential, and restricted to an inner academic circle, and less policy-oriented, it appears to be of little practical interest to peacebuilders.[31]

In these cases, think tanks and NGOs will take over more of the advice function that is held by universities in the top tier and in the United States. Hence, institutions like the Folke Bernadotte Academy in Sweden, the Berghof Foundation in Germany, or the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London are established consultancies on peacekeeping, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding in Europe. Their staff usually hold PhDs, attesting to their academic credentials; they offer consultancy, evaluation, and advice, but commonly do not participate directly in peacebuilding missions or projects. Careers tend also to be relatively stable and yet separate from academic institutions, so that crossovers from think tanks to universities are rare. Consequently, there are far fewer academics moving back and forth between international or public service and academia than there are in the Anglo-Saxon world. A notable exception exists if particular practical issues of peacebuilding are actually the research area of the academic in question. In the latter case, engagement in conflict resolution, mediation, humanitarian assistance, community work, human rights advocacy, and so forth might be (but does not have to be) a spin-off of these research activities. However, the more rigid the university career system is, the less likely such transitions are to happen.

The Subfield of Legal Studies and the Dominance of Anglo-American Legal Studies

The back and forth between universities, think tanks, and organizations is, however, much more frequent in the area of legal approaches to peacebuilding, such as arbitration and dispute resolution, transitional justice, international criminal justice, and human rights law. Here, even in the second tier, there will be many peacebuilders who pass through all types of organizations, because the legal studies field represents some particularities. These are due to the specific structure of the Anglo-Saxon, and in particular the U.S., academic field of legal studies. This field draws heavily on the legitimacy of its legal expertise in conflict and dispute resolution in the business world, in international arbitration, in international law, and, last but not least, in national constitutional and public law and human rights law. These areas can attain a high level of technicality, which makes academics’ resources valuable in this aspect of the peacebuilding field. This happens particularly in areas where peacebuilding missions have taken over parts of the civilian administration and are in need of advice on lawmaking, in areas such as policing, privatization, and public administration design/redesign.

Peacebuilders in this area tend to have started their careers in law firms, moved on to peacebuilding missions, and returned to think tanks or academic institutions to systematize and further their practical experience, where they have often had to break new ground. As legal scholarship consists to a large extent of doctrinal work, that is, the interpretation and (re)codification of legal acts, the divide between the practical and academic fields in law is much smaller than in other disciplines. Exclusive experience in one peacebuilding area can constitute highly valuable capital to be converted into academic credentials, as it gives the peacebuilder exclusive access to specific, expert legal knowledge that can be interpreted only by a very small group of lawyers who have shared this particular experience.

As a number of scholars have pointed out, this duality of legal studies has allowed lawyers to play an increasingly important role in peacebuilding.[32] In some cases their activities reach far into the core of the field, without, however, attaining such a high degree of visible social science exchanges between the academic and peacebuilding fields as in the first tier. Due to their technical nature, these exchanges take place in the background and are less politicized. Only in very rare cases does the appointment of a special envoy in legal affairs become a diplomatic issue (the Goldstone report of 2009, which accused Israel of war crimes, is a case in point). This is also due to the fact that the dominance of the U.S. legal studies field is largely undisputed; whatever battles of ideas exist in the field, they are often reflections of inter-American disciplinary quarrels.[33]

The dominance of the American legal studies field is a direct result of the convertibility of knowledge capital into peacebuilding. Due to its decentralization and derivative character, the legal puzzles and advances in the peacebuilding field correspond more to the nature of Anglo-Saxon common law, and less to continental European civil law traditions. Arbitration, litigation, and legal dispute resolution are far more important areas of legal practice in Anglo-Saxon countries than they are in civil law countries. Accordingly, the educational structure is very different, as is the career path of lawyers. In continental European countries, law firms rarely exist of American size and importance, and the golden career in Europe remains the civil service pathway. Prestige gained from international engagement, transnational advocacy, or an advisory role to international organizations rarely translates into career advancement in national civil services, and is, hence, far less attractive for European lawyers. Those participating in international legal activities, for example, in the international tribunals, tend to be either early in their career or seconded by national ministries. Advocacy of international legal issues rarely develops the same dynamics in European legal fields as it does in the United States.

The prestige of universities is also less important in continental European countries, where lawyers have to take a centrally administered state exam for accreditation. While it happens (and ever more frequently so) that aspiring lawyers will add a LLM (master of laws) or similar degree from a British or American university to their curriculum vitae, only successfully passing a state exam will allow them to practice law. Consequently, the academic field in these countries is far more introverted than the academic field in common-law countries. This results in the strong dominance of Anglo-Saxon understandings of the rule of law, legal procedures, and legal argument, and consequently of justice. Here, in the legal field, one can observe the formation of advocacy coalitions and epistemic communities, notably around the notion of the “right to intervention” and around human rights advocacy, as analyzed, for instance, by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink.[34] As Mikael Rask Madsen argues, this dominance was supported by European reservations about human rights during much of the decolonization and Cold War periods.[35] Yet it is also the specific structure of the respective academic-peacebuilding nexus in Europe and the United States that allows for greater influence by American scholars and think tanks like the International Center for Transitional Justice, which was presided over from 2004 to 2007 by Juan Méndez, who is currently special adviser to the Secretary-General on the prevention of genocide (see also chapter 7).

The Subfield of Religious Studies

Religious universities and organizations are a third type of academic and NGO field that reaches into the peacebuilding field. In faith-based academia or think tanks there is another economy of recognition and prestige at work. Most often, these organizations are Christian organizations. Islamic, Buddhist, or other religious conflict resolution practices frequently exist on the ground, but they rarely achieve a wider visibility in the peacebuilding field or in the scholarly field.[36] While Christian universities in many European, and also, in particular, North American countries are an integral part of the academic landscape, and while Christian NGOs in the North engage in a large variety of consultancy and cooperative networking, Islamic, Buddhist, or other religious peacemakers are far less organized, visible, and integrated than Christian organizations.

Although many Christian universities and colleges are an essential part of the university landscape of their respective countries, their original remit is to contribute to the building of Christian communities, support the theological foundation of Christian values, and facilitate their application and spread (including conversion) in daily life.[37] Some, though not all, are built around theological training and education. Such kinds of institutions are particularly strongly represented in the United States, and (obviously one might add) only very weakly represented in countries where the separation between church and state is very strong and stretches into the education sector (e.g., France). As such institutions have as an essential raison d’être the reproduction of faith, the conventional rules of the game of the academic field (e.g., publications, citations, research grants) play a less important role, and are offset by practical results in the dissemination of belief, knowledge production, and community services in the name of Christianity. Faithful ministry might be as highly valued as a high citation index.

Members of such institutions move horizontally to projects and activities on the ground in the peacebuilding field and take over specific advisory, training, or mediator roles, sometimes as implementing partners of the UN, sometimes independently, and sometimes in the services of the UN, for example, by training military peacekeepers. Usually these moves happen through religious networks, such as peacebuilders moving from a religious academic institution to a network of faith-based peacebuilding organizations, or through their church structure.[38]

The large majority of religious organizations engaged in peacebuilding are, as already mentioned, Christian, and among these Anabaptist groups are particularly important. This is due to the theologically founded pacifism of Anabaptists, which was prominently set out in academic circles by John Howard Yoder in the postwar period, and is currently promoted by John Paul Lederach. Anabaptist pacifism was particularly upheld by political peace movements during, and in between, the world wars, and during the anti–Vietnam War movement in the United States in the postwar period.[39] Of the fourteen graduate programs at religious institutions in North America that deal with conflict management and peace studies, eight are offered by Anabaptist universities or colleges.[40]

Figure 9 above shows that an important number of peacebuilders work at some point in their career for or with a religious NGO. These organizations, and the academics from these institutions, especially the churches and religious communities on the ground, play an important role in the practice of peacebuilding. They are implementing partners for projects; they play the role of mediators and consultants in conflict resolution processes; and they offer various forms of education, training, and employment in conflict and peacebuilding regions. They also forge views and concepts of peace in peacebuilding that are internally discussed in theological debates among and within communities (e.g., in the early Cold War debate between Yoder and Reinhold Niebuhr on pacifism in times of nuclear deterrence, or the ferocious debates within the Catholic Church over poverty and what do about it); and which are disseminated to secular as well as other religious communities through the practice of peacebuilding, and in the wide range of publications in various media, from academic journals to television and websites.

Dissemination, proselytism, and conversion constitute important dynamics of the religious field. The success of Christian (or Muslim, or Buddhist) peacebuilding is a formidable justification for the spread of religion. Peace services give new missionaries of faith access to communities, and allow them to practically reconstruct faith around peace and development initiatives. Within democratic, Northern, and liberal states, and in the framework of liberal and human rights-based global governance approaches, the success of peacebuilding provides an important argument for faith in the struggle with the secular state over the legitimacy of humanitarian, social, and peacemaking action.[41] Successful peacebuilding shows that Christianity (or religion in general) can be a force for democratic change and peace—contrary to the arguments of secular political philosophers across the centuries that religion is a force of violence and destruction.[42] In the context of American culture wars, for instance, peacebuilding allows legitimizing a discourse of Christianity that is not necessarily associated with the conservative Far Right, but which appears as a progressive force reflecting many liberal concerns.[43] In Latin America, the engagement of Christian groups in peacebuilding and reconciliation processes has widely helped to draw a picture of a charitable and helping religion, in contrast to a church that had supported military juntas and violence in the civil wars. In the wider global discourse, successful peacemaking by faith-based organizations appears as a credible alternative to secularism, particularly if this mediation, conflict resolution, or peacebuilding success results from interfaith collaboration.[44] Indeed, as many observers have noticed, the distinction between secular and religious organizations and aid fades in peacebuilding contexts, thereby allowing the transposition of moral legitimacy from one sector to the other; humanitarianism can benefit from various religious ideas of charity and community service, whereas religion can draw on secular ideas of solidarity and responsibility.[45]

Conclusion

The boundaries of the peacebuilding field are defined by the degree to which capital, and most important symbolic capital, can be converted from an adjacent field to peacebuilding, and vice versa. The prestige and authority to speak about peace, to act in its name, and to mobilize social forces in order to build peace can come from a variety of sources. It can be founded institutionally and legally, as is the case for UN missions, which have been authorized and are, at least in principle, supported by the UN Security Council and UN member states. It can also come from the prestige of other institutions and organizations; indeed, such a prestige economy exists between the UN, international organizations, preeminent global universities, global business corporations, think tanks, and, albeit to a lesser degree, NGOs.

Peacebuilders move within these boundaries of the peacebuilding field, frequently changing jobs and passing from one borderline institution to another. In these overlapping zones, particular types of symbolic capital—for example, professional-technical expertise such as legal knowledge, or moral capital such as that held by religious peacebuilders—can be translated from one field to another. The convertibility of symbolic capital (determining which kind of knowledge or prestige can be converted and which cannot) gives important indications as to the structure of the peacebuilding field and its adjacent fields. It is the convertibility of capital that tells us which forms of symbolic capital are valued, recognized, or refuted in the peacebuilding field. The scope of options not taken is infinitely wide; nevertheless, some stand out. Hence, the connection to labor unions or unionism in general is weak. Not one single peacebuilder in the prosopographic sample worked at any time in her or his career for a union. Similarly, people do not rise from very low to very high positions. The importance of a university education, and particularly an elite university education, has frequently been emphasized; the rags-to-riches career does not exist in peacebuilding. The importance of an elite university education also excludes the large majority of the so-called locals from careers in peacebuilding; it most particularly denies former fighters access to the field, and effectively excludes those agents who have been involved in the conflict.

The analysis of the peacebuilders’ career trajectories also shows that the peacebuilding field has evolved in ways similar to other professional fields in domestic labor markets. While the first peacebuilders—Bunche, Urquhart, and others—entered the UN determined to stay with the organization for the rest of their working life, nowadays peacebuilders have a much more fragmented work life. The precariousness of jobs, short-termism and projectism, alternatively called flexibilization, are the hallmarks of peacebuilder careers, and indicate that a double movement is taking place: increased spending by donors and international agency engagement for peacebuilding, on the one hand, and an increased decentralization, privatization, and fragmentation of activities in the field, on the other.

For the peacebuilders this means first of all the sharply heightened importance of networks, and the sociability that founded such networks on the ground.[46] The network structure of the field, however, emphasizes even more the exclusiveness of circles and groups within the field, and leads to the reinforcement of horizontal, and a weakening of vertical, career paths. The closing of career circles introduces and consolidates the inequalities of career chances into the field. These inequalities tend to follow categorical division lines between men and women (fewer women are in managerial positions in peacebuilding, and those who are usually come to these positions later in their career and with lesser pay); between North and South, with lesser career chances for “locals”; between professional and technical-administrative jobs, due to the rarification of vertical career paths; and between those who bring in inherited cultural and economic capital, which allow for a higher investment in university education and training, and those who do not dispose of this a priori capital.

The “boundary-less” neoliberalization of working conditions, and the rise of so-called portfolio careers[47] in the peacebuilding field, replicates developments in other fields, and hence shows the isomorphism of this field with others. The overlapping zones of the NGOs, business corporations, and religious (or, in a wider sense, spiritual) fields with the peacebuilding field testify to the convertibility of mostly symbolic and cultural capital. This convertibility is conditioned by similar conditions of work that have engendered a succession of similar practices over the past decade, in which all these fields have undergone significant changes in career mobility.[48] The key to convertibility remains a set of common references within the peacebuilding field, most notably to what is considered high-quality education and the necessary skills for this type of work. As the following section on the peacebuilders’ habitus will show, high mobility, cosmopolitanism, and liberal mind-sets belong equally to this commonly shared canon. The fragmentation of careers is not necessarily perceived as precarious by the peacebuilders themselves, but rather as flexibility, openness, and an entrepreneurial mind-set, or, simply, one of adventure. Rather than seeing themselves as precarious workers, peacebuilders refer to themselves as self-managing managers. The fluidity between fields, which makes moving between them relatively easy, the close network structure of the fields, and, very simply, the continued increase and widening in peacebuilding engagement by donors, states, and international agencies, reduces individual uncertainty about the future; and the financial rewards for peacebuilding compensate for the lack of career transparency.

The Habitus

The habitus of peacebuilding is multifaceted and complex. Although the preceding chapters have shown that there is a relatively high level of social similarity among peacebuilders in terms of social origin and education, it would certainly be wrong to see them as a monolithic bloc. As a field, peacebuilding allows for various dynamics of relational positioning; people will agree or disagree about certain policies, activities, or opinions depending on the social position they seek to defend or acquire in relation to others. Yet peacebuilders are not totally free in what they think and feel, or how they will behave with respect to this or that event in the field. Behavior has to be readable by others, understandable, and, to a certain but crucial extent, agreeable to them. Despite wanting to distinguish themselves from their peers, individuals also need to fit in. The habitus of a social group comprises, therefore, a range of socially possible behaviors and demeanors.

The concept of habitus does not deny individual agency, but describes the social conditions of the body and mind, which can both be enabling and restraining, under which agents act. The range of behaviors, opinions and ideas, and demeanors that a peacebuilder can display is circumscribed by the boundaries and limited by the content of the peacebuilding field as a professional field and a social group. The relational character of social positioning creates certain expectations of what a peacebuilder is like. Quite literally, the right habitus allows an individual to be “at the right place” when occupying a certain position—as seen both by others and by her or himself.[1] Importantly, habitus as an analytical concept goes beyond role playing. Habitus is internalized and naturalized. An individual is perceived to be “at the right place” exactly because the social expectations, behaviors, ideas, discourses, and manners meet easily and naturally at that point of the social field where precisely such a configuration of economic, social, and cultural capital is required that this specific individual can display.[2] The objective structure of the field that sets specific criteria of the place to be occupied, and the subjective structure of the social individual that makes her or him cultivate those personality traits that fit the place, both have to come together to create a specific habitus. The double movement of socialization and individual internalization of the habitus—what Bourdieu called the “external interiorization”—makes it appear to be obvious or common sense behavior. This deep social normalization of a specific kind of behavior sets the foundation of its own reproduction as it becomes a marker of distinction and of recognition of equals among equals.[3]

As an analytical concept, habitus therefore allows retracing those expectations of behavior. The answers to the following questions provide descriptions of the expectations of a good peacebuilder: What kinds of sensibilities do they have? What kind of behavior is acceptable or even desirable? What attitudes and opinions will find an audience and, preferably, a positive reception? What kinds of political and social ideas are considered appropriate and adequate for peacebuilders? What kinds of visions of peace are common sense in the field?

The following three chapters formulate answers to these questions: first, by looking at the peacebuilders’ sensibilities; second, at the range of political ideas they display and how these tie in with their activities; and, third, how the visions of peace are formulated to be “normal” or “obvious” in the field.

Chapter 5

Peacebuilding Sensibilities

Just as the peacebuilders are sociologically identifiable as a globalized middle class, their habitus corresponds strikingly closely to the concept of Bürgerlichkeit. English lacks a word for this German term; it can be roughly translated as middle-class sensibility or middle-class culture, but it is at once larger and narrower than this. Certainly, Bürgerlichkeit designates a way of seeing and understanding the world, of behaving and moving around as someone specific, a Bürger: a citizen; a cosmopolitan, liberal, middle-class man; a self-made man. Bürgerlichkeit comprises political attitudes and cultural dispositions, and questions of morals and of taste, behavior, and values.

As a culture Bürgerlichkeit was and is the expression of a certain set of values, but, as Wolfgang Kaschuba notes, the term does not sit squarely with the social category of the middle classes.[4] Bürgerlichkeit has never been in any way homogenous, and it extended beyond the middle class upwards toward the aristocracy and, later in the twentieth century, into the lower classes.[5] It therefore makes sense to understand Bürgerlichkeit as being a set of certain practices and types of behavior centered on broad sets of principled beliefs and values. Kaschuba identifies five of those in his analysis of nineteenth-century Germany: the separation of the public and private spheres, an emphasis on individuality, a predilection for learned discourses, the promotion of charity and philanthropy, and a strong belief in progress and modernity.[6] These value sets reflect much of the self-image that the middle classes gave themselves, in which self-organization was considered the dominant and most valued principle of social organization; where education and technology took a central place in the construction of identity and material income; and where, at the same time and quite cosubstantially, the question of humanity’s sense and purpose in the world accompanied a strong belief in modernity.[7]

The culture of Bürgerlichkeit thus quite straightforwardly resulted from the new professions’ quest for a place in society. Although these were constituted very differently according to their professional training and organizational situation—from self-employed to employment as clerks—and according to their income and social circles, the new professions shared at least three common traits. Their income depended in every way on their performance and qualifications. Contrary to peasants, workers, or the nobility, income was not directly dependent on external factors such as birthrights, land ownership, or the provision of work by factories. The new middle classes saw themselves as their own “masters of fortune,” where their hard work and their ability to direct their destiny were decisive factors governing the income they could earn. Not bound by birth, land, or a master or guild, the new professions understood themselves as earning their income and their property through merit.[8] Income based on merit was to be distinguished from income earned from rent, as was the case for landowners, or income earned from exploitation, as the workers. Hence, property and education were intimately linked to the good performance and high moral standing of the middle classes.

Similarly, the culture of Bürgerlichkeit allowed the redefinition of the moral economy of self-interest. As far as income was based on merit, self-interest (or egoism) needed to become morally acceptable. Indeed, Adam Smith’s praise of self-interest expressed in the Wealth of Nations can be read as an ethical treatise. Smith reinterprets selfishness as contributing to the commonweal, as the title of the book indicates. In the culture of Bürgerlichkeit, self-interest becomes closely associated with the common interest.

Associating self-interest with the common interest was accompanied by the split between the private and public sphere and the political distinction between citizen and state. In terms of cultural identity, the almost schizophrenic dualism of a competitive, self-interested, utility maximizing public sphere, whether in the form of the business world or the political world, and a caring, philanthropic, and charitable world born of the private sphere, in the form of the house, the family, or the community, also created a tension between the quest for authenticity and the “true self,” on the one hand, and the conformist, obedient individual, on the other. This tension, most often artistically expressed in novels, drama, music, or (later) film and photography, has been a sharply marked characteristic of Bürgerlichkeit from the eighteenth century until today.[9]

Peacebuilders display a distinctive habitus that is profoundly marked by Bürgerlichkeit, broadly understood as a culture articulated around the three pairings of self-interest vs. common interest, professional utilitarianism vs. a quest for authenticity, and education as means of earning a living vs. property as means of earning a living. However, just as the social class of the Bürgertum, or middle classes, has undergone fundamental changes in the past thirty years, with the increased neoliberal privatization of the public and social, the individual flexibilization and precarization of work, new organizational management styles and associated new living styles, so has Bürgerlichkeit undergone important changes. If the three paired concepts of middle-class sensibilities have remained the same, they are expressed nowadays in different forms than they were in the nineteenth century or in the immediate postwar years.

While the liberal self continues to be the core ideal of middle-class sensibilities and the dominant peacebuilding culture, it is nowadays articulated otherwise. As the examples drawn from the lives of Hammarskjöld, Bunche, and Urquhart will show, the first generation of peacebuilders understood the civil servant ideal to represent the realization of the liberal, autonomous self. The emphasis was on serving a higher cause and being independent, in the sense of a civil servant who dedicates his (they were almost exclusively men) work life to this noble cause and its organization, the UN. The liberal self was articulated as an intellectually independent person of moral integrity who believes in (liberal and democratic) ideals and selflessly serves a “good” organization in order to fulfill these ideals. Being an international civil servant was a calling, in Weber’s sense, that is, a way of fulfilling a moral and ethical duty that was greater than the individual. The concept of the international civil servant gave a new purpose to the middle-class idea of earning an income through hard work and merit; now, hard work, commitment, and sacrifice for the job would lead not only to personal achievement (which remained important) but, even more significantly, to world peace.

Nowadays, due to the fragmentation of their work life, peacebuilders have come to see their own lives instead as a process of constant communication, and as a marketization of their capacity to live up to such lofty ideals as those set by Hammarskjöld and others. Duty, service, and calling are concepts that have lost importance to a work life that requires the individual to move from one contract, project, task, and country to another. The “entrepreneurial self,”[10] who combines neoliberal ideas of continuous self-productivity with post-1968 ideals of self-fulfillment, has now become the standard image of the peacebuilder. Yet there is no clear and neat break between the 1960s international civil servant of peace and the contemporary peace entrepreneur. On the contrary, the current form of peacebuilding habitus draws on powerful images, myths, concepts, and ideas of the past, and cultivates middle-class sensibilities of the nineteenth century, nurtured up until today, albeit in altered guises. This chapter and the following two will unfold the story of those new guises in order to explore the highly diversified and complex peacebuilding habitus.

This chapter, however, will first look at four legendary and standard-setting personalities in the field of peacebuilding, namely Dag Hammarskjöld, Ralph Bunche, Brian Urquhart, and Kofi Annan. The first three are of importance to the field as they were the subject of extensive legend building, following their deaths (Hammarskjöld and Bunche) and retirement (Urquhart), and are, without doubt, considered the spiritual fathers of UN peacekeeping and, by extension, of peacebuilding. The later personality, Annan, marks the switch of the peacebuilding field from its somewhat lumbering origins as a field of international civil service to the more dazzling field of neoliberal peacebuilding entrepreneurism.

Taken as an ideal type, Dag Hammarskjöld’s life and approach to his UN job might serve as matrix by which to gauge the presence and, over time, continuity of Bürgerlichkeit in the UN and in the wider field of peacebuilding. As will become clear in the following, his direct collaborators and two heirs, Bunche and Urquhart, resembled in multiple aspects this ideal type. Hence, they assured, by their very personality, a continuity of the peacebuilding culture all the way to the 1980s when Urquhart retired. Annan, too, on the surface at least, resembled Hammarskjöld, and made a big effort to establish himself as his heir; however, the drama of his own life as well as his politics in defending the UN’s central place in peacebuilding made him much more a representative of the neoliberal civil society entrepreneurs of global governance than an international civil servant.

By analyzing Annan, the chapter will look at the peacebuilding habitus in its contemporary form, and the shift from the image of the international civil servant based on liberal morality to the habitus of the self-motivated, self-fulfilled peace entrepreneur based on the morality of neoliberal globalization. While the retirement of Urquhart certainly represented a rupture in the tradition of the international civil servant—a rupture that, ironically in the eyes of some,[11] was completed with the appointment of the only Secretary-General who had come up through the ranks, Annan—a certain number of sociological traits of peacebuilders continued to be of importance; consequently, a certain type of “culture” continued to be highly valued in the UN and in the peacebuilding field. The liberal self, autonomous and constantly reinventing himself and pushing herself to new limits (or “horizons,” to use current UN lingo), has remained at the core of the peacebuilding culture, but the context of this ideal has changed, allowing new forms of staging this role. The new context of flexibilization and fragmentation of work life most notably leads peacebuilders to redefine the notion of professionalism. The question of what makes a peacebuilding professional is of crucial importance for their own careers, as it serves as a distinctive marker of the wider labor market (which also comprises, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, the fields of NGOs, law and justice, religion, and domestic civil and development services); the question of peacebuilding professionalism is also important for the peacebuilders themselves, as it provides the fundamental justification that whatever they are doing, they are doing something good, namely helping create peace. The second part of this chapter is therefore delving deeper into the importance of professionalism in peacebuilding.

The Ideal-Type Peacebuilder, Protestant Ethics, and Dag Hammarskjöld

Even during his lifetime, Dag Hammarskjöld had come to symbolize what liberal internationalists wanted to see in the United Nations: a body independent and ethically above nation-states in the multilateral pursuit of peace, understood as the protection of individual human lives and, as in the Congo mission, private property.[12] Walter Lippmann, the Cold War journalist who probably should receive the honor of being the first to build the legend of Hammarskjöld, wrote in his eulogy in 1961:

[H]e [Hammarskjöld] was himself the fine flower of the European tradition of civility which, if it is not dying, certainly is not flourishing today. . . . In the great public world where the white lights blazed upon him, he lived an inner life of contemplation and esthetic experience that had nothing to do with power and popularity and publicity. His diplomacy had a finesse and courtliness in the great traditions of Europe. . . . He was a Western man in the highest traditions of political excellence in the West. Khrushchev says that Hammarskjöld was not neutral in the Congo, and that there is no such thing as a neutral man. Hammarskjöld was in fact the embodiment of the noblest Western political achievement—that laws can be administered by judges and civil servants who have their first allegiance to the laws, and not to their personal, their class, or even their national, interests.[13]

As a prime example of the embodiment of European, nineteenth-century Bürgerlichkeit, Hammarskjöld certainly deserves closer scrutiny. Reading through the descriptions of Hammarskjöld’s childhood and his spiritual, philosophical, literary and artistic interests as they are partly reflected in his personal notebook, Markings, one cannot help but be reminded of Weber’s analysis of the “Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism.” The Hammarskjölds, as a family and as individuals, were working hard and diligently but they were not channeling their energy into monetary gain; yet Weber specifically argues that it is not economic activity that makes a capitalist but his (her) work ethos.[14] According to Weber, Protestants and capitalists alike profoundly believe that true human fulfillment has to be realized through unquestioning efficiency, no matter the professional activity or the challenges imposed. Weber’s German term is Tüchtigkeit, the meaning of which actually goes beyond efficiency. Tüchtigkeit not only designates the thoroughness and reliability with which a certain task is completed, but also the relentless willingness to take up any challenge, no matter how onerous, time-consuming, or difficult its achievement will be. Work becomes a calling, an ethical duty, and not merely a means to gain one’s daily bread; this actually distinguishes the capitalist spirit from that of the worker, for whom work means first of all physical survival and reproduction. According to Weber, professional efficiency is an end in itself for liberals and Protestants; it has its own beauty and worth.[15] Hammarskjöld’s life was fundamentally dominated by this core idea of duty-fulfillment.

Weber takes the greatest care in retracing the different Protestant currents and the evolution of the vocation doctrine. It is too much to compare in detail here which traits Hammarskjöld’s beliefs are closer to: Calvinist, Methodist, Pietistic, Lutheran, or other Protestant theologies; in fact, much of Hammarskjöld’s fascination with asceticism is projected onto Catholic figures.[16] Hammarskjöld’s work, life, and ethics can, however, be neatly summed up in the definition that Weber gave of Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. Weber identifies five crucial features of Protestant ethics. First, the idea that man lives in a state of religious grace, which settles him firmly in this worldly life. Second, that man’s status of grace is neither granted nor confirmed by some magical, transcendental ritual, but only by him proving his worthiness and distinct calling through the efficiency and the success of worldly life. Third, and consequently, this requires a systematic and methodical control of one’s state of grace, and hence the total penetration of religious zeal into every thought, action, or behavior. Fourth, this in turn requires and simultaneously produces an orderly social world in which status can be proven and perpetuated. Fifth, living a life has to be rational, orderly, and efficient.[17]

Hammarskjöld spiritually testified to the interiorization of ascetics in Markings. In practical matters he was reported to be able to work excessive hours without tiring. He also never married, and biographers eagerly point out how this self-chosen celibacy matched his spiritual interest in mystic ascetics and his sense of duty.[18] If Hammarskjöld’s biographers are to believed, the fact that many of the darker entries into his diary ceased with his appointment as Secretary-General of the United Nations indicates just how much he saw this position as a calling.[19] Hammarskjöld’s understanding of his role reflects a deeply conservative Protestantism in which spiritual salvation is sought in fulfilling such a position in life in which birth, destiny, and ultimately God has placed man. All his writings, statements, and speeches about the international civil servant reflect the fundamental maxim that Weber identifies as the core of all religious reformation movements in Europe, regardless of their doctrinal differences:

But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume. . . . The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. This was his calling.[20]

Biographers commonly stress the intensity with which Hammarskjöld’s spiritual and work ethics came together in his practice of UN politics. Even this engagement on behalf of humanity, Hammarskjöld’s often professed (and celebrated) search for peace, fits entirely into Weber’s analysis of Protestant ethics:

Charity is expressed—given that it is exercised to attend to the glory of God and not to human creatures—first of all through the fulfillment of the professional tasks which were imposed by the lex naturae, and charity hence acquires an objective, depersonalized character: that of assisting the rational creation of the social universe surrounding us [21]

Hammarskjöld was not interested in the single man, but in grander questions of world peace and humanity. His strong interest in international law, and his propensity to seek out opportunities to fix in writing the rules and procedures of the organization, to document the tasks accomplished and even (before the term became fashionable) the lessons learnt—for instance in the annual reports he introduced—shows that he particularly sought to order the world according to a specific idea of how the rules of the world should be written, and not how the brute force of states shaped it.

Here he followed in the footsteps of his father. Confronted with the German naval blockade that led to famine in Norway, Hjalmar Hammarskjöld had justified his intransigent neutrality policy during World War I with the belief that the shaping of international law and the confirmation of his country’s status in the world were far more important tasks and goals than saving human lives from hunger.[22]

Hammarskjöld’s strong interest in authoring law can also be interpreted as the wish to fix meaning, to impose limits on the interpretation of ambiguities, and, ultimately, to control the flow of politics and diplomacy in the very form of methodically and systematically proving efficiency in every aspect of his work: what Weber identified as stereotypically Protestant.

Hammarskjöld’s ethics thus profoundly shaped his work. When he perished in an airplane crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), on September 18, 1961, he was carrying three books in his briefcase: the UN Charter, the New Testament, and a copy of Martin Buber’s I and Thou. All three, biographers agree, reflect particularly well Hammarskjöld’s intellectual and moral imaginary.[23] The UN Charter was more than a simple legal text for Hammarskjöld; it represented the foundational legitimation of his role and vocation, and of world peace as he saw it. The New Testament was the constant religious reminder of his Protestant ethics. Buber’s I and Thou, which Hammarskjöld was about to translate into Swedish, reflected on the one hand his search for dialogue and understanding, but also, on the other, his mysticism and deep internalization of the individualistic loneliness of his Protestant ethics. Weber spoke of the “isolation of every single individual” in Protestant ethics, and biographers emphasize that Hammarskjöld had no friends, and was a profoundly lonely person.

Buber’s I and Thou reflects the German philosophical tradition of cultural pessimism (Kulturpessimismus), in which modernization and modernity have left men disenchanted and thrown back upon their own individual and immanent souls. God had, in Buber’s words, retreated from this world.[24] Similar to other contemporary thinkers of the fin de siècle, Buber deeply mourned the loss of meaning in modernity, yet he saw it as inevitable. He sought to develop a philosophy of the individual, no longer constituting himself through belief in divine fate but in his relations to the two sides of his own psyche, the I and the me, and their interrelations with the Other. Only in a world of deeply individualized and lonely human beings does the dialogical principle become a human necessity and foundation of communal life.[25]

For Hammarskjöld, the UN Charter reflected this basic reasoning, and transposed both the loneliness of modernity and the necessity of the dialogical principle to the world of states: only through dialogue would it be possible for states, these profoundly separated entities, to peacefully live together. Hammarskjöld saw his own role as facilitator of this dialogue. Hence, it was his personal and professional duty to conduct an impeccable life of integrity. If he was known to have jokingly said that the job description for the UN Secretary-General should contain a sentence prohibiting the candidate from having a family life, he was only peripherally referring to the time he had spent at work. His main concern was, rather, that the loyalty and sense of duty of a UN Secretary-General had to be entirely and indivisibly dedicated to the organization.

