The Use and Misuse of the ‘Local Turn’

Abstract

The following theoretical essay reassesses the critical project for peace and conflict research, and the implications of the related ‘local turn’. This represented an attempt to connect peace and justice more closely together by uncovering localised and subaltern political claims in conflict-affected societies, drawing on concepts of the everyday and hybridity, and on post-colonial and critical debates. The local turn’s subsequent and wide-ranging applications and appropriation were a reaction to the structural findings that were emerging in the field, which was no longer so clearly organised around hegemonic epistemologies, but was developing new ethico-political groundings (some of which indicated the direction of the emerging ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustaining peace’ framework). The local turn’s critical implications transcend such doctrines even if its wider application has often been problematic.

‘But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take’. ¹

Introduction

Peacemaking and peacebuilding theories, concepts and tools are connected to the status, legitimacy and stability of international order. They address political and structural issues, relating to security, territorial sovereignty, power-sharing, compromise, justice, rights and the nature of political order (democratic or otherwise). They are necessary not only to prevent systemic collapse but also tend to depend on the system itself, reflecting its internal paradoxes. Do they preserve the status quo shaped by power-relations, however, as an age-old imperial project (what Kant might have called ‘nonage’)? ² Or are they concerned with scientific and scholarly advances that improve how we understand the removal of violence, followed on by expanding justice and creating sustainability? ³ One attempt to spark further innovation emerged with the so-called local turn, developed in an article written by myself and Roger MacGinty in 2012–2013. This article was originally published in Third World Quarterly and has been widely referenced since then. ⁴ It aimed to resituate and deepen peace as a concept and a praxis for its political subjects, drawing on the authors’ early critical work in International Relations (IR) and in peace/conflict studies. ⁵

The authors argued that theories, concepts and practices of peace, peacemaking, peacebuilding and statebuilding had previously followed the interests of power, the state or international organisations. The article mounted a challenge against state-centric, neoliberal and liberal international order (LIO)-oriented epistemologies of peacemaking. ⁶ It tried to make post-colonial understandings of ‘subaltern’ political claims more audible in the then expanding – and mainly relatively named – LIO, which was becoming increasingly neoliberal rather than liberal. It married this with a critical platform to re-articulate the challenges many conflict-affected societies faced. The article hoped to bring newly claimed and expanding rights that went beyond simple voting, self-determination and subsistence rights into a wider but more bottom-up oriented discussion of peace and its epistemological frameworks, connecting peace with justice rather than security or capital. Any such engagement with ‘subaltern’ perspectives of peace in IR was necessarily critical and post-colonial, ⁷ a positionality with methodological implications that was subsequently lost in many responses. Spivak’s comment that the ‘subaltern could not speak unless resistance was recognised. . .’, was fundamental to the local turn, but also subsequently lost in the wider debates. ⁸

This current theoretical essay deals with theories of peace, which also inform peacemaking, peacebuilding, peacekeeping and statebuilding in the light of the local turn article and its wider trajectory. It endeavours to clarify some misconceptions about the original article, as well as to comment on the debates it helped stimulate. It does so in the spirit of the earlier critique of liberal peace thinking, ⁹ drawing on critical, feminist and post-colonial contributions. ¹⁰ To develop a reassessment of the critical project for peace and conflict research, this article draws upon an archive of functionalism, liberal internationalism and the liberal democratic peace literatures, as well as critical, Habermasian, post-colonial/decolonial, ¹¹ feminist ¹² and ethnographic developments. ¹³ These approaches challenged the 20th century state-centric and industrialised modernity, and similarly offer cautions for a new, potentially nihilistic ¹⁴ and/or multipolar era. ¹⁵

This subsequent essay critically interrogates the impact of the original article and related subsequent debates on the local turn, after a decade or so. Firstly, the article outlines the main challenges and critiques inherent in the ‘local turn’ literature on peacemaking and peacebuilding. Then, after outlining the challenge it raised against more mainstream work on peacemaking, particularly in policy framings, it turns to a discussion of its limitations and appropriation. Finally, this article offers some hints at the potential for the renewal of the critical impetus behind the local turn.

Achievements of the Local Turn

The local turn argument (which did not claim to be doing more than to be synthesising intellectual currents from other areas for IR) made the obvious point that local political agency was being excluded from peacemaking and peacebuilding, which was then in the guise of ‘liberal peacebuilding’. Thus, local peace agency needed to be better incorporated in ‘post-liberal’ frameworks that were emerging if their political legitimacy was to be maintained. ¹⁶ Despite the triumphalist narrative of western elites at that time, it was already clear that too much of the conflict-affected world philosophical and normative claims had been made about the LIO that did not reflect the reality outside of the hard boundaries of the ‘advanced democracies’. Local political claims could and should reshape the state, domestic, regional and international order, this being a key proposition of the original local turn article (though mostly ignored at higher levels of analysis).

