Introduction
Knowledge is central to international peacebuilding, and to scholarly critiques thereof, yet not always openly acknowledged.Footnote 1 With peacebuilding increasingly characterised by an ‘unprecedented project of knowledge production’,Footnote 2 however, practitioners and scholars have begun to focus more explicitly on the epistemics of intervention. This can be understood as an affirmation – and actualisation – of how ‘global governance boils down to a constant, mainly upstream, “under the radar”, and politically defused warfare over the knowledge and interests that steer it’.Footnote 3 Knowledge battles and the valuing of some knowledge claims over others render certain policies and governance arrangements legitimate, even ‘natural’, without the use of brute force. This makes questions about knowledge particularly pertinent for peacebuilding studies.
Recently, a literature has emerged that specifically addresses the epistemics of peacebuilding. These studies share a number of characteristics. To begin with, they depart from assumptions of a given authority of, for example, thematic, technical, and/or institutional knowledge that is held by international agents and challenged by local claims to knowledge and authority.Footnote 4 Instead, works on peacebuilding epistemics analyse the conditions of possibility of certain knowledge(s) to become authoritative, to become expertise,Footnote 5 and of certain agents to inhabit dominant knowledge positions. Studies have found that peacebuilders who seek authoritative positions in fact advance claims to local knowledge based on context familiarity and access.Footnote 6
A further characteristic of many works on peacebuilding epistemics is that they find inspiration in sociological studies of knowledge and expertise. Particularly emphasised are two features of contemporary knowledge production. First, peacebuilding involves multiple issues and plural knowledges. There is no given, incontestable knowledge and no given epistemic hierarchy in relation to a particular issue.Footnote 7 Rather, it is necessary to analyse struggles over knowledge claims, and what (and whose) knowledge is being considered expertise and incorporated into peacebuilding strategies.Footnote 8 Second, knowledge production in peacebuilding and elsewhere has become a ‘socially distributed process’ that transcends professional and geographical boundaries. This calls for greater attention to the transgressive conditions and divergent sources of epistemic authority.Footnote 9 Socially distributed knowledge production and the transgressive character of what becomes authoritative knowledge thus suggest a crossing of boundaries and, by the same token, a simultaneous linking of areas and agents conventionally treated as distinct. What is significant is the ‘problem context’, rather than confinement to pre-assumed institutional, professional, and/or geographical boundaries.Footnote 10
These shared characteristics, however, also bring about an internal tension in the literature on peacebuilding epistemics. While studies initially acknowledge a plurality and transgressiveness of peacebuilding knowledge and expertise, and that epistemic authority is not given but struggled over and achieved in competition, these points subsequently end up stifled. More precisely, existing studies tend to restrict their analyses to the knowledge claims and competitive practices that an individual or group – treated as freestanding – enact to construct their knowledge as authoritative. For example, while demonstrating the geographically transversal character of knowledge production, Markus Hochmüller and Markus-Michael Müller confine their analysis to the International Crisis Group (ICG). They refrain from exploring the broader playing field of agents, power relations, and intersubjective conditions in which a position of epistemic authority for the ICG is achieved.Footnote 11 Likewise, in his study of peacebuilding knowledge production by informal networks, Roland Kostić emphasises knowledge diversity and shows the transgressive character of knowledge production as networks straddle geographical and professional boundaries.Footnote 12 However, when seeking to account for knowledge struggles, Kostić points at factors predominantly internal to the network that are said to make it successful.Footnote 13 The intersubjective conditions and competitive battles over epistemic authority are left out of the analysis.
This article seeks a way to overcome this problem. It is not the first attempt to do so. Two recent studies have a similar goal. Ole Jacob Sending and Catherine Goetze respectively suggest reconceptualisations of peacebuilding expertise and epistemic authority based on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of ‘field’.Footnote 14 While such framing would in principle resolve the aforementioned tension, another shortcoming emerges in their respective works. Neither Sending's nor Goetze's analysis, and this is my first argument in this article, takes fully into account knowledge pluralisation and, particularly, the transgressiveness of knowledge production and authoritative knowledge. Their respective analyses neglect the transgressive character of what becomes authoritative knowledge, that is, the latter's emergence from hybrid social input that transcends conventional boundaries (whether geographical, professional, or of other kind).
Nonetheless, and this is my second argument, there are good reasons to remain with Bourdieu to develop an alternative conceptual position capable of capturing plurality, transgressiveness, and knowledge competition and struggles – and thus of resolving the present tension in the literature. Doing so, it becomes possible to advance four general and interlinked propositions for how peacebuilding epistemic authority can be rethought. First, peacebuilding epistemic authority can be understood as involving the relational positioning of certain knowledge of an object as authoritative, while being simultaneously conditioned by struggles over what knowledge is to be held as authoritative. This implies a perspective from which epistemic authority is inherently linked to the practices that bring into being and define a particular issue as an interventionary object in the first place, and from which the authority of any particular knowledge is never given.Footnote 15 Second, to understand peacebuilding epistemic authority conventional distinctions between ‘international’ and ‘local’ knowledges and agents are not helpful. The matter is better understood as one of different local knowledges in transnational circulation and battles over authority, that place some transnationalised agents in authoritative positions. Third, these transnationalised dynamics may also involve agents who are located in multiple professional and institutional spheres, including but not limited to peacebuilders. Fourth, while a (temporary) state of epistemic authority may be achieved, this is always amid struggles and existing alternative knowledges. Epistemic authority is thus always in flux, more or less embattled, and in need of constant reproduction.Footnote 16 In sum, the alternative conceptual position developed by this article actualises analyses of how the making of peacebuilding knowledge authority is object- and struggle-bound, and (re)produced in and through (epistemic) practice. This process, moreover, may imply that what is advanced as ‘local knowledge’ of a particular object is simultaneously valued and subjugated.Footnote 17 To substantiate this conceptually and empirically though, it is necessary to push the existing uses of the Bourdieusian ‘field’ by Sending and Goetze further towards Bourdieu's underlying relationalism and distinct epistemology.