True Heirs: Ralph Bunche and Brian Urquhart

Chapter 3 has already shown how close Hammarskjöld, Bunche, and Urquhart worked together as a team. However, it also emphasized the rather different social origins of the three. In terms of Bürgerlichkeit, all three certainly shared a middle-class origin, in the sense that they were neither working class nor aristocrats. However, in terms of the social standing of their families and their income they could hardly have been further apart, at least within the broad category of the middle class. Hammarskjöld had rarely known any material hardship; he was born and had been socialized into the privileged world of Sweden’s ruling elite, whereas Bunche and Urquhart had both suffered material hardship, prejudice, and social marginalization. While Hammarskjöld was a typical patrician, with an inherited claim to Bürgerlichkeit, Bunche’s and Urquhart’s cases were more complex, and representative of the social mobility that the middle-class category allowed for (particularly during the postwar years).

The one central characteristic that drew all three together was their education in central institutions of Bürgerlichkeit: the University of Uppsala (the traditional and oldest university of Sweden) for Hammarskjöld, Oxford University for Urquhart, and the University of California at Los Angeles and Harvard for Bunche. Chapter 3 discussed the importance of this educational standard as a marker of their belonging to the middle class. This section will discuss further how much the emphasis on education, and especially the kind of education they received, influenced their habitus and ways of seeing the world around them, as well as influencing their own vocations.

Bunche continued to occupy the position of under-secretary general for special political affairs and special adviser to the Secretary-General on peacekeeping until his death in December 1971, just a couple of days before Kurt Waldheim was elected the fourth UN Secretary-General. Throughout his time as under-secretary general Bunche had been assisted by Urquhart, who also had been his secretary in the Trusteeship Council and in the Congo. Other members of the Congo mission also continued to work closely with Bunche and Urquhart, who succeeded Bunche as under-secretary general in special political affairs. F. T. Liu remained in the peacekeeping team until his early retirement in the wake of the UN’s financial crisis in the 1980s, when Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuellar was forced to make drastic reductions in personnel.

Bunche in particular diverged little from Hammarskjöld’s commitment to working long hours, and shared his profound belief in man’s self-construction through work. As his son related:

My father was a hard taskmaster and disciplinarian. On the top of his agenda during my childhood was education. . . . He continuously drummed into [me] the importance of education, hard work and achievement to the best of one’s own abilities. He believed that in spite of the prejudices in society, with dedication, perseverance and hard work, one could do anything one wanted to with life. . . . My second recollection was his belief in the equality of race and gender, and that all people were created equal and with hard work could achieve whatever they set out to achieve.[26]

Bunche’s views on education followed a typical middle-class canon of education, sports, self-contained activities for the family (e.g., picnics, board games, and educational activities like visiting museums and theaters), and social engagements. Unlike Hammarskjöld, Bunche did have a family, yet he had little time to devote to them. Confronted with the strong dividing line between a caring family life and a competitive, demanding, strenuous public life, Bunche clearly spent most of his life on the public side. The family, and particularly the upbringing of his children, was entirely the responsibility of his wife, at least as far as the daily routines were concerned. In the most patriarchal manner, however, Bunche was never shy about delivering advice on the principles of education to his children.[27] It was also his wife’s role to support and care for him; yet he frequently expressed his dissatisfaction with what Urquhart in his biography called his wife’s “nagging” about his frequent and prolonged absences.[28] He had from an early age experienced health problems, and these increased over time; he expected his wife to be the commiserating and caring receiver of his complaints. Ruth Bunche was first and foremost Ralph Bunche’s wife and the mother of their children; her own profession, fittingly as teacher, came second. The few private photographs that are publicly available of the Bunche family and their homes, whether the architect-built seven-bedroom house in Washington or the apartment in Manhattan, show a stereotypical image of a comfortably well-settled, middle-class family. Family-sponsored announcements, as well as feature articles on family events, published in the New York Times further indicate how much the Bunche family was part of New York’s high society.

As mentioned in chapter 3, Bunche’s life epitomized perfectly the constant positioning and balancing process of a middle-class individual in various social fields. This struggle over social position was also expressed in Bunche’s professed views on society and the politics of his times, particularly with respect to Negro politics and the politics of decolonization. Together with E. Franklin Frazier, sociologist at the University of Chicago, whose monumental study The Black Family considered the higher incidence of single-parent families, divorce, polygamy, and adultery in black communities as deviant or atavistic behavior,[29] he fiercely attacked all allegations that blacks in America would prefer to nurture a culture apart, with their own moral codes and cultural understandings brought from Africa, and which had survived slavery. In particular, Melville J. Herskovits, an anthropologist of West Africa at Northwestern University, had argued in the 1930s and 1940s that descendants of slaves had formed their own culture, mixing elements of their African traditions with the European cultures of the Americas, and that this could, among other things, be observed in the family and kinship structures of African American families (which at the time were still referred to as “Negro”).[30]

The difference between Frazier and Herskovits was not empirical—little doubt existed that the large majority of African American families did not correspond to the nuclear family model of white society. And Bunche’s family was no exception. Bunche hardly knew his own father, who had disappeared even before his mother had given birth and who had lived separately all throughout Bunche’s life. Bunche had been mainly brought up by his grandmother.[31] The debate between the anthropologist and sociologist was actually about the meaning of the different family structures—were these differences so fundamental as to justify the idea that they defined a separate culture, and hence a separate form of political community, as W. E. B. Du Bois concluded from Herskovits’s studies? Or was it simply an aberration induced through forced family separations under slavery, as Frazier argued, which would disappear as soon as former slaves became part of the American middle class? In his own life, Bunche clearly lived the experience of Frazier’s position.

As Elliott Skinner reports, Bunche would have most probably strongly disliked the label “African American”; and Urquhart’s avowal that Bunche himself self-consciously designated himself proudly as “Negro,” and even more strongly as “Black American,” supports this suspicion.[32] Given Bunche’s own assimilation, it should not come as a surprise that throughout his life Bunche attacked first W. E. B. Du Bois and later Malcolm X and the Black Panthers for their separatism. Among others he testified against Du Bois during the McCarthy era, during which Du Bois was refused several times the issuance of a passport to leave the United States.[33] These attacks on Du Bois signaled substantial differences in the views of Bunche on the question of which kind of political claims black Americans should and could make. Hence, they were also important authority struggles within American politics; significantly, Bunche’s and Frazier’s first attacks on Du Bois were made in the 1930s, when both were still much more inclined toward Marxist readings of race, on the grounds that the leaders of the NAACP were too “middle class.”[34] However, very quickly, and following Gunnar Myrdal’s study of race relations in the United States, An American Dilemma, and the interpretation of the New Deal’s effect on black Americans, both became stern defenders of black assimilation.[35]

An important aspect of Bunche’s strong belief in equal chances through education is the correlated steadfast conviction that expert knowledge is the best, the objective and the necessary basis for good policy making. In all his writings, whether on colonial politics, in his PhD dissertation on French colonialism, or in his sometimes scathing memorandum on black leadership in the South, written for Myrdal in 1939, he deplored the lack of knowledge, education, intellectual skills, and expertise as main causes for all social and political ills in Africa and black politics in the United States.[36]

Bunche had very strong opinions on leadership. His PhD thesis compares direct and indirect rule in two French territories. Bunche had reached the conclusion that African people were civilizationally lagging behind and, hence, indirect rule was preferable to direct rule, as it provided more opportunities to train up local people to assume political leadership.[37]

Without ever explicitly discussing his epistemology or ontology of history and society, Bunche adhered (like most social scientists of the time) to the view of history moving forwards, and he certainly believed in ideas of progress and civilization. Pearl Robinson points out that Bunche fundamentally believed in ideas of social progress and the perfectibility of man.[38] He later came to largely agree with Myrdal on the possibilities of social engineering, and gradually overcame his skepticism about the benefits of the New Deal—his newly developing anticommunism helping with this development.[39]

With respect to the world’s colonies, he genuinely believed in the necessity of independence, but not without education, training, preparation, and guidance. Although highly critical of and disgusted by the terror of colonialism, Bunche did admit that some colonial administrations, particularly the French, were training natives, but he argued that by definition colonizers could not do so in an altruistic and civilizing way.[40] As chair of the Trusteeship Council, Bunche could fully play out his conviction, stated in his PhD dissertation, that the mandate system would be the best way to intervene where mistakes previously committed might be corrected, where, indeed, a new and better civilization might be cultivated, through deliberate application of human intelligence and understanding.[41]

Ironically, even though he was a stern critic of the provincialism of black leadership in the South, he does not seem to have been aware of his own sometimes parochial Americanism. He found it rather difficult to imagine other forms of political community than white American liberal democracy. He appreciated the greater freedom of movement for colored people in Paris and London, but despised the food, manners, and political institutions alike of both France and the United Kingdom.[42] Despite having traveled extensively in Africa, and having received training and research practice as a social scientist as well as an anthropologist, Bunche seems to have nevertheless encountered major difficulties in making sense of the rapidly transforming societies in Africa and the independence movements. He experienced what nowadays would be called a “cultural shock,” but showed little self-awareness or reflexivity about this experience. He struggled with his own moral convictions in his encounters with strangeness, as was particularly obvious in his confused and irritable reactions to local politics and customs during his visit to South Africa and his travels in British West Africa in 1937–38.[43] His deep antinationalism and postwar abhorrence of extreme ideologies also led him to fiercely oppose pan-Africanism at the grass-roots level, and particularly Communist variants of pan-Africanist thought and politics. As Martin Kilson points out, this meant that Bunche failed to grasp

the black-peoplehood mobilization discourse [of Africa’s independence movements]. . . . Bunche’s preference for a kind of hyperpragmatic rationalism on the part of the emergent educated African power contenders under colonial rule was a version of wide-eyed idealism too removed from the oppressive specificity of the imperialist process in many parts of Africa.[44]

The conviction that his way of viewing the world was right seems to have been deeply rooted, and allowed for little if no questioning; it was also the basis for his deep conviction that only experts should be involved in policy making. Bunche was, as a political scientist, clearly a behavioralist. Behavioralism was a rather progressive and critical epistemology to hold in the 1930s; yet, as we now know, it was heavily flawed by its systemic blindness to longue durée evolutions, the force of subjectivity in the shaping of social relations, and deeply engrained social structures.[45] Being a behavioralist notably implied having a stern conviction that a single objective, rational, and universal set of factors existed, against which human behavior could be measured as being conformist or deviant. Social engineering and politics then consisted of providing the conditions under which deviant behavior could be made to conform (again).[46] On these grounds he called colonial politics, whether well intended or exploitative, “unscientific.”[47]

Bunche positioned himself in all respects—as a “Black American,” Africanist, civil servant, father—within a discourse of decency, individual merit and achievement, liberal equality, and social responsibility. He was deeply convinced of these values, and particularly of the values of merit, hard work, achievement, and education. These values shaped his personal life and his family life, but also his public life as a black intellectual and, later, as a UN civil servant.

They were and are widely shared by other peacebuilders. In terms of the Secretariat’s cultural continuity, it is particularly important to note the deep admiration for Bunche by his successors. Bunche is singled out as a role model, not only as a peacebuilder but also as a “Black American.” His direct collaborator and successor in office, Urquhart, has played a major role in creating the legend of Bunche. Urquhart took great care to depict modern heroes when writing the biographies of Hammarskjöld and Bunche. Having exclusive access to sources held by the respective families,[48] Urquhart had an excellent opportunity to fashion a distinguished picture of both. These biographies therefore represent an outstanding source for understanding not so much who Hammarskjöld and Bunche were (although both biographies are marvelously documented, researched, and annotated), but how Urquhart thought they should be remembered.

Neither of the two was able to write their autobiography, contrary to the dominant culture of the UN, where almost every major figure in the Secretariat has written their memoirs. For Hammarskjöld and Bunche, Urquhart took over the responsibility of satisfying the urge to bear witness to the work and lives of these international civil servants. His biographies are also excellent indicators of just how much key figures in the UN were embedded in Bürgerlichkeit. Given the strong impulse to give written testimony of the times in which the subjects lived, the narcissistic interest in biography and autobiography is a significant marker of liberal, individualized cultures. The individual understands himself or herself as an active agent of the world around them, whose testimony is of importance for the world. The autobiography is not only a way to stage one’s own self, but also to make sense of the often conflicting social spheres in which the individual is embedded, and which make the quest for authenticity so difficult.

Here, autobiographies (or biographies in the case of Hammarskjöld and Bunche) allow the resolution of the often unsettling contradictions created by the practice of peacebuilding and the lofty ideals behind it. Beyond bearing witness to “what actually happened,” autobiographies and biographies allow the author to celebrate his or her own contribution to the events, as well as the contributions of his or her education, insight, wisdom, and deeper understanding—or lack of empathy and understanding for what is seen as wrongheaded and erroneous politics, accusations, or interpretations. History is no longer merely what is happening; instead, the desire of peacebuilders to bear witness to the history they lived means that they seek to present their subjectivity as crucial to the event itself. The reinterpreted, reread, and retold narrative is the expression of the peacebuilders’ quest for an authentic account of peace; it is, literally, the authoring of the meaning of peace.[49] Autobiographies and memoirs particularly flourish in contentious cases, such as the Congo mission[50] or the failure of the UN in Rwanda, which have led to particularly intense soul searching.[51]

Urquhart’s authoring of Hammarskjöld’s and Bunche’s biographies as well as his own autobiography is therefore the most valuable source of stylization: of how the ideal peacebuilder should be. In his autobiography, Urquhart emphasizes particularly his and his family’s capacity to live up to adversity. His father abandoned the family when he and his brother were very young, leaving his mother alone to earn a living. Through family ties his mother became a teacher at a public school. Through scholarships, and hard work to gain these, Urquhart was able to go to one of England’s most prestigious public schools (which are in fact private schools) and Oxford University.

In his books, Urquhart is never averse to discussing the qualifications of his colleagues and interlocutors. As he was himself the product of an English public school education, so many of the values associated with this education are also those he appreciated in others: intelligence, steadfastness, conscientiousness, determination, calmness, humor, pragmatism, realism, courage. The idea of leadership that transpires from Urquhart’s characterizations is of a person who does not want to take credit for himself, who is independent in thought and action, and who is prepared to take risks and be brave in the face of antagonistic reactions. These positive values are contrasted with far less flattering attributes of incapable leaders and international villains: cleverness, inconsistency, negligence, lack of vision, excitement, lack of humor, rigidity, fanaticism, and opportunism. The highest compliments Urquhart makes in his descriptions are of individual independence and integrity. In his biography of Hammarskjöld in particular, Urquhart draws the image of a solitary warrior of peace braving a hostile world—an image that contrasts strikingly with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s characterization of Hammarskjöld as a “Machiavelli of Peace.”[52]

The ideal peacebuilder corresponds perfectly with the ideal image of the liberal gentleman drawn by Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century, and then particularly represented in nineteenth-century paintings of gentlemen surveying, measuring, and watching the world, such as in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. This is the reasoning, rational, upright, Enlightenment individual braving the world. This ideal type has become a benchmark against which peacebuilder’s actual habitus is measured and valued. Marrack Goulding, another British public school pupil, and successor to Urquhart as under-secretary for special political affairs (and later for peacekeeping after the creation of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations), described Urquhart using exactly such terms:

Urquhart’s courage, intelligence and political street-wisdom had made him a model international civil servant, committed to the multilateral ideal, but realistic, and often very funny.[53]

Again, a generation later, Samantha Power would deliver a flattering and heroic biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the UN mission in Iraq, who was killed in a suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2004. Power described de Mello as a highly committed, egalitarian thinking, freedom fighting, and intellectually high-flying individual who preferred action to theory and pragmatism to idealism.[54]

Kofi Annan: The Gentleman and Entrepreneur of Peace

Civility and autonomy are also words of praise spoken about Annan. Similar to Hammarskjöld, Annan is from a patrician family background. Not only were both his parents from noble families, but his father, a converted Christian, was director of a subsidiary of a Unilever company and commissioner of the Ashanti region.[55] Well off, well educated (in the Gold Coast’s most prestigious boarding school), an Anglophone, and, of course, a Christian, Annan also demonstrates the typical level of overqualification of UN men originating from the (former) colonies. This imbalance between the colonial elites and the West is, obviously one would like to add, not discussed in any of the autobiographical or biographical sketches of his life. Annan masterfully creates the image of self that he wants to present to the public eye. He controls the legend building around his personality by carefully selecting the handful of anecdotes and stories that he and his entourage tell about his life. Hence, the narrative about his family is intended to tell the story that it was his father’s origins that sowed the seeds for his later leadership of the UN. It is not a story of colonialism, of native elites in a colonial system, or of imperial roots laid down in the current international system. The story Annan wants to convey is a judiciously calibrated narrative about a gentleman peacebuilder. Anecdotes about his father, their father-son relationship, Ghana’s independence, and other matters, such as his arrival as an African scholarship student in 1960s Minnesota, have been carefully crafted, and are retold, often word by word, by Annan, his wife, his collaborators, and his biographers in various settings (books, articles, interviews, lectures, and so forth).[56]

His autobiography, Intervention: A Life in War and Peace, published in 2012, is a collection of these well-rehearsed anecdotes. In an impressive example of first-tier enmeshment of the economic and the peacebuilding fields, the book is coauthored by his former UN collaborator and now consultant in “geopolitical risk,” “macro intelligence,” and “investment strategy” for corporate finance and business, Nader Mousavizadeh; Annan sits on the Mousavizadeh’s company’s advisory board, among others, like the former British foreign minister and current CEO of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, or the former CEO of Shell Asia.[57] Each of these autobiographical anecdotes has the aim of conveying the image of a modest, empathetic, cosmopolitan, independent, calm, and thoughtful person whose position as Secretary-General was thrust upon him (rather than sought).[58]

Annan tried with all his might to step into Hammarskjöld’s footprints. He frequently quotes Hammarskjöld; he revived the tradition of reports by intensifying the pace of their publication; he solicited external expert advice in order to legitimize and extend the lineage of peacebuilding from Hammarskjöld to his own time; and, like Hammarskjöld, he surrounded himself with a close-knit, cabinet-type circle of inner staff who were and remain entirely devoted to him. He also sought out opportunities to claim the inheritance of Hammarskjöld. For instance, he instigated and supported a large conference devoted to Hammarskjöld in honor of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, “The Adventure of Peace.” The conference was, like similar events, an excellent occasion of self-referencing in peacebuilding, with close aides of Annan (Shashi Tharoor, Jan Eliasson, Jean-Marie Guéhenno) contributing various chapters.[59] Forewords and contributions to books about Hammarskjöld, as well as frequent references to his works and writings, mark out Annan as an expert in Hammarskjöldian thought.

Yet Annan also renewed the image of the Secretary-General. The novelty of Annan’s image, distinguishing him from Waldheim, Pérez de Cuellar, and Boutros-Ghali, was that he, the career UN cadre, managed to fashion himself as an entrepreneur of peace. In an ever more competitive field, Annan overhauled Hammarskjöld’s argument that world peace can be administered only by the UN. Hammarskjöld argued that the UN was in between states, and therefore best placed to make sure that world peace was not breached; Annan undertook a seemingly endless series of initiatives, reports, conferences, commissions, and so forth to defend the UN’s centrality in a much more complex peacebuilding field, where other international agencies, NGOs, churches, security companies, corporate actors, and, last but certainly not least, armed groups, competed with the UN over the authority to determine what peace is and how it is to be achieved.

Any aspect of contemporary armed conflict constituted an opportunity for Annan to bring in the UN: as a forum of experts, as lawmaker, or as fundraiser for action. The reviews of the Rwanda and Srebrenica dramas were launching points for a discussion on the need for the UN to act, and to be accordingly equipped by member states. The wars in the former Yugoslavia led to the instauration of the international criminal court, and conveniently shoved a big chunk of uncharted legal territory the UN’s way, at the same time discarding political debates about statehood, rebellion, and government authority. The wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone made Annan take the topics of child soldiering and resource looting (blood diamonds) to the Security Council, wrestling the latter issue out of the hands of the World Bank, thereby widening the scope of people who would be, by force of a UN Security Council resolution, under the protection of the UN. He also reached out to the business sector with his Global Compact, and increasingly involved the UN in climate change discussions under the rubric of peacebuilding. He eagerly soaked up any debate about peace and war within and outside the UN, with the aim of converting the scholarly or political debate into symbolic capital for the UN in order to justify its continued central role in peacebuilding.[60] Hence, the debates over state failure in the 1990s, over democratization and peace, and about international criminal responsibility, for instance, were skillfully merged into a debate over sovereignty, which his friend and then foreign minister of Canada, Lloyd Axworthy, proposed to lead, and which ultimately culminated in the responsibility to protect doctrine and its influence on the 2005 World Summit Declaration.[61] And, when push came to shove in the oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, Annan engaged Mark Malloch Brown, who had been before joining UNDP the lead partner of the political PR company Sawyer Miller, to refashion his and the UN’s public image.[62]

In the process, Annan displayed all the qualities an entrepreneur is supposed to show if classical entrepreneurial theory is to be believed: alertness to new opportunities and to market openings, zeal in exploiting such opportunities and maximizing gain from them, thinking up and realizing new coalitions and alliances to further goals, and the capability to steer and guide these new initiatives and processes to one’s own advantage.[63] What is more, all these initiatives were typical examples of projects that have become popular as new management tools. For each initiative, Annan would put together a new and different team (although recycling old hands from time to time, as discussed in chapter 4). The teams would flesh out a report with recommendations, which were, in turn, outsourced to other nonstate actors (NGOs, ad-hoc alliances, think tanks, business corporations, and so forth) to be realized. The UN Secretariat would, in some cases, keep a coordinating role, yet most often in cooperation with a think tank or other international agency. The emphasis was on quickly and flexibly producing UN recommendations on topics that were in the public eye, from poverty to terrorism, to state failure, democracy, child soldiering, and blood diamonds; although the term “sustainability” was commonly associated with these initiatives, not all of these initiatives survived the times very well.

The entrepreneurial nature of Annan’s time as Secretary-General reflects well the neoliberalization of peacebuilding, where private corporations, civil society organizations, private individuals, and a host of other nonstate actors have taken over functions, activities, and also the legitimacy of states and state actors. Tacitly, the role of the Secretary-General has shifted from following a spiritual calling to becoming a resourceful trader of peace ideas; just as, for many liberal professions, neoliberalism has introduced a shift from an expert fulfilling his professional duty to individuals who have to market and sell themselves as problem solvers and project managers.[64]

The Paradox of Professionalism

Chapters 3 and 4 have already shown that the peacebuilders’ career paths follow the pattern of neoliberal market economies, with a high fragmentation and what could be called the projectization of their work lives. The increased precarity of the workplace—or what is called in neoliberal jargon the flexibilization of the workplace—places high demands on individuals because uncertainty over future employment affects all aspects of people’s lives: their family relations, their financial situation, their further education and training, their place of living, and so forth.

In peacebuilding, as in humanitarian assistance or development, much of this uncertainty is wittingly accepted by newcomers to the field. In fact, it is the apparent cosmopolitanism of the workplace that makes peacebuilding attractive in the first place. Just as the liberal core values of peacebuilding have not changed from Hammarskjöld to Annan, despite its repackaging and different appearance, today’s peacebuilders continue to value the core ideas of middle-class sensibilities. They perceive themselves as a cosmopolitan, merit-based, and philanthropic elite realizing the core values of liberalism—autonomy, individual freedom, human dignity—in their work and lives. The necessity to reinvent themselves, to find new contracts and projects, is seen as a challenge and, actually, as a constitutive part of their professional identity. Peacebuilders are truly liberal individuals who understand their work as part of their personal self-fulfillment. They are, so to say, a happy precariat who perceive their fragmented work lives as personal development and opportunities, and not as a misery resulting from the capitalist reordering of the world.

The image of the ideal peacebuilder is, in this respect, the image of an optimist, believing in the perfectibility of mankind and, as a central condition of that perfectibility, in individual freedom to make one’s life better. All respondents to the 2008 and 2012 surveys placed individual liberty as their most important political value. All of those surveyed, furthermore, agreed on a core set of values (apart from individual liberty), including ideas such as tolerance, fairness, and solidarity. Yet important distinctions exist from other values with which “individual liberty” is combined. The answers to the question as to which additional values should be part of a “good” political canon clustered into four groups (see figure 10), ranging from a libertarian cluster that emphasizes individuality and competition to a conservative cluster of values with family and patriotism at its core. The libertarian and conservative profiles are represented to a lesser degree than the classical liberal and cosmopolitan profiles, yet their presence is still important. These political differentiations give weight to the attitudes and opinions peacebuilders have about politics, the causes of wars, and the solutions to conflicts in the countries in which they intervene. These differentiations will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters. Here, it is noteworthy that such differentiations exist, yet there is no radical departure from the liberal canon of individual liberty, human dignity, and fairness.

This core canon is the basis for peacebuilders’ own perception of their work and ethics. It helps create a self-legitimating image of peacebuilding that gives consistency and coherence to a work life and professional field that, in fact, contains enormous ambiguities. In their individual careers, peacebuilders have to deal with a large variety of ruptures and reconstructions; as a social class, their professional existence hinges particularly on states, yet peacebuilding needs to be distinguished from state politics in order to be ethically credible and for the peacebuilders to be truly professional. The peacebuilders’ struggle for consistency is best expressed as a striving to professionalize, ideally and practically, what they are doing.

In their own perception, an essential part of the peacebuilders’ professional and personal identity is the philanthropic impetus behind their work. Peacebuilders insist that they are doing something meaningful—a conviction strongly conveyed by the exemplary figures noted above, who were ready to discuss technicalities, problems of administration, or the management of peacebuilding, but who would never have questioned (and still don’t question) the usefulness of peacebuilding. Peacebuilding is building peace—maybe not enough, or not well enough, but nevertheless, the legitimacy of interventionism per se is never questioned.

As the raison d’être of the UN is the preservation of world peace, the international civil servant is, by definition, doing good when she is doing her job right, whether this involves state power or not, or whether the person is close to any state or not. And the converse is true: he is doing well by being good. This image has produced a particular discourse about professional ethics: a good international civil servant, a good peace entrepreneur, and a good peacebuilder strives to get the job done. Thus, the descriptions Urquhart, Power, and others give of an ideal peacebuilder focus on the specific understanding of peacebuilders as professionals. And in their own self-descriptions, peacebuilders distance themselves markedly from “bureaucrats”—from UN bureaucrats, if peacebuilders are not working for the UN, or from national civil service bureaucrats and diplomats if they are working for the UN. Hence, Power, for instance, describes in many places in her biography of Vieira de Mello just how much he hated the paperwork at the UN. Others, like Goulding, Urquhart, or staff interviewed in the United Nations Oral History Project, frequently relate anecdotes of how they subverted the established, complicated, and highly formalized procedures of their organizations.[65]

Fig. 10. Political values clustered into four profiles

What peacebuilding yet lacks, if it is to count fully as a profession in the business world sense, is the associated organizational, jurisdictional, and regulatory free space. It is, rather, a profession in the continuous process of being made. The UN-centeredness of peacebuilding does resemble an informal regulatory authority, but although the UN has enormous ideational power, it has little legal canonical power. Projects like the “Horizon” Project[66] or the the Report “The Challenge of Sustaining Peace” of the Review of Peacekeeping[67] have been intended to establish a commonly shared canon of professionalism, similar to other code-of-conduct projects in the humanitarian field (e.g., the Sphere project)[68] or the international business field (e.g., the Global Compact).[69] Yet, to date, no enforcement processes exist; there is no formal accreditation process; there are not even institutions or legal rules that would allow for the raising of disputable cases and incidents of lack of professionalism, for example, in cases of human rights abuses by peacekeepers.[70] There is not one set of easily identifiable professional skills or knowledge that makes up the profession of peacebuilding. Other than classical liberal professions such as law or medicine, there is not even a single clearly designated object of work.

The elusive nature of the notion of “professionalism” in peacebuilding, and its weak relation to specific skills, knowledge, or even standardized protocols, emphasizes how much the discourse of professionalism is part of self-description and self-identification. Individually, this represents the peacebuilders’ wish to stylize themselves as the holders of esoteric knowledge that not only distinguishes them from what would be called in neobusiness jargon their “clients,” but also justifies the specific career paths they are following. Collectively, the discourse of professionalism draws boundaries between different organizations as it allows hierarchization along lines of professional efficiency, whether or not this professionalism is anchored in real, measurable entities.

The discourse of professionalism becomes possible because those activities comprising peacebuilding do correspond to the major, central criteria that much of business studies or organizational studies would associate with liberal professions: namely, the assumption of self-directed work based on specific skills and knowledge that are usually acquired in years-long studies in universities and work on the job. And, even though the peacebuilding’s deontology is rough, mostly tacit, and unwritten, and not in any way linked to a professional association, a clear set of professional values is apparent in the practices of peacebuilding. As Willem Schinkel and Mirko Noordegraaf point out, professionalism requires a certain self-awareness of what the work is about and what constitutes “good work.”[71] This awareness may be implicit, and only minimally officially regulated, or even not regulated at all; what’s crucial, however, is the self-referential discourse it allows to those who consider themselves working in this domain to define what they understand to be “good work.” Improving the human condition requires expert knowledge and extreme diligence—hence, from an elite who can provide, in Urquhart’s words, “intelligence and courage” and is hard working. The highly selective, self-referential, and close-knit network structure of the field effectively excludes not only critical voices from other professional fields (e.g., academic, policy making) and within the organization, but also from the countries and populations where peacebuilding takes place. Dissident voices are perceived as uninformed, parochial, self-interested, sometimes as silly, and, in the worst case, as violent “spoilers” of peace processes.[72]

The discourse of professionalism serves therefore not only to give a sense and purpose to the peacebuilders’ career and to the social field collectively, but also to exclude others, critics or otherwise, from the field. The notion of professionalism also implies a normative distinction from amateurism, to be understood as work that does not generate income and as work that is poorly done, without skills and knowledge.[73] The peacebuilders clearly want to distance themselves from amateurism, which is frequently associated with spontaneous volunteer and grassroots organizations that are considered all too often to go into countries without sufficient preparation or knowledge, and with at best naïve, and at worst harmful, agendas.[74]

Professionalism further implies a notion of independence and autonomous decision making. Independence and autonomy are co-requisites of expert knowledge. However, peacebuilders as a group typically do not hold a common canon of expert knowledge, unlike engineers, for instance, or other chartered professions or professions with minimum qualification standards. In order to be considered highly professional, the peacebuilder would rather make the argument that she or he brings in expert knowledge in one specific area (e.g., security, logistics, communication, law). Like other professionals, peacebuilders perceive themselves as not just working, but she or he “has to be educated and trained, [socialized] as [a] member of an occupational domain, supervised by his/her peers and held accountable.”[75] Most important, the skills and knowledge associated with peacebuilding are specialized, acquired through extensive training and experience and not commonly available; in short, “esoteric knowledge.”

In a catchy yet rather undefined manner peacebuilding’s professionalism was summarized in the title of OCHA’s 2011 report on humanitarian assistance, “To Stay and Deliver,” authored by the former director of OCHA, Jan Egeland, and the think tank Humanitarian Outcomes.[76] A sense of duty appears to be one of the most important traits of the peacebuilder’s professional culture. Urquhart particularly liked to underscore this value with anecdotes about himself or others fulfilling their mission under the most difficult circumstances. The absence of a phone and any kind of catering in the Congo; the risks incurred during travel or on the ground; the frequent mention of long working hours, foregone weekends, and lack of holidays; the phone calls in the middle of the night and the work meetings before sunrise . . . all these anecdotes stress the 24/7 attitude, the unquestioned availability of the peacebuilder to the organization, and the unconditional willingness to fulfill the task.[77]

“Stay and deliver” implies other work-related yet personal skills: stress resilience and the unpretentious acceptance of difficulties in work in order to overcome those difficulties. “Stress” and “challenge” are expressions that return frequently in interviews. Interviewees recurrently used expressions such as “you need to be able to get on with it,” “deal with it,” “it was my job so I just did it,” “it’s hard work but that’s what it needs,” “that’s the job,” and similar. They also tended to emphasize stress resilience and a sense of duty as crucial for taking the job in the first place, and for further career advancement. People who left the organization are commonly seen as having been unable to work under the harsh conditions of peacebuilding.