The local turn debate was soon often understood as a literal and uncritical ‘impact’ oriented call for better local data, in parallel to working with (or ‘on’) local actors and micro issues, while disregarding structural and macro issues. ¹⁷ Worse, it could be seen as a patronising western example of counter-insurgency style thinking (the authors of the original article suffering from an unrealised colonial desire. . .). ¹⁸ Notwithstanding the limitations of ‘impact’ and policy interpretations, the subsequent debate has been broad reaching and has helped put local peace praxis, related political claims from subaltern actors, and a range of non-official actors, tools and positionalities on the agenda of international peace actors in the United Nations (UN) system, in the European Union (EU), African Union (AU) and other peacebuilding-linked organisations and actors. It has raised the issue of new types of internationalism, and so – for better or worse – has some significant practical impact. ¹⁹ For policymaking, where the local turn was widely adopted, it has supported a growing interest in mapping out localised peacemaking practices, attitudes and capacities in very wide range of conflict-affected societies, across networks and the international system itself (which was increasingly being understood as partly transversal and trans-scalar as the local turn article identified). ²⁰ This more mainstream archival adaptation meant that ‘conflict sensitivity’ could be developed in order to refine top-down governmental initiatives, which could then claim ‘local ownership’ while extending state authority. ²¹

Even so, and somewhat in contrast, the authors saw the local turn as an attempt at critical work on peace during the apogee of ‘liberal peacebuilding’, meaning it was a cipher for a break from mainstream, western thinking about peace more broadly – in conceptual, theoretical and methodological terms. This was aimed at contributing to a more ‘critical peace and conflict studies’. ²² It set out to challenge, not confirm, the problem-solving literatures and their depiction of the recent uncertain path of peacemaking as only minor problem requiring insignificant refinements to be introduced. Such problem-solving approaches had sought to make peace within the confines of Cold War structures, or later within western facing political liberalism. Subsequent work on the local turn brought these positions together with thinking on resistance, structural change, justice and sustainability as they might be reconstituted ‘after liberalism’.

This more critical version of the local turn drew on an eclectic range of contributors to what was then known as the third and fourth ‘debates’ in IR theory ²³ : Habermasian critical theory ²⁴ ; work by cosmopolitan thinkers such as David Held ²⁵ ; Edward Said and Noam Chomsky’s earlier contributions ²⁶ ; Richard Falk’s work on justice ²⁷ ; post-structuralist contributions such as key works from Robert Walker ²⁸ ; contributions of feminist thinkers like Cynthia Enloe ²⁹ ; critical IPE thinkers, such as Susan Strange ³⁰ and others. ³¹ It was heavily influenced by the then growing engagement of the discipline with Michel Foucault’s oeuvre, particularly on power, resistance and governmentality. ³² The work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak underpinned the key step the local turn critique tried to make in terms of positionality, scale, transversality and hybridity. ³³ Scholars such as Vivienne Jabri, Roland Bleiker and Francois Debrix had already previously begun to import such work into peace debates within IR ³⁴ (which were slightly antediluvian until that point). Debrix’s book in particular, which was an application of critical-theoretical work such as by Rob Walker, ³⁵ Jabri and Bleiker, opened up new practical and methodological possibilities.

The local turn article, but less so perhaps in the subsequent debates, rested on this critical and post-structural heritage and attempted to bring its implications into a sharper relief for peace thinking and tools. This meant challenging the continuing political salience of violence, similarly challenging the monopoly of elite structures of power, the ‘reductio’ logic of the territorial states-system, the power-logic of sovereignty, nationalism and the discrimination it all hid. It aimed to foreground the hidden, ‘local agency’ of peacemaking and understand how it contributed to the reform of political order, local, state-level and international. It unpacked global power-hierarchies and injustices in other words. All of those negative elements of traditional thinking about peace had also survived within the supposedly advanced form of liberal peace that emerged after Boutros Ghali’s part – ‘victor’s peace’ statement and semi-ethical renewal, the Agenda for Peace of 1992. ³⁶

There were significant possibilities that emerged from the local turn article and the subsequent debates. These included new (at least in IR) ethnographic, bottom-up and spatial methodologies designed to engage with local peacemaking, political and security issues (in other words to move away from ‘armchair theories’ of power and war, and to ‘. . .move off the veranda. . .’ methodologically). ³⁷ They supported – at a minimum – a better understanding of the need for, and issues of, ‘conflict sensitivity’ and ‘local ownership’ ³⁸ on the part of the UN, donors, international NGOs and the International Financial Institutions, as well as liberal peacebuilders.

Critical Agency, Resistance and Post-Colonial Global Civil Society

A substantial impact has been the increased non-northern and non-western academy’s engagement with, and work on, peace issues. ³⁹ This has supported the growing influence of new voices in scholarship and practice, particularly relating to matters of agency, resistance, ideology, the nature of peaceful political order and political reform. Furthermore, multi-disciplinary analysis has become common, partly helped by the subaltern positionality such critical approaches suggested, including across the arts ⁴⁰ and a wide range of associated practices. Everyday perspectives of peacemaking are much more clearly understood, ⁴¹ even if their limitations are not.

The local turn article and debates were a challenge to the notion of a relatively empty and unorganised ‘field’ that could be operated on from above as opposed to one that is entangled and relational, complete with hierarchies and power-relations. ⁴² It also foregrounded resistance and critical agency (which was one of its most noted early insights), ⁴³ dynamics and capacities which had been mostly ignored in conflict oriented analytical paradigms. This critical version of the concept has since been deployed across disciplines, from the arts to anthropology, international relations, political science and development studies, across conceptual areas from the city and urban planning, to protest and democratisation, all with the intention of displacing unjust hierarchies of power by creating or uncovering new tools based upon consent, legitimacy, empathy, sustainability and justice. Of course, despite all of this, debates are still often northern dominated and old hierarchies persist. ⁴⁴

The local turn article synthesised and also challenged existing frames of critical reference for peacemaking and for resultant political orders. Throughout post-Enlightenment political and historical writings there has echoed a key motif of the weak and powerless. This undercurrent indicated the development an understanding of, and a critique of, power ⁴⁵ – whether monarchy, religion, imperialism, the state, authoritarianism, totalitarianism or capitalism – and its institutional frameworks. Such a critique produced ‘enlightenment’ (‘Kant calls critique “. . .the critical movement that precedes Aufklärung. . .”’), ⁴⁶ which also promoted critical forms of agency, and thus redefined the everchanging conditions and demands for emancipation. According to Marx, political emancipation could be understood as entailing equality under the state and law regardless of then salient matters such as religion, property or other private characteristics. ⁴⁷ Cleary, such enlightenment critiques have become too limited in the contemporary world to understand the contemporary workings of power, the production of order, agency or the grounds for emancipation (which now would perhaps go much further into the realms of justice and sustainability than Kant, Marx or later Foucault could envision). ⁴⁸ Critique would now require much deeper reform of and innovation in political structures and peacemaking tools that maintain legitimate authority and order.

