Based on her FirstView article in the European Journal of International Security (EJIS), Anna Danielsson reconceptualises the politics of knowledge authority in post/conflict interventions.

Knowledge matters for the politics of international security. Not least so in relation to international peace- and statebuilding interventions. In recent years, the production, transfer, and diffusion of knowledge in interventions has flourished. As David Lewis says, contemporary international interventions are characterised by an ‘unprecedented project of knowledge production’. This has turned knowledge into a vital, at times strategic, resource of international organisations and other actors. Also scholars of interventions have begun to scrutinize interventionary knowledge(s), with attention also to the academic production of knowledge of conflict and postconflict environments. Not least, critical works question whether scholarly research can ever claim a distanced position from the object that it sets out to study.

In asking questions about how peacebuilders and policymakers come to know conflicts and their dynamics, what actors (including scholars) are involved in making such knowledge claims possible, and what forms (rather than others) of knowledge end up as authoritative and more or less unquestioned, scholars have found inspiration in sociological studies of knowledge and expertise. In doing so, however, it is the contention of this article that many studies end up contradicting their own starting points. These concern both how knowledge and expertise are transgressive and plural in character – thereby linking societal spheres that are conventionally understood as distinct – and how knowledge authority is never given but struggled over and achieved in competition. In other words, while extant works on the epistemics of peacebuilding interventions are by no means ‘wrong’ or do not make significant contributions to our understanding of knowledge in and of interventions, they remain incomplete vis-à-vis their own initial premises.

This article offers a way to overcome this problem. It is not the first attempt to do this, however. Recent works along similar lines use Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’ to reconsider how we think about and study peacebuilding knowledge and expertise. Yet, and this is my first theoretical point, these works restrict the analysis to peacebuilding as a distinct field, thereby failing to take into account – precisely – the transgressiveness of knowledge and knowledge production. That said, and this is my second theoretical point, I argue in the article that there are good reasons to remain with a Bourdieusian conceptualisation of these matters. This provided that his thinking about fields is pushed away from understandings of fields as demarcated by conventional professional boundaries, and toward an understanding of fields as capturing the transgressive and embattled production of certain objects and subjects – of certain ‘interventionary objects’ that at the same time make subjects and their dominating/dominated epistemic positions.

Based on a reconfiguration of Bourdieu’s concept of field and the related notion of struggles, the article offers a different point of view of the knowledge and knowledge production that informs and constitutes peace- and statebuilding interventions. This view forms around the notion of an ‘interventionary object’, and is better suited to fully address the history and sociology of the forms of knowledge that inform and shape matters of international security. The article puts this thinking to use in an analysis of peacebuilding interventions in Kosovo and Bosnia that seek to diminish the prevalence of informal economic activities, and translates the theoretical reasoning into four main empirical points of illustration.

First, the ‘informal economy’ emerged as a distinct interventionary object in and through the production of multiple and competing knowledge claims. When consolidated in the mid- to late 1990s, this object – in a particular configuration – attracted new agents on the global scene as well as propelled established ones to reposition themselves and their strategies.

Second, the group of agents that were involved in making informality into an interventionary object was not confined to peacebuilders. Apart from peacebuilding actors such as the World Bank, the involved agents ranged from think tanks, policy experts, and university-based academics, to state agencies in Peru.

Third, and following from the above, the production of informality as an interventionary object was from the start a transnational process, in which some forms of knowledge ‘travelled’ globally with greater ease than others.

Fourth, this process was marked by continuous epistemic battles over the ‘right’ and ‘legitimate’ knowledge of informal economies. In these struggles, some knowledge forms, and actors, emerged as dominant – a processes both shaped by and shaping what may be understood as an overarching symbolic logic of peace- and statebuilding. This has implications for the type of orderings that peacebuilders (re)produce in and through their practices. That said, any state of such epistemic authority is never a finished one but requires constant acts of safeguarding and boundary work.

In sum, and contra conventional wisdom in works on the epistemics of interventions, this article introduces the concept of an ‘interventionary object’ that admits for a less predetermined view of what actors and what knowledges are significant in shaping how peace- and statebuilding unfolds. By implication, this connects to wider debates about the relation between international studies and peacebuilding research. By shifting to analyse the formation of interventionary objects as a process in which peacebuilding actors participate but are not the sole architects of, we gain an understanding of how peacebuilding activities are constituted by, and constitutive of, wider global arrangements and circuits of power that have significant socio-material consequences ‘on the ground’, in conflict environments and elsewhere.

– Anna Danielsson, Swedish Defence University

– Danielsson’s FirstView EJIS article is now available free of charge until the end of April 2020.

– She was previously a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Government, Uppsala University. Anna’s research is situated at the nexus of war studies, social and practice theories, critical peace and conflict studies, and the history and sociology of knowledge. She works on issues pertaining to urban warfare, urban peacebuilding, and the production of knowledge and expertise in international interventions.