In the survey of 2012, which explicitly asked how challenging the peacebuilders thought their job was, about 65 percent of the respondents replied that their job was extremely or very challenging.[78] Correspondingly, about 60 percent indicated that they felt often or quite often stressed at work.[79] The survey also presented the blog post of an aid worker from a conflict zone reporting a verbal skirmish with local youth, whom the aid worker perceived as aggressive and ungrateful. The survey asked the respondents to say what they would tell the aid worker. Only a few respondents showed outright sympathy with the blogger. The large majority saw the aid worker’s behavior as a reaction induced by stress, indicating that the aid worker’s burnout was the likely cause for the skirmish, but nevertheless thought that his reaction to the youngsters’ provocation was unprofessional. An important number drew the conclusion that the blogger should “get another job,” hence showing that such a stress reaction was considered inappropriate and indicative of the person’s unsuitability for the job.[80]

Stress resilience is also considered an indicator of belonging to an efficient and successful organization. The way stress resilience is understood has, however, changed over time. While the first generation of peacebuilders largely sought to justify high levels of stress as being simply part of their duty (and sometimes with military parallels), in the vein of the 1960s “organization man,”[81] many contemporary peacebuilders have interiorized and individualized the requirement for stress resilience. Being able to cope is now a personal characteristic that needs to be nurtured and cultured individually. Just as being a peacebuilder is deemed a personal calling and a step toward self-fulfillment, experiencing stress or even breakdown is considered a personal failure.

Unsurprisingly, stress and burnout remain extremely sensitive topics. Interviewees commonly referred to other people being stressed or showing signs of burnout, and particularly having family or health problems associated with stress, but denied that they suffered the same. Blogs also talk about the effects of stress, but usually in ironic ways, for example by making fun of expats’ drinking habits,[82] but rarely give a subjective account of what it means to work fourteen to sixteen hours a day, or to hold two or three jobs at a time in one mission. In this respect, peacebuilding shows again its isomorphism to related fields, like the academic field or the field of business corporation management, where the interiorization of self-exploitative models of work are equally widespread.[83]

With respect to the business world, peacebuilders particularly draw attention to the nonprofit nature of their work. This is emphasized on a personal level as well as on the level of the collective image peacebuilders want to give of themselves. In personal interviews, interviewees often insisted that they could have had much better paid jobs in the business world, but that they preferred to work for their respective organizations in order to do something “sensible.” The same story is told in the many interviews and autobiographical sketches, where peacebuilders argue that they had never been motivated by material gain.[84]

The delineation from the business world remains, however, a difficult task, and not only because many peacebuilders do in fact end up working for corporate organizations. Against the background of the same neoliberal paradigm of self-marketing, much of what is seen as characteristic of a successful peacebuilder corresponds to well-known images of successful business leadership: vision, seizing opportunities, inventiveness and improvisation in difficult environments, self-preservation in pursuing goals, diplomacy, pragmatism, realism, intelligence, and courage. The peace entrepreneur presents a much more attractive image of peacebuilding nowadays than the civil servant, as Annan’s self-stylization shows. Hence, the peacebuilder’s distinction from the business world is first and foremost a discursive one, not one of practice.

The main value that distinguishes peacebuilding discursively from other occupations is its representation as a form of selfless commitment; peacebuilders particularly emphasize the nonprofit character of their hard work. This, however, moves them fairly close to the world of NGOs and charity organizations from whose amateurism peacebuilders also seek to be distinguished, leading to the simultaneous but somewhat paradoxical emphasis on procedures, hard work, and channels of accountability (report writing, meetings, feedback to headquarters) that assure the quality of delivery.

The peacebuilders’ insistence on professionalism ultimately draws another thin line between the image of the international professional and the national civil servant and national bureaucrat, a line that is, again, often nonexistent in the reality of many peacebuilders’ careers. The discourse of professionalism implies independence. As holders of esoteric knowledge, and as experts in their fields, real professionals act according to their own independent analysis of a situation, and devise a course of action that only they or their peers can evaluate and judge. Being a professional means, by definition, being independent and “neutral,” in the sense of being solely committed to solving a problem and not being beholden to any vested interests that might have contributed to the problem in the first place.

In the view of many interviewees, survey respondents, and in the views articulated in published materials, a peacebuilder is not a diplomat in national service; his (most often not her) job is to defend the interests of humanity and peace. In personal interviews, every interviewee emphasized how much his or her international service had distinguished her or him from their fellow countrypeople, how little they felt committed to their own country’s foreign policy, and how much they were pleased to work in a multilateral, international, and national-interest-free environment. In a world where most peacekeeping and peacebuilding takes place in intrastate wars, the continued insistence on Hammarskjöld’s ideal of the international civil servant standing above national interests certainly appears as a relic of the past. Yet the insistence on neutrality continues to have an important function as a discourse of distance from national administrations and administrators.

Conclusion

The habitus of peacebuilders is articulated in behaviors, values, and practices that are profoundly marked by middle-class sensibilities. These have changed over time in accordance with the changes of the global capitalist system and most notably the flexibilization of the workplace. While early peacebuilders like Bunche or Urquhart saw their professional career in the terms of Hammarskjöld’s image of the international civil servant, later peacebuilders like Annan understand themselves rather as entrepreneurs of peace. As professional careers have become more and more fragmented and precarious, peacebuilders have, like other liberal professions, embraced these changes as opportunities for self-fulfillment. These adaptations have allowed peacebuilders to preserve their core values and self-images such as their belief in careers built on merit and professional efficiency. The frequent job changes, the short-termism and projectism of peacebuilding, its high mobility and volatility, hence, have been normalized in the ways people in the field act out their professional careers. The field-specific values of professionalism, for instance, the expectation of stress resilience, have been largely internalized and are perpetuated in the professional practices of the field. It is not surprising then that in their political worldviews and discourses peacebuilders emphasize exactly such middle-class values as autonomy, leadership, efficiency, and accountability. The next chapter will delve deeper into those values.

Chapter 6

Narratives of Intervention

Leadership, Liberalism, and Social Justice

The discourses of the ideal international civil servant and peace entrepreneur can be interpreted as self-legitimating strategies by peacebuilders to defend their particular interests as a social class, a profession in the making, and as representatives of international organizations, which need to find and confirm their place in world politics. As the notion of habitus implies, these strategies are not necessarily deployed rationally or even consciously; they are subconscious, incorporated normalities of behavior and thought.[1] Even though we can sensibly argue that the specific self-interest of peacebuilders to construct their social position is a good reason for such kinds of discourses, we cannot assume that these discourses have an inherent merit, for example, that they are inherently rational or utility-maximizing. There could have been others.

Those discourses that have been chosen, however, have been particularly attractive because they resonate and are effective with an audience that is important for peacebuilding’s existence: states, and in particular Western states; NGOs and other international organizations, and in particular humanitarian and human rights NGOs; other liberal elites in overlapping fields; and the Western media, which function as amplifiers of peacebuilding’s causes and reasoning. The discourses are part of the symbolic exchange between these various actors of world politics, and accompany the exchange of other types of capital, be it people or finances, as described in chapter 4 on the overlapping boundaries of the peacebuilding field.

These discourses draw on knowledge and images that are commonly known, and which provide a common language through which the organizationally, politically, and socially different actors can communicate. They reflect the socialization of the peacebuilding field and its adjacent fields by alluding to commonly shared concepts, normative ideas, and worldviews. Peacebuilding uses the vocabulary of political theory (“democracy,” “fairness,” “justice”) to create associations between their work and concepts and images of which most of their interlocutors have some notion. This chapter will explore this vocabulary in order to provide an inventory of the political theory “bits and pieces” that are used in peacebuilding. Three archetypical discourses emerge from this analysis: one on leadership, one on liberal values, and one on social justice. All three discourses set the normative boundaries within which discussions over peace and peacebuilding measures legitimately take place.

In the 2008 and 2012 surveys, peacebuilders were asked several questions regarding their political worldviews.[2] Among them was a question about what reading had influenced their political thinking. A first look at the answers shows that liberal political theory was actually thinly represented. This result is surprising, given the deep interiorization of core liberal values discussed in the preceding chapter, and in light of the frequent claim that peacebuilding aims at building what Roland Paris has called a “liberal peace.”[3] However, as figure 11 shows, the first four most frequently mentioned authors are certainly not typical examples of liberal thought. Although Thomas Hobbes can be considered a “protoliberal” in his skepticism and insistence on individual negative freedom,[4] Plato, Karl Marx, and Niccolò Machiavelli were authors who are loathed by liberals.[5] Yet, the high representation of these three nonliberal thinkers was well balanced by a large range of Enlightenment philosophers and liberal theorists. A strong penchant for dystopian literature (not shown in figure 11) equally emphasizes the peacebuilders’ liberal ideas. The influence of Plato, Hobbes, and Machiavelli clearly exists alongside liberal ideas, not despite them.

The peacebuilders’ answers do show that the common language of peacebuilding is firmly rooted in Western academic traditions of political philosophy. The canon presented in figure 11 is the standard Western, white male reading list of any liberal arts college.[6] The political virtues discussed in most of the literature mentioned reflect largely the preoccupations of this type of Western education: individualism, merit, achievement, self-fulfilment (or what Charles Taylor calls “authenticity”[7]), expertise and skills, and the judicious separation of economic utility-maximizing and communitarian ethics of care. Given the educational background of peacebuilders (see chapter 3 and 4), these readings do not present any surprises. However, in terms of discourses of peacebuilding they allow us to map out three strands of thought that demonstrate the breadth (and, by inference, the outer boundaries) of political thought in peacebuilding. The three strands are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they have to be seen as indicating the acceptable realms of discourse within which discussions over matters of peacebuilding, from the question of effectiveness to the question of legitimacy, take place.

Fig. 11. Political theorists

The readings reflect three preoccupations of peacebuilding discourses that will be discussed in more detail in this chapter: the theme of leadership and service to the community, with the strong presence of Plato, Hobbes, and Machiavelli; the question of social organization along liberal lines, with frequent reference to John Rawls and other liberal writing, such as The Federalist Papers; and the questions of social justice and political engineering within the context of a liberal world. Peacebuilders are no revolutionaries, and adhere strongly to the concepts of private property, market economy, and competition. The strong presence of Marx as reading reference does not represent, therefore, a communist-revolutionary trend among peacebuilders; instead, it shows awareness of the structural inequalities of capitalism and its negative effects, as will be discussed in more detail below.

Leadership and Service to the Community

By answering the question of their preferred reading, respondents demonstrated their idea of what appropriate reading for a peacebuilder would look like. They candidly revealed their image of politics as they think it should be, rather than their personal, intimate reading pleasures. The concept of leadership is a highly important value for peacebuilders. Quite a large number of interviewed peacebuilders accordingly also mentioned biographies and autobiographies of state leaders among the literature that had inspired their political thinking. Memoirs of statesmen and women (at the time of the first wave, Madeleine Albright’s memoirs, for instance, had just been published) were widely read.

Despite writing in different periods and under different epistemological premises, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Plato represent a common strand of thought. All three authors are mainly preoccupied with the question of good leadership in a world of conflicting interests, potential violence, and the impossibility of imposing on a human community certain objective criteria circumscribing good and right decisions. All three postulate a theory of elite government, although with widely differing arguments and different implications. All three argue for the strategic use of force; not for force itself, but as a necessary evil to uphold and order a political community well. And all three distinguish the servant of the political community, its political leader, from the private, moral person that he or she otherwise might be; although again, they do so quite differently. For peacebuilding, all three put forward an important justification for intervention, namely the idea that wise (and consequently, good) leaders will have to override “common sense” or popular feelings in order to preserve fundamental political principles, and first among them, the integrity of the political community itself.

It is worth starting with the discussion of the justifications Machiavelli offers for intervention and top-down ordering politics. Machiavelli has been recognized as an early theoretician of statecraft and diplomacy; more recently, he has been seen as a republican (the pejorative sound of “Machiavellianism” might be due to the very royal despise of exactly these republican ideas in English Reformation).[8] The aim of the utilitarian approach to power in Machiavelli’s writing, particularly in The Prince, is the preservation of the state. State reason is, in Machiavelli’s argument, and similar to Hobbes, a rational principle of peace, and, hence, an ethical principle. The best form of a state is a republic, and so the preservation of the state means the preservation of the republic, quite contrary to the title of the work itself. As Maurizio Viroli argues, this title should not mislead us about Machiavelli’s intention, which was to write down principles of government that meant to preserve the state, of which the prince would be (merely) its leader.[9] Quentin Skinner points out the importance of Machiavelli as an advocate of a consequentialist ethics of politics in which the possibility that a leader sometimes has to do evil to do well is entirely acceptable. The Prince can be read exactly as the title therefore implies, namely as advice to a political leader of how to preserve the fortunes of his state in the interest of its citizens.

Machiavelli’s piece of advice that has commonly provoked the most outrage is the one telling a leader to pursue certain policies that he, the leader, thinks are right even if they are most unpopular and are against “common sense.”[10] In the logic of Machiavelli’s consequentialist ethics, the important question to ask is not whether any citizen, or what we would call today a “stakeholder,” should be protected in any particular course of action, but whether the leader’s actions are beneficial to the survival of the government, or rather the leader per se. It is the service done to ensure the persistence of the prince that counts, not the price, whether material or moral, that has to be paid for it.[11] Hence, the leader is bound by political logic, and the laws and rules that govern the survival of government, but the leader is not bound by particular interests or specific moral considerations simply for the virtue of these moral considerations.

As Skinner points out, referring to Isaiah Berlin’s reading of The Prince, Machiavelli believes that there are different types of morality that have to be weighed against each other in politics: the inner morality of Christian values and the pragmatic morality of state survival.[12] Berlin sharply formulates the juxtaposition Machiavelli undertakes of two types of morality in his writing:

To advocate ideal measures [of Christian morality], suitable only for angels, as previous writers seem to him [Machiavelli] too often to have done, is visionary and irresponsible and leads to ruin [politically]. . . . To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men; if one wishes to build a glorious community like those of Athens or Rome at their best, then one must abandon Christian education and substitute one better suited to the purpose.[13]

Those respondents who mentioned Machiavelli as an influence on their political thinking wanted to demonstrate their agreement with these basic ideas of political realism. Machiavelli’s understanding of politics connects perfectly well with the world of international service. Not only is the system of international politics seen as a field of politics that particularly requires realist leadership; its nature as a system of force and power also requires clear-headed leaders who can see above and beyond day-to-day quarrels and intrigues, and who have the survival of the whole in mind. It is from this perspective that Conor Cruise O’Brien called Dag Hammarskjöld a “Machiavelli of Peace.”[14] This interpretation of Machiavelli as advocating leadership as a form of arbitration, and oriented toward the survival and glory of the political community, moves his precepts close to Hobbes’s political philosophy.

A common reading of Hobbes’s influence on international relations is to equate his conception of the state of nature with the anarchical structure of the interstate system without overarching power that could secure the peaceful coexistence of nations.[15] Since Martin Wight’s distinction between the Hobbesian, Lockean, and Marxist theories of international relations, Hobbes has been associated with the realist tradition; yet a growing number of critics argue that neither Hans Morgenthau nor other classical realists saw Hobbes as a theorist of international anarchy.[16] Nevertheless, the association of Hobbes and realism, the conflation of the Hobbesian state of nature with international anarchy, and the argument that strong power is needed to secure survival, are all markers of what could be called the realist conception of international politics.

Citing Hobbes as formative political reading can therefore be interpreted as the respondents’ tentative attempt to give the impression that she or he has well understood the anarchical nature of international politics and is perceptively aware that this anarchy is structural, as it is conditioned by the lack of an overarching ruler or “Leviathan.” Hobbes’s description of the state of nature in which all men, whether by evil or by good, stumble into chaotic relations, summarized in his famous “Men live without a common power to keep them all in awe,” simply seems a very correct observation of the war-prone international system.[17]

Another interpretation of Hobbes places much less emphasis on the association of the state of nature with anarchy, and focuses more on Hobbes’s skepticism about reality. This reading requires a somewhat closer study of Hobbes’s philosophy beyond the Leviathan, yet, due to Richard Tuck’s and Skinner’s work on Hobbes, it has become more widely known in the past decades. Hobbes was, like many intellectuals of his time, intrigued by the first astounding results of the optical sciences, and he derived from these and from other, philosophical sources, like Michel de Montaigne’s works, a deep skepticism about men’s capacity to capture and understand one universal truth. His skepticism was, as Tuck points out, less about the existence of truth than about men’s capacity to recognize truth, if it existed, all in the same way as the truth; and even if men would all universally recognize truth, this would still be no proof that it was the true truth.[18] Hobbes’s skepticism was epistemological and ontological. Indeed, Hobbes saw the origins of war exactly in the diversity of such central values as good or evil.

Consequently, Hobbes understood language to be the only means by which men can establish if not a common understanding, then at least an authoritative and, by common agreement, shared definition of central values and the laws that should reign over them. The king’s role is to be the arbitrator and authorized author of this definition; the king is, and this is crucial, not considered a person, but an abstract principle, namely that of arbitration.[19] The king is awarded this role for no other reason than his being the sovereign who, by definition of the word “sovereign” itself (again, as institution, not as person), is able to provide protection and guarantee the survival of the citizenry—an early formulation of the social contract between rulers and ruled.

In this reading of Hobbes, an organization like the United Nations, or a nongovernmental organization that brings peace and development, has a particular place in the world as arbitrator of international relations. These organizations are exceptional because they break the logic of anarchy and international survival. Even though they are not sovereign in the classical sense, they are able, in principle, to provide protection from hunger, fear, and death.

The idea that the UN offers a global social contract is a very attractive justification for intervention. The UN, and in a larger sense the so-called international community, proposes the same deal to citizens as does the Hobbesian sovereign: namely, the protection of the right to survival in exchange for the legitimacy of authoring the rules of the world citizenry. With regard to Hobbes’s skepticism, the justification similarly proposes that international multilateral organizations take up a special role in international politics, as institutions that can name and define global politics in a disinterested manner by using its own language to arbitrate between conflicting interests. They are not states that are motivated by particular and parochial interests; they are similar to Hobbes’s kings as arbitrators. Hence, citing Hobbes as most influential political reading, as many of the respondents did, does not represent a contradiction of the conviction that multilateralism and international law are the most apt instruments of international peace, but a corroboration of it.

It is the insistence on leadership on the one hand, and the survival of the political community on the other, that puts Machiavelli in the same category of political thinker as Hobbes and, in certain senses that will be explained more below, Plato. There are certainly deep and important differences between the three, most notably their philosophical reflection about truth that set the skeptics Machiavelli and Hobbes apart from the idealist Plato. Yet all three developed arguments about political leadership that turn around the central idea of virtuous leadership for the preservation of the commonweal; a discourse that resonates well with the international civil servant discourse of Hammarskjöld (see chapter 5).

The argumentative logic of Hammarskjöld’s international civil servant and the Machiavellian, Hobbesian, and Platonian ideal of service to the community is the same. The Prince’s morality must not lie in being good when it is outright self-destructive to be good; Hobbes’s king does not need to be right, good, or wise, but simply the only one who resolves ambiguity; and Plato’s philosopher kings might be misled, but, as long as they honestly serve the republic, they are always just.

The peacebuilding narrative is quite similar: neutral international civil servants are doing right and good when they are doing well, as described by the UN Charter and by international law. An overarching idea of the public good (the “republic” in Machiavelli’s case, or the UN Charter in Hammarkjöld’s case) serves as the key reference for ethical judgments. Whatever serves the right cause is good service, even if this includes unfairness or injustice in particular instances.

Plato in particular developed the argument that it is the purpose of virtue that makes a political act good and just, rather than its actual effect or the way it is executed. Only if the purpose of a political act is reasonable and reached through thorough logical reflection will it be truly disinterested, and so by definition beneficial to the public good (as opposed to individual interests, which follow whim and sentiment). According to Plato, philosophers are called upon to govern because they have the rare capacity to understand truth, as they have the faculty of objective and reasoned judgment. A philosopher seeks truth with his or her (women, too, could become philosophers) entire soul if she hates untruth; is only interested in ideas, not in material goods; and is brave, generous, autonomous, just, and conciliatory. True philosophers are selected through exigent education in warfare for their bodily strength, but also in algebra, geometrics, analytical geometrics, astronomy, harmonics, and dialectics. These sciences allow them to be enlightened and to guide the “blind” and ignorant.

Plato argued that his was a utopian ideal, as very few men understand the importance of philosophers and are thus willing to grant them ruling status. Furthermore, politics is corrupted by material desires and private property. Both provoke eternal struggles and antagonisms between the rich and the poor. These struggles lead society down the path of decline, where the political community moves from aristocratic government (which is the closest to Plato’s philosopher state), to an oligarchic government, then, through rebellion, to democracy, which is accompanied by increasing laziness and lack of discipline, as the formerly disempowered classes do not have the necessary qualities to rule. The institutional decay of democracy finally allows a populist tribune to take power and to become a tyrant. The tyrant is the exact contrast of the philosopher: cruel, rapacious, passionate, unjust, and a warmonger, full of hatred, and, deep inside, unhappy.

Plato’s philosopher state has been highly influential on the formulation of a large variety of elite political schema and on utopian visions of society, as it has sharpened liberal thought. It has provided for two thousand years the cultural script of political philosophy that discusses a utopian past or future in order to contrast this vision of justice with the present one, where moral decay, institutional dysfunction, and human fallibility lead to constant struggle and violence. Although Plato on the one hand, and Machiavelli and Hobbes on the other, are epistemologically opposed, all three argued for strong leadership as a political solution to diversity, multiplicity, diverging interests, and human conflict. Their key argument was, in all three cases, that just causes of politics will lead wise rulers (whether arbitrating kings, power-conscious princes, or philosopher kings) to take just decisions.

What is striking in this reference to Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Plato is how little they correspond to the dominant perception of peacebuilding as a liberal enterprise. Of course, Machiavelli and Hobbes were both writing at the beginning of the modern period, and were theoreticians of a sort of proto-Enlightenment. They had already integrated into their political philosophy disenchantment with the world, the notion that God is dead, and the idea of the individual’s immanent, worldly, singular, and lonely responsibility for his life and, as political leader, for his real, existing community. This did represent a major break from the Christian political thinking that dominated much of the Middle Ages. But it was not yet liberal thought. Freedom was no category of thought at all for Machiavelli, and it was a minor concern for Hobbes. Individualism, too, is embryonic in Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’s thought, so that the central category of liberal political thought, namely individual freedom, is underdeveloped and entirely secondary to the much more important and overwhelming question of the survival and existence of the political community, or, in modern expression, the state. In the clearest contradistinction to a modern thinker, Adam Smith, for instance, neither Hobbes nor Machiavelli, nor Plato for that matter, would even have dreamt of making up an argument for men’s capacity for self-organization; the entire enterprise of their political philosophy was about the fact that men are naturally, inherently, necessarily incapable of peaceful self-organization. Neither Hobbes nor Machiavelli make an argument about men’s natural capacity for reason—on the contrary, they argue for a strong state exactly because men are not reasonable. Plato does argue that politics are best if built on the grounds of reason, but that reason is not inborn to every man on earth; it is a quality that is gained through education, discipline, learning, and the practice of philosophy. It might, thus, require innate intelligence, but it is certainly no universal and intrinsic characteristic of mankind. People’s inherent inconsistency, their unreasonable and irrational behavior, their adherence to arbitrary ideas, and so forth—all this actually justifies the need for leadership that is virtuous, wise, and strong.

Contract and Intuitive Liberalism

The image of liberal peacebuilding is better served with the large array of liberal authors who were equally cited by the respondents: Rawls predominantly, but also Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Adam Smith, The Federalist Papers, David Hume, and Benjamin Franklin. These philosophers and liberal theorists are mentioned in the good company of a long row of novelists and essayists who deal with liberal preoccupations: the dystopians H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, the libertarian writer Ayn Rand, and the libertarian anarchist Robert Nozick; or, representing again another type of liberalism, the contemporary New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. Taken together, readings in classical liberalism represent the third largest category of readings among the 2008 and 2012 surveyees (see figure 11). If dystopians and globalism-favorable literature is counted along with classical liberal political thought, then the category of liberalism even represents the largest (see figure 11).

It is a truism to state that liberalism does not represent a particularly homogenous political ideology. Beyond the common assumption of the individual’s freedom, liberal authors will disagree on a wide number of issues, as anyone who compares Rand to Smith will know.[20] Yet the majority of political theory authors mentioned by the respondents are in some form or other adherents of the contract theory of liberalism, the libertarians being a strong outlier here; all authors build their arguments on some kind of undiscussed and “self-evident” assumption that men are endowed at birth with reason and freedom and are born equal; and all these theorists defend in some way a vision of human history as a civilizational process in which full liberal democracy represents, if not a real, existing, perfect political system, then at least a desirable utopia.

Contract theory is very obviously the foundation of liberal institutionalism in international politics. Historians of the “International Relations” discipline point out that its origins lie in the Wilsonian moment of bringing together the world’s states in an assembly to create a global institution, the League of Nations.[21] The narrative of liberal institutionalism, particularly around the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations, is authoritatively laid down as the story of rational men coming together and creating a universal institution for the defense of a universal peace.[22] In American political science more generally, for instance in the works of John Gerard Ruggie, adviser to Secretary-General Annan from 1997 to 2001, the widely accepted narrative of international organizations tells the tale that these arise out of functional and rational arrangements among international actors.[23]

Rawls’s The Law of Peoples offers a theoretical account of such a “realistic utopia,” as he calls his proposition for a global covenant in which societies agree upon a set of fundamental rules for living together in an international system without one overarching ruler.[24] In fact, the absence of an overarching ruler is, in Rawls’s theory, not a defect but a purposeful part of the design. Formulating his theory of political liberalism, Rawls presumes that a well-ordered, decent society, which is based on common principles of governance, and does not need a government or state that will rule by force. Political institutions are not necessarily central government institutions. Rawls’s ideal society is one of self-government, in which common institutions play the role of arbitrators rather than of rulers—an ideal he sees perfectly well-reflected in the world of states that lack an overarching ruler.

Domestically, societies—that is, liberal and democratic societies—are held together by common agreement on the procedures of appraising justice. These procedures do not define what justice is, but only how fair adjudication of justice can be achieved in cases of divergent interpretations and opinions. Such procedures can, but do not necessarily have to, be institutionalized; more important, they have to be commonly shared and accepted, and must have grown out of the recognition that everyone is equal. The crucial characteristic of Rawls’s original position is that not only are all members of the original position equal when they enter it, they also recognize each other as totally equal while deliberating. They do so not out of humanist ideology, but as a consequence of reasonable consistency of thought. If they could not recognize each other as totally equal, there could be no consistently reasonable agreement. Reason, not humanism, leaves them no other option than to recognize each other as equal.

The image of society underscoring Rawls’s just society is one of common people building consensus about fairness from within themselves and for themselves. Government of any kind is then simply a functional accessory to reasonable agreement on the procedures of justice. Government does not incorporate the people’s will (which Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s republicanism requires, for instance); it is merely a set of institutions that assist a people’s democratic self-rule—if people can arrange their lives around principles of fairness without state institutions, then these institutions might even cease to exist. Rawls does not make a strong normative claim for a lean state, as Locke did, for instance. But the ideal underscoring his philosophy of political liberalism and public reason is well modeled on the image of self-government of the early settler communities in America, which were only loosely associated into a state.

Rawls’s “original position” in his Theory of Justice and the analogous covenant of societies in The Law of Peoples are the most contemporary formulations of contract liberalism. By developing an argument about public reason as the basis for political liberalism and as a fundamental principle of fairness, Rawls tried to lift contract theory out of the morass of natural law. In Rawls’s theory, individuals do not have freedom or justice as a birthright. Claims about the fundamental character of mutual respect and freedom arise out of the original position. The individuals in the original position agree upon respect, tolerance, and fairness because these are the only reasonable principles to maintain under the condition of an entirely disinterested person.

Rawls’s argument is contrary to both the utilitarian and the communitarian argument. Individuals in his system do not behave as egoistic rationalists in the original position as they have no utility to maximize; but they also have no particular identity to defend, and therefore have no interest in doing so either. Disinterest allows pure reason to reign. A social contract based on respect for procedures of justice is the most reasonable solution to the dilemmas that arise when many individual wills have to cooperate and live together in a collective.

Yet, when transposing his political liberalism to the international sphere, Rawls struggles to make a cosmopolitan claim about a global original position. Instead, he proposes a covenant of societies, presupposing the existence of liberal and democratic societies based on the principles of justice found in the original position.[25] This account resembles in many ways the traditional narrative of international liberal peace, in which foundational principles of the international system such as sovereignty, nonintervention, and respect for borders are reasonable devices to prevent risks for existing societies and offer solutions for conflicts, if ever they arise.[26]

Rawls hence proposes a staggered view of the rules of the international system: these rest on the reasonable dialogue between what he calls “civilized” and “decent” societies, which in turn are governed by procedures of fairness that have been determined via a social contract (original position), which has itself become possible because the veil of ignorance has transformed individuals into disinterested and equally free men. Yet at the base of this argument remains the question of what kind of persons those in the original position are. Rawls shifts the argument of reason away from birthright toward the reasoning process once people are in the original position, yet he does not address the original, foundational assumption that people are born as individuals with innate reason and liberty, and with equal status one to each other. This ontological preassumption goes entirely undisputed or, indeed, undiscussed.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the most ardent critique of Rawls’s liberalism focuses on the original position and the individuals therein. Formulated from various angles, the main and most common concern is expressed by the question whether a person who is an absolute individual, and stripped of any identity markers such as age, sex, or color of skin, can reasonably exist. Rawls indeed postulates that individuals in the original position do have a basic knowledge of society and economy and also of human psychology . . . the question then arises how they can have this knowledge, but no knowledge about the social and biological facts that constitute society, economy, and psychology, such as the differences between gender, age, race, and communitarian belonging.[27]

Rawls’s response to this criticism was evasive. The primacy of the proposition that totally equal, totally free (in the sense of unbound), and totally reasoning individuals can exist, if not in reality then at least as a “utopian” ideal, is simply never fully discussed. As for the question of how the individuals in the original position could actually deliberate—for instance, which language they would speak, that is, which language could be entirely neutral with respect to the sex, age, and cultural belongingness of the speaker, and hence be entirely nonindividual—Rawls simply evaded the debate by pointing out that his was a “realistic utopia,” not a vision of political reality.

This elusiveness is not uncommon for liberal theory; in fact, the presumption of total liberty is the crucial definition of liberalism and the key to liberalism’s inherent logic of progress and perfectibility. Even if in practical terms, now and here, full individual liberty is inexistent, it is a basic ontological assumption that such a state can be achieved someday, somehow. The ahistorical nature of liberalism’s presumptions contrasts strikingly with the utopian ideal of historical progress toward truly liberal societies, from humanity’s natural state onwards. The ideas of free will and perfectibility intimately hinge upon each other. As Gerald Gaus, Shane Courtland, and David Schmidtz argue:

That the good life is necessarily a freely chosen one in which a person develops his unique capacities as part of a plan of life is probably the dominant liberal ethic of the past century.[28]

What direction should the good life take if it is not to become a better person, or, at least, to live better and more comfortably? Rousseau and Mill defended the idea of progress more vigorously than present-day liberals, who are cautious about suggesting concrete models of the good life, yet the idea that a good life exists still persists in Rawls’s “original position.”

Fundamentally, human beings are free, equal, and reasoned in liberal theory, no matter whether in reality, history, or real life they are or they are not. Contrary to Hobbes, liberals assume that human beings have, in principle, the capacity for self-government and autonomy exactly because they are born free and equal and endowed with reason. Hobbes’s protoliberalism ends precisely when it comes in having faith in people’s capacity to live peacefully together despite, or even because of, their differences. Rawls’s formulation of procedures of public reason and fairness, however, allows for divergences of opinion, belief, and lifestyle, all the while keeping to the basic liberal principles of public justification and fairness.