Drawing upon the histories of critique, enlightenment and emancipation remains helpful for this renewed objective. Critical literatures tend to refer to the dexterity with which hidden resistance from below is mounted, ⁴⁹ its wide-ranging but almost invisible networks, its political and ethical standing, and an understanding that counter-powers that may respond via a counter-revolutionary movement. They are historically familiar with the dangers of the development of a counter-revolutionary dialectic. ⁵⁰ The latter often depends on the debasement of scholarly findings and the undermining of social legitimacy, being very aware however that there is a delay between the re-emergence of base interests such as the utility of violence, and the conservative delegitimization of, and eventual reconstruction of, critique. There has also been a growing understanding that top-down power tends to be unaccountable and hegemonic. ⁵¹

Despite this sophisticated potential for critical thinking about peace in IR, which the local turn endeavoured to import into IR, most thinking and practice around peacemaking today remains focused on elite diplomacy, international mediation, formal engagements in politics, peacekeeping and military intervention in more forceful terms. This ‘mainstream’ has a weaker interest in social issues, civil society, social movements, rights, justice and development. Yet the story of peacemaking from below has been gradually but inexorably emerging.

Following a long line of debate and theory, the local turn article attempted to decentre (and decolonise) previous understandings of the peacemaking tools used to preserve ordered, top-down hegemony, from below, and in a long-standing tradition of critical challenges. Hunt has argued it helped develop a ‘thicker’ conceptual understanding of war and peace, as well as more context-sensitive forms of peacebuilding. ⁵² From the authors’ perspectives over 10 years ago, highlighting new peacemaking positionalities and tools and providing them with some emancipatory perspective, ones which have since been influential in policy and disciplinary circles since, was a major achievement. Similarly, various contributions to the attempt to break down state-centric and institutionalist control of peacebuilding, expanding the definitions of peace and the tools of peacemaking have been significant.

Revisiting the Structural Challenge

Structural and political economy concerns had already been widely discussed, seen as both the source of a peace dividend via open markets and structural reform, as all as reinstating a global hierarchy in which conflict-affected states could make little headway. ⁵³ Liberal internationalism had been argued to be an extension of 19th century colonialism extended to the framework of the modern states-system, which simultaneously offered self-determination and liberal rights (except to those in the margins). ⁵⁴ Liberalism within the LIO was seen as disabling (or making unnecessary) new or alternative approaches to political order emerging within conflict-affected states, as well as blocking alternative contributions and representation in international order itself. Peacebuilding would be illegitimate without liberal institutions, human rights and democratisation, but these often have remained partially implemented or not implemented at all and have been undermined by persisting hierarchies and massive inequalities in the global political economy. ⁵⁵ Consequently, liberal peace as a domestic and international political framework has never received global or universal local consent, indicating that it would soon be subject to ideological, geopolitical and multi-local challenges. At the time of the local turn, the liberal peace’s upon dependence on Eurocentric thinking, supplanting structural-material issues with identity, democracy and rights frameworks and the crudity of post-imperial territorialisation which it depended were becoming clearer.

This clarified a liberal philosophical, international and state-level project, which had coalesced under hegemony during the 20th century and hinted that these levels had become coercively or cooptively aligned with each other. Even despite such ‘convergence’ these elements of the LIO had limited local and social engagement partly because of methodological shortcomings in that era. This project was aligned around liberal hegemony (in practice and in ideology), itself aligned with policy-oriented scholarship particularly after the end of the Cold War, but was mainly parsimonious and pragmatic in its balancing of existing power structures against new rights claims from the new entrants into ‘international society’. ⁵⁶

Drawing from scholarly developments such as: Thomson’s ‘history from below’ ⁵⁷ ; critical theories such as those of Habermas ⁵⁸ ; the work of post-structuralists like Foucault and his interrogation of power, resistance, neoliberalism and governmentality ⁵⁹ ; Scott’s ⁶⁰ examination of powerless, everyday resistance; Lefebvre’s and de Certeau’s different perspectives on the everyday ⁶¹ ; and critiques of neoliberalism ⁶² ; post-colonialism and subaltern studies ⁶³ ; ethnography ⁶⁴ ; or debates on participatory forms of democracy and development ⁶⁵ ; and many other sources, the development of political order and related peacemaking tools had already long been understood as an elite and hegemonic endeavour. ⁶⁶ Local, everyday contributions had long positioned themselves as filling such gaps in the context of peacemaking and political order development. Yet they were soon locked into a reactionary struggle with both local and regional conflict dynamics, as well as inherent stasis at the international level under the conditions of western hegemony. Hegemony soon was illustrating once again how it was practiced in turning subterranean challenges for justice, representation and sustainability into counter-insurgency and stabilisation praxis (e.g., in Iraq or across the MENA region after 9/11), resurrecting the dialectical relationship between revolution and counter-revolution as a slow-moving, cyclical historical process. ⁶⁷ Is peacemaking an intervention in that process, to tame it, or camouflage, to push back the revolution, or to tame the counter-revolution?