To make and illustrate these arguments, the article is divided into two parts. In the first, I substantiate my critique of Goetze and Sending. Here, I suggest a reading of Bourdieu that conceptually brings about the aforementioned propositions sensitive to pluralisation and transgressiveness. Despite the critical reading of Sending and Goetze, then, their works function as sounding boards against which an alternative Bourdieu-inspired conceptual direction may be outlined. This direction forms around a reading of Bourdieu that renders a set of theoretical distinctions for how the concepts of fields and struggles – including the more ambiguous ‘field of power’ – may be used.Footnote 18 These distinctions, summarised as four new lines of inquiry, shift the analytical focus away from pre-assumed subjects and objects of (authoritative) knowledge, to the transgressive and relational processes whereby the object and subjects come into being in the first place. In the article's second part, I illustrate the arguments empirically. Guided by the new lines of inquiry, and by illustrating the relational and transgressive emergence of knowledge authority in peacebuilding operations on informal economies, the second part demonstrates the value of the article's conceptual position.Footnote 19 In the conclusion, I discuss the article's contributions to the literature on peacebuilding epistemics and, briefly, to peacebuilding research and international studies more generally.
Peacebuilding epistemics through the lens of ‘fields’
Recent works by Sending and Goetze make use of Bourdieu's concept of ‘field’, and related notions of ‘capitals’, ‘struggles’, and ‘(mis)recognition’, to shed light on peacebuilding knowledge and expertise.Footnote 20 Knowledge is central to Bourdieu's sociology, which couples epistemological and sociological concerns. Although he does not (as far as I know) use the term ‘epistemic authority’, Bourdieu's thinking is fruitful for the study thereof. The concept of field reveals the conditions of possibility of ‘symbolic power’, understood as a power of constitution that refers to the construction, recognition, and legitimation of a particular knowledge and vision of the world, that becomes authoritative and constitutive of practices and hence the world itself.Footnote 21 A field can thus be understood as an analytical tool with which to grasp the relational processes whereby agents are attracted to and invest in a particular issue – a particular object – and simultaneously (and variously) construct and constitute the object by advancing competing claims to knowledge.Footnote 22 Seen from a perspective of fields, then, epistemic authority is not tied to official mandates or subjective strategies but is relationally brought into being with the object through practices and claims to knowledge, and is as such constantly embattled.
While useful for the analysis of peacebuilding epistemic authority, the question is how to employ the Bourdieusian field thinking to overcome the problem that marks existing research. In this part, I argue that while Sending's and Goetze's approaches give some (albeit limited) understanding of knowledge plurality and struggles, they fail to take into account the transgressiveness of authoritative knowledge. Both Sending and Goetze remain within a geographical international-local divide (effectively reifying it) and within assumed professional boundaries that envision peacebuilding as a distinct field of practice. From a perspective of epistemic authority as involving hybrid social input and transgressing conventional boundaries, this is problematic. In order to address the initial problem, rather, I argue that the Bourdieusian tools are still useful but need a further push towards the underlying epistemology and relationalism of Bourdieu's thinking.
In the following, I make this argument by posing two questions: what field and which struggles are pertinent to construct and analyse? Doing so, this part identifies a friction within Bourdieu's own work on fields. Such friction, however, also opens up the possibility of conceptualising fields differently. As we are to see, this reasoning relies on a shift from ‘subject-centred’ investigations to an ‘object-centred’ one.Footnote 23 This implies a break with conventional views of peacebuilding as forming a distinct field of practice, and of peacebuilders as sole subjects involved in interventionary knowledge production. The shift in perspective entails a focus on the processes whereby an interventionary object emerges in the first place, which involves various agents attracted to the object and its stakes. The idea here, then, is not to claim ‘the correct’ reading of Bourdieu (as if that was ever possible/desirable). Rather, this part comes up with a set of theoretical distinctions for how fields can be understood that shift the analytical focus to the transgressive making of an interventionary object. These distinctions are summarised as four new lines of inquiry.
What field?
Goetze points out that existing research fails to examine the conditions of possibility of international peacebuilders’ ‘authority, domination, and power’, not least in terms of knowledge.Footnote 24 To remedy this, Goetze offers a sociology of peacebuilders that focuses on socioeconomic background, education, values, career trajectory, and networks. Agents are part of the peacebuilding field if they distinguish and understand their activities as peacebuilding, and thereby participate in struggles over ‘the authority to define what peace is and how it should be built’.Footnote 25 While this analysis is intuitively appealing and offers an impressive sociology of peacebuilders, for the analysis of plural, competing, and transgressive knowledges, Goetze's analysis is too focused on constructing peacebuilding as a distinct, semi-autonomous field. More precisely, by constructing fields based on the types of agents in them, peacebuilding as a distinct field stems from agents’ self-representations and claimed professional identities. This perspective can thus render few insights into peacebuilding authoritative knowledge as transgressive and an effect of hybrid social input. There is no space for examining how the production of, and struggles over, knowledge that becomes authoritative in peacebuilding may involve agents from various professional, institutional, and geographical spheres.
Interestingly, a construction of fields based on agents’ self-representations and claimed professional profiles illustrates a friction in Bourdieu's own thinking. This opens up for an alternative interpretation of how to conceptualise the field as analytical tool. For Bourdieu, reality and knowledge are relationally constructed and constituted in relation to sociomaterial conditions, positions, and dispositions. Relationalism requires a break with substantialist thinking, in favour of a focus on ‘the apparent invisibility of the relations between agents rather than the visibility of these same agents. This invisibility does not mean pre-existence but action in the making that binds agents together as well as distinguishes them.’Footnote 26 Relations of interdependence and distinction condition practices and subjects in relation to a specific object. An agent has no inner substance, but is defined by her relative position in the web of relations that constitutes the object. Such relational construction (mediated by practices) of knowledge and reality, objects and subjects, involves social agents as well as researchers.Footnote 27 However, while strictly applying a relational thinking in his studies of religion, media, or academia,Footnote 28 Bourdieu is less clear on how to think relationally when it comes to the ‘distinctions between fields’.Footnote 29 He is critical of the notion of profession as it gives a false sense of homogeneity.Footnote 30 Rather, ‘an agent or institution belongs to a field inasmuch as it produces and suffers effects in it’.Footnote 31 At the same time, he talks about the religious, political, or academic field as if distinctions between fields hinged on the types of agents in them.