This restraint is the key to the concept of neutrality. According to Rawls and other liberals, political institutions need to respect freedom, and hence not engage in judgments about the good life. Both the requirements of public reason and overlapping consensus that Rawls formulates as the basis for liberal institutions force political institutions to be neutral with respect to the ways policies are justified. Policies cannot be justified by ranking certain types of lifestyles over others.[29]

Yet this neutrality is based on a tacit presumption that, at its origins, society is structured completely equally for all wo/men. This means that lifestyles, cultures, life chances, ideas of the good life, and personal tastes all have the same chances of expressing themselves in the marketplace of ideas, and no structural, indelible, and durable inequalities exist. This presumption simply ignores what Charles Tilly has called “categorical inequalities,” namely structural inequalities that endow actors with different capacities to shape life chances according to preestablished categorical dividing lines in society, such as gender or race. As Carole Pateman and Charles Mills have pointed out in their respective feminist and race-sensitive critiques, Rawls’s Theory of Justice ironically does not address what can be considered the greatest manifestations of injustice, namely gender and race discrimination.[30]

Similarly, his The Law of Peoples is frustratingly silent on politics beyond the state system, whether of the transnational kind or in terms of truly global interconnections. In both respects, whether discussing domestic liberal institutions or international politics, Rawls’s theorizing takes the existing order for granted and advocates a basically conservative approach to international politics. The conflation of state and society—despite the term “people”—is a particularly noticeable feature of Rawls’s conservative approach to international politics. Rawls defines people or societies according to his theory of justice as the group of peoples in which liberal democratic principles of justice reign. He does contrast societies with “states,” which he defines in The Law of People solely by state institutions’ coercive power of sovereignty; hence he defends here a narrow and typical liberal understanding of the state as a realpolitik apparatus of force.[31]

Yet, on the other hand, he describes societies using the same terms in which most international law describes states. According to Rawls, a society exists by

protecting its political independence, its territory, and the security of its citizens; maintaining its political and social institutions and its civic culture; securing its proper self-respect as a people, which rests on its citizen’s awareness of its history and cultural accomplishments.[32]

Societies are states built on popular sovereignty and on the democratic constitution of governmental institutions. In liberal and democratic societies, states are liberal and just societies. This representation of states not only presupposes that the society/state is the only legitimate form of political community in international politics; it also implies that it is the most reasonable one. Objections to statism, whether from the point of view of alternative, nonstatist political communities, or because of the factual and historical incongruence of society and state, are not discussed. On the contrary, by reserving the notion of “state” for nonliberal, unjust, and immoral societies, and by claiming that states are by nature expansive—the outlaw states—Rawls likens any other form of political community to tyrannical and aggressively expansionist systems.

Hence, The Law of Peoples explicitly introduces a ranking of societies in order of legitimacy and “goodness” according to their degree of liberalism in political life. The core of the international society that he proposes comprises liberal democratic societies, seconded by so-called decent societies that respect some of the fundamental rights of civilized people. At the margin of international society, or even outside of it, there are to be found so-called burdened states (so, states not societies) and “outlaw states.” The rationale behind the confusing hairsplitting Rawls undertakes to tease out his notion of state and society becomes clear in this usage: states are, by definition, illiberal institutions. Classical antistatism that has not overly marked the Theory of Justice finds its way back into Rawls’s liberal theory through the backdoor of his classification of international society.

Yet, what crucially underlies Rawls’s international ranking is the idea that societies can change, and that, indeed, such changes can be induced by intervention or assistance intended to protect liberal and decent societies from rogue states and “burdened” divergent societies. These societies can be helped by more advanced societies to become civilized. Intervention is not only necessary for security and protection, but it is also possible, because people, societies, and political communities can evolve and progress toward higher levels of civilization. This is a traditional liberal view of civilization and progress that already has been expressed by former liberal thinkers like Rousseau or Mill,[33] both of whose works also feature prominently on the list of peacebuilders’ readings.[34]

In sum, Rawls’s liberalism reflects a number of concerns that previous chapters have already identified as characteristic for peacebuilding. With respect to Rawls’s ontology of the individual, we can find the undisputed idea of the reasonable, equal, and autonomous individual who will first of all strive to live a “good life”; and the implicit idea that it is the individual’s responsibility to forge such a “good life” for themselves. In terms of the social and political imaginary, the concepts of social perfectibility and of the autonomy of political decision making are as central to Rawls’s philosophy as they are to contemporary peacebuilding.

Social Justice and Progress

The concept of progress and civilization is, however, not a solely liberal brainchild. Indeed, it reflects much of the Judeo-Christian ontology of time and history, and in particular reveals the Protestant assumption of the improvement and ultimate perfectibility of a given destiny that moves men (and women) along one single, linear life toward the goal of salvation. Mill particularly expressed this core idea of improvement explicitly when he distinguished “civilized nations” from barbarians who show “a very low grade of social improvement.”[35]

The idea that societies can progress toward better states of justice is also the motivation for many respondents to mention Marx when asked about their political readings. The ideological goggles of the twentieth century have trained observers to see social and political thought as being “divided in two: bourgeois sociology and Marxism,”[36] hence setting up Weber as a theoretician of the former, against Marx as spiritual mastermind of the latter. At first sight, it appears therefore surprising to see Marx as having had such a large influence on peacebuilders who, according to the analysis in chapter 5, should be much more clearly part of the “bourgeoisie.” Yet it is probably more Marx than Weber whose historical materialism reflects the deep belief in the progress through time of humanity, a common destiny, and an ultimate moment of redemption rewarding humanity’s effort in bettering its fate.

Peacebuilders are no communist revolutionaries. When asked for their priorities, if they had the power to transform the world tomorrow, “abolishing private property” was not on the top of the list.[37] Similarly, communist or revolutionary leaders were almost entirely absent from the list of most admired political personalities. Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara were mentioned only twice each.[38] Revolutions were also not mentioned as remarkable historical events, whereas the end of communism was voted the most important event in recent history by the majority.[39] Of the various ways one can read Marx, peacebuilders most certainly do not read him as an inspiration for creating a communist society.

In fact, Marx can also be read as a sociologist of modernity and industrialization. When putting forward Marx as inspiring reading, peacebuilders signaled that they thought his work is important to understand the structures of estrangement and exploitation but not that they would want to launch a communist revolution. These concerns overlap well with the cited liberal literature, which is also preoccupied with questions of a fair society, albeit under the assumption that social inequality is not necessarily equivalent to unfairness or the pathologies of modernization. The sensitivity toward the structural foundation of injustice is also reflected in other readings chosen by the interviewees such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, or a range of more generalized critiques of capitalist production forms, and most notably of globalization, such as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level or Paul Krugman’s and Joseph Stiglitz’s writings.[40] These readings most particularly express peacebuilders’ concerns over the origins and dynamics of poverty and the negative effects of capitalism, as they can be also seen in the degradation of our natural environment. “Ecology” and “environmental consciousness” were major concerns of peacebuilders in interviews as well as in the open sections of the surveys.

Given the international agencies’ drive for liberalization and the installation of market mechanisms in postconflict reconstruction settings, one finding is surprising: that many peacebuilders indicated that capitalism-critical or capitalism-skeptical readings were important sources of political inspiration. At least half of the people working in peacebuilding missions indicated skepticism about the claim that a liberal market economy is beneficial for society, and suspected that the capitalist production mode was the cause of violent conflict.

Yet this critique of capitalism is entirely consistent with the idea of men’s moral fallibility. Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Tocqueville saw the primary causes of the evil men do in private and individual greediness; Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Foucault, and Bourdieu saw the causes of conflict, violence, and exploitation in societies in the constraints on behavior that the capitalist production mode imposes on individuals. The difference between the two schools lies in the analytical framework, although not in the observation of connections between material conditions and social conflict.

More important however, is the fact that in the history of social movements over the past forty years, critique of or skepticism about capitalism have provided an important justificatory discourse for individual commitment to intervention. The structural constraints of capitalism are taken for granted, and so is the corollary power analysis of Gramsci, Foucault, or Bourdieu, which all converge in postulating that these structures are systematic and embodied so that they are beyond an individual’s capacity to change. In this case, peacebuilders will argue that their work contributes to bettering people’s lives—at least, that tiny bit that is possible within the given structural constraints. Such an interpretation is in line with many statements made in in-depth interviews, where interviewees pointed out that they felt rewarded for their work in peacebuilding missions because they “contribute a little bit” or “at least, they make a little difference.” The argument that they made little contribution is deployed largely in more scholarly discussions of humanitarianism, for instance by the founder of Doctors of the World, the first head of the UN mission in Kosovo, and former French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, or the Oxford researcher Hugo Slim.[41]

This observation also allows us to perceive a consistency between this literature and the larger corpus of contemporary nonfiction books on specific countries and events. Most of these recount individual stories of salvation or redemption in or after conflicts, such as Au nom de tous les miens (For Those I Loved, in English) by Martin Gray or The Heart Must Break, by James Mawdsley, both autobiographical tales of overcoming injustice and violence (although it must be pointed out that Gray’s book was not only ghostwritten but also contains untruthful parts, particularly about his detention in Treblinka).[42] They praise the individual’s fight against the machine, very much replicating the disillusionment of the post-1968 and post-1989 political culture that led to the idea that capitalism as a system is too powerful to be changed.[43]

The sensibility about the negative effects of capitalism corresponds largely to humanist sensibilities, similar to those that motivated charitable social movements in the nineteenth century, from the abolition of slavery to Florence Nightingale’s early humanitarianism. Scholars like Martha Finnemore or Michael Barnett have commonly identified humanism as an ideological precondition for the rise of humanitarian norms. They identify a common history of humanitarianism and the idea of a right or even an obligation to intervene in order to save civilians, and situate this humanist-humanitarian turn in the revolutionary age at the end of the eighteenth and the course of the nineteenth centuries.[44]

Although sharing the intellectual origins celebrating human individualism and reason, humanism developed into its own branch of political philosophy. Most accounts of the history of humanitarians, however, tend to refer to any kind of liberalism as humanism. Barnett, for instance, mentions the conservative liberal Edmund Burke and the utilitarian liberal John Stuart Mill as representing the humanist tradition. A fine analysis of liberal traditions, however, shows up some important differences between libertarian liberalism and humanism. The latter emphasizes individual agency to a much larger extent and deals explicitly and particularly with the paradox that men who are endowed with reason are still also subject to sentiment and emotion. The struggle between sense and sensibility is at the heart of this philosophical reasoning. Of these sentiments, those that are seen to make us particularly human, namely compassion, empathy, and charity, are the philosophers’ and literature’s objects of interest.

Given the emphasis that historians of intervention put on this tradition, it is surprising how weakly the humanist tradition of political thought is represented on the reading list. The most mentioned philosopher of this tradition is Rousseau, who particularly stressed compassion as an organizing idea of political communities. Yet, other important figures, such as Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, the twentieth-century philosopher John Dewey, or, to mention a non-Western writer, Rabindranath Tagore, and in the literary section Victor Hugo or Stefan Zweig, are largely absent from the reading list. Voltaire and Kant are mentioned once each, the latter with specific reference to his Perpetual Peace. Taken out of the context of his general philosophy, this short text has become a classic of the liberal peace tradition.

The great mythical events of this discourse are the Lisbon earthquake, the abolition of slavery and British abolitionist William Wilberforce; the Crimean War and Florence Nightingale; and Henri Dunant’s “souvenir of the battle of Solferino” and the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions; or, starting somewhat later, the creation of Oxfam during the Second World War or Médecins sans Frontières in Biafra. These events, however, were not mentioned by the peacebuilders interviewed in response to any question about historical events, nor do the names associated with the humanitarian movement appear in the list of admired personalities.

The identification with the humanist tradition of international political action seems, therefore, weak, and then only associated with a concern for global social justice, which was expressed in a range of other questions: all respondents agreed fully or at least a little with the statement that “worldwide exploitation and economic injustice are the basis of world-wide armed conflict”; similarly, nobody refuted the argument that “wars are the expression of fundamental inequalities in society.”[45] The logic of both statements follows the social justice understanding of wars, namely that gross social inequality will provoke conflict.

Unsurprisingly, many respondents emphasized values of solidarity, equality, and equity of distribution of public goods, and advocated state-led social reforms.[46] On the list of things respondents would do if they had the power to change the world tomorrow, measures like land reform ranked high. However, the measure “abolition of private property” ranked extremely low. Furthermore, the list of values also showed an interesting gap between women and men. Women were in general more sensitive to values that reflect a philosophy of care and solidarity, as table 4 shows.

Taken altogether, this allows for the conclusion that significant skepticism exists toward the economic liberal claim that capitalism is beneficial to everyone and everything. Yet the peacebuilders did not draw the conclusion that capitalism should be abolished; simply that its harmful effects need to be moderated. Humanitarian action and individualized contributions to a collective good are legitimate strategies of cushioning the populations hit hard by global capitalism, given the latter’s structural irreversibility.

This last type of discourse remains compatible with the former two, particularly with respect to elite politics. Moreover, the common core allows for a common ground to discuss diverging opinions, attitudes toward, and views on practical politics. Notably, the references to professionalism and the collective endeavor of “doing good” provide a fertile ground to build consensus, and may therefore also be considered as a thick organizational culture. Already in the first mission in the Congo the main line of defense in all memoirs written about this time is that “[w]e saved people and that was what this whole thing was about.” [47] In contemporary peacebuilding, too, the “efficient good-doer” precept binds the missions together: that all that is done is for the benefit of the victims, and whatever is done is done professionally, and through the great individual efforts of every single peacebuilder.

Conclusion

The peacebuilders’ reading lists reveal an important part of the dominant discourses of intervention. Far from being mutually exclusive, the three discourses mentioned above (leadership, liberalism, social justice) converge to form a solid doxa—a normatively framed metadiscourse on the rightness of and need for intervention by outsiders to reestablish peace in a society.

Table 4. Female-male differences in political values

Values

Women—average consent (1 fully agree—-5 fully disagree)

Men—average consent (1 fully agree—- 5 fully disagree)

Combativeness of individuals

4.38

4.19

Community and belonging

3

2.46

Competitiveness

3.3

2.78

Conflict

5.59

5.21

Contention of politics

4.14

3.39

Critical discussion

1.73

1.88

Ecology

1.67

1.78

Equality

1.49

1.75

Equity

1.65

1.77

Fairness

1.38

1.52

Family values

3.57

2.81

Harmony of society

2.22

1.98

Home

3.78

3.08

Identity

3.64

3.07

Individual liberty

1.97

1.93

Individuality

3.59

2.83

Loyalty to the state

3.59

2.96

Merit of individuals

2.62

2.2

Nation and patriotism

4.14

3.31

Plurality of lifestyles

2

1.93

Private property

3.27

2.78

Security

2.08

1.94

Solidarity

1.86

1.89

State sovereignty

3.17

2.75

Tolerance

1.46

1.63

Peacebuilding happens based on the solid conviction that a small, well-educated, highly skilled, and “professional” group of people can effectively and legitimately rule a political community if their intentions are to serve the community. The philosopher king, the king as arbitrator, or the reasoned prince are placeholders for the enlightened and disinterested international civil servant. The discourse of being above particular interests, whether they are national interests, as in Hammarskjöld’s time, or the particular interests of warlords in today’s wars, remains a powerful justification for peacebuilding. Rawls’s liberal theory of the law of peoples provides the grammar in which the idea can be expressed that global institutions (international law, organizations, regimes, and so forth) are the fairest agents of justice in the world, as they adjudicate, arbitrate, translate, convert, and distill particularist ideas of justice. Given the structural inequalities and injustice in the world, international agents are also the most appropriate to intervene in order to fight poverty and change the world un tant soit peu.

The three discourses are complementary and form one justificatory complex. This does not mean, however, that all peacebuilders would wholeheartedly agree on these three discourses and uniformly reproduce them. As the gender difference in the value ranking above shows, important disagreements will exist over the right order, the right sequencing, and, of course, the right interpretation of these values. Women put solidarity, tolerance, and equality first, and traditional liberal values such as individuality, private property, or competitiveness find themselves relegated to being not so quite important preoccupations; men, on the other hand, display the profile that is commonly depicted as traditionally liberal, with a much greater emphasis on individuality, security, and merit. These findings reflect similar findings on sex differences in work values or general political values; they also reflect other studies’ findings that such sex differences are rather small with respect to value orientation, but significant with respect to considerations about the consequences of actions for others and for the environment.[48] Hence, such differences do indicate that female peacebuilders would situate problems differently from their male colleagues and, consequently, propose different policies and measures, thereby seeming to be more inclined to take the consequences of action into account.

All three discourses, however, provide justifications for the ethics of protection and intervention, as they are expressed in the responsibility to protect doctrine and in concepts of human security that accompany much of the peacebuilding measures. All three presuppose a global community of equal human beings whose actions and lives depend on one another in some way or other. The reading list shows the range of political worldviews and its outer limits. All three discourses converge around fundamental values such as merit, individual freedom, rights (including to private property), autonomy, and justice; all the while they represent a formidable repertoire of antagonistic arguments within this wider frame of assuming a universal, international community. Actors within the field can distinctively position themselves with respect to each other without abandoning this fundamental core. At the same time, the common adherence to this core inscribes the outer limits of the field.

The existence of a global community is, given these considerations, a fact not a debate. The views of the world expressed in the writings discussed above are mainly ahistorical; indeed, historical analyses of the world in general and critical accounts in particular (i.e., neo-Marxist or postcolonial analyses of the world system) are entirely absent from the reading list. The conflicts that have shaped this world, and the struggles that are still ongoing over the definitions of universal values and global community, disappear from sight.

Chapter 7

The Nomos of the Field

The Fatalism of Saving Lives

Peacebuilders are moderate people, as the preceding chapters have shown. At the core of their political values are individual freedom, tolerance, and justice. They believe in elite government and social engineering. They don’t believe in revolution, abolition of private property, or other radical alternatives. Peacebuilders are also well-mannered gentlemen (and women) and tradesmen (or women) of peace. Diplomacy is as much a norm of good behavior as it is a professional practice. Peacebuilders don’t want to appear offensive, but they know what is right for the world and for ensuring peace. Their belief that their understanding of peace is the right one is so strong that one could call it the “fatalism of saving lives.” Even if many (maybe even most) peacebuilders would agree that interventions do not always achieve what they promised, they do insist that, in any and all cases, interventions have stopped violence and saved lives. Intervention is presented as a nonchoice, a necessity, something that has to be done, or, at least that liberal peacebuilding is still the best way to save peace, and, if anything, needs to be expanded.[1]

Yet peacebuilding often does not bring peace, but only transforms violence.[2] Conflict resolution is, according to Tatiana Carayannis and her colleagues, “based on weak evidence and normative objectives,” and makes “problematic assumptions with regard to the actors and conflict structures involved.”[3] John Heathershaw speaks of “virtual peace,”[4] and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Florian Kühn of an “illusion.”[5] Alan Kuperman has investigated more deeply what he calls the “moral hazard” of interventions, and has come to the conclusion that interventions often might cost more lives than they save. [6] Early on, after the disappointments of the 1990s, David Rieff and Alex de Waal criticized humanitarian assistance, an important part of current peacebuilding practices, for incentivizing actors to perpetuate conflicts, and for not living up to the self-set expectations of humanitarian intervention.[7] Empirical evidence in fact sheds serious doubts on the claim that peacebuilding builds peace. Yet the questions and doubts about interventions at the core of the field are not concerned with fundamental justifications, nor even with the very crucial question of whether peacekeeping and peacebuilding really save lives, but only about their practicalities. It is the “doing well” that is questioned, not the “doing good.”

The fatalism of saving lives is the most visible and articulate symptom of the peacebuilding field’s closure. As peacebuilding continues as an international practice despite its apparent failures, this is because it is justified by another rationale than its success on the ground; it has, over the years, developed a dynamic of its own.[8] It relies on a deeply internalized narrative of what is right or wrong in peacebuilding—the doxa, as Bourdieu called it. The doxa is part of a wider nomos, a normative belief structure that ties the field together as a coherent space of action.[9] The nomos summarizes the constitutive and prescriptive norms that guide actions and thinking in the field, and synthesizes them into an undisputable moral claim.[10] In the case of peacebuilding, the nomos of the field can be described most aptly as the claim of “stopping violence and saving lives.” Peacebuilding’s ultimate justification lies in the unshakeable faith that both are possible, and that this is what peacebuilding eventually achieves.

The field’s norms and practices, which translate the nomos into action, are rarely explicit or canonically laid down, and they remain open to debate in a limited sense, for they are interpreted and enacted differently by different actors in the field. In fact, the struggle over fixing the nomos’s meaning is the essential political struggle in the field. While the doxa defines the permissible practices—the language in which the field’s norms are narrated—the nomos represents the deontology that morally justifies binding these norms together into a coherent and intelligible whole. Bourdieu calls the nomos the “principle of the right vision and division” in the field, that is, the overarching set of normative ideas that makes actors think that a specific discourse, idea, or behavior either belongs rightly to the field or should be excluded from it.[11] By normatively defining what is right or wrong in a field, the nomos reflects relative power positions in the field.

The self-proclaimed nomos must therefore not be taken at face value. Underlying the claim of self-evidence is a struggle for symbolic dominance in the field. The stances actors take on the matter are not arbitrary and cannot be explained by the inherent values of the defended norms themselves. It is, rather, the capital that actors have at their disposition to reproduce their authority in the field that determines their standpoint on the field’s norms. The norms discussed need to provide sufficient common ground for all actors to agree in order to claim a place in the peacebuilding field; otherwise, the field will cease to exist and either be turned entirely upside down, split into new fields, or fall into oblivion. At the same time, the norms need to be sufficiently vague and open to interpretation for actors to position themselves distinctly from each other. They also need to be compatible with overlapping fields (state civil services, NGOs, business, academia) due to the “convertibility” of capital forms. Finally, these ideas have to be normalized, that is, made to appear normal and commonsensical—this is the social sense of the fatalism of saving lives. Only if these norms appear to be common sense, and only if the belief in their veracity is fully interiorized, can they be practiced, that is, acted out in the field. Only then can they also become immune to questioning, and allow actors to fend off critics and declare them to be outsiders to the field.

The capital of prestige that needs to be mobilized in this struggle is particular to the peacebuilding field; it is “peace capital,” so to speak. Peace capital is a specific form of political capital. It is generated by political actions, that is, effective interventions into the political life of a community, and by the actor’s reputation. Bourdieu calls the power to gain from reputation and standing within the field “symbolic capital.” A high accumulation of symbolic capital is the foundation of symbolic dominance in the field. In the case of peacebuilding, the first tier has accumulated the most peace capital and hence strongly defines the nomos of the field. Self-referential and horizontal networking further reinforces the upper tiers’ symbolic power. The second tier commonly conforms to the nomos; in fact, the force of symbolic power is precisely its capacity to command adherence and respect.

The nomos deployed in these stories founds and normalizes the specific morality of peacebuilding in order to present it, in fatalistic fashion, as indisputable. Critiques of peacebuilding are rebuffed most effectively when they can be accused of being not only wrong but also immoral and irresponsible. The fatalism of saving lives depends particularly on the capacity to claim exclusive morality because the question of peace is, indeed, a matter of life and death. The rightness of peacebuilding has to be internalized at a fundamental level in order for its necessity to be reasonably and emotionally indisputable. The authority to decree and act out peacebuilding depends crucially on actors’ capacity to make others in the field accept and internalize their respective claims to legitimacy.

In peacebuilding, the nomos is commonly transmitted in emblematic stories that are constructed around categorical terms like “nonviolence” or “justice.” The stories are often highly stylized in order to reduce the complexity and ambiguity that normative ideas carry. The analysis of the nomos thus requires a deconstruction of these stories and a contextualization of the categorical terms in which key normative beliefs are expressed, and this is what will be done in this chapter. Such emblematic stories are told about personalities like Nelson Mandela and historical events like the Holocaust. The stories grow more ritualized and normalized as one approaches the core of the field, and comparatively more critically disputed the further away one moves from this core.

Icons of Peace

Both surveys for this book, conducted in 2008 and 2012, asked peacebuilders about their heroes, that is, political personalities past and present whom they admired for their achievements. The question was open-ended and respondents could give multiple answers. While a substantial proportion answered that they had no heroes, or that they admired ordinary people who did extraordinary things, a quite large number of respondents had personal heroes. The word cloud generated (figure 12) with the responses shows the frequency of names mentioned: Nelson Mandela stands out, followed by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King (MLKing in the word cloud) as well as the already mentioned answers “none” or “ordinary people.”

When queried in interviews why they chose Mandela, Gandhi, or King, respondents pointed to their nonviolent strategies. All three are official icons of the UN. The UN has declared an International Day of Non-Violence every October 2nd, Gandhi’s birthday,[12] and an International Nelson Mandela Day for Freedom, Justice and Democracy every July 18th, Mandela’s birthday.[13] The UN has not yet declared a Martin Luther King day, contrary to the United States where King’s birthday on January 20 is a federal holiday; but the UN has honored King in other ways: it has issued stamps with his profile, dedicated a page on its external communication webpage to him, and King quotes are conventional baggage of every other UN speech on justice, nonviolence, or peace.

Fig. 12. Word cloud of “heroes” most often mentioned

The iconization of the three is founded on a very simplistic, some would say whitewashed,[14] reading of their lives and political ideas as it is reflected in many Western mainstream media.[15] Gandhi, Mandela, and King are all presented as lone leaders. Time magazine structured its special edition of August 2013, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington in 1963, into subsections: “One Man, One March, One Speech, One Dream”—one, one, one, one Martin Luther King, and nobody else. Of the thirty-six photos accompanying the articles, nineteen are directly related to the March, and of these twelve are focused on King; another six are zoomed into the image in a way to make King clearly stand out. Two photos show King in the midst of his family, yet both are framed in a way that King is set apart from other family members.[16]

Biographies of the three greatly outnumber books on their respective movements. Their iconization has led to the vanishing of others from the picture (quite literally so, as many photos represent others only at the edge of the photo’s frame, blurred in the background, or not at all). Names like John Lewis might be known to a politically informed American public as belonging to the representative from Georgia and a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Outside Georgia, however, the name is barely known. Bayard Rustin’s absence from many depictions of the civil rights movement or diminished representation of his extraordinary role has, ironically, even caught the attention of the media itself, as Time magazine titled an article in his honor: “The Invisible Man, Why Bayard Rustin Is the Unknown Hero of the Civil Rights Movement.”[17]

At Mandela’s death in December 2013, news covers usually represented him alone, for instance by putting the photo of his Nobel Peace Prize at center stage. Time magazine published a series of sixteen photos about Mandela’s life. Two of these show him among fellow ANC members, yet none of them is identified. The Economist put up a cover in which the elder statesman Mandela sits alone on a chair against a black background, presumably cut out of a larger context, and looking up to the skies. The legend accompanying the photo is the last verse of William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”: “It matters not how strait the gate / How charged with punishments the scroll / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” According to his biographer, Elleke Boehmer, Mandela had the habit of reciting this verse to his fellow prisoners on Robben Island, and by “espousing this poem . . . assum[ed] a Victorian persona.”[18]

If one Googles the word “Gandhi,” the first two pages of images all represent Gandhi alone, the same as for Mandela and King. Many photos of Gandhi were staged, and particularly those that have iconic status, like Gandhi standing alone at the beach of Dandi during the Salt March and holding up his fist in defiance; in fact, thousands had accompanied Gandhi on his way to Dandi.[19] The staging and representation of the three as single leaders epitomizes the emphasis on leadership. On one of the covers of Time magazine (on whose covers he appears four times in his life) Mandela’s name is explicitly associated with leadership under the heading: “Mandela at 90/ The Secrets of Leadership. Eight Lessons from One of History’s Icons.”[20]

Nonviolence

The carefully crafted icons translate several fundamental norms and narratives of peacebuilding, and most notably the normative idea of peace as a sphere of nonviolence. Hammarskjöld originally set nonviolence as a normative standard for UN action when creating the first peacekeeping mission. The key idea of “neutrality” was that the UN, although the sole legitimate user of violence in the international system, must not use violence because it is the most inappropriate conflict resolution tool. Dialogue and diplomacy should be used in its stead. Hammarskjöld argued from an international law point of view, as well as giving a moralistic reading of recent history where the suffering of the two world wars only confirmed the disastrous effects of the use of violence. Regarding the Congo, for instance, Hammarskjöld’s discourse of nonviolence was aimed at keeping the superpowers out, and allowed the UN to distance itself from the anticolonial nationalist movements of Africa, which he and his collaborators considered to be protofascist.[21] The demand for nonviolence was repeated again and again in all interventions and noninterventions. The 1990s adage that the UN could deploy peacekeeping only “where there was a peace to keep” was a reformulation of Hammarskjöld’s nonviolence doctrine.

The vision of peace encapsulated by nonviolence builds on the dialectical pairing of violence with “evil” and, hence, nonviolence with “good.” Whether in Gandhi’s terms or in the more tactically minded nonviolent strategies of King or Mandela, the main argument for nonviolence postulates that the use of violence will create more evil and harm than any nonviolent strategy can do, just as Hammarskjöld argued.[22]

All these narratives diminish the historical situatedness of nonviolent strategies, and in particular how these allowed Gandhi, King, and Mandela to position themselves in their movement’s internal struggles. The narratives essentialize nonviolence. In the reductionist version, for instance, of Gandhi’s nonviolent doctrine his political strategy in the Indian competition over leadership is conveniently set aside. However, historical evidence shows that Gandhi for all intents and purposes was first of all a nationalist who did not, initially, reject violence as a revolutionary means, but simply saw nonviolence as a more effective strategy.[23] There also remains a debate over how much Gandhism has inspired or been co-opted into present-day Hindu nationalist politics, with all the violence this has generated.[24]

The Western narrative of Gandhism often argues that the nonviolent principles and movement in India were an inspiration for the American civil rights movement. According to this narrative, Gandhi particularly stressed the notion of evil, as he saw the use of violence for national independence as inviting a violent future for the Indian state. His vision implied that deep inside, under the cover of colonialism, racial segregation, and apartheid politics, all human beings share a common humanity that nonviolence preserves. It is this common humanity that represents the highest moral good in the world. Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence was based on the priority of ascetic norms, according to which no other worldly good could rival the value of humanity.[25] No other worldly good can therefore justify the use of violence, that is, the destruction of human lives.

Dag Hammarskjöld fully ascribed to this view, although he preferred the more mystical expression by Buber of the principle of dialogue and understanding (see chapter 5), and the belief that conflicts among humans are temporary and superficial, and can be—should be—overcome. Love, and reaching out your hand, are not only the best means to create communion, they are also the “true” means, as they are in themselves acts of love and able to overcome even deep, ongoing conflicts.

Similarly, King also referred to Buber’s dialogical principle to argue that segregation was unjust. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in 1963 he wrote:

Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.[26]

King not only argued that unjust laws have to be resisted but he also pointed out that the injustice of these laws is morally corrupting in general. Injustice can lead the oppressed to revolt violently and extremely; and it leads the other, the adversary, to cherish laws for the law’s sake and not for justice, even if she or he is sympathetic (what he called “the white moderate”). Only by understanding each other and “being extremists for love,” as King called it, can such kinds of oppositions and negations be overcome.[27]

The argument that the use of violence is by itself corrupting humanity and impeding the authentic communion of humans has been made equally (and still is being made) by Anabaptist movements such as the Mennonites, who, as revealed in chapter 4, occupy a large space in the scholarly field that overlaps the peacebuilding field. As in the Gandhian idea of the dialectics of violence/evil vs. nonviolence/good, the ethics of the Anabaptists postulate that violence is anathema to God’s Creation and, at the same time, the foremost test of the sincere believer. Nonviolence is a way of worshiping God and saving humankind from its innate sinfulness.[28] A true Christian needs to imitate Jesus and overcome his or her fear of death and misery—engaging in nonviolence is exactly the way to do this:

It is the power that comes when defenses fall, when fear of being hurt or killed disappears, when one is no longer interested in defending oneself, but in doing God’s will. When we no longer seek to protect or defend ourselves, when we make ourselves vulnerable, we are free. Of course we can be killed. But nothing can deter us from doing or saying what we believe is true. When we accept vulnerability, literally nothing has power over us.[29]

This credo of defending one’s true self, of being authentic in one’s beliefs and values, is not exclusive to Anabaptists, but forms an essential part of the West’s culture of individuality. In secular terms, Rousseau’s moral philosophy of self-determination, autonomy, and individuality is probably the earliest secular expression of the ideal of authenticity. Charles Taylor revives Rousseau’s ideal in an attempt to save authenticity of the “Self” from the distortions of modern consumerism and hedonism. The key method to restore authenticity, he argues, is through dialogue and exchange based on empathy and nonviolence. In Taylor’s philosophy, the Self is redeemed as authentic through the renunciation of the other’s destruction and negation; by recognizing myself in the other I affirm my own self.[30] His argument is strikingly similar to Gandhi’s argument of gaining spiritual power through nonviolence, or the Anabaptist argument of overcoming fear (and embracing the afterlife) through the courage that is needed to resist violence.

Discourses of Peace beyond the Religion-Secularism Divide

The doctrine of nonviolence is quite obviously nourished by religious and spiritual considerations for which Mandela, Gandhi, and King are exemplars. Photographs often show them preacher-like in front of masses. Such photos are taken from a low angle to make them appear larger than life and overbearing.[31] They are also often depicted using large arm and hand gestures, embracing the crowds or pointing to the future. The religious and mostly Christian elements of the heroic iconography of the three men can hardly be ignored. The perception of all three men as modern heroes is deeply steeped in religious, and in particular Christian, terms. These images clearly have parallels to representations of priests and saints.