The further conceptual development of the local turn debates ⁶⁸ connected critical scholarship on peace (note, not peacebuilding or statebuilding as a policy epistemology per se) with a better understanding of critical notions of emancipatory praxis. Hinsley and others (perhaps more radical) had already travelled this path, but had long been forgotten or marginalised in the rush to consolidate the LIO after 1990. ⁶⁹ The local turn article adopted the term ‘local’ metaphorically, not literally, in structural, positionality terms. It read the praxis of peace through its critical baggage with the global, civil and post-colonial peace constituencies, councils and networks ⁷⁰ that were emerging in conflict-affected societies, as well as through critical agency and resistance, ⁷¹ drawing on the notion of the subaltern that had been developed in the Global South. ⁷² It thus offered locally grounded but transversal, transnational and trans-scalar connections for international peace actors and theories with previously ignored or hidden local political claims under conditions of peacemaking and reform. These were set against the structural challenges peacemaking raised for the maintenance and consolidation of international order. This challenge saw the relationships and networks that emerged as agonistic (partly drawing on Shinko’s development of agonistic peace), ⁷³ as a developing framework for critical agency, ⁷⁴ drawing upon earlier bodies of work on functional cooperation, security communities, institutionalism, human needs, conflict resolution and transformation. ⁷⁵ This type of thinking was often underpinned by a critical understanding of politics as a political struggle over the distribution of land, rights, identity and resources, and an attempt to insert justice into social, state-level and international terrains of peace praxis. ⁷⁶ Underpinning the local turn was an intuition that political struggles were now less over territorial sovereignty in which to isolate and promote emancipation (e.g. for self-determination into ‘effective states’) but more for transversal access to transnational networks, for expanding rights against political and economic hierarchies, for global mobility and for sustainable social, economic and political systems, plus related access to knowledge and opportunities to add to the international public good. ⁷⁷

This approach opened the way for a theoretical and methodological step forward in terms of broadening the understanding of peace in IR, the ranges of actors involved in designing it and the methodological approaches that could be used. It contributed to more just and sustainable policy thinking and doctrines (if not practice), which prefigured the UN’s later ‘Sustaining Peace Agenda’, the ‘New Agenda for Peace’ and other transnational doctrines more recently emerging. ⁷⁸ Connections with work on peace’s pluriversality, entanglement and relationality could also begin to develop. ⁷⁹

All of these theoretical and methodological steps, twists and turns had already been signalled by earlier scholars, critical theorists and post-structuralists, feminist and environmentalist contributions and in IR and peace and conflict studies, by earlier scholars like David Mitrany, Edward Azar, John Burton, Elise Boulding or more recently Lederach, ⁸⁰ of course. The local turn helped to reframe and consolidate such earlier insights for a coming post-liberal shift, and for the War on Terror era, where the policy concept of peacebuilding was evolving into very ambiguous ‘statebuilding’ territory, including the development of concepts and policies related to stabilisation and resilience. ⁸¹ The local turn article expressed (and warned) in particular that failing to reposition peacemaking might lead back to earlier and cruder practices of power in the area, and the subsequent decade since the original article was published has borne this out. The development of feminist thought in response to counter-critique it was in particular a significant lesson for critical peace and conflict scholarship, yet much of was soon caught out by the sophisticated nature of counter-critique.

Indeed, what should have been foreseen was the need risky to establish ‘guardrails’ against the hegemonic co-optation of what was essentially a subaltern, structural challenge to mainstream realist and empiricist thinking, and its liberal and institutionalist ‘policy embeddedness’, as well as the encroachments of neoliberalism (which can be seen as a cipher for the local turn’s counter-revolutionary corruption). Much of this was on display as liberal peacebuilding turned into neoliberal statebuilding, and later stabilisation during the 2000s, more nakedly in the service of US foreign policy after the Iraq invasion. Work on the local turn often characterised transversal and transnational contributions to peacemaking as fragmented, isolated and unsupported in the face of structural and geopolitical dynamics and forces.

The Unintended Consequences of the Local Turn

Similarly, on the negative side of the ledger, disciplinary turns may have ‘fragmenting and destabilising effects’ in parallel to the provocation of radical potential. ⁸² This may be intended and productive in an emancipatory sense (which was the goal of the original article), but disruption can also undermine knowledge, and the destabilisation of any consensus also weakens methodological and ethical defences against co-optation and misuse (i.e. just as it appears that the local turn is itself partly contributed to a new counter-insurgency framework). There has been a risk that approaches to peacemaking may become even more deeply divided into multiple intellectual camps, also losing sight of a wider perspective – especially structural and normative questions that are too substantial to be dealt with solely by micro-scale research. The continuous morphing of peacebuilding through new turns ⁸³ also highlighted the political economy of academia where conceptual innovation, policy impact and agenda-setting knowledge has been privileged over reconciliation, justice and sustainability. ⁸⁴

What has been most surprising has, firstly, been the way that the critical agenda for emancipatory thinking about peace (drawing on discussions of the relationship between critique, enlightenment and emancipation), which the initial article was built on, was soon forgotten and ignored in favour of perhaps more descriptive or prescriptive versions ⁸⁵ : and secondly, how policymakers and policy-oriented scholars colonised some aspects of the argument effectively to reiterate the liberal peace project within the framework of territorial sovereignty to reimagine intervention and ‘programming’ as a counter-insurgency oriented project of datafication ⁸⁶ ; and thirdly, how easily the notion of a local and emancipatory peace ⁸⁷ project was depoliticised and further relegated to a kind of descriptive, counter-insurgency mapping project.