For some observers, the construction of fields based on agential types makes the Bourdieusian approach unsuited to capture the fluid and transgressive character of knowledge and expertise. Authoritative knowledge and experts are typically understood as ‘boundary phenomena’ located in intermediary positions between, for instance, ‘science, universities and knowledge production on the one side, and power, politics, parliaments and making binding decisions on the other’.Footnote 32 Expertise and experts, for instance think tanks, are ‘boundary organizations’ that straddle and mediate the divide between established fields.Footnote 33 The irony of parts of this critique, though, is that such representations rest on the assumption of pre-existing fields characterised, precisely, by agential types and professional profiles.
Nevertheless, this discussion takes us further towards the alternative way of envisioning Bourdieusian fields. Thomas Medvetz, for instance, somewhat adapts Bourdieu's field theory to capture the special role of think tanks in establishing, while traversing, the boundaries between established fields.Footnote 34 This, however, leaves the question of the object out of the analysis. A more encompassing approach, which draws on Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, is offered by Gil Eyal. When studying the production of expertise on Arab affairs in Israel, Eyal found it difficult to distinguish between an academic field of Middle Eastern Studies and the bureaucratic field of military intelligence. Agents constantly straddled these boundaries. This led him to suggest that the boundary between fields should be analysed as ‘a real social entity’. The boundary turns into a hybrid social space whose existence, form, and delimitations are ongoing achievements and always struggled over.Footnote 35 Eyal develops this argument with the help of Latour's thinking on hybrids.Footnote 36 Approaching the boundary as a hybrid space entails that what is inside is ‘neither here nor there’.Footnote 37 Indeed, and akin also to Bourdieusian reasoning, there is a double dynamic within the hybrid. The production of knowledge and expertise make, simultaneously, the object and subjects of expertise – it brings about (and utilises) hybrids. Yet within the hybrid there are also constant attempts at ‘purification’. That is, there are constant epistemic struggles as agents seek to advance their particular knowledge and gain legitimate authority, and in this way enact the boundaries of the space in particular ways.Footnote 38
As this indicates, there is an alternative way to conceptualise fields that is better suited to capture the transgressive character of knowledge and epistemic authority. This requires that we take seriously the field as analytical tool, that is, as a lens constructed by the researcher rather than by social agents and their self-representations. Moreover, in the study of peacebuilding as a multifaceted phenomenon comprised of various tasks, it is particularly rewarding to remain with Bourdieu. In Eyal's partly Latour-inspired account, there is a slight balance in favour of the subjects (and networks) of expertise and the struggles between them, at the neglect of broader structuring forces that shape the object and that may, at least in part, extend beyond a certain hybrid. All in all, this alternative forms around Bourdieu's call for a ‘double epistemological rupture’ with the object and subject(s) of knowledge and invites a first reconsideration of what field to analyse.Footnote 39 Rather than being guided (and constrained) by prior assumptions about knowledges and agents, the object and subject(s) are constructed as the effects of multiple, relational (epistemic) practices that are enacted by various agents.Footnote 40 With regard to the field, then, three new lines of inquiry can be formulated.
A first line of inquiry forms around peacebuilding as a phenomenon that comprehends multiple tasks, for instance humanitarian assistance, agricultural development, economic reconstruction, and security-sector reform. Such compartmentalisation into functional areas is sometimes criticised for enabling a ‘silo mentality’.Footnote 41 Here though, compartmentalisation is the starting point for an analysis of the emergence of the object – the ‘object of intervention’. An object of intervention refers to a distinct peacebuilding problem or issue that emerges as an effect of competing knowledge claims enacted by multiple subjects, some of which may be directly involved in peacebuilding. Through these competing claims, epistemic struggles are produced through the emergence of the object. This process may be analysed as a field provided that it involves interdependencies as well as distinctions between knowledge claims and agents.
This is akin to recent works in IR theory that shift focus from ‘how knowledgeable practices shape the interests and actions of international subjects’ to how various governance objects emerge as products of knowledge practices and struggles over ‘who gets to define and represent those objects’.Footnote 42 The difference is that subject-centred perspectives are concerned with how forms of knowledge constitute agents’ subjectivities and actions, while this type of object-centred approach ‘foreground[s] objects and, with them, how the space of the international is constituted and populated with common problems and imperatives’, around which various ‘actors coalesce and interact’.Footnote 43 Such governance objects can be understood as ‘hybrid entities comprised of ideas, artifacts, physical phenomena, and practices’ that are made distinct from other objects.Footnote 44
In fact, this resembles Sending's approach. Rather than agent's self-representations, Sending focuses on the practices that condition and make possible a governance object. Authoritative knowledge of an object is the effect of an ‘ongoing process of competition for the authority to define what is to be governed, how and why’.Footnote 45 The emergence and dynamics of governance objects shape global politics by conferring authority on some knowledges, activities, and subjects, rather than others.Footnote 46 In other words, there are similarities between Sending's approach and the position developed by this article. However, in relation to peacebuilding, Sending's account becomes too generic. It fails to take into account the transgressiveness of authoritative knowledge in both a professional, institutional, and geographical sense. For Sending, peacebuilding is one expression of a general international field. This field enables peacebuilders to approach ‘the local’ as an ‘international governance object’.Footnote 47 This level of abstraction does not permit investigations into how the various aspects of peacebuilding translate into specific interventionary objects and how these are produced and governed by specific knowledge claims. Moreover, Sending begins from a given set of subjects (UN peacebuilders). He thus partially remains within a subject-centred perspective. There is no room for analysing how the production of interventionary objects may be conditioned by hybrid social input, that is, involve agents from multiple professional and geographical spheres. Sending thus also reifies the international-local divide so characteristic – and criticised – of peacebuilding research.