For King, these quite obviously go hand in hand with his personality and training as a Baptist minister. The success of his speech at the March on Washington more than fifty years ago is, among other things, associated with his capacity to preach, and the strength of the religious rhetoric employed in the speech. King himself used numerous religious allegories in his speeches, most notably comparing the civil rights movement to Moses leading the chosen people out of Egypt.[32]

Gandhi, being a devout Hindu, drew parallels between his Hindu religious and spiritual ideas and Jesus. His interpretation of Jesus’s life and words focused on the renunciation of worldly pleasures and his politics of reconciliation, just as he himself saw the essence of his satyagraha not in political effects alone, but also in the spirituality of renunciation, sacrifice, and—even though it was a word and concept he did not use—redemption. Gandhi was throughout his life engaged in Hindu-Christian dialogue, and he wrote frequently about the ethical example Jesus set for spiritual communion and for communities.[33] His attire alluded to representations of Christ, and it would be underestimating Gandhi’s self-aware sense of staging to a Christian audience to assume that this was pure coincidence. Indeed, Western friends and acquaintances often reported that his behavior and appearance reminded them of Jesus.[34]

Mandela represented less obvious allusions to Christianity. Yet, although it seems he was not himself a religious person, Mandela was closely associated with religious personalities after his release from prison in 1990, most particularly with Bishop Desmond Tutu. He is also frequently referred to in religious terms when he is called, just like King or Gandhi, a saint or a savior.[35]

All three icons transcend the religion-secularism divide that is said to be characteristic of Western modernity. Their images, and the often simplistic rendering of their thought, fuse religious and secular discursive elements. Unsurprisingly, the wide variety of interpretations of their lives and teachings mean that references to them can be found in new age spiritualism as well as in predominantly atheist social movements. They represent, one could say, white canvasses on which almost any spiritual movement that seeks to justify nonviolence can paint their normative vision.

In the peacebuilding nomos—“stopping violence and saving lives”—Protestant and liberal-humanist ethics both provide a particularly large share of the discursive repertoire of justification and shape peacebuilding habitus in practice. The urge to be efficient, to make productive use of time, to be dedicated to the task, to fulfill the task dutifully . . . all the good qualities of a peacebuilder that have been discussed in the preceding chapters are also the qualities that Mandela, King, and Gandhi personify. Never were they caught idle; even in prison, in the forced situation of a castaway, Mandela kept himself busy, if only by reciting Victorian poetry—again, an exercise to keep the spirit alive, to further the intellect and the productivity of the mind.[36]

But also, beyond their individual qualities, the three icons of peace epitomize a comfortable synthesis of liberalism and Protestantism, for their political engagement never shook the foundations of the existing liberal order against which they railed. Obviously, their political agitation brought about radical changes in the legal constitution of their respective countries, but it hardly touched the socioeconomic basis of private property and capitalist production on which segregation and colonialism were built; neither did the respective political changes dislodge their countries’ bourgeois culture. The canon of Protestant-liberal values discussed in chapter 5—hard work and merit, self-organization and autonomy, duty and efficiency—were, in fact, reproduced and reclaimed by these movements, and were anything but deconstructed, criticized, or replaced with an alternative. In retrospect, it appears that the struggle was more over the question of who should benefit from the spoils of radical political change, and not so much over the economic, social, and, in this respect, cultural production structures of colonialism, apartheid, or racial segregation. The Marikana massacre in 2012, in which forty-four striking miners were killed, and which was preceded by a constant erosion of workers’ and unions’ rights in democratic rainbow South Africa, is but one example of how little the changes induced by the end of apartheid questioned fundamental structures of exploitation.[37]

The Holocaust Narrative as Passe-Partout Justification

The heroification of Mandela, King, and Gandhi suits perfectly well the “saving lives” nomos of the field. By claiming their legacy (albeit consciously admitting the utopian nature of the hope of an entirely peaceful world) peacebuilders place themselves on the side of those who are nonviolent. The insistence on the futility and social harmfulness of violence depoliticizes and culturalizes situations of violent conflict and makes them simply problems of deviant antisocial behavior to solve. Conflict is not about political or economic antagonism, which might be solvable only by an ultimate, and therefore deadly, power game.[38] Rather, conflicts arise out of a lack of communication and dialogue, simply because the protagonists do not understand each other. The fact that heroes of nonviolence come from all over the world and do not solely represent white Westerners is taken as proof that humanity’s resistance to violent politics is universal. It is taken for granted that the wish to save lives is what every rational and sensible actor would want; understanding each other is thus eventually possible; anything else must be deviant behavior.

The depoliticization of violence naturally leads to its delegitimization. Inasmuch as violence is presented as being an inefficient, impractical, ineffective, and useless tool of politics, it is also nonpermissible. This discourse, which has been, in the UN context, constructed on the grounds of the Second World War and the nuclear extermination threat, has shifted in the past two decades to fit intrastate violent conflicts. Drawing on various sources, from revived theories of a just war to human rights, the dominant discourse stylizes any violent death as gratuitous, unnecessary, irrational, or simply “bad.”[39] The event that most clearly symbolizes the horror of death for nothing, death as pure abnormality, is the Holocaust, and it comes as little surprise that most of the surveyees see the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general as the most horrible political event in recent history.[40]

The utter evilness of the Holocaust and genocide is presented as entirely self-evident and indisputable beyond any discussion of political and socioeconomic or military dynamics. The Holocaust and genocide are exclusively understood as deadly cultural conflicts. Francis Deng, who elaborated on several key legal concepts regarding the responsibility to protect doctrine, and who was special adviser to the Secretary-General on the prevention of genocide, argues:

[W]hile the Holocaust has unique characteristics, genocide is a common human tragedy that has occurred far too many times in the past, and if the root causes are not well understood and addressed comprehensively, is almost certain to occur again in the future. . . . My first point is self-evident and does not need elaboration. . . . It is worth noting that whatever constitutes “genocide,” it is the most extreme aspect of much larger identity conflicts or violence.[41]

Fig. 13. The most horrible event in recent world history

Deng puts forward the contradictory but common claim that the Holocaust was unique and yet paradigmatic for other genocides to come. This contradictory claim represents the foundational dialectics of the Holocaust narrative that is characteristic of the explanations given for other cases of violence. The uniqueness of the Holocaust lies in its monstrosity, its immense scope not only in terms of the number of people killed but also in terms of the number and nature of all the people who participated directly and indirectly in this killing, and in terms of the bureaucratic, technological, and political sophistication of its event.[42] Yet, while the contingency and convergence of these complex and various causes of the real Holocaust make up its historical uniqueness, other violent situations of racial or ethnic conflict in the world most certainly display one or several of its aspects. It is in this sense that the Holocaust is also paradigmatic, as almost any racially, ethnically, or religiously discriminatory measure can be likened to a similar occasion in 1930s and 1940s Germany.

Its complexity made (and still makes) the Holocaust an ideal mobilizational rhetoric, which has been widely used by a large array of actors to frame injustices done to them as deadly threats and monstrous. A recent example of the versatility of the Holocaust as victimization discourse is certainly the wars in former Yugoslavia, where all sides claimed to be at risk of genocide by their respective adversaries.[43]

The multiple usages made of the Holocaust narrative epitomize its spread well beyond the historically concerned countries and populations. The diffusion of the Holocaust narrative, however, did not happen uniformly and evenly, as it has followed various paths and interests, and, hence, has produced a variety of versions, which emphasize different moral and political lessons to be drawn from this historical event.[44] Germany’s left-wing public and parties (the Social Democrats and Green Party) undertook, for instance, an impressive U-turn in the 1990s using the Holocaust narrative. In the early 1990s they fiercely argued that the lessons of the Holocaust and Second World War, the “Never Again” mantra, should be that German troops must never again be deployed outside German territory. By 1999, the slogan “Never Again” had become the Social Democrat–Green government’s main justification for having the Federal Army participate in the NATO bombings of Serbia, as it was argued that these served to prevent the genocide that the Serbian police and army were planning against Kosovo Albanians.[45]

Historical research on the causes of the Holocaust has not contributed to clarifying the question of what actually could or would effectively prevent genocide. Neither do the lessons drawn by historians like Jürgen Kocka, who emphasizes the Holocaust’s uniqueness by arguing for a “German special path” to modernity,[46] nor Christopher Browning’s verdict that everyone of us ordinary men (or women) could be a mass murderer,[47] nor Theodor Adorno’s universalizing claim that the potentiality of mass murder is an inherent part of modernization,[48] constitute in any way a reference to the political discourses about the Holocaust. The minimal impact these “historian quarrels”[49] have on the political reality of the Holocaust narrative instead show that the Holocaust has been largely dissociated from its historical context and from the academic debates that reflect on its conditions of possibility.

In some instances, the Holocaust narrative has gained the quality of a foundational myth. With some delay this has been certainly the case for the self-definition of Israel as presented by its political and diplomatic elites.[50] But others, too, have recuperated the Holocaust narrative as a legitimizing discourse, for example, the European Union or the United States.[51] In the peacebuilding field, the Holocaust narrative has taken a central role in the justification of intervention over the past two decades and through the active advocacy of a number of personalities who are part of the upper tier of the peacebuilding field. Prominent among them are the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, the Pulitzer Prize winner and current U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, and Michael Ignatieff, former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party and currently Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where Power, too, had held the same position before becoming adviser to President Barack Obama.

Wiesel’s struggle to establish the Holocaust narrative as a narrative of absolute evil dates back to Israel’s 1967 war and his defense of Israel’s aggressive occupation policies as forms of self-defense and Israels’ ultimate struggle for survival.[52] Power has come later to this narrative, and reformulated the already existing and vivid debate about humanitarian intervention and just war in terms of genocide prevention. Ignatieff has embedded the Holocaust narrative in his larger work as an advocate of human rights and humanitarian intervention. The Holocaust narrative feeds on and into larger debates in peacebuilding and adjacent fields about humanitarianism, intervention, and human rights. It draws on a powerful imagery that has been shaped by popular culture, for example, the Hollywood film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg, as well as high-brow culture as the numerous literature Nobel prizes for authors who have written about the Holocaust show.[53]

Crucially, the Holocaust epitomizes the conundrum of the modern subject and its vulnerability.[54] It symbolizes antiliberalism at its worst: not only were those human beings who were imprisoned, tortured, and killed in concentration camps deprived of any opportunity to exercise choice and reason in their lives, they were held in this state of animality (rather than humanity) through violence and bodily injury. Yet, such de-subjectivization and dehumanization was produced with modern and, arguably, liberal technologies of collective governance and organization by the overbearing machines of a modern state. Hence, the state that produced extermination camps and conducted genocide—the Nazi state—also dehumanized the perpetrators by depriving them of individual agency and humanity. Worse than the worst nightmares of nineteenth-century liberal thinkers, the Nazi state not only impeded the free development of individual freedom, wealth, and happiness, it dehumanized individuals and fundamentally destroyed any free expression of subjectivity.[55]

This core tale of dehumanization serves as an essential conjunction of the Holocaust narrative and other discourses, such as human rights, international justice, or reconciliation, as will be illustrated here with some of Ignatieff’s writings. The anxious tale of tyranny’s force of dehumanization introduces a justificatory consistency into the account of human rights according to which these rights have been steadily expanded since the Second World War, first as a response to the war and the Holocaust, and then as a universalized cosmopolitan response to injustice and dictatorship—a narrative particularly put forward by uncompromising advocates of the responsibility to protect doctrine.[56]

Cosmopolitanism posits that the universal individual is the primordial basis for any politics and, hence, that the protection of individuals is preeminent over the protection of other political actors, that is, the state and its sovereignty. In fact, the responsibility to protect doctrine allows redefining sovereignty as the protection of individuals, that is, that states enjoy the rights of sovereignty only for as long as they provide protection to individuals.[57] Cosmopolitanism draws particularly on the Holocaust and the specter of Nazism to argue for a universal responsibility to protect minimum human rights.[58] Today’s responsibility to protect doctrine is considered to be the most recent step in a history of ethical progress in the form of globalizing and universalizing human rights since the Second World War.[59]

The intertwining of cosmopolitan theory and the Holocaust narrative provides the backdrop for a complex argument that links the protection of human rights with the justification of humanitarian interventions, or “just wars,” and the establishment of institutions of transitional justice, such as criminal tribunals or truth and reconciliation commissions.[60] Human rights are defined in this context as minimum rights for protection, but not as maximum entitlements for citizenship and agency. The call issued to the international community is one to save individuals from cruelty and torture, but it is not necessarily a call to place power in their hands;[61] people need to be protected. Their rescue can, in the end, only be undertaken by third states, and by only such states whose actions are legitimate in the sense of just war theory.[62] In 2002, in his defense of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Ignatieff unapologetically defended this imperialist reasoning:

Imperialism used to be the white man’s burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect. Nations sometimes fail, and when they do outside help—imperial power—can get them back on their feet. Nation-building is the kind of imperialism you get in a human rights era, a time when great powers believe simultaneously in the right of small nations to govern themselves and their own right to rule the world.[63]

Yet the role of states needs to be restricted to not much more than this type of saving from violence; Ignatieff explicitly rejects any claims of collective human rights, and he does so most obviously in that he sees only the state as being capable of attending to such collective human rights; hence this opens the door to all forms of tyranny:

Those who insist that civil and political rights need supplementing with social and economic ones make a claim that is true—that individual rights can only be exercised effectively within a framework of collective rights provision—but they may be obscuring the priority relation between the individual and the collective. Individual rights without collective rights may be difficult to exercise, but collective rights without individual ones means tyranny.[64]

Again, the specter of the dehumanizing state looms large. Ignatieff sees democratic institutions and constitutionalism as being the only forces capable of counterchecking potential tyranny, and therefore holds up particularly the United States for its history of defending human rights. Ignatieff considers himself a pragmatist insofar as he argues that human rights are, first of all, practical instruments for achieving individual freedom and for obtaining the benefits of freedom, such as wealth generated by market economies and justice produced by democratic institutions. The poor U.S. record of human rights protection and its ongoing imperialism are, therefore, simply lesser evils, as in the end they do serve to propagate democracy and market liberalism.[65]

This position—that U.S. intervention is necessary to prevent further genocide and so is the lesser evil—is equally defended by Elie Wiesel, who implored President Bill Clinton at the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in 1993:

And we have learnt [from the Holocaust] that when people suffer we cannot remain indifferent. And Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in former Yugoslavia, last fall. I cannot sleep since what I have seen. Something—it is true what I am saying—we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country. People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done.[66]

However, advocating for U.S. intervention to save human lives has been marked in Power’s writings, and most notably in her Pulitzer Prize–winning book A Problem from Hell.[67] In her book, Power takes as her starting point the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin’s battle to see the genocide recognized as a crime against humanity and for the establishment of an international convention that would allow circumventing sovereignty and international intervention in cases of genocide. From the perspective of the debates on intervention that raged in 1940s America, Power scrutinizes the U.S. engagement to prevent genocide or to save victims of genocide in the post–World War II period. She comes to the unsurprising conclusion that the United States “has consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress genocide.”[68] Like Ignatieff and others, Power argues that the United States has a double responsibility to act in cases of genocide: as a democratic country that, according to Power, has a “tremendous normative impact,” and as the state that “had the greatest potential to deter these crimes.”[69]

Transitional Justice: Law and Reconciliation

Although the discourse that fuses American destiny with interventionism has lost some of its attractiveness since the war in Iraq (and regained traction with the election of Barack Obama, the interventions in Libya, and the calls for intervention in Syria),[70] the nomothetic connection between the Holocaust narrative and the fatalism of saving lives persists due to the continued presence of its advocates in the upper tier of the field, and due to the malleability with which it can be connected to other dominant discourses in other fields. The Holocaust narrative thus bridges the peacebuilding field with discourses on justice and reconciliation as they are presented in various forms in discourses on transitional justice.

Chapter 4 described how, in terms of personal networks and professional trajectories, the peacebuilding field overlaps with parts of the American academic fields of legal studies, but also of social sciences engaged in promoting humanitarian intervention. The flow of ideas and people is particularly intensive between the legal field and peacebuilding, populated with such prominent figures as Theodor Meron (Charles L. Denison chair of the New York University School of Law and president of the International Criminal Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia, as well as presiding judge of the Appeals Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda); Cherif Bassiouni (emeritus professor of law at De Paul University and frequent adviser to the UN); José Moreno-Ocampo (first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and professor at the University of Buenos Aires, Stanford, and Harvard Law School); and Ocampo’s assistant José Alvarez (professor at the University of Michigan Law School, George Washington University, and Georgetown University), and other members of various UN human rights and legal commissions and legal advisers to the U.S. president.[71] The most influential research projects on transitional justice are based at American top-level universities, such as the Project on Justice in Times of Transition at Harvard University, which has recently merged into the Beyond Conflict think tank.[72]

American think tanks also play a crucial role as relays for ideas and pools of people who participate in the peacebuilding field; particularly specialized think tanks like the International Center for Transitional Justice, of which Ocampo is the honorary president, and which was founded in 2000 by Priscella Hayner and Alex Boraine, former deputy chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, professor of law at New York University Law School and the director of the New York University Law School’s Justice in Transition program. Since 2006, the academia-practice nexus even has its own publication outlet in the International Journal of Transitional Justice, hosted by Cambridge University Press and edited by Laurel Fletcher, professor of international human rights law at the University of California at Berkeley.[73]

Although the field of practice is much more populated by American lawyers than by those of other nationalities, the concept of transitional justice has gained traction all over Europe and the Americas in the past decades. It is an area of legal development that allows for the merging of the politics of human rights, humanitarianism, and democratization with the expansion of a legalistic approach to world politics more generally.

As Catherine Turner argues, transitional justice has become a performative event within whose limits “all efforts of peace-making must play out.”[74] Similar to the legalization of other domains of global governance, the discourse and practice of transitional justice allow for a depoliticization of fundamental antagonisms. The concept of transitional justice draws on the normative power of natural law to displace political debates over legal and constitutional issues in postconflict settings and regime changes. From such a perspective, conflicts are not profoundly and essentially about differing views of social organization or politics, including the question of what kind of law should be constitutive of the political community, they are only violent expressions of varying interests in resources and stakes (power, posts, votes, and so forth). Due process, clarity of rules, and fairness of institutions of law—in short, the full array of legal instruments in the democratic and Western rule of law tradition—can be brought to bear on adjudicating such competitions of interest.

The concept of transitional justice thus remains vague, as it covers a wide range of very different activities, from international or transnational criminal tribunals and trials to locally rooted institutions and rituals of forgiveness and redemption. Classically, transitional justice is defined as “justice associated with periods of political change,”[75] whereby the often unspoken assumption is that this change goes from an authoritarian regime in which human rights violations took place, to a better, that is, democratic and liberal, regime where such human rights violations, by the very definition of democracy, do not take place. The law and the ideas of justice imposed by regimes of transitional justice, therefore, draw on two sources of supposedly intrinsic legitimacy: the promise of a brighter, more democratic, more liberal, and more just future, on the one hand, and the rightness of human rights norms, derived from natural law, on the other hand.[76] Both aspects are discursively emphasized through the Holocaust and genocide narrative.

Interviewed and surveyed peacebuilders definitively said they believed that liberal democracy is the normative and most desirable state of states. They strongly agreed with a number of statements that praise democracy in Winston Churchill’s manner, that is, as a faulty system, yet one that is still better than any other. Consistently they refuted statements critical of democracy, for example, any describing it as inefficient or responsible for creating unruliness, disorder, and insecurity, or both. It is, however, symbolically most striking that they voted in significant numbers in agreement that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Eastern Europe, as well as the end of apartheid, were the most remarkable historical events in the recent past.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid, as well as the end of the Latin American junta regimes, stand for paradigmatic transitions. They symbolize the bankruptcy of the two political regime types that competed most successfully with liberal democracy over the past decades, namely discriminatory oligarchy (in Latin America and South Africa), on the one hand, and communism, on the other. Without necessarily sharing Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalism that the ideological quarrel about the best form of government has ended, peacebuilders do think that the political, social, and economic changes in Latin America in the 1980s, in Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s, and in South Africa since then were a move to the better. Personalities like Nelson Mandela are admired for the part they played in these transitions.

The establishment of transitional justice as its own field of research and practice has allowed the integration of broader approaches than the hitherto narrow legalistic understanding. The field of religiously motivated conflict resolution, which promotes mainly Christian ideas of forgiveness, had been especially able to contribute successfully to the understanding of transitional justice.[77] Here, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is frequently regarded as an exemplary case of rendering justice in the aftermath of an unjust regime. This narrative is actively promoted by those who participated in the transitional regimes of the time, not least by Nelson Mandela himself, and the initiator of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its chair, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who is, as Mandela was, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a member of the Elders. Personalities like Alex Boraine, for instance, aforementioned cofounder of the International Institute for Transitional Justice, also have actively propagated the South African experience as a paradigm to be followed by other countries.

Conclusion

The nomos of a field is, according to Bourdieu, “the vision of the world [that] is the division of the world”: the vision that creates a fundamental distinction between the inside of the field and its outside.[78] It presents itself as a consistent, inherently logical, and “natural” story because it pushes difference and dissent outside the field. The act of doing peacebuilding confers on peacebuilders the legitimacy and authority to speak about peacebuilding. Those who do not participate in the field can neither share its nomos nor practice peacebuilding in its authoring and authoritative form. To do is to know; and it is this distinguishing and excluding function of the nomos that Bunche was, for instance, invoking when in the early 1960s he consistently replied to any critique of the UN mission in Congo in the following manner:

The reports of the Secretary General to the Security Council which are public documents and which, I assure you, are truthful and objective, would correct misconceptions that you have of what the United Nations is doing in the Congo and particularly in Katanga.[79]

Whomever Bunche was addressing in this letter (and similar ones that he wrote), he was clearly rejecting the correspondent’s authority to speak to the matter at all. The ultimate argument that only the UN, and in a wider sense today the peacebuilders, can know what needs to be done in peacebuilding is based on the seemingly undisputable claim that whatever peacebuilding does, it primarily saves lives that otherwise would have been wasted in, by definition, gratuitous death.

The nomos of the peacebuilding field posits that saving lives is the noblest ethical obligation, and that its pursuit allows for no critique or contradiction per se, as the report “The Responsibility to Protect” asserts:

The controversy [over the legitimacy of intervention] has laid bare basic divisions within the international community. In the interest of all those victims who suffer and die when leadership and institutions fail, it is crucial that these divisions be resolved.[80]

The claim that intervention is a priori necessary to save lives and avoid suffering and death is repeated all over in every foundational document of the peacebuilding field. It is also a claim that is constantly reiterated by key actors in the field, whether the United Nations Secretary-General or the NGOs that work in the field. It is the fundamental and foundational norm of the field.

This norm is approached and legitimized from various perspectives, depending on which adjacent fields actors come from. The stories told in justification of the nomos—the heroic figures of Mandela, Gandhi, and King, the Holocaust, the transition toward a better future—translate reputational capital from various neighboring fields such as law, business, or the NGO world into symbolic capital in the peacebuilding field.

These stories form an entirely consistent and thick variation of what Didier Fassin calls “humanitarian reason.”[81] Humanitarian reason, an expression of modern humanism as much as of the modern politics of egalitarianism, not only posits that “being alive” is the most precious human good and goal, but it also creates the figure of the humanitarian, an active agent who can fight suffering and abolish gratuitous death.[82] Humanitarian reason is motivated not only by compassion, but inspires the world far beyond simple acts of Good Samaritan charity; it confronts deep, fundamental questions about inequality and suffering, and consequently about the very foundations of the Enlightenment assumption that all human beings can be and are agents of their lives:

In the face of violence, disasters, and epidemics, and also poverty, insecurity, and misfortune, what is intolerable is not only the presence of the tragic but the inequality in which it is embedded.[83]

It is the embeddedness of the peacebuilding field’s nomos in a wider worldview of what human agency represents in our complex, differentiated, modern, and unjust societies, and of what human life is worth in such a world, that gives it its definite symbolic power. The stories told about Mandela, or nonviolence, or the Holocaust, and so on represent the nomos as a self-evident, natural, universal, and indubitable necessary logic. The fatalism of saving lives has no alternative and no antithesis. The only disputation of the fatalism of saving lives that would be possible is the acceptance of killing and death; yet such an argument disqualifies totally any such disposition and makes it effectively nondebatable.

The nomothetic stories are, however, not only superficial justificatory discourses. At the same time as they provide a universalizing legitimacy, the nomos eventually covers up its social conditions of existence and conceals its particularity and, in some cases, like those of warfare in Afghanistan or Iraq, its utterly violent distinction. The fact that the dispositions, sentiments, ideas, and normative aspirations expressed in the nomothetic stories are, in fact, the privilege of a few, and that they depend on the mastery of specific resources of power, is entirely concealed by the stories’ universalist claims and the fatalistic exclusion of any counterdiscourse. The nomos not only operates an exclusion of topics and debates from the field, much more importantly it operates an exclusion of people from the field. It does so on the grounds of a social selection that is taking place through various institutions of socialization from families to universities, and on the grounds of its distinguished and distinguishing habitus.

Conclusion

In March 2004, riots broke out all over Kosovo. Kosovo Albanians attacked Kosovo Serbs in the enclaves and neighborhoods where they had remained after the first violent wave of expulsion in summer and autumn 1999.[1] In winter 2014 and spring 2015, young Kosovo Albanians emigrated massively from the region and illegally crossed the borders into European Union countries.[2] Ten years apart, both events exemplify the difficulties of peacebuilding: a precarious peace agreement, one that reflects international diplomatic haggling more than local conditions of violence, is administered by an international elite that pursues a strict liberalization program (including the forced privatization of state-owned companies) and legitimizes weak and corrupt governments, which, in turn, suffer from porous governance and are unable to provide any perspective to their citizens in the face of rising levels of unemployment and poverty. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes,

rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.[3]

The friction created by international peacebuilding is, indeed, heat and light, yet rarely peace. Even if physical safety is (re)established after conflict (and the riots of 2004 showed that this was not the case), peacebuilding rarely founds peace—if peace is to be understood in any way as a measure of collective well-being, stability, and prosperity.

This observation was the starting point into an inquiry as to the conditions of possibility by which peacebuilding is continued even though it rarely fulfills its promises. Far from being only an international policy, peacebuilding is a versatile practice around which a social field has emerged over several decades. It is a global socio-professional field in which global power relations are enacted and reproduced in multiple ways: in professional practices and values, in political struggles and discourses, and in the everyday lives and professional careers of peacebuilders. Peacebuilding continues because it has become for a large range of people and organizations, at many different social levels, a way of earning a life and leading a professional career. However, the field analysis revealed that the evolution of peacebuilding not only represents the making of a profession but also the creation of a specific culture and habitus with its own codes, references, discourses, norms, and rules. This culture resembles strongly the middle-class culture of the new liberal professions of the nineteenth century in Europe and America. This resemblance is not a coincidence given that the social structure of the field reflects largely the Western middle classes—in its social outlook as well as in its more institutionalized patterns, for example, in the emphasis on education and the subsequent privilege of a small circle of educational institutions.

Subject to the pressures of neoliberalism, peacebuilders have reinterpreted the spirit of capitalism into an ethics of continuous professional reinvention and projectist entrepreneurship. The diffuseness and weak institutionalization of the field has stimulated the expansion of personal networks as means of professional development. The cult of the entrepreneurial self—the man or woman of vision, initiative, creativity, and merit who constantly reinvents him- or herself—is sustained by the highly individualist and individualizing working and living environment of highly mobile cosmopolitans. Contrary to its universalizing discourse, such cosmopolitanism is highly particular and presupposes an education and socialization in a limited number of institutions and social contexts.[4] The field sustains its own dynamics through this particularism.

Consequently, the field is self-referential and its reproduction is quite independent from the local (however defined). Its autoproducing dynamics make the field immune from fundamental criticism and also to a large extent against external shocks. Even though the field is under constant scrutiny and subject to a large variety of scholarly research, changes to peacebuilding practices remain internal to the field, incremental, and do not question fundamentally its social structures or its doxa and nomos. Even violent attacks on peacebuilders such as the 2003 car bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, which killed twenty-two people, including the special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, do not shake the field in its foundations. They simply lead to reinforced security procedures that produce ever more material manifestations of the peacebuilders’ separateness from the local environment. Hence, the building of walled compounds secured with barbed wire and by roadblocks, and the increased use of armored vehicles that are not allowed to stop en route, are extremely visible forms of the field’s closure.[5] They are also material manifestations of the domination peacebuilders and the peacebuilding field seek over the local political fields.

This is not to say that peacebuilding may not produce positive results for the populations that fall under its practice or that living conditions may not be significantly improved compared to the situation during or before the war. Yet the results on the ground are, indeed, of lesser importance for the explanation of peacebuilding than its internal dynamics. The problem of peacebuilding is not so much that it does not produce the peace it claims but that it reproduces unequal global structures of domination through the way the field is internally constituted. When the question is asked of what global power structure is materialized and expressed in peacebuilding, the field analysis clearly shows that the dominance of the liberal and cosmopolitan culture of Western states is undisputed and, for the moment, fully resistant to any contestation. The peacebuilding field is exemplary for the way European middle-class sensibilities and cultures of the self have survived the onslaught of neoliberalism, which has rendered the world of work ever more precarious, and marginalized large parts of society that do not have the cultural (especially educational) and social capital to move with ease in global and social networks.

The peacebuilding field is formed by capital configurations that translate easily into other globally dominant fields, namely those structured in a similar way around cultures of professionalism and the entrepreneurial self, for example, the field of global management and business, parts of the NGO world, or the national civil services of globally important states. These fields are simultaneously globalized and localized so that the peacebuilding field stretches well into local politics, society, and culture, yet it does so only under the specific conditions of the field’s doxa, which, in turn, reflects much of the world’s dominant discourses of individual and “minimal” human rights, cosmopolitan liberalism, individualism, and their associated discourses of merit, achievement, self-invention, creativity, autonomy, and so forth. Hence, peacebuilding is, indeed, intervening, and it is doing so much more fundamentally than the façade of “international administration” would lead us to believe.

When Khrushchev argued that “there are no neutral men” he expressed this thought entirely in the language of the world-political conflict of the day. However, Hammarskjöld’s response and the eulogy the journalist Walter Lippmann wrote on the UN Secretary-General quite astutely responded in terms of their social habitus:

The Soviet government has now come to the conclusion that there can be no such thing as an impartial civil servant in this deeply divided world, and that the kind of political celibacy which the British theory of the civil service calls for is in international affairs a fiction,[6]

writes Lippmann in 1961. According to this view, there is a neutral habitus, that is, a social behavior, that is not only dissociated from political ideology but also from the discussion over power, authority, and domination in general. The field analysis in this book has shown that such a habitus does not exist, but that, on the contrary, political ideology is inextricably inscribed in peacebuilding’s practice and discourse. Far from being neutral, peacebuilding is entirely political in the way it is made possible socially, by the way it is done practically, and by the way it is understood and justified by its actors’ discourses.

Actors in the field are also not disinterested but heavily involved in reproducing the field’s structure. They do so when trying to reproduce their own position and dispositions in the field (their material livelihood as well as their habitus). This is a conflictual and differentiated process. The class of peacebuilders is by no means monolithic. Dissent, resistance, and struggle exist inside the field. Yet these conflicts, competition, and the equally existing assimilation processes take place within certain limits. These limits are set by the nomos, doxa, habitus, and rules of the game of the field. The nomos and the doxa of the field do not encumber its internal dynamics of distinction and assimilation; rather, they set the outer limits of the field’s competition. Within these limits actors will strive to distinguish themselves by contending with others’ dispositions and by advancing or defending their own. As the section on habitus has shown, the field’s competition is about far more than simply the distribution of material benefits. In order for fundamental changes to happen, such internal struggles over power and authority need to come together with external pressure on the field, either through rivaling fields and actors, or through shock-like events that shake the foundations of the field.[7]

The book developed on the background of the question of which global power structure peacebuilding is the image of. Clearly, the power structures of the peacebuilding field are conditioned by the dominance of Western, liberal, and neocapitalist forms of knowledge and practice. No principle of fair national distribution, as it is practiced at the UN, can by itself break this dominance, as the assumption of Western (and by consequence “white”) superiority is tacitly and, often, unconsciously institutionalized in the professionalization of the peacebuilding field. The terms of recruitment and career advancement, the daily practices of work, and also sociability, the requirements of self presentation and communication—all these practices and ways of doing seem mostly inauspicious at first sight. However, the preceding analysis of the field’s network structure, its enormous reliance on educational capital, its closeness to the business and NGO fields, as well as its inherent habitus, all reproduce social structures and cultures that privilege the European and North American historical traditions of ordering society and politics.