Indeed, it might be true to say that the citations, attention and substantial policy attention this article received turned out to be mostly for problematic reasons (although for many critical academics, PhD its students and civil society actors, there was an intuitive and normative engagement with its critique). The local turn was seen as ‘not local enough’, too normative, too complex, too radical, Orientalist, patronising, too idealistic and so on. Much of the counter-critique constituted a deflection from the massive structural-political challenge the article (which followed the path of critical theorists, post-structuralists, feminist and post-colonial thinkers) mounted against sedentary liberal and realist praxis in IR. ⁸⁸

Key Problems That Have Emerged

In practice, the LIO now appears relatively moribund after the Iraq invasion, the failures in Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, many frozen conflicts, Ukraine and regressions as in Sri Lanka or Cambodia, deadlocks in the Balkans and in Cyprus, war in Gaza and the wider Middle East, and in an era of populist-nationalist and authoritarian politics. The once vaunted political stance of the BRICS actors has been marred by their connection with the return of the political utility of threat and violence, especially the Russian President’s undoing of the proscription of violence in sub-Saharan Africa, Ukraine and Syria, as well as in the Caucasus. Similar patterns can be seen with China’s only slightly more subtle role in Hong Kong, Myanmar and Taiwan, less subtle harassment of Taiwan, as well as with liberal states’ murky connections with US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11.

Local peace actors have generally been marginalised and have lost their sponsors as the LIO has retreated as a result. The failure of the LIO, the fact that the BRICS appear normatively adrift and the marginalisation of local peace agency and transversal networks have undermined the local turn. Many critical (SDG-type) goals and prescriptions have been only marginally achieved, under the auspices of a political stalemate ⁸⁹ in most conflict-affected societies and set against the rise of populist politics. This development effectively reflects a clash between Enlightenment knowledge about peace, and its expansion into new non-western epistemological terrains – even as Enlightenment knowledge about peace was attempting to transcend its own limitations. ⁹⁰ At the same time, critical goals have been depoliticised and bureaucratised, and diverted into discussions of national, regional or hegemonic interests. Any gains have been easily rolled back towards a situation more familiar to the conflict management theories of the 1960s ⁹¹ : authoritarian nationalism, ideological struggle, the rise of the utility of violence in politics and geopolitics (or counter-peace). ⁹² This time, ‘discourse’ has proven to be comprised of ‘buzzwords’ rather than leading to actions and has been used to disguise the lack of structural progress, change or reform from countries likes Cyprus (which has hosted a peace process since at least 1964) ⁹³ to Timor-Leste, El Salvador ⁹⁴ or Bosnia, ⁹⁵ where little or slow implementation seems to have become an art form of prevarication. ⁹⁶ The key issues with the shifting from critique to superficial (but also superficially more inclusive) data gathering that the local turn seems to have followed can be summarised as follows.

Firstly, the then fashionable but rather ambiguous notion of a turn managed to capture attention. This was useful in cementing the research area and its underlying methods and ethics. But the term also has had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing a very limited version of what the article was working through at that point (in the context of major interdisciplinary advances and methods, along with the growing identification of Eurocentrism, and the War on Terror, among other empirical dynamics). In other words, a turn can be unstable and work both ways. It may point to the positive prospect for the adoption of new and improved thinking about peacemaking in this case, by representing the political claims of conflict-affected subjects to powerful and institutional actors, or it may signify the adoption and synthesise of a policy/theoretical discourse as a hegemonic policy apparatus but with little practical change, in order to gain short-term legitimacy.

The deeply embedded nature of conflict’s roots, the nature of power in intractable conflicts and the short-termism and limited capacity of key actors in the international system interested in more emancipatory forms of peacemaking point to the latter outcome. Most critical theorists were unprepared for this outcome (and yet needed to be). One of the oldest lessons of challenging embedded power, which is extremely practised in its reactive response to critical challenges, appears to be just how easily power can undermine the legitimacy, practical salience and reach, of scholarly knowledge and justice claims.

Secondly, some of the uses and deferential references to this concept have tended to take the concept as a literal injunction and instrumental methodology rather than an engagement with positionality and its structural and politico-ethical dynamics and consequences. The ‘local’ injunction was taken descriptively by some scholars, and prescriptively by many policymakers comfortable with liberal hegemony. This meant the apparent policy-scholarly agreement on the local turn was in fact a dialogue of the deaf for the most part. The political need for structural reform was often completely written out of research on ‘local peacemaking’ and ‘hybrid peace’ in the work of many scholars who came to the concept from other disciplines (such as anthropology), as well as in the adoption of the concept in bureaucratic policy (such as in the UN or by various donors and NGOs all over the world). This literal injunction favoured a depoliticised view of peacemaking, allowing conflict power structures to maintain themselves as well as counter-intuitively enabling the possibility of escalation, while reducing the scientific incentive for peace praxis to move closer to broadening understandings of justice. It was assumed that no harm could come from mere description, or from adaptive doctrines with little chance of implementation. Harm for subaltern actors was not well understood, however, especially from a macro-perspective.

Thirdly, in reality, ‘the local’ was only part of the methodological and conceptual framework the local turn article was trying to open up in IR and peace and conflict studies, drawing on critical argumentation which had already long been discussed in political theory, political philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, post-colonial studies, development studies and many more disciplinary areas. It connected to post-colonial, critical agency, which raised big political issues of structural, historical and cultural injustice. Yet, the work that has cascaded in the area has tended to represent micro approaches to peace as if they were the sole objective in their own right and could effectively be deployed to make peace without challenging major structural actors and systems. Nor was this work affected by geopolitics or ideology, which was unrealistic. It normalised a new ‘local silo’ that ignored the next important step, which was to look at how peace formation actors indirectly shaped peace agreements by voicing substantive political claims through them, impacting tools and shifting objectives at the state and international levels in a kind of feedback loop that defied the top-down ⁹⁷ epistemologies of peace that were then dominant (i.e. in liberal peacebuilding or the LIO). Indeed, the intellectual history of the concept of the everyday, and its deep implications has been mostly ignored, wildly simplified and essentialised, somewhat ironically since the local turn was first outlined.