Instead, the first line of inquiry implies a historicisation of the (if possible) relational dynamics and competing knowledge claims that bring into being an interventionary object, analysed as a semi-autonomous ‘field of an interventionary object’. Empirically, this concern whether any particular peacebuilding task can be studied as an effect of relationally conditioned practices that construct and constitute this object through competing knowledge claims. Moreover, while only relatively autonomous, the interventionary field forms around a distinct object. From this follows that the emergence of the object involves the creation of its outside, that is, enactments of boundaries that distinguish the object and its stakes from other domains. The epistemic struggles that go on within the interventionary field are thus at the same time struggles over the borders of the field.Footnote 48 As Matt Carlson puts it: ‘claims to expertise are at once solidifying while differentiating’ and the boundary between the inside and the outside of the field ‘becomes a site of tension’.Footnote 49
From this follows a second line of inquiry. Given that the analytical focus lies with relational practices that advance claims to knowledge of an object while bringing the object into being, the conceptual position developed here departs from subject-centred accounts. This does not mean a lack of agents, but only that we cannot know on beforehand which agents to include in the analysis.Footnote 50 Generally, agents to be considered are those who partake in the production and advancement of competing claims to knowledge of the object. This may involve academics, and academically produced knowledge.Footnote 51 Participation is conditioned upon agents experiencing an attraction to the object, that they consider the issue meaningful and worthy of ‘investment’.Footnote 52
Closely related is a third line of inquiry. As touched upon, when researching fields of interventionary objects, we should be open to the possibility of such fields to involve agents not only from different professional and institutional spheres, but also geographical. Indeed, what is ‘revealing about peacebuilding is that the actors constitutive of it transcend the local/international divide’.Footnote 53 While this is ultimately an empirical question, I therefore suggest adding the qualifier ‘transnational’ to fields of interventionary objects. The point of a transnational field is precisely to avoid any easy ordering into either international or domestic domains. In a transnational field, agents are ‘neither entirely international nor national but effectively transnational’ – shaped by their positions and practices in national as well as international settings.Footnote 54
Which struggles?
So far, the proposed framework approaches peacebuilding as a phenomenon comprised of a myriad of transnational fields of interventionary objects, each made possible by a variety of practices, knowledge claims, and agents. However, the framework remains underdeveloped with regard to how certain claims and knowledges become authoritative. A fourth line of inquiry thus concerns the types of struggle that shape what, and whose, knowledge becomes authoritative. In relation to other object-centred approaches, such as that advanced by Eyal (and, in part, by Sending), attention to multiple epistemic struggles and their mutually structuring dynamics is what makes the Bourdieusian tools particularly useful for a study of peacebuilding epistemic authority.
For Bourdieu, practices that construct and constitute an object (field) depend on and put into play various resources. These ‘capitals’ are of different kind. Social capital, for instance, refers to the ‘aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’.Footnote 55 Cultural capital may exist as embodied dispositions, artistic or intellectual goods (such as paintings or awards), or as institutionalised resources, such as educational credentials.Footnote 56 The knowledge hierarchies of a field link to the field's specific capital configuration. Positions in the field are relatively defined based on their placement in this configuration. The different, dominant/dominated ‘poles’ of a field can be understood as analytical notions that help to make sense of knowledge hierarchies and the relative positioning of knowledge claims.
Capitals, then, are potential sources of power and epistemic authority. Still, to become powerful any capital and related knowledge claim must be recognised by agents in the field.Footnote 57 Power and epistemic authority are thus not properties of specific agents, but relationally brought into being by all. Acts of recognition temporarily structure the field into dominant/dominated poles around which different knowledge claims and agents coalesce.Footnote 58 Such acts, moreover, may simultaneously involve more or less explicit struggles. Agents seek to advance their particular knowledge claims and position themselves as holders of legitimate authority over the object and its stakes.Footnote 59 As mentioned, these struggles at the same time concern the field's borders that construct the object and its stakes as distinct from other domains.
One type of struggle is hence that which plays out internally within the field. Still, fields are only semi-autonomous. They are not immune to struggles and structuring forces that are in part external to them, and that they also structure.Footnote 60 For the here proposed rethinking of peacebuilding epistemic authority, which envisions peacebuilding as fragmented into a myriad of transnational fields of interventionary objects, this is a crucial insight. When portraying peacebuilding as a fragmented phenomenon that involves practices and subjects beyond those conventionally associated with the building of peace, it is important to be, at the same time, open to interventionary fields as structured by (and structuring of) an encompassing symbolic logic of peacebuilding. To grasp such a ‘fragmented whole’,Footnote 61 the Bourdieusian concept of a ‘field of power’ is useful.Footnote 62
A translation of this concept into a ‘field of peacebuilding power’ renders a tool with which to interrogate more completely the forces that condition peacebuilding epistemic authority over a particular interventionary object. Following previous work that have adapted the field of power into transnational dynamics, the field of peacebuilding power can be understood as one of several transnational fields of power that exist with relative autonomy from national dynamics.Footnote 63 The field of peacebuilding power spans horizontally and amalgamates the multiple transnational fields of interventionary objects. Like any field, the field of peacebuilding power is a field of struggles. These struggles, however, involve agents that inhabit dominant positions in their respective interventionary fields, whether these are UN agencies, large international organisations such as the World Bank (WB), locally-based organisations, think tanks and organisations like the ICG, or academics. The struggles of the field of peacebuilding power concern the ‘relative value and potency of rival kinds of capital’ and thus the legitimation of the ‘dominant principle of domination’ in peacebuilding.Footnote 64
With this tool, it becomes possible to analyse whether, and if so how, the dynamics and battles of the field of an interventionary object are shaped also by (and help shape) an overarching symbolic logic of peacebuilding. Two caveats are in order. First, in order to understand the dynamics of a field of peacebuilding power, an initial analysis of multiple interventionary fields would have to be conducted. Second, there is no given homogeneity or automatic correspondence between the field of peacebuilding power and an interventionary field.Footnote 65 Instead, one can think of the relationship as a constant and two-directional work of mediation that may result in homologous knowledge logics. The point of the field of peacebuilding power as an analytical tool is thus not to assume or predict the dynamics in an interventionary field. Rather, it is a tool with which to summarise the analysis of an interventionary field and get a more complete understanding of dominant and dominated positions and knowledge claims.Footnote 66
In this sense, the analysis of peacebuilding epistemic authority can in fact make another use of Sending's argument. In his account of peacebuilding as an international field that approaches ‘the local’ as governance object, Sending argues that peacebuilding is shaped by an ‘ethnographic sagacity’.Footnote 67 This logic inclines peacebuilders to ‘seek recognition from peers and superiors for their ability to deploy local knowledge as a means to further “international rule”’.Footnote 68 Peacebuilders favour forms of local knowledge that are in line with internationally predefined programmes and goals.Footnote 69 Potentially, and again the point is that this can help make further sense of the analysis, a logic of ethnographic sagacity may constitute an overarching symbolic logic of peacebuilding. This logic would thus stem from a mutually structuring relationship between interventionary fields and the field of peacebuilding power. In sum, with this fourth line of inquiry, and by both drawing on and diverging from Sending, the here developed conceptual position is as attentive to a potential encompassing knowledge logic inherent to peacebuilding activities as it is to the plurality and transgressiveness of knowledge, knowledge battles, and expertise.