It is not only the power/knowledge of peacebuilding that is at stake, as any Foucauldian analysis could argue on the grounds of the last two chapters; beyond the epistemology of the world that privileges European (and by consequence, North American) traditions of thinking about politics and society, peacebuilding reproduces social relations and ways of living together in society that reproduce and normalize Western social history and experience in general, and the organizational experience of civil administrations under neoliberal, entrepreneurial pressure in particular. It is this capacity of the field to exist without acknowledging its local environment that (re)produces its power.

It is also this unidirectional force of absorption that makes it appear uncomfortably close to colonial practices of the past. If we are to accept Valentin Yves Mudimbe’s characterization of colonialism as a threefold process of

the domination the physical space, the reformation of the natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective, the latter by the manner of managing ancient organizations and implementing new modes of production,[8]

then peacebuilding does, indeed, stand in the tradition of colonialism. It does so not because it would explicitly carry imperial intentions. It does so because it imposes its forms of managing social organizations and because these forms of social organization crucially depend on essential institutions of the modern, bureaucratized, liberal/neoliberal, capitalist, and universalized process of globalization.

Importantly, the peacebuilding field’s mode of reproduction seems to be autodynamic and not in need of othering; Orientalism is a by-product, not a necessary condition of the peacebuilding field. The professional ethos of the field crucially defines its “rules of the game” and hence creates the well-functioning auto-referential dynamics of the field. And because this ethos and its accompanying habitus are highly internalized and normalized, it does not appear to anyone in the field that the impetus to save lives can, in fact, lead to the destruction and negligence of lives and people. This is particularly obvious for the fatalism of saving lives and its discourse of nonviolence, which generously conceals the violence of military interventions, for example, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, and the violence of peacebuilding itself, for example, if peacekeepers are accused of human rights abuses and sexual exploitation.

It is also observable for two other effects of international administrations and peacebuilding, both of which come dangerously close to Mudimbe’s definition of colonialism, but which have not been intensely discussed in this book. Peacebuilding deeply affects property relations in the intervention society either directly, as UNMIK did when imposing the privatization of state-owned enterprises, or indirectly, through refugee resettlement or even more subtly when supporting the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the restructuring of property rights there.9 Again, such policies and practices do not arise from planed colonization projects; rather, they arise from a field-specific habitus, doxa, and nomos that, all the while defending liberal ideas of autonomy and freedom, does not allow any alternative vision of politics, society, or economy.

Similarly, the domestication of the native does not only take place in direct interventions that seek to reeducate spoilers, for example, in cases where the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina dismissed elected politicians considered too extreme, but more subtly in the integration of locals (people) and the local (a real and imagined space) into the peacebuilding field. The right of passage remains the professional ethos of peacebuilding, and, in this, most important is the educational and cultural capital that confers the authority to speak in the field. As the field is fuzzy at its boundaries it retains an integrating force by absorbing external influences; yet serious challenges are kept at bay through various forms of delegitimation—serious critiques or alternative habituses simply do not fit in, and they might not even find their way into the field as the actors who carry the critique will have abandoned integrating the field long before. Peacebuilding is a field of power that reflects unequal relations in the world by its exclusionary authority.

Yet peacebuilding is not quite the same as nineteenth-century colonialism. After all, the declaratory object of peacebuilding and its raison d’être is not the exploitation of virgin territories. The countries and societies in which peace is built are also not those “undiscovered” lands set apart from globalization and modernity that Africa or parts of Asia were in the seventeenth century. There is neither a colonizing country, nor an open, explicit competition over territories, as the scramble for Africa represented. The state-sovereignty framework does not seem to fit the practices of peacebuilding. The “local,” however defined, is an integral part of globalization, and peacebuilding remains only one field among a long row of other global and transnational fields—a relational web largely unexplored. The interlocking of societies, economies, politics, and spaces is much more complex and multifaceted, not least because many territories are formally and legally independent, with important consequences for the agency of the “local.”

Indeed, something new is created in the encounter of the global—international peacebuilding—and the local—the postconflict environment. Yet the newly created spaces and its culture and power relations stand in multiple and complex relations to each other, with the global quite clearly dominating the local. Peacebuilding does reproduce the structures of Western domination on all three levels mentioned by Mudimbe; it does so in a very different world setting and with a different outlook than nineteenth-century colonialism, most notably because forms of resistance and integration have substantially changed over the past hundred years, as Tsing’s notion of “friction” well indicates.10 All too often the “local” and “international” are represented as juxtaposed, opposed, and more or less clearly delimited spaces. Yet from this book’s analysis these gray zones might better be understood as spaces of distinctive professional practices and habituses, which, in turn, reflect distinctive patterns of capital configurations that transgress nation-state boundaries; they are socially determined.

Such an approach may capture more palpably the power relations among those who intend to build peace and those whose peace is built. The power of the peacebuilding field does not lie in its capacity to force policies upon people. Its power lies in its paradigmatic capacity to reproduce a dominant model of making a living and of living a life; a model that is, itself, suspended and reproduced in powerful global structures. The space in which this model is deployed is well guarded through a large set of formal and informal institutions, through expectations of behavior and discourses, through clear limits to authoritative and admissible ideas and debates, and through a deontological ethics that delegitimizes a wide range of dissenting and alternative voices and practices. It limits the peacebuilders’ capacity to reach out and engage with others more generally. Yet this is also the political space in which the globally recognizable peace is negotiated. This is not a definite process, exactly because multiple social logics are at work beyond the simple fulfillment of a given policy. Rather, it makes sense to see peacebuilding as one of those spaces that have popped up a little bit everywhere in the world with the globalization of the past two decades, and which in multiple and various ways have opened political spaces beyond nation-state borders.

The exploration of this book has shown that field analysis is an extremely useful tool to draw out global power structures and the ways people, ideas, institutions, practices, and discourses are in- or excluded in global politics. Field theory allows a multilayered analysis and considers a large range of expressions of such power structures; importantly, it allows constant contextualization. It is evident that nothing analyzed here happens simply like that and would be without alternatives. Field theory quite usefully allows retracing the conjunctural history of behaviors, discourses, practices, and policies that are, all too often, taken for granted. It will certainly be useful for the further exploration of peacebuilding’s overlaps with other global policy areas, and of its effects on wider circles of people than those working in peacebuilding.

Notes

Introduction

1. Audra Mitchell, Lost in Transformation: Violent Peace and Peaceful Conflict in Northern Ireland (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); David Chandler, Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building (London: Pluto Press, 2006); David Chandler, International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2010); Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (London: Polity, 2007); Mats R. Berdal and Astri Suhrke, The Peace in Between: Post-War Violence and Peacebuilding (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2012); Astri Suhrke, When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan (London: Hurst, 2011).

2. Edward Newman and Oliver P. Richmond, Challenges to Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers during Conflict Resolution (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2006); Anders Themnér, Violence in Post-Conflict Societies: Remarginalisation, Remobilisers, and Relationships (New York: Routledge, 2011).

3. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars (London: Zed Books, 2001); Mark R. Duffield and Vernon Marston Hewitt, Empire, Development and Colonialism: The Past in the Present (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2009); Laura Zanotti, “Taming Chaos: A Foucauldian View of UN Peacekeeping, Democracy and Normalization,” International Peacekeeping 13, no. 2 (2006); Laura Zanotti, Governing Disorder: UN Peace Operations, International Security, and Democratization in the Post–Cold War Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Caroline Hughes and Vanessa Pupavac, “Framing Post-Conflict Societies: International Pathologisation of Cambodia and the Post-Yugoslav States,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2005); Susanna Campbell, David Chandler, and Meera Sabaratnam, A Liberal Peace? The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding (London: Zed Books, 2011).

4. Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013); Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions; Anders Themnér and Thomas Ohlson, “Legitimate Peace in Post-Civil War States: Towards Attaining the Unattainable,” Conflict, Security & Development 14, no. 1 (2014).

5. Thomas George Weiss and Ramesh Chandra Thakur, Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Alex J. Bellamy, “Whither the Responsibility to Protect? Humanitarian Intervention and the 2005 World Summit,” Ethics & International Affairs 20, no. 2 (2006); Alex J. Bellamy, “Realizing the Responsibility to Protect,” International Studies Perspectives 10, no. 2 (2009); Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, “The New Politics of Protection? Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and the Responsibility to Protect,” International Affairs 87, no. 4 (2011); Anne Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Philipp Rotmann, Gerrit Kurtz, and Sarah Brockmeier, “Major Powers and the Contested Evolution of a Responsibility to Protect,” Conflict, Security & Development 14, no. 4 (2014); Mónica Serrano and Thomas George Weiss, The International Politics of Human Rights: Rallying to the R2P Cause? ( Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2014).

6. Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” in Neorealism and Its Critics: New Directions in World Politics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

7. Ibid., 129.

8. Béatrice Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below: UN Missions and Local People (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2006).

9. Michael Pugh, ed., Regeneration of War-Torn Societies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

10. Timothy Donais, “A Tale of Two Towns: Human Security and the Limits of Post-War Normalization in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 7 (2005); John Heathershaw, “Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and the Idea of ‘Virtual Peace’: The Triumph of Form and Process over Content in International Interventionism” (London: University of Westminster, n.d.); Caroline Hughes, Dependent Communities: Aid and Politics in Cambodia and East Timor (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2009).

11. Séverine Autesserre, “Hobbes and the Congo: Frames, Local Violence, and International Intervention,” International Organization 63, no. 2 (2009).

12. Vivienne Jabri, “Peacebuilding, the Local and the International: A Colonial or a Postcolonial Rationality?,” Peacebuilding 1, no. 1 (2013): 3–16.

13. Tania Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 232.

14. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000): 8.

15. Li, Will to Improve, 15.

16. Michelle Maise, “What It Means to Build a Long Lasting Peace”, Beyond Intractability, ed. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess (Boulder, CO: Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado, September 2003), accessed August 2015, http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/peacebuilding.

17. Mathijs van Leeuwen, Willemijn Verkoren, and Freerk Boedeltje, “Thinking beyond the Liberal Peace: From Utopia to Heterotopias,” Acta Politica 47, no. 3 (2012).

18. See, for instance, Vivienne Jabri, The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity (London: Routledge, 2012).

19. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

20. See Annika Björkdahl and Kristine Höglund, eds., “Precarious Peacebuilding: Friction in Global-Local Encounters,” Peacebuilding 1, no. 3 (2013): 289–99.

21. Cox, “Social Forces,” 129.

22. Stefano Guzzini, “The Concept of Power: A Constructivist Analysis,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005).

23. See, for instance, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), and the critique of Mikael Rask Madsen, “Human Rights and the Hegemony of Ideology: European Lawyers and the Cold War Battle over Interantional Human Rights,” in Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice, ed. Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth (London: Routledge, 2011), 258–78. See also Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

24. In the case of peacebuilding, this is the preoccupation of the literature that focuses on the UN Security Council: for instance, Aidan Hehir, The Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric, Reality and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Weiss and Thakur, Global Governance and the UN; Alex J. Bellamy, “Realizing the Responsibility to Protect,” International Studies Perspectives 10, no. 2 (2009).

25. Antje Wiener, The Invisible Constitution of Politics: Contested Norms and International Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

26. Olaf Bach, Die Erfindung der Globalisierung: Entstehung und Wandel eines zeitgeschichtlichen Grundbegriffs (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013).

27. Tsing, Friction, 11–12.

28. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).

29. Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).

Chapter 1

1. Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 75.

2. Didier Bigo, “Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices, Practices of Power,” International Political Sociology 5, no. 3 (2011); Anna Leander, “Habitus and Field,” in Working Paper, ed. Copenhagen Business School (Frederiksberg, 2009); Anna Leander, “Thinking Tools,” in Qualitative Methods in International Relations, ed. Audie Klotz and Deepa Prakash (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 11–28.

3. Loïc Wacquant and Pierre Bourdieu, Réponses (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992); Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Paris: Raisons d’agir éd., 2004); Pierre Bourdieu, Science de la science et réflexivité: Cours du Collège de France, 2000–2001 (Paris: Raisons d’Agir, 2001).

4. See, for instance, Bourdieu, Science de la science et réflexivité, 12; but also Bourdieu, Sozialer Raum und Klassen: Leçon sur la leçon (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 55.

5. Although he did sometimes speak of a “theory of fields”: Questions de sociologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980), 113.

6. Michael Barnett et al., “Peacebuilding: What Is in a Name?,” Global Governance 13 (2007).

7. Pierre Bourdieu, La noblesse d’Etat: Grandes écoles et esprit de corps (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989), 375.

8. Ibid., 195.

9. Pierre Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000), 35, 52.

10. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (1985).

11. Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique, 52.

12. See, for instance, Michael Barnett and Christoph Zürcher, “The Peacebuilder’s Contract: How External Peacebuilding Reinforces Weak Statehood,” in The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations, ed. Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk (London: Routledge, 2009), 23–52; Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk, The Dilemmas of Statebuilding : Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations (London: Routledge, 2009).

13. George Lawson and Robbie Shilliam, “Sociology and International Relations: Legacies and Prospects,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23, no. 1 (2010): 70.

14. See for a more detailed critique of mainstream approaches, Daniel Bertrand Monk and Jacob Mundy, The Post-Conflict Environment: Investigation and Critique (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).

15. John Martin and Forest Gregg, “Was Bourdieu a Field Theorist?,” in Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Fields: Concepts and Applications, ed. Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangez (New York: Routledge, 2015); Bernard Lahire, “The Limits of the Field: Elements for a Theory of Social Differentiation of Activities,” in ibid.

16. Lahire, “Limits of the Field,” 63.

17. See, for instance, Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth, The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lawyers and the Rule of Law in an Era of Globalization (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); Mikael Rask Madsen, “Reflexivity and the Construction of the International Object: The Case of Human Rights,” International Political Sociology 5, no. 3 (2011); Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Sovereignty Games: Instrumentalizing State Sovereignty in Europe and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); David Swartz, Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals: The Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Trine Villumsen Berling, “Bourdieu, International Relations, and European Security,” Theory and Society 41, no. 5 (2012).

18. Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980); Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World; The Sense of Honour; The Kabyle House or the World Reversed: Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse.

19. See, for further discussion, Swartz, Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals.

20. Bourdieu, Questions de sociologie, 119; see also Beate Krais and Gunter Gebauer, Habitus (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2002), 19.

21. Stacie E. Goddard and Daniel H. Nexon, “Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International Politics,” European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1 (2005).

22. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

23. Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, “International Practices,” International Theory 3, no. 1 (2011); Emanuel Adler, “The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and NATO’s Post–Cold War Transformation,” European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 2 (2008).

24. Jarrod Hayes, “Review Article: The Democratic Peace and the New Evolution of an Old Idea,” European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 4 (2012): 767–91; Piki Ish-Shalom, “Theory as a Hermeneutical Mechanism: The Democratic-Peace Thesis and the Politics of Democratization,” European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 4 (2006). See, for a general discussion of constructivist contributions, Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth Simmons, eds., Handbook of International Relations (New York: Sage, 2012); Ewan Harrison, “State Socialisation, International Norm Dynamics and the Liberal Peace,” International Politics 41, no. 4 (2004).

25. Michael Lipson, “Peacekeeping: Organized Hypocrisy?,” European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007); “Performance under Ambiguity: International Organization Performance in UN Peacekeeping,” Review of International Organizations 5, no. 3 (2010); Mats Berdal and Dominik Zaum, Political Economy of Statebuilding: Power after Peace (London: Routledge, 2013); Charles T. Call and Elizabeth M. Cousens, “Ending Wars and Building Peace: International Responses to War-Torn Societies,” International Studies Perspectives 9, no. 1 (2008).

26. Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992).

27. See Rebecca Adler-Nissen, “Sovereignty,” in Bourdieu in International Relations, ed. Rebecca Adler-Nissen (London: Routledge, 2013), 179–92.

28. This is particularly often the case in historical analyses; see, for instance, Martha Finnemore, “Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention,” in The Culture of National Security, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 153–85; Michael N. Barnett, The International Humanitarian Order, Security and Governance Series (London: Routledge, 2010); Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

29. See, for instance, Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, “The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction,” in The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, ed. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Rope, and Kathryn Sikkink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–38; Susanne Zwingel, “How Do Norms Travel? Theorizing International Women’s Rights in Transnational Perspective,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2012); Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse, “From Europeanisation to Diffusion: Introduction,” West European Politics 35, no. 1 (2011).

30. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984).

31. Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Jonas Tallberg, The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

32. The former is particularly noticeable in the proliferation of titles like “The Power of Norms” or “The Power of Ideas”; see, for instance, Theresa Reinold, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: The Power of Norms and the Norms of the Powerful (London: Routledge, 2013); Stephen Bell, “The Power of Ideas: The Ideational Shaping of the Structural Power of Business,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 4 (2012); Peter Hilpold, “Intervening in the Name of Humanity: R2P and the Power of Ideas,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law 17, no. 1 (2012).

33. See, for a discussion, Andrew W. Neal, “Michel Foucault,” in Critical Theorists and International Relations, ed. Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams (New York: Routledge, 2009), 161–70.

34. See Charlotte Epstein, The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

35. See, for instance, Michel Foucault, “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au collège de France, 1975–1976 (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 29.

36. Ciaran Cronin, “Bourdieu and Foucault on Power and Modernity,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 22, no. 6 (1996).

37. Staf Callewaert, “Bourdieu, Critic of Foucault: The Case of Empirical Social Science against Double-Game-Philosophy,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (2006).

38. See, for instance, Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

39. Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris: Fayard, 1982).

40. See also Stefano Guzzini, “The Concept of Power: A Constructivist Analysis,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005).

41. Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire.

42. Pierre Bourdieu, “Sur le pouvoir symbolique,” Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations 32, no. 3 (1977).

43. Bourdieu, La noblesse d’Etat; “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989).

44. Autesserre, Peaceland.

45. Adler and Pouliot, “International Practices,” 4.

46. See Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000 [1972]), 238–41.

47. It is this connection between doing and effect on society that probably led the German translator to translate “le sens pratique” (the practical sense) as “der soziale Sinn” (the social sense).

48. Krais and Gebauer, Habitus, 66–67.

49. Bourdieu, Sozialer Raum und Klassen, 73.

50. Thomas Bierschenk, “Anthropology and Development: An Historicizing and Localizing Approach,” in Working Papers, ed. Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien (Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, 2008).

51. David Mosse, “The Anthropology of International Development,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): 235.

52. Séverine Autesserre, “Going Micro: Emerging and Future Peacekeeping Research,” International Peacekeeping 21, no. 4 (2014).

53. See also Rebecca Adler-Nissen, “Towards a Practice Turn in EU Studies: The Everyday of European Integration,” JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 54, no. 1 (2016).

54. Lisa Smirl, Spaces of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism (London: Zed Books, 2015); Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below; David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (London: Pluto Press, 1999); Ole Jacob Sending, “Why Peacebuilders Fail to Secure Ownership and Be Sensitive to Context,” Security in Practice 1 (2009).

55. Autesserre, Peaceland, chap. 6.

56. Bourdieu, Sozialer Raum und Klassen, 75, my translation; Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, 272–73.

57. Pierre Bourdieu, “Postface,” in Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and Erwin Panofsky (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2011), 151; Bourdieu uses the same image comparing these schemes to the improvisation of musicians as Charles Tilly did much later when introducing the notion of “scripts”; see Charles Tilly, Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005), 84.

58. Bourdieu, “Postface,” 152.

59. Patrick Champagne and Olivier Christin, Pierre Bourdieu: Mouvements d’une pensée (Paris: Bordas, 2004), 57.

60. See, for a longer discussion of a Bourdieu-inspired critique of the concept of identity, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000).

61. Loïc Wacquant, “Putting Habitus in Its Place: Rejoinder to the Symposium,” Body & Society 20, no. 2 (2014).

62. Champagne and Christin, Pierre Bourdieu, 68.

63. Many countries require visa applicants and bearers of student visas to prove that they have sufficient economic resources to sustain their studies and livelihood during their stay in the host country.

64. See Sozio-Ökonomisches Panel at http://www.diw.de/en/soep or the British household panel survey at https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/bhps, both accessed March 2015.

65. Anthony Giddens, “Action, Subjectivity, and the Constitution of Meaning,” Social Research 53, no. 3 (1986): 529.

66. Krais and Gebauer, Habitus.

67. Barney A. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968).

68. Abraham H. Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 16.

69. See, most notably, the recently declassified documents on the Congo in the Foreign Records of the United States (FRUS), U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–68, Volume 23, Congo, 1960–1968, ed. Nina D. Howland, David C. Humphrey, Harriet D. Schwarz, and Adam M. Howard. Belgian ministerial cabinet meetings have also become accessible online, although they seem to have been weeded with respect to Lumumba’s assassination, see Procès verbaux du Conseil des ministers, Archives Générales du Royaume et Archives de l’Etat dans les Provinces: http://lib.ulg.ac.be/en/eresources/proces-verbaux-du-conseil-des-ministres. Also Sergei Mazov, “Soviet Aid to the Gizenga Government in the Former Belgian Congo (1960–61) as Reflected in Russian Archives,” Cold War History 7, no. 3 (2007).

70. See Kai Koddenbrock, “The International Self and the Humanitarianisation of Politics: A Case Study of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo,” in Statebuilding and State-Formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention, ed. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (London: Routledge, 2012), 214–29.

71. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Staatlichkeit in Zeiten des Statebuilding: Intervention und Herrschaft in Bosnien und Herzegowina (Hamburg: P. Lang, 2009); Campbell, Chandler, and Sabaratnam, A Liberal Peace?; Chandler, Empire in Denial; Hughes and, “Framing Post-Conflict Societies,” 873–89; Vanessa Pupavac, “Human Security and the Rise of Global Therapeutic Governance,” Conflict, Security and Development 5 (2005): 161–81; Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War.

72. Thomas George Weiss, UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Lipson, “Peacekeeping: Organized Hypocrisy?,” : 5–34; Lipson, “Performance under Ambiguity,” 249–84; Wolfgang Seibel, “Moderne Protektorate als Ersatzstaat: UN-Friedensoperationen und Dilemmata internationaler Übergangsverwaltungen,” in Governance in einer sich wandelnden Welt, ed. Gunnar Folke Schuppert and Michael Zürn Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Sonderheft 41 (2008), 499–530; Sending, “Why Peacebuilders Fail to Secure Ownership.”

Chapter 2

1. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

2. Patrice Lumumba, Speech at the Ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence, 1st of June, 1960, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/06/independence.htm, accessed February 2015.

3. Much of these suspicions have been confirmed since then, even though important documents have not been fully disclosed yet. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (London: Zed, 2002); John Kent, America, the UN and Decolonisation: Cold War Conflict in the Congo (London: Routledge, 2010); Matthew Hughes, “Fighting for White Rule in Africa: The Central African Federation, Katanga, and the Congo Crisis, 1958–1965,” International History Review 25, no. 3 (2003); Olivier Boehme, “The Involvement of the Belgian Central Bank in the Katanga Secession, 1960–1963,” African Economic History, no. 33 (2005); Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso, 2002). An argument suggesting that Katangese politicians were mainly responsible for Lumumba’s death can be found in Miles Larmer and Erik Kennes, “Rethinking the Katangese Secession,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 4 (2014).

4. De Witte, Assassination of Lumumba; A. Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

5. Stephen D. Krasner, “Sharing Sovereignty. New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States,” International Security 29, no. 2 (2004); Robert I. Rotberg, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation, 2004); Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). More recently, Stephen D. Krasner and Thomas Risse, “External Actors, State-Building, and Service Provision in Areas of Limited Statehood: Introduction,” Governance 27, no. 4 (2014).

For a critical view on the state failure paradigm, see the following articles from Third World Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2014): Derick W. Brinkerhoff, “State Fragility and Failure as Wicked Problems: Beyond Naming and Taming”; Olivier Nay, “International Organisations and the Production of Hegemonic Knowledge: How the World Bank and the OECD Helped Invent the Fragile State Concept”; Isabel Rocha De Siqueira, “Measuring and Managing ‘State Fragility’: The Production of Statistics by the World Bank, Timor-Leste and the G7+”. See also Heather Marquette and Danielle Beswick, “State Building, Security and Development: State Building as a New Development Paradigm?,” Third World Quarterly, 32, no. 10 (2011); and Alina Rocha Menocal, “State Building for Peace: A New Paradigm for International Engagement in Post-Conflict Fragile States?,” Third World Quarterly, 32, no. 10 (2011).

6. See, for instance, the UN Peacebuilding Fund: http://www.unpbf.org/application-guidelines/what-is-peacebuilding/, accessed April 2014.

7. See, for a discussion (particularly the conclusion), Ray Murphy, UN Peacekeeping in Lebanon, Somalia and Kosovo: Operational and Legal Issues in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

8. V. P. Fortna, “Does Peacekeeping Keep Peace? International Intervention and the Duration of Peace after Civil War,” International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2004).

9. Alan J. Kuperman, “The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans,” International Studies Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2008).

10. Bliesemann de Guevara, Staatlichkeit in Zeiten des Statebuilding; Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Statebuilding and State-Formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention (London: Routledge, 2012); Klaus Schlichte, The Dynamics of States: The Formation and Crises of State Domination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Suhrke, When More Is Less.

11. Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions; Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo; Catherine Goetze and Dejan Guzina, “Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, Nationbuilding—Turtles All the Way Down?,” Civil Wars 10, no. 4 (2008).

12. Mitchell, Lost in Transformation; Hughes, Dependent Communities.

13. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012); Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations: A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World (London: Basic Books, 2003).

14. Reprinted in the New York Times, August 15, 1960.

15. Christopher J. Bickerton, “State-Building. Exporting State Failure,” in Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations, ed. Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, and Alexander Gourevitch (New York: University College London Press, 2007); Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect, 173; see, for case studies, Niels Nagelhus Schia and John Karlsrud, “Frictions in Peacebuilding Interventions: The Unpredictability of Local-Global Interaction,” Special issue of International Peacekeeping 20, no. 2 (2013).

16. For a detailed description of these events, see De Witte, Assassination of Lumumba. For a thorough discussion of UN special envoy Andrew Cordier’s dislike of Lumumba, see Carole Collins, “Fatally Flawed Mediation: Cordier and the Congo Crisis of 1960,” Africa Today 39, no. 3 (1992).

17. See Telegram from the Station in the Congo to the Central Intelligence Agency, September 5, 1960, Central Intelligence Agency Files, Job 78–00435R, DDO/ISS Files, Box 1, Folder 3, [cryptonym not declassified] Ops. Secret; Rybat; [cryptonym not declassified]; Emergency. Received at 2357Z, reprinted in Foreign Records of the US (FRUS), Africa, 1964–1968, vol. 23, Congo, 1960–1968, document 15. Paper Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency, undated, Central Intelligence Agency Files, Job 78–00435R, DDO/ISS Files, Box 1, Folder 3, [cryptonym not declassified] Ops. Secret. A handwritten notation on the paper reads: “Prepared for Nixon 7 Sept 1960,” reprinted in Foreign Records of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 23, Congo, 1960–1968, document 16.

18. Larry Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo: A Memoir of 1960–67 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007).

19. The arrest ultimately led to Lumumba’s assassination in Katanga at the hands of Moïse Tshombé and Belgian settlers; it remains unclear how far the CIA was involved in the assassination, see “Editorial Note,” Foreign Records of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 23, Congo, 1960–1968, document 45; also De Witte, Assassination of Lumumba.

20. Collins, “Fatally Flawed Mediation.” See also Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, “Ralph Bunche, Patrice Lumumba, and the First Congo Crisis,” in Trustee for the Human Community: Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa, ed. Robert A. Hill and Edmond J. Keller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 148–59.

21. Kent, America, the UN and Decolonisation.

22. See David N. Gibbs, “Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the Congo Crisis of 1960–61: A Reinterpretation,” Journal of Modern African Studies 31, no. 1 (1993). For the state failure and statebuilding discourse, see, for instance, James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States,” International Security 28, no. 4 (2004).

23. See, for example, Telegram from the Mission at the United Nations to the Department of State, July 14, 1960, Department of State Archives, Central Files, 770G.00/7–1460. Confidential; Priority, reprinted in Foreign Records of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. 14, Africa, Document 123; Telegram from the Mission at the United Nations to the Department of State, July 21, 1960, Department of State, Central Files, 655.70G/7–2160. Confidential, reprinted in Foreign Records of the United States, 1958–1960. Vol. 14, Africa, Document 139; Memorandum of Conversation, July 28, 1960, Department of State, Central Files, 332.70G/7–2860. Secret. Drafted by McBride. Approved in S on August 1, reprinted in Foreign Records of the United States, 1958–1960. Vol. 14, Africa, Document 153.

24. Jean-Bruno Mukanya and Samir Saul, Cavalier seul: La France contre les interventions multilatérales durant la crise Congolaise, 1960–1963 (Paris: SEHRIC, 2010); Alan James, “Britain, the Cold War, and the Congo Crisis, 1960–63,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28, no. 3 (2000).

25. David N. Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and US Policy in the Congo Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

26. See Walter Lippmann, “Interview with Khruschev,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 3, no. 4 (1961). For the text of Khrushchev’s speech, see http://archive.org/stream/KhrushchevInNewYork_395/KINY3_djvu.txt, accessed November 2014; a video extract is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_V2fQCKe4, accessed November 2014.

27. Dag Hammarskjöld, “The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact” (1961): http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/dag/time1961.htm, accessed November 2014.

28. Kent, America, the UN and Decolonisation.

29. Rajeshwar Dayal, Mission for Hammarskjöld: The Congo Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

30. Conor Cruise O’Brien, To Katanga and Back, a UN Case History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).

31. Stephen Ryan, The United Nations and International Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), chap. 4.

32. Norrie MacQueen, The United Nations, Peace Operations and the Cold War (New York: Pearson Longman, 2011).

33. For a critique of this approach, see David Jason Karp, “The Responsibility to Protect Human Rights and the RtoP: Prospective and Retrospective Responsibility,” Global Responsibility to Protect 7, no. 2 (2015).

34. Khalid I. Babaa, “The ‘Third Force’ and the United Nations,” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 362, no. 1 (1965); Steven K. Holloway and Rodney Tomlinson, “The New World Order and the General Assembly: Bloc Realignment at the UN in the Post–Cold War World,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 28, no. 2 (1995).

35. See Susan L Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 1995); Susan Woodward, “The Security Council and the Wars in the Former Yugoslavia,” The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945, ed. Vaughan Lowe et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 406–41; The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis, ed. Nebojša Popov (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000); V. P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, ed. Jasminka Udovički and James Ridgeway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

36. Woodward, “Security Council and the Wars in the Former Yugoslavia.”

37. Marrack Goulding, Peacemonger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (New York: Random House, 1999), 38.

38. Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished, 45.

39. Ibid., 43; see also Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

40. David N. Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).

41. Milica Bakič-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31; Marìa Nikolaeva Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

42. Steven B. Redd, “The Influence of Advisers and Decision Strategies on Foreign Policy Choices: President Clinton’s Decision to Use Force in Kosovo,” International Studies Perspectives 6, no. 1 (2005).

43. Mike Bowker, “The Wars in Yugoslavia: Russia and the International Community,” Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 7 (1998).

44. A good example of this is Stephen Engleberg’s analysis in the New York Times in which he ascribes Yugoslavia’s financial crisis to its political crisis and not the other way around; see “Feuds Crippling Yugoslav Economy,” New York Times, April 20, 1991. There has been in the meantime rather substantial research on the importance of Yugoslavia’s debt crisis in the 1980s and the pressures of structural adjustment programs: see Viachaslau Yarashevich and Yuliya Karneyeva, “Economic Reasons for the Break-up of Yugoslavia,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 46, no. 2 (2013); Woodward, Balkan Tragedy; Gibbs, First Do No Harm; David A. Dyker, Yugoslavia: Socialism, Development and Debt (London: Routledge, 2013).

45. Kent, America, the UN and Decolonisation.

46. For example, a number of analysts argue that timely debt rescheduling or debt relief would have decisively strengthened the Yugoslav federal government and, consequently, deflated the conflict between the republics, while depriving Slovenia and Croatia of the most virulent nationalist propaganda; see, for instance, Michael Barratt Brown, “The Role of Economic Factors in Social Crisis: The Case of Yugoslavia,” New Political Economy 2, no. 2 (1997): 299–315; Michael Barratt Brown, “The War in Yugoslavia and the Debt Burden: A Comment,” Capital & Class 17, no. 2 (1993): 147–60; Egon Žižmond, “The Collapse of the Yugoslav Economy,” Soviet Studies 44, no. 1 (1992): 101–12.

47. Robert M. Hayden, “Yugoslavia’s Collapse: National Suicide with Foreign Assistance,” Economic and Political Weekly (1992); Stathis N. Kalyvas and Nicholas Sambanis, “Bosnia’s Civil War: Origins and Violence Dynamics,”in Understanding Civil War: Europe, Central Asia, and Other Regions, ed. Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis (Washington: World Bank, 2005), 191–229.