Fourthly, and similarly, the concept of hybridity was received – and then forgotten – as if it had been stripped of its political and ethical dynamics, which ultimately pushed the local turn towards counter-insurgency epistemologies rather than decolonial approaches. Such strategies, oversights or blind spots, it was pointed out by colleagues often on the receiving end of peacebuilding, led to peace praxis resembling counter-insurgency strategies of imperial powers and authoritarian states. This was rather than following the scripts produced from bottom-up in peace formation frameworks of agency.

Fifthly, the resultant depoliticization of peacemaking (pointing to technocratic and bureaucratic versions of peace) fully contradicted the objective of the local turn and its attempt to bring peace closer to global justice, partly as a basis for everyday peacemaking and for a better understanding of the emergence of hybrid political orders. The liberal peace era together with the overlay of the War’ on Terror revived the resonance of a framework of ‘peace – with-counter-insurgency, making it difficult to keep the scholarship on non-violent, representative, inter-generational and justice-oriented dynamics of peace separate from existing international practices. Without a critical-theoretical framework, empirical work on peace also drifted far away, in terms of ethical ambition, from the understanding of peace that has been emerging in critical scholarship and even in global policy settings such as the UN Secretariat or the World Bank.

The history of previous local turns as well as social movements and civil society work suggests that any developments tend to be slow and opaque, and that policymakers only really engage with local political claims when much else has failed, when the existing system is about to fail or collapse, and their core interests are threatened more than they would be under the terms of a high-level peace agreement. This is why so many peace processes have focused on security through the state and territorial rearrangements, in order to lessen their negative impact on power-holding elites, but it is becoming increasingly hard to sustain any peace agreement that does not relate to local and subaltern political claims (except through illiberalism and authoritarianism). This was a blind spot that arose partly because of a rejection of political and international theory by many working on the local turn debates. Perhaps this was the most dangerous of the undercurrents that emerged from the local turn, which pointed to a convergence between the rise of populism in the West and around the world with the rise of a kind of academic populism, in which aspiration, hope and rhetoric (perhaps connected to ethical ideals or to national interests and policy) replaced a close engagement with the deep political and structural history of international theory, and relational dynamics of emancipation in a complex world.

Uncritique and the Depoliticization of the Local Turn

Ignoring Hybridity

Such problems have undermined the emancipatory intent of the local turn. ⁹⁸ Its deeper critical and structural heritage was merely implicit and was easily ignored. To avoid such depoliticization, work on hybrid political orders and hybrid forms of peace offered a way forward (starting with Australian and New Zealand-based scholars, particularly Brown, Boege and Clements working on Timor-Leste and the Pacific). ⁹⁹ It formed an early platform for the local turn; in that, the post-colonial theorisation of hybridity pointed to local justice, equality and representation questions ¹⁰⁰ that top-down liberal forms of peacebuilding had skated over, placing them in the context of the reform of the state and international political order. Matters of sustainability and indigeniety were also alluded to, beyond the lifeworld of the LIO. The local turn and its hybrid dynamics could not obviate the need to deal with ideological or justice questions raised by civil society developmental and social movements (who generally suspected that the West did neither want another Marshall Plan, nor wanted to pay reparations for colonialism, or bear responsibility for any proxy conflicts). Yet, after 1990s, the ‘international community’s’ embrace of rights and democratisation rapidly gave way to a United States and United Kingdom backed neoliberalisation of the politics of peace towards capital and ‘empire’ ¹⁰¹ – with or even over, rights and democracy (as was on full view in Iraq). ¹⁰² Northern Ireland, perhaps, received its Marshall Plan, even though this depended on a flimsy back-channel method ¹⁰³ supported by a hegemon (the United States plus the EU), but social justice/democratic outcomes for peace processes or peacebuilding eluded attempts in Cambodia, Bosnia and many other conflict-affected countries. Many of these cases suggested hybrid political outcomes were emerging, however.

Hybrid frameworks of politics partially accounted for local political claims and had some moderating effects on elites and power politics ¹⁰⁴ by making western accounts of peacemaking more sensitive to non-western political discourse, and starting the translation of local political claims outside of the Global North for a wider audience. But they also reiterated the unequal interplay of political forces, which led to a critique of the local turn as a form of counter-insurgency, resilience training and stabilisation, traps into which it could all too easily fall. Given that epistemologically the local turn was based on a ‘counter-counter-insurgency’ ¹⁰⁵ methodology, this concurrent criticism was perhaps intellectually inaccurate, but in practice local datafication and depoliticization became common. The more ‘local’ peace methods became the more they could critically identify the sources of conflict, but the less able they were to respond materially to deep structural and justice problems, from global capital to militarism, state-centricism and territoriality. This paradox risked reiterating the causal processes of contemporary conflict as peacemaking and peacebuilding methods and objectives (as counter-insurgency and stabilisation approaches may tend to do in that they also normalise hierarchy, inequality and structural or cultural forms of violence). ¹⁰⁶

The retreat from hybridity, which occurred soon after the local turn became mainstream meant that that the wide-spread adoption of a descriptive and prescriptive version of the local turn within in academic and policy circles rapidly turned it into a caricature of itself. In the Global South, a focus on alternativity, on grievance and justice, also played a role in undermining it from a Eurocentric perspective. Indeed, conflict-based power and institutions survived the local turn critique by co-opting many of these counter-claims, including through constant discursive but impact-free policy adaptation and their uses deep within the academy ¹⁰⁷ as a means of prolonging the transitional but still hierarchical order rather than resolving subaltern political rights claims. In effect this depoliticised, uncritical version of the local turn turned quickly into a mandate for localised, descriptive research, and epistemological co-optation and hypocrisy at the international level, and entitlement amongst global and local elites rather than reform and inclusion. This mandate tended to be apolitical and uninterested in reforming the state, the international or global scale of IR, or thinking beyond territorial sovereignty, liberal internationalism, liberal institutionalism or neoliberalism, as ordering systems in IR. This reluctance was buttressed by some marginal normative and ethical positioning, which was connected to the local turn, but was limited to aspiration and therapy. ¹⁰⁸