Informal economies and the production of peacebuilding epistemic authority
Somewhere in Bali in the 1990s, the story goes, a couple of dogs barked. This may not appear that remarkable. Still, as the story continues, it becomes an entry point into relational and transgressive historical dynamics that have arranged informal economies into distinct interventionary objects and, simultaneously, brought into being struggles, strategies, and agents. Tracing these dynamics, it becomes clear that the question of what (and whose) knowledge is made authoritative in peacebuilding activities on informality involves and depends on relations and struggles between a multitude of variously located practices and agents, beyond those directly associated with the building of peace.
The man telling the story about the dogs in Bali is Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist and entrepreneur. de Soto describes how he took a stroll through the island's rice fields. As he walked, he had no idea about when he crossed the boundary separating one farm from another. But, as he says, ‘the dogs knew’: ‘every time I crossed from one farm to another, a different dog barked. Those Indonesian dogs may have been ignorant of formal law, but they were positive about which assets their masters controlled.’Footnote 70 In de Soto's rendition, the barking dogs are metaphorical of claims to a legalist-institutionalist form of local knowledge of informality that focuses on the ‘rules’ and ‘costs’ of informal economies.
Existing research shows that legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims of informality became authoritative in the peacebuilding missions to Bosnia and Kosovo. At the same time, there were multiple and competing representations of informality in play during these missions.Footnote 71 Informed and summarised by the new lines of inquiry established in the previous part, the following account of the production of informality as an interventionary object illustrates the processes conditioning this particular state of epistemic authority in the Bosnia and Kosovo missions. To understand this, then, the analysis needs to go beyond peacebuilders and trace the relational and transgressive emergence and circulation of an interventionary object and the knowledge claims that constitute it, as well as the various types of struggles that ground a (temporary) positioning of certain claims as authoritative.
From Bali to the Balkans
In the early 2000s, informal economies and the question of ‘formalisation’ became a privileged peacebuilding task within the confines of economic reconstruction.Footnote 72 This can be understood in relation to two developments. First, there had at the time been a general shift in peacebuilding practice from economic and political liberalisation to statebuilding and institutional strengthening.Footnote 73 Understood as a deviation from institutional governance standards, informality became a key issue. This also made the WB, among others, ‘as significant an actor in peacebuilding as the UN or NATO’.Footnote 74 In addition, there was at the time an increased focus on conflict's economic dimensions and different aspects of a war economy.Footnote 75 Informal or ‘coping’ economic activities of ordinary people were considered distinct from those of former warlords.Footnote 76
Two of the largest peacebuilding missions at the time, those to Bosnia and Kosovo, exemplified this new focus on informality. During these missions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the International Labour Organization (ILO), as key agents, carried out ‘anti-informality’ operations and implemented specific policies and governance arrangements. These were informed by legalist-institutionalist claims to local knowledge of informality and centred on the notions of ‘costs’ and ‘rules’. Policies and arrangements were focused on simplifying rules and regulations, and on removing institutional barriers. The goal was to lower various costs of the formal economy, such as taxes, unfavourable labour markets, and transaction costs. By decreasing the costs of formality, the expectation was that people would become disincentivised from engaging in informal economic practices.Footnote 77 In both missions, the authority of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims was further enhanced also by state agencies and smaller as well as local organisations. In Kosovo, for instance, these particular knowledge claims were supported by the national government's Small and Medium Enterprise Support Agency, and by local and international think tanks such as the Riinvest Institute, the Kosovo Foundation for Open Society, and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.Footnote 78
However, this particular state of peacebuilding epistemic authority for legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims was not given. In fact, peacebuilders in Bosnia and Kosovo produced multiple representations of informality. Some contrasted the notion of costs and related institutional solutions, and instead depicted informality from a perspective of its social and historical preconditions, as well as its potential role as alleviator of poverty and marginalisation.Footnote 79
In order to illustrate how come legalist-institutionalist claims to local knowledge of informality nevertheless ended up authoritative, I will follow the four lines of inquiry developed in the previous part and trace the transgressive processes, knowledge work, and struggles that conditioned this state in the first place. This illustrative analysis will take us beyond peacebuilders and beyond a focus on peacebuilding as a distinct field of practice, and into relational processes that conditioned the emergence of informality as a distinct object and that involved the work by various professionals, located in multiple geographical settings. The transgressive emergence of informality as a distinct interventionary object, analysed as a field, thus involved a simultaneous crossing and linking of institutional, professional, and geographic boundaries. From this perspective, de Soto and his Peruvian think tank Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Institute for Liberty and Democracy, ILD) are among a set of agents not directly engaged in peacebuilding, but nonetheless central in the processes leading up to the (initial) formation of ‘informality expertise’ in the peacebuilding missions to Bosnia and Kosovo.