48. Robert Shapiro, Richard Sobel, and Eric Shiraev, International Public Opinion and the Bosnia Crisis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002); Philip P. Everts and Pierangelo Isernia, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force (London: Psychology Press, 2001).

49. Gibbs, First Do No Harm.

50. For the French context, Alice Krieg-Planque has undertaken a very thorough newspaper analysis to retrace how the notion of “purification éthnique” has taken root and meaning in French media; see Alice Krieg-Planque, Purification éthnique: Une formule et son histoire (Paris: CNRS, 2003). For a differentiated analysis of French, German, and British news reporting, see Reiner Grundmann, Dennis Smith, and Sue Wright, “National Elites and Transnational Discourses in the Balkan War: A Comparison between the French, German and British Establishment Press,” European Journal of Communication 15, no. 3 (2000).

51. Bobo Lo, Russian Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era: Reality, Illusion, and Mythmaking (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 25 and 55.

52. Robert M. Hayden, From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans: Studies of a European Disunion, 1991–2011 (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

53. See Jane Boulden, Peace Enforcement: The United Nations Experience in Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001).

54. Qerim Qerimi, “An Informal World: The Role and Status of ‘Contact Group’ under International Law,” Chicago-Kent Journal of International and Comparative Law 7 (2007): 7.

55. The “consortium” that put in place the Office of the High Representative comprised 51 actors, states, and international organizations, of which the UN was one.

56. Daniel H. Joyner, “The Kosovo Intervention: Legal Analysis and a More Persuasive Paradigm,” European Journal of International Law 13, no. 3 (2002).

57. Roméo Dallaire and Brent Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004); Michael N. Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

58. Ingvar Carlsson, Sung-Joo Han, and Rufus M. Kupolati, “Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda” (New York: United Nations, 1999).

59. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Florian P. Kühn, “‘The International Community Needs to Act!: Loose and Empty Signalling of a Hackneyed Concept,” International Peacekeeping 18, no. 2, 135–51.

60. See letter dated December 15 by the Secretary-General in the preamble of the report.

61. “Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35, the Fall of Srebrenica” (New York: United Nations, 1999). The report on Srebrenica was commissioned through General Assembly Resolution 53/35 in November 1998, which had been introduced by Bosnia and Herzegovina and sponsored by Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Liechtenstein, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malaysia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Turkey, and the United States. UN Security Councial Resolution A/53/PV.72. The resolution was adopted without a vote.

62. Kofi A. Annan and Nader Mousavizadeh, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2012).

63. Secretary-General of the United Nations, An Agenda for Peace, Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping. Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to the Statement Adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992, (1992); “Supplement to an Agenda for Peace: Position Paper of the Secretary-General on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations,” (United Nations, 1995); United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Department of Field Support, “A New Partnership Agenda, Charting a New Horizon for UN Peacekeeping” (New York: United Nations, 2009); Lakdar Brahimi, “Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations,” ed. Panel on United Nations Peace Operations and Secretary-General (2000); Secretary-General of the United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General on ‘In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All’ (2005).

64. Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect.

65. United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Department of Field Support, “A New Partnership Agenda.”

66. Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect.

67. See, for instance, the interviews with UN staff Sture Linner and F. P. Liu at the UN oral history project, http://www.unmultimedia.org/oralhistory/, accessed November 2014.

68. Lisa Smirl, “Building the Other, Constructing Ourselves: Spatial Dimensions of International Humanitarian Response,” International Political Sociology 2, no. 3 (2008).

69. Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide, 110.

Chapter 3

1. Lippmann, “Interview with Khrushchev,” 154–58.

2. Séverine Autesserre has documented a great number of these frames, ideas, and practices: “Hobbes and the Congo,” 249–80; Trouble with the Congo; Peaceland.

3. Paul Novosad and Eric Werker, “Who Runs the International System? Power and the Staffing of the United Nations Secretariat,” Center for Global Development Working Paper 376 (2014).

4. Marion Fresia, “Une élite transnationale: La fabrique d’une identité professionnelle chez les fonctionnaires du Haut Commissariat des Nations Unies aux Réfugiés,” Revue Européenne des migrations internationales 25, no. 3 (2010): 167–90.

5. Bessma Momani, “Recruiting and Diversifying IMF Technocrats,” Global Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 167–87; Wendy Larner and Nina Laurie, “Travelling Technocrats, Embodied Knowledges: Globalising Privatisation in Telecoms and Water,” Geoforum 41, no. 2 (2010): 218–26.

6. David Lewis and David Mosse, Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2006); David Mosse, Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2005); David Mosse, Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Mosse, “Anthropology of International Development,” 227–46.

7. The information for this table was extracted from various sources: autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, encyclopedia entries, UN documentation, newspaper archives, and personal communications from family members.

8. UCLA 2051/208/3, Brian Urquhart also quotes this letter in his biography of Bunche; see Brian Urquhart, Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).

9. Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 377.

10. Westfälischer Anzeiger, 17.09.2011, at www.wa.de/lokales/boenen/todestag-heinrich-wieschhoff-1407946.html, accessed November 2014.

11. Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War, 325.

12. The nobility of blood and the nobility of money in Europe, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of direct descent of the first Pilgrims on America’s East Coast. See for a contemporary discussion, Thomas R. Pickering and Edward J. Perkins, “The Foreign Service Is too White. We’d Know—We’re Top Diplomats,” Washington Post, May 18, 2015.

13. See Jürgen Kocka and Ute Frevert, Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich (Munich: DTV, 1988).

14. Eric Hobsbawm, “Die englische Middle Class 1780–1920,” in Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1995), 85–111.

15. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 2002).

16. Reinhart Koselleck, “Drei bürgerliche Welten? Zur vergleichenden Semantik der bürgerlichen Gesellschaften in Deutschland, England und Frankreich,” in Begriffsgeschichten, ed. Reinhart Koselleck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 433.

17. Wolfgang Kaschuba, “Deutsche Bürgerlichkeit nach 1800. Kultur als symbolische Praxis,” in Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1995), 92–127.

18. Koselleck, ‘Drei bürgerliche Welten?,” 437.

19. Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 869–97; Craig Calhoun, “Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008): 105–14; Catherine Goetze and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, “Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of Peacebuilding,” Review of International Studies 40, no. 4 (2014): 771–802.

20. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, and Naná de Graaff, “Corporate Elite Networks and US Post-Cold War Grand Strategies from Clinton to Obama,” European Journal of International Relations (2012): 1–27; Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984).

21. Zygmunt Bauman, “Parvenu und Paria,” Merkur, no. 3 (1994): 237–48; Zygmunt Bauman, Flaneure, Spieler und Touristen (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1997).

22. See the critique of too rigid a notion of “class” in Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.”

23. Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

24. Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); see also Charles P. Henry, Ralph Bunche: Model Negro or American Other? (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

25. Ben Keppel, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47; Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 131; Bunche allied here with E. Franklin Frazier who for his entire life disputed Herskovits’s contention of a distinct African American culture, see also Henry, Ralph Bunche, 58–61.

26. Quoted in Jonathan Scott Holloway, “Ralph Bunche and the Responsibilities of the Public Intellectual,” Journal of Negro Education 73, no. 2 (2004): 125.

27. Henry, Ralph Bunche, chap. 1.

28. See, for instance, the testimonies (mainly from white men) at his birth’s centennial on the webpage of the Ralph Bunche Institute, www.ralphbuncheinstitute.org/ralphbunchentenary.

29. “Calm UN Aide in Congo, Rajeshwar Dayal,” New York Times, September 13, 1960.

30. Rajeshwar Dayal, A Life of Our Times (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1998), 190.

31. Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjöld (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 241.

32. O’Brien, To Katanga and Back.

33. Bertram G. Ramcharan, “The History, Role and Organization of the Cabinet of the United Nations Secretary-General,” Nordic Journal of International Law 59 (1990): 103; Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect.

34. Manuel Fröhlich, Political Ethics and the United Nations: Dag Hammarskjöld as Secretary-General (London: Routledge, 2008); Urquhart, Hammarskjöld.

35. Usually, these two titles are combined in one post, however occasionally a mission has a head of mission (or chief of staff) and a special representative of the Secretary-General. The special representative can be additionally doubled up with a special envoy for specific matters for instance, in 2006 Martti Athissari was the Secretary-General’s special envoy to Kosovo to report on the opportunities of Kosovo’s independence.

36. A few smaller missions have been omitted in this table, notably purely military missions like the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP). This table also takes into account only missions that were ongoing and funded at the moment of the writing of this book; hence, even if there were former missions in Somalia, this table only takes into account the United Nations Support Office for African Union Mission in Somalia (UNSOA).

37. For Koenders’s biography, see http://www.parlement.com/id/vg09llmaheyj/a_g_bert_koenders, accessed October 2014.

38. A similar pattern can be observed in the European Union where nationality becomes a factor in internal organizational communication in those sectors that are highly political: see Hans J. Michelmann, “Multinational Staffing and Organizational Functioning in the Commission of the European Communities,” International Organization 32, no. 2 (1978): 477–96; Arndt Wonka, “Decision-Making Dynamics in the European Commission: Partisan, National or Sectoral?,” Journal of European Public Policy 15, no. 8 (2008): 1145–63.

39. Novosad and Werker, “Who Runs the International System?”

40. “Liberia Election: Winston Tubman Profile,” BBC News Africa online, November 8, 2011.

41. Frank Prial, “An Old UN Hand Is Now Special Envoy to Somalia,” New York Times, November 1, 1992.

42. See Novosads and Werker, “Who Runs the International System?”

43. See chapter 1 for a discussion of methodological questions.

44. This qualification follows the World Bank distinction of industrialized high-income countries (distinguished again between OECD and non-OECD countries), upper middle-income countries, lower middle-income countries, and low-income countries as of 2012.

45. The total number of the prosopographic sample is 557 but only 330 of these have a postgraduate degree.

46. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, La reproduction: Eléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1970), 279.

47. They came to similar conclusions in their analysis of university students; see Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Les héritiers, les étudiants et la culture (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1965).

48. Bourdieu found similar relationships in his study of academic excellence in France: see Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984).

49. Michael Tzanakis, “Bourdieu’s Social Reproduction Thesis and the Role of Cultural Capital in Educational Attainment: A Critical Review of Key Empirical Studies,” Educate (March 11, 2011), http://www.educatejournal.org/index.php/educate/article/view/251, accessed January 2015; Lawrence J. Saha and Joanna Sikora, “The Career Aspirations and Expectations of School Students: From Individual to Global Effects,” Education and Society 26, no. 2 (2008): 5–22; Jason D. Edgerton and Lance W. Roberts, “Cultural Capital or Habitus? Bourdieu and Beyond in the Explanation of Enduring Educational Inequality,” Theory and Research in Education 12, no. 2 (2014): 193–220.

50. M. D. R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, and Donald J. Treiman, “Family Scholarly Culture and Educational Success: Books and Schooling in 27 Nations,” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 28, no. 2 (2010): 171–97.

51. A survey by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages found that in the period 2004–5 only 18 percent of all K–12 students in public schools in the United States enrolled in foreign language classes; see American Council on The Teaching of Foreign Languages, “Foreign Language Enrollments in K–12 Public Schools: Are Students Prepared for a Global Society?” (Alexandria, VA: ACTFL, 2010). See, for a longer discussion for the case of the United Kingdom, Kathryn Board and Teresa Tinsley, Language Trends 2013/2014: The State of Language Learning in Primary and Secondary Schools in England (London: CfBT Education Trust, The British Council, 2014).

52. Urquhart, Ralph Bunche.

53. In the qualitative interviews the only worker child I interviewed confirmed this. The interviewee recounted how the parents insisted on hard work for school and were extremely supportive of all educational matters even if this support entailed financial sacrifices.

54. This finding has been similarly brought about by Magdalena Nowicka, Transnational Professionals and Their Cosmopolitan Universes (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005).

55. John Hassard, Jonathan Morris, and Leo McCann, “‘My Brilliant Career’? New Organizational Forms and Changing Managerial Careers in Japan, the UK, and USA,” Journal of Management Studies 49, no. 3 (2012): 571–99.

56. See, for an overview of the discussion, Lindsey Macmillan, Claire Tyler, and Anna Vignoles, “Who Gets the Top Jobs? The Role of Family Background and Networks in Recent Graduates’ Access to High Status Professions,” in Department of Quantitative Social Science, Working Paper No. 13–15 (London: University of London, 2013).

57. J. Blanden, P. Gregg, and S. Machin, Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America (London: London School of Economics, 2005).

58. Richard G. Wilkinson, and Kate E. Pickett, “The Problems of Relative Deprivation: Why Some Societies Do Better Than Others,” Social Science & Medicine 65, no. 9 (2007): 1965–78.

59. UNICEF’s data and statistics page, for instance, gives an impression of the high inequality of educational attainment in the world, see http://data.unicef.org/education/overview, accessed November 2014.

Chapter 4

1. Anthony J. Hesketh, “Recruiting an Elite? Employers’ Perceptions of Graduate Education and Training,” Journal of Education and Work 13, no. 3 (2000): 245–71; Louise Morley and Sarah Aynsley, “Employers, Quality and Standards in Higher Education: Shared Values and Vocabularies or Elitism and Inequalities?,” Higher Education Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2007): 229–49.

2. United Nations, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resource Management, Generic Job Profile Associate Political/Electoral Affairs Officer, P2, 2007.

3. See, for a discussion of professional profiles, Autesserre, Peaceland, chaps. 5 and 6.

4. International Council of Voluntary Associations and Paul Curion, “Strength in Numbers: A Review of NGO Coordination, Kosovo Case Study, 1999–2002,” in Strength in Numbers, ed. ICVA (Geneva: ICVA, 2010).

5. Major discussions are David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); Alexander De Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars.

6. For a frank account of an NGO bankruptcy, see Nick Thompson, “The End of Children’s Aid Direct,” Humanitarian Exchange Magazine, no. 23 (2003). The author, Nick Thompson, who turned off the lights of Child Aid Direct in 2002, became director of Tony Blair’s Africa Initiative in 2008 and its CEO in 2012.

7. See their webpage: http://www.careinternational.org.uk/who-we-are/senior-management-team; http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/about-us/people/executive-directors; http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/about-us/our-trustees, accessed November 2014.

8. See, for an extensive discussion of privileging the global, that is, the Western, over the local, Autesserre, Peaceland.

9. David Lewis, “Tidy Concepts, Messy Lives: Defining Tensions in the Domestic and Overseas Careers of U.K. Non-Governmental Professionals,” In Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development, ed. David Mosse (New York: Berghahn, 2011).

10. Rebecca F. Taylor, “Extending Conceptual Boundaries: Work, Voluntary Work and Employment,” Work, Employment & Society 18, no. 1 (2004): 29–49.

11. The Russell Group comprises British universities that were formed out of colleges of the University of London, hence, which count as “traditional” universities similar to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

12. http://www.africagovernance.org/africa/news-entry/AGIs-CEO-reflects-on-5-years-supporting-effective-governance/, accessed November 2014.

13. Martin Delgado, “Very Cosy Comrades! Now We Reveal How Ed Miliband Once Shared a House with His New Foreign Secretary,” Daily Mail, October 17, 2010; “The Labour Machine: An Insider’s Guide,” Belfast Telegraph, April 26, 2007; Kathy Marks, “Blair’s Babes Nudge for Places at the Top Table,” Independent, August 14, 1997.

14. Rosalind Eyben, “The Sociality of International Aid and Policy Convergence,” in Adventures in Aidland, ed. David Mosse (New York: Berghahn, 2011).

15. Neil Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

16. Frederik Claeyé, Managing Nongovernmental Organizations: Culture, Power and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2014), chap. 7.

17. Damian Hodgson and Svetlana Cicmil, Making Projects Critical, Management, Work and Organisations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

18. David Lewis, The Management of Non-Governmental Development Organizations (New York: Routledge, 2006); Susan M. Roberts, John Paul Jones III, and Oliver Fröhling, “NGOs and the Globalization of Managerialism: A Research Framework,” World Development 33, no. 11 (2005): 1845–64.

19. Peter Walker, Karen Hein, Catherine Russ, Greg Bertleff, and Dan Caspersz, “A Blueprint for Professionalizing Humanitarian Assistance,” Health Affairs 29, no. 12 (2010).

20. See, for instance, the case study of Shell in Nigeria: S. Heap and Oxford INTRAC, “NGOs Engaging with Business: A World of Difference and a Difference to the World” (Oxford: International NGO Training and Research Centre, 2000).

21. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “Empowering the United Nations,” Foreign Affairs 71, no. 5 (1992): 89–102.

22. See for a list of programs in the United States and the world, http://www.conflict-resolution.org/sitebody/education/grad.htm, accessed November 2014.

23. See Kofi Annan’s foreword to Simon Chesterman, Secretary or General? The UN Secretary-General in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

24. http://www.un.org/sg/pdf/HIPPO_Report_1_June_2015.pdf, accessed June 2015.

25. Paul Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); P. Collier, “The Political Economy of State Failure,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 25, no. 2 (2009): 219–40; P. Collier, “Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 44, no. 6 (2000): 839–53; P. Collier and A. Hoeffler, “Aid, Policy and Peace: Reducing the Risks of Civil Conflict,” Defence and Peace Economics 13, no. 6 (2002): 435–50; Astri Suhrke, Espen Villanger, and Susan L. Woodward, “Economic Aid to Post-Conflict Countries: A Methodological Critique of Collier and Hoeffler—Analysis,” Conflict, Security & Development 5, no. 3 (2005): 329–61; C. Cramer, “Homo Economicus Goes to War: Methodological Individualism, Rational Choice and the Political Economy of War,” World Development 30, no. 11 (2002): 1845–64; Laurie Nathan, ‘The Frightful Inadequacy of Most of the Statistics’: A Critque of Collier and Hoeffler on the Causes of Civil War (London: London School of Economics, 2005); Adrien M. Ratsimbaharison, “Greed and Civil War in Post–Cold War Africa: Revisiting the Greed Theory of Civil War,” African Security 4, no. 4 (2011): 269–82.

26. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War; Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars2001); Duffield and Marston Hewitt, Empire, Development and Colonialism.

27. Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below.

28. Zanotti, Governing Disorder.

29. Smirl, “Building the Other, Constructing Ourselves”; Smirl, Spaces of Aid.

30. Autesserre, “Hobbes and the Congo”; Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo; Autesserre, Peaceland.

31. The reasons for the greater introversion of the academic systems in continental Europe or Japan might be very different. In France the strict control governing admittance to the system through its “aggrégation” and stern Francophony leads to in-breeding; whereas in Italy or Germany the scarcity of full-time professorial chairs leads to a high dependence of junior researchers on senior colleagues. See, for a discussion of national differences between the United States, Great Britain, and France in the field of economics, Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

32. Dezalay and Garth, Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice; Dezalay and Garth, Lawyers and the Rule of Law in an Era of Globalization.

33. Ron Levi and John Hagan, “Lawyers, Humanitarian Emergencies and the Politics of Large Numbers,” in Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice, ed. Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth (London: Taylor and Francis, 2011), 13–47.

34. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders.

35. Madsen, “Human Rights and the Hegemony of Ideology.”

36. They are also not very much in the eye of the researcher, so that actually little is known about other religious practices, experiences, and mechanisms of peacebuilding beyond particular case studies; see M. Abu-Nimer, “Conflict Resolution, Culture, and Religion: Toward a Training Model of Interreligious Peacebuilding,” Journal of Peace Research 38, no. 6 (2001): 685–704; Tsjeard Bouta, S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana, and Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Faith-Based Peace-Building: Mapping and Analysis of Christian, Muslim and Multi-Faith Actors (Amsterdam: Netherlands Institute of International Relations “Clingendael,” 2005); Susan M. Kilonzo, “The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and Peacebuilding in Kisumu District, Kenya,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 6, no. 1 (2011): 80–85.

37. See the websites of these universities and colleges, e.g., http://www.bethelu.edu/about/mission, http://www.nd.edu, http://www.ambs.edu/about/index.cfm or http://www.mscollege.ca/about.php, all accessed November 2014.

38. Chadwick F. Alger, “Religion as a Peace Tool,” Global Review of Ethnopolitics 1, no. 4 (2002): 94–109; Jacob Bercovitch and Ayse S. Kadayifci-Orellana, “Religion and Mediation: The Role of Faith-Based Actors in International Conflict Resolution,” International Negotiation 14, no. 1 (2009): 175–204.

39. Nigel Dower, The Ethics of War and Peace: Cosmopolitan and Other Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).

40. Based on the compilation of conflict resolution and peace studies graduate programs by the Center for Conflict Resolution at Salisbury University, http://www.conflict-resolution.org/sitebody/education/grad.htm, accessed November 2014.

41. Michael N. Barnett and Janice Gross Stein, Sacred Aid: Faith and Humanitarianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Cecilia Lynch, “Religious Humanitarianism and the Global Politics of Secularism,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

42. See Mark Juergensmeyer, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

43. See, for instance, John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination. The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

44. Nick Megoran, “Towards a Geography of Peace: Pacific Geopolitics and Evangelical Christian Crusade Apologies,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, no. 3 (2010): 382–98; Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Interfaith Just Peacemaking: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives on the New Paradigm of Peace and War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

45. See Barnett and Gross Stein, Sacred Aid.

46. See Eyben, “The Sociality of International Aid and Policy Convergence.”

47. Laurie Cohen and Mary Mallon, “The Transition from Organisational Employment to Portfolio Working: Perceptions of ‘Boundarylessness’,” Work, Employment & Society 13, no. 2 (1999): 329–52.

48. Melinda Mills, Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Sandra Buchholz, Dirk Hofäcker, Fabrizio Bernardi, and Heather Hofmeister, “Converging Divergences? An International Comparison of the Impact of Globalization on Industrial Relations and Employment Careers,” International Sociology 23, no. 4 (2008): 561–95; Hassard, Morris, and McCann, “‘My Brilliant Career’?”

Chapter 5

1. Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby, Habitus: A Sense of Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

2. Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, 90.

3. Ibid., 92, 97.

4. Kaschuba, “Deutsche Bürgerlichkeit nach 1800. Kultur als symbolische Praxis,” 92–127, 92.

5. See, for instance, Maiken Umbach, “Culture and ‘Bürgerlichkeit’ in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 180–99.

6. Kaschuba, “Deutsche Bürgerlichkeit,” 97.

7. Manfred Hettling, “Bürgerliche Kultur—Bürgerlichkeit als kulturelles System,” in Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Bürgertums. Eine Bilanz des Bielefelder Sonderforschungsbereichs (1986–1997), ed. Peter Lundgreen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000), 324.

8. Koselleck, “Drei bürgerliche Welten?,” 418.

9. In social theory this has been explored deeply by George H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behavioralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); see also Peter Lundgreen, “Bildung und Bürgertum,” in Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Bürgertums: Eine Bilanz des Bielefelder Sonderforschungsbereichs (1986–1997), ed. Peter Lundgreen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000), 173–94; Kaschuba, “Deutsche Bürgerlichkeit”; Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (Brooklyn: Verso, 2013).

10. Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst; see also Boltanski and Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme.

11. James O. C. Jonah, “Interview with James Jonah, Former FES Scholarship Holder on the Occasion of the 30th Anniversary of FES New York,” interview by Werner Puschra (New York: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2011).

12. Gibbs, “Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the Congo Crisis of 1960–61.”

13. Walter Lippmann, “Dag Hammarskjöld, United Nations Pioneer,” International Organization 15, no. 4 (1961): 547–48.

14. See chap. 2, Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 51–54.

15. Ibid., 55.

16. For a thorough discussion of the history of Weber’s essay and the controversies it created, see Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute; and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); William H. Swatos and Lutz Kaelber, The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005).

17. Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” 163.

18. Urquhart, Hammarskjöld.

19. See, for instance, Peter B. Heller, The United Nations under Dag Hammarskjöld, 1953–1961 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), 8.

20. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001), 40.

21. Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” 101 (my translation).

22. Urquhart, Hammarskjöld; Heller, United Nations under Dag Hammarskjöld, 1953–1961.

23. Fröhlich, Political Ethics and the United Nations.

24. Robert Merrihew Adams, “The Silence of God in the Thought of Martin Buber,” Philosophia 30, no. 1 (2003): 51–68.

25. Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

26. Ralph Bunche Jr. on his father at the occasion of his centenary: www.ralphbuncheinstitute.org/ralphbunchecentenary/, accessed November 2014.

27. Urquhart, Hammarskjöld, 123.

28. Ibid., 47, 53, 123.

29. See E. Franklin Frazier, “The Negro Family,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 140 (1928): 44–51; “The Changing Status of the Negro Family,” Social Forces 9, no. 3 (1931): 386–93; “The Impact of Urban Civilization upon Negro Family Life,” American Sociological Review 2, no. 5 (1937): 609–18; “Ethnic Family Patterns: The Negro Family in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 53, no. 6 (1948): 435–38.

30. Melville J. Herskovits, “The Negro in the New World: The Statement of a Problem,” American Anthropologist 32, no. 1 (1930): 145–55; “The New World Negro as an Anthropological Problem,” Man 31 (1931): 68–69; “On the Provenience of New World Negroes,” Social Forces 12, no. 2 (1933): 247–62; The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941).

31. Urquhart, Ralph Bunche.

32. Elliott P. Skinner, “Ralph Bunche and the Decolonization of African Studies,” in Trustee for the Human Community: Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa, ed. Robert A. Hill and Edmond J. Keller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 65.

33. Keppel, Work of Democracy, 32.

34. B. Lindsay, Ralph Johnson Bunche: Public Intellectual and Nobel Peace Laureate (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 46.

35. Keppel, Work of Democracy, chap. 2.

36. Ralph J. Bunche and Jonathan Scott Holloway, A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

37. See Henry, Ralph Bunche, chap. 5; Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics, 94–95.

38. Pearl T. Robinson, “Ralph Bunche the Africanist,” in Trustee for the Human Community: Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa, ed. Robert A Hill and Edmond J Keller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 78.

39. See J. B. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 210.

40. See Martin Kilson, “Ralph Bunche, African American Intellectual,” in Trustee for the Human Community. Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization in Africa, ed. Robert A Hill and Edmond J Keller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 9.

41. Ibid, 10.

42. Urquhart, Ralph Bunche.

43. Skinner, “Ralph Bunche and the Decolonization of African Studies,” 63.

44. Kilson, “Ralph Bunche, African American Intellectual,” 17; also Nzongola-Ntalaja, “Ralph Bunche, Patrice Lumumba, and the First Congo Crisis,” 150.

45. James Farr, “Remembering the Revolution: Behavioralism in American Political Science,” in Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions, ed. James Farr, John S. Dryzek, and Stephen T. Leonard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 199–224.

46. See Kilson’s discussion of Bunche’s pragmatism in “Ralph Bunche, African American Intellectual.”

47. Ralph Johnson Bunche, A World View of Race (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968), 46.

48. Ralph Bunche’s personal papers are partly accessible at the library of the University of California in Los Angeles but, given the huge preponderance of mundane correspondence and the almost complete absence of working papers, notes, or memos, this archive does not provide any other information than that already used by Brian Urquhart for his biography. This is of little surprise if one considers that it was Urquhart who selected the papers to go into this collection.

49. On the meaning of self-stylization in modernity, see J. Brockmeier and D.A. Carbaugh, Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2001).

50. For instance, see O’Brien, To Katanga and Back; Dayal, Mission for Hammarskjöld; Brian Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Row, 1987); Syed Habib Ahmed, From South Asia to North America: An Autobiography, 1915–2000 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

51. See Dallaire and Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil; Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide; Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Le patron de Dallaire parle: Révélations sur les dérives d’un général de l‘ONU au Rwanda (Paris: Duboiris, 2005).

52. O’Brien, To Katanga and Back, 47.

53. Goulding, Peacemonger, 3.

54. Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); see also the award-winning documentary based on Power’s book, Sergio, directed by Greg Barker (Los Angeles: HBO, 2009).

55. See chap. 2 in James Traub, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

56. Kofi A. Annan and Nader Mousavizadeh, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2012); “Nane Annan: Lawyer, Artist and Wife of UN’s Nobel Laureate,” Ghanaweb.com, 2001; Rachel A. Koestler-Grack, Kofi Annan: Guiding the United Nations (New York: Chelsea House, 2007); Stanley Meisler, Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War (Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley and Sons, 2007); Shashi Tharoor, “Man of the World,” Hindu, September 29, 2002.

57. See http://www.macroadvisorypartners.com/the-firm/global-advisory-board, accessed November 2014.

58. Compare, for instance, United Nations, “Kofi Annan, Interview,” United Nations Intellectual History Project (New York: Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, 2007), and the videos of his lecture at Columbia’s School for International Politics and Affairs on October 17, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLmS4yRZjcE, the talk at Jackson Institute Town Hall meeting at Yale, February 7 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSZ1t2CysSs, and his lecture at the Geneva Institute for Graduate Studies on April 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOkVOD8Oc_A, all accessed December 2015.

59. Sten Ask and Anna Mark-Jungkvist, The Adventure of Peace: Dag Hammarskjöld and the Future of the UN (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

60. Anoulak Kittikhoun and Thomas G. Weiss, “The Myth of Scholarly Irrelevance for the United Nations,” International Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2011): 18–23.

61. For the history of the responsibility to protect doctrine, see Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect.

62. Randeep Ramesh, “Meet Kofi Annan’s Right-Hand Man,” Guardian Weekly, January 12, 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/guardianweekly/story/0,12674,1399076,00.html, accessed June 2016.

63. See, for a longer discussion of the entrepreneurial personality, Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst, chap. 3.

64. See, for similar examples, Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).

65. See United Nations, “Sture Linner,” Oral History Project (New York: Dag Hammarskjöld Library, 1990); Goulding, Peacemonger, 11.

66. See http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/newhorizon.shtml, accessed November 2014.

67. United Nations, “The Challenge of Sustaining Peace,” Report of the Advisory Group of Experts for the 2015 Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture, available at http://www.un.org/pga/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/07/300615_The-Challenge-of-Sustaining-Peace.pdf, accessed June 2016.

68. See http://www.sphereproject.org, accessed November 2014.

69. See https://www.unglobalcompact.org, accessed November 2014.

70. Guglielmo Verdirame, The UN and Human Rights: Who Guards the Guardians? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Marie Deschamps, Hassan B. Jallow, and Yasmin Sooka, “Taking Action on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers: Report of an Independent Review on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by International Peacekeeping Forces in the Central African Republic,” ed. United Nations (New York: United Nations, 2015).

71. Willem Schinkel and Mirko Noordegraaf, “Professionalism as Symbolic Capital: Materials for a Bourdieusian Theory of Professionalism,” Comparative Sociology 10, no. 1 (2011): 68.

72. See particularly Autesserre, Peaceland, and Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo, for such exclusion mechanisms on the ground; but also Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Florian P. Kühn, “On Afghan Footbaths and Sacred Cows in Kosovo: Urban Legends of Intervention,” Peacebuilding (2014): 1–19. For a case study on Bosnia, see Chandler, Bosnia. For a recent usage of the spoiler notion, see the special issue, “Micropolitics Meets Geopolitics: Internal Dynamics and Dysfunctions of International Organizations,” Journal of International Organization Studies 5, no. 1 (2014).

73. Eliot Freidson, Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 23.

74. Michael Edwards and David Hulme, Non-Governmental Organisations’ Performance and Accountability: Beyond the Magic Bullet (London: Routledge, 2014).

75. Schinkel and Noordegraaf, “Professionalism as Symbolic Capital,” 69.

76. Jan Egeland, Adele Harmer, and Abby Stoddard, To Stay and Deliver: Good Practice for Humanitarians in Complex Security Environments (New York: United Nations, 2011).

77. Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War.

78. The question was “How challenging is your job?”; respondents responded on a five-step scale with 1 (very challenging) to 5 (not challenging at all).

79. The question was “In a typical week, how often do you feel stressed at work?”; respondents responded on a five-step scale with 1 (extremely often) to 5 (not often at all).

80. About 20 percent saw this as typical burnout; 16 percent would have recommended that the aidworker take it easy in the situation; 18 percent would have recommended that the worker pull himself together and show self-control in such a situation; 27 percent would have explicitly recommended that he seek another job if it was too difficult for him to deal with such a situation; 6 percent explicitly described the aidworker’s behavior as unacceptable; and only 7 percent showed outright, explicit sympathy.

81. William Hollingsworth Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).

82. See particularly the very popular blog Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like, http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com; Smirl, Spaces of Aid, chap. 1.

83. Leopoldina Fortunati, Svend Erik Larsen, and Julia Stamm, “Introduction to the Special Section on Knowledge Management in Postmodern Society,” Information Society 28, no. 4 (2012): 201–7; Chris Lorenz, “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 599–629.