The uncritical ‘local’ soon become a silo, static, descriptive, full of petty conceptual squabbles over its boundaries and limitations (like territorial sovereignty but writ small). There was little critical agency, beyond pacified resilience and few political debates, apart from on ‘compliance’ (e.g. ‘becoming liberal’). The scientific politico-ethical repositioning of political subjectively in the local turn was lost. Yet, without a complex notion of the local, there could be neither reform, justice or sustainability, nor an understanding of the emergence of complex, hybrid polities. Hybridity helped to understand how peace, order, war, conflict and violence are entangled, relational global problems, and that peace historically is always being scaled up from multiple, networked, transgressive and complex notions of ‘locality’, which may also be controversially dependent upon external platforms (e.g. supporting a peace process, reform, security, democracy, rights and development).

The retreat from hybridity meant that local turn’s impact has thus been mainly in the realm of doctrine and rhetoric, and methodology, rather than effective practice, where instead it has been used to camouflage the lack of structural reform. This may have helped to methodologically ground a wide array of single case, comparative and conceptual research projects on the localised dynamics of peacemaking, which are producing empirical data and analysis about the dimensions of peace on a scale that has never before been achieved. ¹⁰⁹ However, localised data and concepts have not solved the inevitable power-relations or justice issues or responded to conflict-driving dynamics at state and international levels. ¹¹⁰

Hybrid peace frameworks were also deflected by emergent counter-peace dynamics: including surveillance capitalism, technologies of populism and the resurgence of territorial-nationalism and geopolitics. ¹¹¹ Shifting attention to a disembodied and disempowered ‘local’ rather than investigating more complex political hybridity, allowed such new technologies of governance to maintain the liberal and neoliberal governmentality of peacemaking tools and related research.

Despite these omissions and regressions, the local turn critique laid the way for a more post-colonial debate about peace to emerge by way of literatures on hybridity, ¹¹² even despite attempts to use the local turn and hybridity to consolidate the liberal peace. Hybridity pointed towards decolonial theories of peace, and its marginalisation and displacement by the ‘local’ as a descriptor has only intensified the decolonial critique. This has led to some speculation about a nihilistic finale for peace as a conceptual debate – a kind of uncritical and depoliticised understanding of the impossibility of peace. Yet, it is also clear that the end of peace (as a debate and praxis) would mean political systems could not maintain themselves, new rights claims could not be developed or acted upon and violence would maintain its political utility.

A Weak Platform for Expanded Rights Claims

This ‘uncritique’ pointed to another significant problem with the praxis associated with the local turn. New political claims were and could be made, but would they be incorporated into the liberal peace system or rights, or merely diverted into weaker doctrinal statements? Over the post-Cold War period it increasingly became clear that peace was embedded in power-relations underpinning the LIO, challenged by those geopolitical forces emerging in the Global South, Russia and China, and which predictably have constituted themselves as oppositional forces in an increasingly multipolar environment. Concepts of conflict resolution, mediation, thinking about the constitutional and legal design of peace, associated rights and justice issues, as well as now peacekeeping practices, have begun to fade from the international stage, and conflicts tend to be settled through force of arms and domination ¹¹³ (as appears to be the case in Syria, Ukraine or currently in Israel/Palestine). In practice, this has meant the fragmented international community is only paying lip service to local political claims in conflict-affected societies or even ignoring them completely (though local claims and advanced scholarship on peacemaking are corralled in UN or donor-state doctrine), as in Palestine and Syria over the last decade or far more. ¹¹⁴

Yet, even so, these political claims are expanding, and one of the most successful, culminative impacts of the local turn agenda has been that it made international actors aware of the legitimising function of local peace agency, its ethics of cooperation, pluralism, reconciliation and innovation, deep embeddedness and global, transversal and trans-scalar networks. This included the breadth of the political claims that were being made from such platforms in conflict-affected societies. A lack of resources, political will and perseverance undermined this engagement though, on the part of international actors, though global civil society remains engaged with a scattering of donors.

The reality of these theoretical and methodological blind spots was that effectively stalemates and blockages to peace, if not geopolitics, economic extraction and outright war (as in Somalia, Rwanda, DRC, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan) were camouflaged by the ‘parsimony’ of liberal peace theory and practices after 1990. They then drifted towards counter-peace praxes (from Cambodia to Afghanistan and Syria where authoritarianism, autocracy and low-level violence masqueraded as democratic peace, peace processes or ceasefires for a while) heralded by the return of authoritarian oppression and geopolitical instability (notable after the failures of the Minsk agreements for Ukraine). ¹¹⁵ On the theoretical side, the drift was towards descriptiveness, apolitical methods, artificial boundaries between ethics and advanced knowledge, towards utopian rather than grounded norms about peace.

This multiple slide also heralded the failure of this particular Enlightenment-facing phase of the critical scholarly project as well as much of the LIO ¹¹⁶ – and points to the need to reinvent it substantially. A new layer of the international peace architecture ¹¹⁷ – a historical framework that runs back in several layers to the early modern states-system in Europe – needs to be designed to stabilise the manifold failures of the old framework, as well as build new layers to deal with new forms of violence and resulting political claims, all in the expectation of a clearer synergy between peace, justice and sustainability.