Some caveats are in order. The missions to Bosnia and Kosovo are chosen here as existing research has demonstrated a state of epistemic ‘consensus’ over informality in these missions, amid conditions of multiple representations and possible alternative knowledges. Rather than conventional case studies though, the Bosnia and Kosovo missions are used as points of departure for a historicisation and tracing of the relational and transgressive emergence of informality as a distinct interventionary object, and the struggles over knowledge authority that simultaneously occurred. This means that the illustration does not focus on potential further epistemic struggles over informality as played out in Bosnia and Kosovo. Further, as the analysis functions as an illustration of the developed conceptual position, it is wanting as a history. It is wanting also as an ‘orthodox Bourdieusian’ study, as this would for example require a more in-depth reconstruction of the field's dispositional logic(s). That said, the analysis illustrates the relational and transgressive processes and struggles that formed informality into a distinct interventionary object; dynamics that conditioned what became considered (again, at least initially) ‘informality expertise’ in the peacebuilding missions to Bosnia and Kosovo. As we are to see, these dynamics involved a simultaneous valuing and subjugation of claims to local knowledge of informality.
What field? The emergence of informality as an interventionary object
In 1986, de Soto published a book entitled El Otro Sendero (The Other Path). This would become a bestseller, praised by leading politicians in the UK and US, and a catalyst of the global rise of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims of informality. The book advanced a perspective focused on the local conditions of informal economies. These conditions were understood in terms of the ‘costs of formality’, that is, various types of legal and institutional barriers that were assumed to underpin the existence of informal economic activities.Footnote 80 Much knowledge work prior to and after this publication conditioned the advancement of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims.
One decisive project was the establishment in 1981 of the ILD think tank in Lima, Peru. This was a direct outcome of efforts by members of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) to connect the neoliberal movement via a global net of think tanks.Footnote 81 Financial support, advice on advocacy, and social contacts provided by MPS-related think tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the Centre for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) helped set up the ILD.Footnote 82 Thanks to this, the ILD could begin pilot studies of the costs of formality in Lima. Following these projects, in turn, de Soto and the ILD published El Otro Sendero and got involved in Peruvian domestic politics. In 1992–4, the ILD carried out pilot studies on the registration of urban property in Lima. Two years later, the Peruvian government initiated the Urban Property Rights Project (UPRP), a comprehensive programme for urban formalisation directly based on legalist-institutionalist claims to knowledge of informality. Soon, the WB joined the UPRP.Footnote 83 While not the Bank's first encounter with informality, this meant that legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims entered global policy circles and discourses.
This initial spread of legalist-institutionalist claims thus depended on much work inside and outside of Peru. This work involved various resources. Different forms of cultural capital were significant. Legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims enjoyed objectified cultural capital through the publication of El Otro Sendero and through various awards and prizes given to de Soto. Also, de Soto himself carried a kind of ‘embodied’ cultural capital.Footnote 84 This arguably strengthened the value of the objectified cultural capital. While often interpreted as ‘cultural refinement’, embodied cultural capital can be understood also as a personal background that renders an aura of legitimacy. As a Peruvian, de Soto could say that his country's problem with informality was due not to global inequalities but to domestic conditions.Footnote 85 Moreover, legalist-institutionalist holding of cultural capital was further facilitated by a vast amount of social capital established through MPS contacts. For instance, many of the awards given to de Soto came from MPS-linked organisations, such as the Cato Institute.Footnote 86 With capitals being mutually strengthening, social and cultural capital helped attract economic capital to the legalist-institutionalist position, not least then in the form of financial support from the WB.
These capitals were relationally significant. Specifically, they conditioned the advancement of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims that opposed the, at the time, established epistemic positions on informality. Although the concept had gained some traction already in the 1950s, it was not until the 1970s that it reached momentum. The World Employment Program (WEP) launched by the ILO in 1969 was crucial. The WEP and the links it forged between the ILO, the WB, trade unions, and scholars was one factor behind the establishment of an initial epistemic consensus on informality.Footnote 87 This was a dualist consensus that saw informal economies as residuals of modernity.Footnote 88 In the late 1970s and early 1980s though, consensus shifted from dualism to dependency. The ILO and other international organisations repositioned in favour of a conception of informality as a spin-off to capitalist development. This implied a turn to development planning and governance arrangements favouring state support of informal businesses.Footnote 89
It was only, however, with the rise of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims that more pronounced relational dynamics started to form around informality as a distinct interventionary object distinguishable from others, permitting an analysis of informality as a semi-autonomous transnational field with its distinct stakes and epistemic struggles.Footnote 90 Although there had been contestations also within the dependency consensus, these did not concern any specific stakes of informality as such.Footnote 91 With the advancement of legalist-institutionalist claims, however, new stakes were established that concerned the local conditions of informality. From the early 1990s, old (such as the ILO and the WB) and new agents were attracted to and converged around these stakes, and advanced competing claims to the ‘right’ local knowledge of informality. This involved also scholars. While de Soto and the ILD had initially made a virtue of not having links to the social sciences – thereby distinguishing themselves from the dependency position – the success of new institutional economics (NIE) in the 1980s and 1990s underpinned a legalist-institutionalist academic literature on informality.Footnote 92 Legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims thus came to benefit also from scientific capital, which worked in conjunction with the other resources. As one CIPE employee put it when explaining the organisation's early support of de Soto and the ILD: ‘there was a common interest in the new institutional economics, and one thing that informed our work from the early days was this institutional approach with Douglass North, and all of us knowing each other’.Footnote 93
In sum, with regards to the first line of inquiry (and while this is never a finished accomplishment), informality emerged as a distinct interventionary object through relationally positioned and competing knowledge claims that constituted informality as a specific object. Legalist-institutionalist claims disrupted an established epistemic consensus, and established novel stakes of the object. As the following section further demonstrates, these stakes attracted new agents and propelled older ones to reposition themselves. The emergence of informality as a distinct object was thus not only conditioned by competing claims to knowledge, but also conditioning of new knowledges and expert positions.Footnote 94
Related to the second line of inquiry, the emergence of informality as a distinct interventionary object and the new stakes were not linked to a given set of agents, but effects of practices, knowledge work, and claims by a heterogenous group of agents whom were attracted to and coalesced around the object. These included domestic think tanks in Peru and the United States, Peruvian state agencies, academics, and large international organisations such as the WB and the ILO. Some of these agents, then, are also engaged in peacebuilding, but all of them have shaped, and been shaped by, the relational process conditioning informality as a distinct interventionary object in the first place.