84. See, for instance, the discussion of Kofi Annan’s career in Meryl Gordon, “No Peace for Kofi: A Father’s Burden,” New York Magazine, May 2, 2005.

Chapter 6

1. Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes, 218.

2. Most of these questions were open ended and allowed respondents to give multiple answers. They will be explained further below.

3. Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

4. See, for this argument, J. Judd Owen, “The Tolerant Leviathan: Hobbes and the Paradox of Liberalism,” Polity 37, no. 1 (2005): 130–48.

5. See, in particular, Karl R. Popper, The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge, 1996); The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945).

6. A good example of these is, for instance, the “Great Books” movement in the United States that originated in the 1920s, and which is still a reference for many college liberal art programs.

7. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

8. See the introduction by Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

9. Ibid.

10. David Edmonds, Nigel Warburton, and Quentin Skinner, “Quentin Skinner on Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince,” in Philosophy Bites Back, ed. David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 37–50.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Reading Political Philosophy: Machiavelli to Mill, ed. Nigel Warburton, Jon Pike, and Derek Matravers (Milton Keynes, UK: Psychology Press, 2000), 44.

14. O’Brien, To Katanga and Back, 47.

15. Michael C. Williams, “Hobbes and International Relations: A Reconsideration,” International Organization 50, no. 2 (1996): 213–36.

16. Ibid., and Nuri A. Yurdusev, “Thomas Hobbes and International Relations: An Assessment,” METU Studies in Development 34, no. 2 (2008): 413–32; Francis Cheneval, “The Hobbesian Case for Multilateralism,” Swiss Political Science Review 13, no. 3 (2007): 309–35; Delphine Thivet, “Thomas Hobbes: A Philosopher of War or Peace?,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16, no. 4 (2008): 701–21; Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement Theory,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 2 (2011): 298–315.

17. See Giulio M. Gallarotti, “More Revisions in Realism: Hobbesian Anarchy, the Tale of the Fool and International Relations Theory,” International Studies 45, no. 3 (2008): 167–92.

18. Richard Tuck, Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

19. Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999): 1–29.

20. Michael Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

21. See, for instance, Chris Brown and Kirsten Ainley, Understanding International Relations (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 20.

22. See Mazower, Governing the World; Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations; for a critical deconstruction of this narrative, see Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics.

23. See, for instance, John Gerard Ruggie’s widely cited article, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982): 379–415.

24. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples; with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

25. Charles R. Beitz, “Cosmopolitanism and Global Justice,” in Current Debates in Global Justice, ed. Gillian Brock and Darrel Moellendorf (Amsterdam: Springer Netherlands, 2005), 11–27.

26. See, for instance, Richmond, Oliver P., The Transformation of Peace (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

27. See, for instance, feminist criticism as formulated by Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); Kathy Miriam, “Getting Pateman ‘Right’, the ‘Sexual Contract’, Sex-Right, and Pateman’s Ontological Critique of (Post)Modern Male Dominance,” Philosophy Today 49, no. 3 (2005): 274–86.

28. Gerald Gaus, Shane D. Courtland, and David Schmidtz, “Liberalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/liberalism/, accessed June 2014.

29. See Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,” Ethics 99, no. 4 (1989): 883–905.

30. Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

31. Rawls, Law of Peoples, 26.

32. Ibid., 21, 29.

33. John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” New England Review 27, no. 3 (2006): 258. Originally published in 1859.

34. Beate Jahn, Liberal Internationalism: Theory, History, Practice (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

35. Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention.”

36. Karl Löwith, T. B. Bottomore, and William Outhwaite, Max Weber and Karl Marx (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982), 42.

37. The question asked was “If you could change the world tomorrow, what would be your priority?” with a rating from 1 (very important) to 7 (not important at all). Surveyees were then presented with a list of policy measures, one of which was “Abolish private property.” No one saw this measure as a priority; almost everyone rated this option as “not important” or “not important at all.”

38. This was an open-ended question asking “Which personality do you admire most?” Respondents could give multiple answers. See also the next chapter in this book.

39. This was an open-ended question asking “Which is the historical event that left the strongest impression on you?” See next chapter for further discussion.

40. Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); Paul R. Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

41. See, for instance, Bernard Kouchner, Les guerriers de la paix du Kosovo à l’Irak (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2004); Hugo Slim, “Being Humanitarian: Personal Morality and Political Project in Today’s Wars,” podcast audio, Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (2011), http://www.elac.ox.ac.uk/podcasts/, accessed March 2014.

42. Gitta Sereny, “The Men Who Whitewash Hitler,” New Statesman, November 2, 1979.

43. Johanna Siméant, “Entrer, rester en humanitaire: Des fondateurs de MSF aux membres actuels des ONG médicales françaises,” Revue Française de science politique 51, no. 1 (2011): 47–72.

44. Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 49.

45. This question asked respondents to express their agreement or disagreement with a battery of statements on global politics, war, and peace on a scale from 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree). The statements were taken from various agency publications, i.e., speeches by the UN Secretary-General, World Bank or UNDP reports, or discussion papers by donor agencies like the Department of Foreign and International Development in the United Kingdom.

46. The question about political values asked respondents to express their agreement or disagreement with a list of values that should be promoted in politics on scale from 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree). The values asked for were “individual liberty,” “equality,” “merit of individuals,” “tolerance,” “equity in the distribution of public goods,” “competitiveness,” “solidarity,” “security,” “critical discussion,” “state sovereignty,” “fairness,” “private property,” “community and belonging,” “loyalty to the state,” “ecology,” “harmony of society,” “identity,” “individuality,” “plurality of lifestyles,” “family values,” “nation and patriotism,” “contention of politics,” “home,” “conflict,” and “combativeness of individuals.” The question about political reforms was an open-ended question that asked “Which political reform do you admire the most?”; respondents could give multiple answers. Welfare reforms were mentioned most often, closely followed by voting rights.

47. United Nations, “Sture Linner,”, 7.

48. See, for instance, Paul C. Stern, Thomas Dietz, and Linda Kalof, “Value Orientations, Gender, and Environmental Concern,” Environment and Behavior 25, no. 5 (1993): 322–48.

Chapter 7

1. See, for instance, the debate “Governance, Peacebuilding, and State-Society Relations” at the International Peace Institute, November 17, 2015, https://www.ipinst.org/2015/11/twenty-first-century-peacebuilding-international-expert-forum#3, accessed November 2015; see also the debate on the responsibility to protect with Kofi Annan, Lloyd Axworthy, and Lyse Doucet, University of Ottawa Centre for International Policy Studies, 2011, The Responsibility to Protect 10 Years On: Reflections on Its Past, Present Future, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohzVUuUsn3g. The Centre for International Policy Studies is directed by Roland Paris, who argued in 2010 that there is no alternative to liberal peacebuilding: see Roland Paris, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 337–65.

2. Mitchell, Lost in Transformation.

3. Tatiana Carayannis et al., “Practice without Evidence: Interrogating Conflict Resolution Approaches and Assumptions,” in JSRP Paper, ed. Justice and Security Research Programme (London: London School of Economics, 2014), 2.

4. Heathershaw, “Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and the Idea of ‘Virtual Peace’.”

5. Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn, ‘llusion Statebuilding.

6. Alan J. Kuperman, “Intervention in Libya: A Humanitarian Success?,” podcast audio, Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (2012), http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/intervention-libya-humanitarian-success, accessed January 2014; Alan J. Kuperman, “The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans,” International Studies Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2008), 49–80; Timothy W. Crawford, and Alan J. Kuperman, Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion and Civil War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); Alan J. Kuperman, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001).

7. Alex De Waal, “Mission without End? Peacekeeping in the African Political Marketplace,” International Affairs 85, no. 1 (2009); Alex De Waal, “Darfur and the Failure of the Responsibility to Protect,” International Affairs 83, no. 6 (2007); De Waal, Famine Crimes; Rieff, Bed for the Night; David Rieff, “Humanitarianism in Crisis,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 6 (2002).

8. John Heathershaw, “Seeing Like the International Community: How Peacebuilding Failed (and Survived) in Tajikistan,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 2, no. 3 (2008).

9. On the relationship between doxa and nomos, see Pierre Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000), 63.

10. Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes, 140.

11. Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique, 63.

12. http://www.un.org/en/events/nonviolenceday/.

13. http://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/.

14. See, for instance, Seumas Milne, “Mandela Has Been Sanitised by Hypocrites and Apologists,” Guardian, December 11, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/11/mandela-sanitised-hypocrites-apologists-apartheid, accessed February 2014.

15. For more critical biographies that discuss, among other things, the iconization processes, see Gary Younge, The Speech: The Story behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013); Jad Adams, Gandhi: Naked Ambition (London: Quercus, 2010).

16. Time Magazine, August 26/September 2, 2013, double issue “‘I Have a Dream’ Anniversary Issue.”

17. Andrew Sullivan, “The ‘Invisible Man’,” Time Magazine, January 12, 2003, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,407356,00.html, accessed February 2014.

18. Elleke Boehmer, Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 164.

19. Adams, Gandhi, 190.

20. Richard Stengel, “Mandela: His 8 Lessons of Leadership,” Time Magazine (2008).

21. Apparently, Cordier dismissed Kwame Nkrumah as Mussolini and Lumumba as “little Hitlers” in his private correspondence; see Carole Collins, “Fatally Flawed Mediation: Cordier and the Congo Crisis of 1960.” See also De Witte and Wright, Assassination of Lumumba.

22. Dower, Ethics of War and Peace, chap. 5.

23. Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

24. David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

25. Adams, Gandhi.

26. Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), UC Davis Law Review 26, no. 4 (1992–93): 840.

27. Ibid., 845.

28. For instance, the dedication of the Nonviolence Handbook reads: “For all those who have the faith that humanity can be redeemed by nonviolence and the courage to prove it,” Michael N. Nagler, The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2014), emphasis mine.

29. Theodore J. Koontz, “Christian Nonviolence: An Interpretation,” in The Ethics of War and Peace, ed. Terry Nardin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 175.

30. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

31. See, for instance, the photographs reproduced in Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.: His Life and Crusade in Pictures (New York: Life Books, 2008).

32. Younge, The Speech.

33. Robert Ellsberg, ed., Gandhi on Christianity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991).

34. Terrence J. Rynne, Gandhi and Jesus: The Saving Power of Nonviolence (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).

35. See, for instance, Bruce Thornton, “Nelson Mandela, Western Saint,” Frontpage Magazine, December 9, 2013, http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/nelson-mandela-western-saint/, accessed February 2014; Erin Wilson, “A Secular Saint? The Life and Legacy of Nelson Mandela,” http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/12/09/3907740.htm, accessed February 2014; critically, Noel Solani, “The Saint of the Struggle: Deconstructing the Mandela Myth,” Kronos, no. 26 (2000).

36. Boehmer, Nelson Mandela.

37. See Melanie Müller, “Der Bruch in der südafrikanischen Gewerkschaftsbewegung,” in Focus Afrika (Hamburg: German Institute of Global and Area Studies, 2014); Peter Alexander, “Marikana, Turning Point in South African History,” Review of African Political Economy 40, no. 138 (2013).

38. Christopher Cramer, Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries (London: Hurst and Co., 2006).

39. Mitchell, International Intervention in a Secular Age.

40. This was an open-ended question asking “Which was, according to you, the most horrible event in recent history?” Respondents could give multiple answers.

41. Francis Deng, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” in Discussion Paper Series, ed. The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme (New York: United Nations, n.d.).

42. Alan Rosenberg, “Was the Holocaust Unique? A Peculiar Question?,” in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

43. Alice Krieg-Planque, Purification ethnique: Une formule et son histoire (Paris: CNRS, 2003); Gagnon, Myth of Ethnic War.

44. Helmut Dubiel, “The Rememberance of the Holocaust as a Catalyst for a Transnational Ethic?,” New German Critique, no. 90 (2003).

45. Michael Schwab-Trapp, Der Nationalsozialismus im öffentlichen Diskurs über militärische Gewalt (Heidelberg: Springer, 2003).

46. Jürgen Kocka, “Ein deutscher Sonderweg: Überlegungen zur Sozialgeschichte der DDR,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 40, no. 94 (1994); “Der ‘Deutsche Sonderweg’ in der Diskussion,” German Studies Review 5, no. 3 (1982); “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg,” Journal of Contemporary History 23, no. 1 (1988).

47. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

48. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

49. This is what the dispute is called that occurred in the 1980s between West German historians over the question whether the Holocaust was part of a “totalitarian” time period, which also included Stalinism, or whether it was unique to German history. The controversy saw the sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the historians Jürgen Kocka, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Heinrich August Winkler, Eberhard Jäckel, and Wolfgang Mommsen on the one hand arguing for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and the philosopher Ernst Nolte, the journalist and editor of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Joachim Fest, and the historians Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand, Rainer Zitelmann, Hagen Schulze, and Michael Stürmer on the other. See Konrad H. Jarausch, “Removing the Nazi Stain? The Quarrel of the German Historians,” German Studies Review 11, no. 2 (1988).

50. Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflection on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000); Saul Friedländer, Nachdenken über den Holocaust, vol. 1788 (Tübingen: C. H. Beck, 2007); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

51. Dubiel, “Rememberance of the Holocaust as a Catalyst for a Transnational Ethic?”

52. Novick, Holocaust in American Life.

53. For example, Nelly Sachs, Imre Kertész, Patrick Modiano, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Czesław Milosz, Wisława Szymborska.

54. Dubiel, “Rememberance of the Holocaust as a Catalyst for a Transnational Ethic?”; Efraim Sicher, “The Future of the Past: Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary American Post-Holocaust Narratives,” History & Memory 12, no. 2 (2000).

55. Early formulations of this argument can be found in Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (London: Gollancz, 1962); Karl R. Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies. Recently, it has been the philosopher Giorgio Agamben who has discussed “camp culture” and subjectivity: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1995).

56. See, for a critical account, Samuel Moyn, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in the History of Cosmopolitanism,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 4 (2014).

57. Cécile Fabre, “Cosmopolitanism, Just War Theory and Legitimate Authority,” International Affairs 84, no. 5 (2008).

58. Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007); Daniele Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002).

59. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Michael Ignatieff, “Reimagining a Global Ethic,” Ethics & International Affairs 26, no. 1 (2012); Michael Ignatieff and Amy Gutmann, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

60. Michael Ignatieff, American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), with contributions from a wide range of top-tier peacebuilders-cum-academics such as John Gerard Ruggie and Anne-Marie Slaughter; similarly Jonathan Moore, Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

61. Wendy Brown, “‘The Most We Can Hope For . . . :’ Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2 (2004).

62. Fabre, “Cosmopolitanism, Just War Theory and Legitimate Authority.”

63. Michael Ignatieff, “Nation-Building Lite,” New York Times Magazine, July 28, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/magazine/nation-building-lite.html, accessed September 2014.

64. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 346.

65. See particularly Ignatieff’s introduction to American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

66. Elie Wiesel at the Holocaust Memorial Museum dedication, April 22, 1993, video, www.c-span.org/video/clip-Holocaust-memorial-museum-dedication, accessed November 2014.

67. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

68. Ibid., 503.

69. Katie Bacon, “Never Again Again—an Interview with Samantha Power,” Atlantic Unbound, March 14, 2002, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/interviews/int2002–03–14.htm, accessed September 2014.

70. See for instance, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s continued advocacy of intervention in Syria: Anne-Marie Slaughter at Project Syndicate, April 23, 2014, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/anne-marie-slaughter-on-how-us-intervention-in-the-syrian-civil-war-would-alter-vladimir-putin-s-calculus-in-ukraine, accessed September 2014; May 28, 2013, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-consequences-of-ruling-out-military-intervention-in-syria-by-anne-marie-slaughter, accessed September 2014; “Syria Intervention Is Justifiable, and Just,” Washington Post, June 8, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/syrian-intervention-is-justifiable-and-just/2012/06/08/gJQARHGjOV_story.html; Michael Ignatieff, “Ignatieff: ‘We Have a Duty to Intervene in Syria’,” Deutsche Welle, May 18t, 2013, http://www.dw.de/ignatieff-we-have-a-duty-to-intervene-in-syria/a-16822252, accessed September 2014.

71. See, for more information, Leslie Vinjamuri and Jack Snyder, “Advocacy and Scholarship in the Study of International War Crime Tribunals and Transitional Justice,” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004); for the specific case of the Darfur campaign, see Ron Levi and John Hagan, “Lawyers, Humanitarian Emergencies and the Politics of Large Numbers,” in Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice, ed. Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth (London: Taylor and Francis, 2011), 13–47.

72. See the webpage of Beyond Conflict, http://www.beyondconflictint.org/history/.

73. See, for a critical discussion, Christine Bell, “Transitional Justice, Interdisciplinarity and the State of the ‘Field’ or ‘Non-Field’,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 1 (2009).

74. Catherine Turner, “Deconstructing Transitional Justice,” Law and Critique 24, no. 2 (2013), 197.

75. Ruti Teitel, “The Law and Politics of Contemporary Transitional Justice,” Cornell International Law Journal 38 (2005): 838.

76. Turner, “Deconstructing Transitional Justice.”

77. See, for instance, Daniel Philpott, The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

78. Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, 348.

79. UCLA Ralph Bunche Collection, Collection 2051, Box 227, Folder 7, January 8, 1962, Letter to Mr. John Hitchcock.

80. Centre for International Policy Studies, “The Responsibility to Protect 10 Years On: Reflections on Its Past, Present Future,” para 1.5.

81. Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

82. Ibid., 250.

83. Ibid., 252.

Conclusion

1. “Many Die as Kosovo Clashes Spread,” BBC News, March 17, 2004.

2. Harriet Alexander, “Exodus from Kosovo, Why Thousands Have Left the Balkans,” Telegraph, February 21, 2015.

3. Tsing, Friction, 5.

4. See Goetze and Bliesemann de Guevara, “Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of Peacebuilding.”

5. Smirl, Spaces of Aid; “The State We are(N’t) In: Liminal Subjectivity in Aid Worker Auto-Biographies,” in Statebuilding and State-Formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention, ed. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (London: Routledge, 2012), 230–44; “Building the Other, Constructing Ourselves”; Mark Duffield, “Challenging Environments: Danger, Resilience and the Aid Industry,” Security Dialogue 43, no. 5 (2012).

6. Lippman, “Khrushchev.”

7. Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, A Theory of Fields (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85.

8. Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 2.

9. James Thuo Gathi, “Dispossession through International Law: Iraq in Historical and Comparative Context,” in Decolonizing International Relations, ed. Branwen Gruffydd Jones (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Leopold von Carlowitz, “Resolution of Property Disputes in Bosnia and Kosovo: The Contribution to Peacebuilding,” International Peacekeeping 12, no. 4 (2005); Rita Augestad Knudsen, “Privatization in Kosovo: ‘Liberal Peace’ in Practice,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 7, no. 3 (2013).

10. Tsing, Friction.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to the illustrations and tables.

Abbas, Mekki, 70, 74

actor, 3, 11, 26, 139–40

Afghanistan, 52, 87, 101, 104, 209, 216, 222

agency. See actor

Agenda for Peace, 46, 63, 64

agency-structure problem, 30. See also under Bourdieu, Pierre, fields, habitus

agent. See actor

Ahmed, Syed Habib, 70, 74t

Albright, Madeleine, 58

Alvarez, José

Anabaptists, 134, 201–2

Annan, Kofi, 56, 62–63, 84, 125–27, 144–45, 156–61, 168–69, 180

auditing firms. See strategic management consulting

authenticity, 143, 172, 202

authority. See capital; symbolic capital

Axworthy, Lloyd, 160

Bangura, Zainab Hawa, 91

Bassiouni, Cherif, 212

Belgium, 38, 43, 48–50

biography, 38, 128, 155–56, 199

Blair, Tony, 59, 120, 253n6

Blair’s Babes, 120. See also Thomson, Nick; Milliband, David; Milliband, Ed

Boltanski, Luc: New Spirit of Capitalism, 10–11

Boraine, Alex, 212, 214

Bourdieu, Pierre: categories, 32, 34; concept of capital, 19–20, 28 (see capital); fields, 2–3, 17–20, 30, 31, 46, 68, 104–5, 136, 167, 218, 224; habitus, 11, 27–30, 31, 139–40; practices, 24–27; reflexivity, 17, 36; understanding of power, 19–20, 24; understanding of the state, 21

bourgeoisie, 11–12, 78, 186, 187, 204. See also Bürgerlichkeit; Bürgertum; middle classes

Boutros, Boutros-Ghali, 21, 53, 56, 57, 63, 124, 159

Brahimi, Lakhdar, 87, 92; Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, 126

Branson, Richard, 125

Buber, Martin, 148–49, 201

Bunche, Ralph: and Africa, 50, 79–80, 152–55; and Brian Urquhart, 81, 94, 102, 128–29, 136, 143–44; and race politics, 79–80; in the Congo, 50, 70–71, 72, 76–84; educational capital, 94, 99, 150–51, 153, 215; upbringing, 70, 152. See also Congo Club

Bürgerlichkeit: concept, 141; culture of, 143, 151, 219; and education, 150; liberal self, 145; private-public divide, 142, 151; and Tüchtigkeit, 146. See also authenticity, biography, bourgeoisie, education, middle classes

Bürgertum: Bildungs- und Beamtenbürgertum, 77; concept, 78. See also bourgeoisie; Bürgerlichkeit; middle classes

capital: configuration, 9, 28; conversion, 135, 137; cultural capital, 98, 222; economic, 76, 98–99, 103; educational capital, 20, 29, 93–96, 101, 103, 105–8, 119, 124, 128–29, 132, 165, 222 (see also expertise); peace capital, 196; social capital (see networks); symbolic capital, 9, 24, 196 (see nomos; power). See also under Bourdieu, Pierre

careers, 109–111, 116–19, 134, 145, 162, 218; in law, 131–32

Chiapello, Eve: See Boltanski, Luc

Cliffe, Sarah, 126

Cold War, 44, 47–48, 52, 55, 60, 65, 71, 76, 133; end of, 53–54, 56, 58, 213

Congo: 1960 mission, 11, 37–38, 46, 53–55, 58, 59, 64, 65, 69–71, 83–84, 157, 150, 156, 166, 191, 215; and Cold War, 48, 51, 146, 200; and Patrice Lumumba, 44, 48–50, 80; appeal for intervention, 43–44, 47–48; and decolonization, 50, 52; Katanga, 44, 49, 52

Congo Club, 44, 48–49, 76

constructivism, 18, 22

Contact Group, 45, 61

Cordier, Andrew, 49, 72t, 76–77, 84, 233n16, 252n21

Cox, Robert, 4, 7

data, 32–37

Dayal, Rajeshwar, 52, 73, 82–83

Deng, Francis, 205–6

Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), 111, 157

development aid, 119

Dorsinville, Max H., 70, 75, 82, 83

Doyle, Michael, 127

doxa, 95, 192, 195, 219–20, 222, 252n9. See also nomos

Egeland, Jan, 113, 166

Elders, The, 125–26, 214

Eliasson, Jan, 91, 159

entrepreneurial self, 10, 137, 144, 159, 218. See also neoliberalism

European Communities/ European Union, 53–58, 60, 63, 91, 110, 207, 217

Evans, Gareth, 127

expertise, 5–7, 79, 101, 105, 112, 117, 124–27, 131, 136, 153–54, 159–61, 165, 168

fields: and social differentiation, 18–19; methodology, 31–32; rules of the game, 24, 27, 196, 220; socio-professional, 68, 84–85, 91–101, 136; world political, 65–66. See also Bourdieu, Pierre; capital

Foucault, Michel, 6, 23, 187–88

France, 47, 50–51, 53, 55, 57–61, 78, 130, 133, 154

friction, 6, 10

Gabriel, Peter, 125

Gandhi, Mahatma, 197–204, 215

Gardiner, Robert, 70, 74, 83

geographical origin, 69–70, 81, 94–95, 99, 158

Goffman, Erving, 24

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 52

Goulding, Marrack, 56, 157, 163

Great Britain, 47, 50, 55, 57, 60, 61

Gramsci, Antonio, 188

Guéhenno, Jean-Marie, 126–27, 159

habitus: and distinction, 29, 139, 224; Erwin Panofsky, 28; methodology, 37–38 (see also biography; prosopography); modus operandi, 29, 220. See also Bourdieu, Pierre; capital

Hammarskjöld, Dag: and the Congo, 44, 47–54; and peacekeeping, 57, 58, 63, 67, 70–71; as example for others, 128, 175, 177, 192, 200–201, 220; habitus, 143–151, 155–61, 169–70; international civil servant, 51, 91, 144, 146, 177; network, 79, 81, 83–84, 91

Hammarskjöld, Hjalmar, 148

Haq, Ameerah, 91

Hayner, Priscilla, 212

Hobbes, Thomas, 171–79, 184, 188. See also leadership

holocaust, 197, 205–11, 213, 215–16

human rights, 106, 114, 116, 123, 128, 130–35, 170, 205, 208–13, 220

humanitarian aid, 12, 44, 61–66, 106, 114, 116, 123, 135, 164, 170, 189–90, 212, 215

humanitarian intervention, 50, 63, 128, 132, 208, 212

Ignatieff, Michael, 208–11

International Monetary Fund (IMF), 58

institutionalism, 3, 18, 22

Iraq: food for oil, 160; 1991 Gulf War, 55, 56; 2003 Iraq war, 209, 211, 216, 222; United Missions Assistance Mission for Iraq, 85, 99t, 157

Jones, Bruce, 126

justice: social justice, 13, 171, 173, 186–90, 192; transitional justice, 44, 131, 209, 211–14

Kasavubu, Joseph, 49–50

Katanga, 43–44, 48, 52, 215

Khiari, Mahmoud, 70, 74

Khrushchev, Nikita, 50–51, 64, 67, 71, 81, 146, 220

King, Martin Luther, 197–204, 215

Kittani, Ismat, 93, 94

Koenders, Bert, 85, 86t, 87t, 91, 94

Koselleck, Reinhart: Drei bürgerliche Welten, 78

Kosovo: 1999 NATO attack on Serbia, 61, 63, 207; United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, 56, 62, 188, 217

language education, 94, 98–99, 103

law schools, 94, 107, 124, 131–32, 211–15

leadership, 13, 153, 156, 167, 169, 173, 175–80, 192, 199, 215

Lederach, John Paul, 134

liberalism: and cosmopolitanism, 137, 209; and freedom as political value, 161, 179, 180, 182, 184, 208; and law, 185, 192; liberal peace, 7, 13, 171, 182; liberal professions, 13, 142, 160, 164, 169, 218. See also Rawls

Lippmann, Walter, 67, 145, 220

Liu, F. T., 72t, 83, 84, 150

Lumumba, Patrice, 43–50, 80, 231n69, 234n19, 252n21

Machel, Graça, 125

Machiavelli, 171–79

Malloch Brown, Mark, 160

management, 97, 102, 107, 119, 121–24, 143, 160, 167, 219

Mandela, Nelson, 125, 197–204, 214–16

Marx, Karl, 171, 173, 175, 186–88

Méndez, Juan, 133

merit, 13, 78, 79, 103, 142, 143, 153, 155, 161, 169, 171, 191, 192, 193, 204, 218, 220

Meron, Theodor, 211

middle classes: concept of, 77–79; globalization, 78, 79; sensibilities, 11, 218; social group, 77, 99, 141. See also Bürgertum, bourgeoisie

Miliband, David, 120, 158

Miliband, Ed, 120

Mladenov, Nikolay, 85, 99t

Mobutu, Sese Soku, 44, 49–50

modus operandi, 28–29

Moreno-Ocampo, José, 212

Narasimhan, Chakravarthi, 82, 93

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 54, 67–57, 60–63, 91, 207

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 82

neoliberalism: and globalization, 10, 14, 58, 123, 160; transformation of work, 137, 143–45, 161, 167, 218, 221, 222. See also entrepreneurial self

networks, 38, 82, 94, 102, 105, 113–15, 119, 121, 125, 127, 129, 158, 219. See also capital

neutrality, 44, 51, 81, 113, 168, 184, 200

Nkrumah, Kwame, 62, 82, 252n21

nomos, 13–14, 195–97, 204, 214–16, 219, 220, 222

nongovernmental organizations, 12, 18, 21, 68, 101, 105–6, 114–21, 127, 134, 215, 219, 221

nonviolence, 197–205, 216, 222

O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 52, 75, 83, 157

Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 91, 165, 166

Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE), 36, 55, 56, 57, 60–62, 66, 91, 108, 110, 113, 118

Osorio-Tafall, Bibiano, 75, 83, 84, 88t

Passeron, Jean-Claude, 97

Peacebuilding Commission, 64

peacekeeping, 44, 47, 51, 53, 55–59, 61–68, 93, 124, 144, 164, 168, 195, 200

Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier, 52, 56, 88, 150, 159

Plato, 37, 171–73, 177–79, 188. See also leadership

Plaza, Lasso Galo, 71, 75, 82, 83, 88

power: ontology, 7, 22–24, 27; symbolic, 24, 65, 196, 216

Power, Samantha, 129, 157, 208

practice: and authority, 23–27; and habitus, 141, 169, 204; peacebuilding, 11, 30, 51, 67, 83, 104, 129, 134, 147, 156, 164, 195, 212, 214, 218–24; professional, 17, 32, 123, 137, 168

professionalism, 105, 108–9, 162, 164–65, 218, 222

projectism, 106, 114, 118, 122

prosopography, 37–39, 96, 109, 114, 116, 136, 240n45

Ramos-Horta, José, 85, 90, 126

Rawls, John, 179–86, 192. See also liberalism

realism (international relations theory), 18, 21, 22

recruitment, 30, 81, 103, 105, 107–8, 112–13, 116, 117–18, 119–21

Responsibility to Protect, 46, 50, 127, 128, 160, 193, 209, 215

Rikhye, Indar Jit, 73, 83

Ruggie, John G., 127, 180

Russia, 56–61, 93, 95, 98, 99, 214

Rwanda: genocide, 62, 63, 66; inquiry, 156, 159

Sahle-Work, Zewde, 91

Secretariat General: and peacekeeping, 12, 32, 44, 57–61, 64; authority, 51, 52–53, 54, 55, 83, 95, 155; high level panels, 62, 125–26; reports, 63–64, 106, 126, 132, 158–60, 164–68

Security Council: and peace operations, 21, 45, 52, 60, 92, 135; relationship to Secretariat General, 44, 51–57, 59, 61, 63, 159; resolutions, 49, 62

Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 127, 255n70

Slim, Mongi, 82, 83,

Smith, Adam, 142, 179

Soviet Union, 38, 48, 50–53, 55, 56, 71, 81–82, 83, 220

special representatives, 81, 85, 91, 93–95, 102, 125, 126, 132

Srebrenica, 62, 66, 91, 159

state failure, 44, 49, 64, 160, 232n5

strategic management consulting, 121–22

stress, 166–67, 169, 248n79

Suez crisis, 47

survey: methodology, 33, 36–39; results, 95–98, 100, 161, 166, 168, 171, 180, 187, 197, 205, 213

Swing, William Lacy, 86, 91

Taylor, Charles, 172, 202

Thant, U, 76, 82

think tanks, 106, 124–25, 127, 130–33, 135, 160, 212

Thomson, Nick, 119–20

trusteeship, 48, 50; United Nations Trusteeship Council, 76, 80, 153

Tshombé, Moïse, 44, 234n19

Tubman, Winston A., 93

Tutu, Desmond, 125, 203, 214

United Kingdom (UK). See Great Britain

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 91, 110–111, 160

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 62, 66, 68, 91, 110, 111, 118

United Nations peace operations: KFOR, 56; ONUC, 69; SFOR, 61; UNFICYP, 83; UNMIK, 36–37, 56, 91, 222; UNPROFOR, 57, 60, 61, 91

United States of America (USA): foreign policy, 50–52, 55, 58–61, 70, 71, 222; policy advisors, 127, 129, 208, 210–11, 212; socialization ground of peacebuilders, 76–80, 99, 124, 132

Urquhart, Brian, 72t, 81, 82, 83–84, 102, 128–29, 136, 144–57, 163–69

values, 57, 77, 128, 141, 155, 156–57, 161–64, 169, 171, 190–93, 194; methodology, 13, 36–37

Vieira de Mello, Sergio, 87, 89, 157, 163, 219

visa, 12, 33, 100, 101

Waldheim, Kurt, 93, 150, 159

Weber, Max, 11, 143, 146–49

Welsh, Jennifer, 127

Wieschhoff, Heinrich, 72, 76–77, 84

Wiesel, Elie, 208, 210

World Bank, 58, 68, 111, 126–27, 159

World Summit Declaration, 63

Yeltsin, Boris, 60

Yoder, John Howard, 134

Yugoslavia, 53–61, 159, 207, 210, 235n44

Zannier, Lamberto, 91

Zerrougui, Leila, 91