Finally, and with regards to the third line of inquiry, the above demonstrates the multiple geographical locations of the agents involved and the, from the very start, transnational character of the informal field. Neither its external boundaries nor its internal lines of differentiation and opposition are easily drawn between the international and the local, whether in terms of agents or knowledges. Rather, and as the next section illustrates, these are characterised by the ‘right’ type of knowledge claims of informality's local conditions. In other words, the epistemic hierarchies of the transnational field of informality concern different kinds of local knowledge of informality that are of hybrid origin and in, with more or less ease, transnational circulation.
Which struggles? Battles over knowledge and the temporary establishment of epistemic authority
As informality emerged as a distinct object, claims to local knowledge became entry requirements, stakes, and main lines of differentiation in the field. By the mid- to late 1990s, the field had consolidated around two main poles that worked to distinguish knowledge claims, and around which old and new agents coalesced. Some agents previously linked to the dependency consensus, such as the ILO, repositioned themselves closer to the legalist-institutionalist position.Footnote 95 Beneath antagonisms and different knowledge claims and constitutions of informality, then, was a shared recognition of this as a phenomenon that could (and should) be known and intervened upon, and the value of local knowledge for this.
Ever since, legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims have remained orthodox and inhabited dominant positions in the field, yet not without contenders. A snapshot of contemporary field dynamics and internal struggles sheds an initial light on this. The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) advances knowledge claims that recognise the value of local knowledge of informality, but that can also be characterised as heterodox and contending. This shows in how the IIED's claims explicitly oppose legalist-institutionalist conceptions and judge these as too ‘technocratic’, ‘efficiency-focused’, and/or ‘legalistic’.Footnote 96 Instead, the IIED claims an understanding of the ‘social value’ of informal economies.Footnote 97 The organisation emphasises the challenges but also opportunities with informality.Footnote 98 Rather than strict formalisation, the IIED speaks of a ‘light-touch’ or ‘selective’ formalisation. The idea is to create ‘well-being within informality, rather than hoping to replace it with something’.Footnote 99 Significant here is that this opposition at the same time implies an act of recognition that, unwittingly, produces a dominant position for legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims. Indeed, contenders in the informal field have to recognise, and by that partially legitimate, legalist-institutionalist claims and categorisations in order to counterbalance them, and make use of them for their opposed aims. At the same time, this adds to the authoritative positioning of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims.Footnote 100
Another organisation in the contemporary field is the aforementioned CIPE. Since the field's emergence, CIPE has played a vital role for the continuous production and advancement of legalist-institutionalist claims to local knowledge of informality. For CIPE, formalisation is key to strengthen democratic governance and secure economic efficiency.Footnote 101 CIPE advances claims to knowledge that constitute informality as an effect of high costs and ‘barriers to market entry’, in turn ‘caused by badly designed laws and regulations’ specific to each context.Footnote 102 Formalisation is to be achieved through legal and regulatory reforms that lower the costs and institutional barriers to formal market entry.Footnote 103 While CIPE was set up to ‘pursue a partnership model of programming, where we would not dictate a particular policy agenda or programmatic course of action, but fund local organisations’ and their projects,Footnote 104 the way in which the organisation refers to ‘costs’, ‘barriers’, and ‘incentives’ informs of basically preset understandings of and claims to what constitutes informality in different local contexts. In addition, while speaking from orthodox positions in the field that only exist as they are relationally interdependent on yet distinct from past orthodoxy and current heterodoxy, CIPE's advancement of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims needs not to show awareness of antagonistic positions and contending claims.
These respective advancements of claims to local knowledge of informality together illustrate interdependent yet differentiated positions in the field, from which agents speak and act. The examples point to the field being structured into two main segments, a dominant and a dominated knowledge pole. While merely providing a somewhat rough picture, this gives a sense of the field's knowledge hierarchies in terms of competing claims to local knowledge of informality. These claims thus constitute in different ways informality as an interventionary object.
The field's dominant pole is characterised by claims to local knowledge that advance certain preset factors as constitutive of informality. As seen, legalist-institutionalist claims to local knowledge of informality assume their meaning from assumedly cross-culturally valid determinants such as costs and institutional barriers. The dominated pole, on the other hand, is characterised by knowledge claims that advance relatively unstrained conceptions of what constitutes informality. As exemplified by the IIED, these claims may emphasise the social and cultural context of informality, but involve fewer specific factors that on beforehand limit what local knowledge of informality may concern. As mentioned, furthermore, agents positioned near the dominated pole tend to advance claims that – through opposition and contestation – recognise the authority of orthodox legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims. The temporary authoritative positioning of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims to informality thus depends on all agents in the field.
Internal struggles and the different knowledge poles illustrate different constitutions of informality as an interventionary object. This, then, also concerns the borders of the informal field. More or less consciously, as agents seek to advance their particular knowledge of the object, they construct different relations to the object's outside, for instance in terms of the envisioned relationship between informality and the formal economy. From orthodox/dominant positions, informality is constituted as the inverse of formality. Legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims, as exemplified by CIPE, assume a strict dichotomy between the formal and the informal. The latter can be decreased (formalised) thorough improvements of the former. The borders of the informal field are thus enacted in essentialist and dichotomous terms, based on a determinist view of human agency. From heterodox positions, rather, and as exemplified by the IIED, the borders between informality and formality are made more ambiguous, malleable, and less predictable. For the IIED, ‘informality not only coexists with the formal economy; the two can be symbiotic’.Footnote 105 This is another rendition of the field's external boundary, from which the conception of informality as the inverse of formality does not make sense. Moreover, these internal struggles and differentiations also push the participating agents in the direction of particular outsides, while they – by necessity – also remain in the field.Footnote 106 Orthodox positions can involve agents such as CIPE that claim informality expertise based on a general profile as experts on private sector development and market-led solutions. Heterodox positions, by contrast, both advance more unstrained conceptions of informality and, by the same token, suggest the need for more specialised knowledge. As one IIED official puts it: working on informality is ‘part almost of our DNA’.Footnote 107
The history and internal knowledge contestations of the informal field, then, partly account for how come legalist-institutionalist claims to local knowledge of informality achieved epistemic authority in the peacebuilding missions to Bosnia and Kosovo, under conditions of multiple representations and potentially alternative governance arrangements. As the WB and the other IOs involved in economic reconstruction in Bosnia and Kosovo participate in the informal field, their peacebuilding activities on informality are structured by, and help structure, the knowledge dynamics and hierarchies of the informal field. The WB has been positioned near the dominant knowledge pole ever since the field's emergence. Its peacebuilding activities in Bosnia and Kosovo are thus shaped by this positioning, just as the Bank's financial support to de Soto, the ILD, and the UPRP project were crucial for the advancement of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims in the first place. The ILO, on the other hand, has experienced shifting positions in the field. From having been closely associated with the early dependency consensus, the organisation was subsequently drawn closer to the dominant pole. Moreover, and as mentioned, this pole not only attracts large peacebuilding IOs, but also national state agencies in Kosovo and Bosnia as well as local and international think tanks. Rather than either international or local, then, the formation of peacebuilding epistemic authority places some effectively transnationalised agents in authoritative positions.
What is significant here is that we cannot understand these peacebuilding organisations’ activities by treating them as freestanding, or by taking their representations and valued knowledge(s) as given. Rather, these organisations’ knowledge claims and practices are effects of historical and relational dynamics, struggles, and knowledge hierarchies that involve all agents in the semi-autonomous field of informality, whether or not these are directly engaged in the building of peace. As seen, the epistemic authority of legalist-institutionalist claims to local knowledge of informality depends not least on how agents located closer to the dominated pole nevertheless recognise these claims. Likewise, the alternative, but marginalised, representations of informality that existed in the Bosnia and Kosovo missions, and that could have informed other governance arrangements, resemble knowledge claims linked to the dominated pole of the informal field.
The epistemic authority and travel of legalist-institutionalist claims from Peru and Bali to peacebuilding in the Balkans were thus in part conditioned by relational and transgressive processes and struggles that brought informality into being as an interventionary object in the first place. That said, also struggles partly outside the interventionary field matter. While this illustrative analysis cannot do justice to the idea of a field of peacebuilding power, legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims can indeed be summarised in terms of an ‘ethnographic sagacity’, that would then form an overarching symbolic logic of peacebuilding. Legalist-institutionalist claims recognise the value of local knowledge while, simultaneously restricting the meaning of this to certain preset factors, much in the same way as discussed by Sending. Also important is that this particular constitution of the object of informality makes it translatable and portable to various contexts. This is an important characteristic of global governance objects in general.Footnote 108 The precise make-up of the costs of formality may be context-specific, but the explanatory primacy of costs is not questioned. By contrast, knowledge claims positioned nearer the dominated knowledge pole appear less easily translated into abstract notions, less easily portable.
Important to recall, however, is that the field of peacebuilding power stands in a two-way relationship to transnational interventionary fields. The former is thus shaped by the dynamics and struggles of a multitude of transnational fields of interventionary objects. While some recent observations point to a widespread acknowledgement of the value of local knowledge in peacebuilding,Footnote 109 of note is that a field of peacebuilding power and an overarching symbolic logic of peacebuilding can only be understood following the analysis of several fields of interventionary objects, and how these – potentially – involve struggles over different forms of local knowledge, each linked to different governance arrangements and outcomes.
To summarise, the illustration of various types of epistemic struggles that shape the transnational field of informality was guided by the fourth line of inquiry developed in the first part. While the analysis suggests that the authoritative positioning of legalist-institutionalist knowledge claims to informality can be summarised in terms of an ethnographic sagacity, it is vital (in contrast to Sending) to also place this in relation to the internal, field-specific struggles and acts of recognition that make this possible. Historically contingent object-bound struggles (whether or not explicitly recognised as such) also shape any potential overarching symbolic logic of peacebuilding. Changing epistemic hierarchies in interventionary fields would thus likely effectuate changes in the field of peacebuilding power. Moreover, attention to various types of struggles illustrates that an interventionary object attracts multiple agents from different institutional, professional, and geographical locations. Although in this case the interventionary field of informality has displayed a rather stable logic since its emergence, such ordering is an ongoing achievement that requires constant acts of safeguarding and boundary work amid multiple agents and contending knowledge claims.
Conclusion
This article has addressed a present tension in the literature on peacebuilding knowledge and expertise. It shows that the recent turn to Pierre Bourdieu's thinking tools is a fruitful way forward, but only if these tools are pushed further towards the relationalism, object-focus, and epistemological breaks at heart of Bourdieu's thinking. Based on this, the article develops a conceptual position based on an alternative reading of fields and struggles. This position was summarised as four new lines of inquiry. Subsequently, these informed an empirical illustration of how peacebuilding epistemic authority can be alternatively understood as inherently linked to the relational and transgressive processes through which contending knowledge claims bring an interventionary object into being. Looking specifically at how the making of informality as an interventionary object has shaped peacebuilding epistemic authority on informal economies and anti-informality operations, the article has demonstrated the plurality and transgressiveness of this, as well as how claimed local knowledge of informality is simultaneously valued and subjugated. Informality as an interventionary object in the Bosnia and Kosovo missions could, therefore, have been authoritatively understood in other ways, leading to other governance arrangements.
By offering a more firmly object-centred approach to peacebuilding epistemic authority, the article makes a conceptual contribution to the literature on peacebuilding epistemics and pushes it beyond its present tension. This, in turn, links to the relation between international studies and peacebuilding research more generally. As others have noted, it is problematic to assume peacebuilding as a distinct arena with little or no connection to international structures.Footnote 110 By shifting to analyse the formation of interventionary objects as a process in which peacebuilders participate but are not the sole architects of, we gain an understanding of how peacebuilding activities are both constituted by and constitutive of wider global arrangements and circuits of power that have significant sociomaterial consequences ‘on the ground’, in conflict environments and elsewhere.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of EJIS for their constructive and much helpful comments and suggestions. Many thanks to Berit Bliesemann de Guevara for her valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.
Anna Danielsson is Assistant Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. 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.