The bottom-up, decentring view that the local turn facilitated, had as a primary objective the closer relationship between peace praxis, the expansion of rights and broadening notions of justice. ¹¹⁸ This immanent critique was perhaps in keeping with a world in which emancipatory forms of governance, redistribution and the expansions of rights and material welfare was ontologically thought to be possible and acceptable in a limited, liberal sense. ¹¹⁹ Indeed, this hypocrisy has been the grounds for most ‘provincial’ Eurocentric critique, but its limited perspective has little to offer for local peacemaking which diverges from liberalism according to much local data now available, nor in a multipolar international framework where the LIO is now strongly contested, or where the ambitions of local participation for peacemaking would be thought of very differently even when compared with critical notions of emancipation (i.e. in terms of contesting territorialism, nationalism, authoritarianism, imperialism, stratification and a range of injustices). Indeed, such versions of peace and order have been seen from below (as well as by some elites) to be neither possible nor acceptable in many cases. Peace of the sort understood by elites, states and liberals remains visible to only elites as with justice or sustainability constituents, but from the perspective of local turn agency, this may not constitute peace. Simultaneously, understandings of peace from the bottom-up perspective are shielded – or even blocked – by the dominance of top-down praxes.

Conclusion: Towards Emancipatory Rather Counter-Insurgency Epistemologies

The local turn has enabled more local engagement with peace praxis, meaning more epistemological space could theoretically be created for networks of local voices, actors and scholars, as well as for the transmission of knowledge about peacemaking. This has helped highlight local solutions, dynamics and micro-processes, even if they contravene political interests, and it has contributed to the slow decolonization of knowledge about peacemaking on article at least. It indicates that peacemaking is political and requires engagement with the problems of power, the distribution of resources, recognition and status, rights and ultimately the nature of legitimate political authority and order, among many political issues – a peace with epistemological (or global) justice to paraphrase Bhambra. ¹²⁰

Yet, the local turn has also tended to trivialise such major political questions and has been used instead to gather data on methods, territorial spaces, custom, resilience, local conflict avoidance tools and approaches. It has constituted the local as a kind of micro-territorial and sovereign entity, imitating and awaiting being scaled up to the state, within the putative LIO (or within another of the emerging poles of international order). In developing in this manner, reminiscent of counter-insurgency thinking – at least in preliminary terms – the local turn has inadvertently perhaps tended to obscure the political issues that war and conflict – and research therein – revolve around. Yet, the local turn has also helped break open a previously relatively exclusive focus on state and elite-based peacemaking with a very minor role for alternative actors and approaches, and it has begun to reconnect ‘the local’ and its political claims and networks to praxes of intervention, state reform and the restructuring of the international. It has partially succeeded; therefore, in that such justice-oriented issues are more prominent, but it has also turned in on itself. Perhaps the next step would be to look again at its political, structural and global justice dimensions (as was envisioned in the original article), rather than separate its datafication and positionality implications from the existing structural disjunctures of world politics.

The collaboration of critical peace and conflict scholarship with the descriptive and prescriptive datafication of the ‘local’ for neoliberal, geopolitical, counter-insurgency and state-centric objectives has been commensurate with only discursive impact. This is why it appears that the direction of some of the later work represents a kind of academic populism, ¹²¹ in which the key questions and problems were ignored in the haste to gather data to support careers, policy-driven objectives, or the state, and political theories and philosophies that have long dealt with such issues were also ignored. This exploited the new technological possibilities of bottom-up and participatory research methodology, but the ethical engagement and vocation of working and geopolitical for contemporary and with others was lost in the increasingly liberal, neoliberal or nationalistic format of academia. This development was also ultimately indirectly (perhaps by omission) connected to a policy, methodological and epistemological reconsolidation of ‘national interests’ through academic ‘policy impact’ orientations (as opposed to the former interest in global/local issues under the liberal international framework). ¹²² This highlighted methodological nationalism over methodological liberalism or ‘methodological everydayism’. ¹²³ Thus, the critical research agenda became neutralised in an attempt to disallow political or structural issues and consequently to concur with the anodyne, problem-solving line that a lot of policy has taken over the last 30 years. This neutralised the ethical and political dimensions of theory and data, and followed policy prescriptions rather than contextual evidence on structural reform and justice. It has deflected the developing concept of peace from an emancipatory agenda and into a stabilisation and counter-insurgency project for neoliberal hegemony (a project which is now collapsing before our eyes).

Thus, the wider local turn has not delivered on the core ethico-political challenge of how to reconstruct peaceful politics from below, and what kind of state (ness) and international/global system would enable that to happen. Yet the local turn was an attempted corrective against such morbidities, trying to follow alternative sets of data rather than the usual quasi-imperial scripts of peacemaking. From this point of view it was a failure (perhaps even a therapeutic one), ¹²⁴ although it has kept a hint of underground critical thinking about peace and justice alive. A possible withdrawal from peacemaking as a critical enterprise has been a somewhat predictable and contrary result, sparked as a reactionary dynamic by the structural and justice claims that were emerging in the critical literature on peace and conflict studies. The goal of the development of peace and conflict studies, conflict resolution, transformation, even liberal peacebuilding, as well as concepts like peace formation, hybrid and everyday peace, ¹²⁵ and ultimately the local turn was to connect peacemaking’s subaltern subjects with questions of power, justice, subaltern political claims, sustainability and alterity. Yet, since the local turn the situation has probably become more difficult for local peacemakers and transversal because of the structural shifts and failures we have seen, the collapse of international dialogue, weakening standards and law, and the substantial reduction of donor funding for civil society actors and movements. The more the local turn pushed towards concepts of peace-with-justice, the more reactionary the resistance it has faced, including within the LIO, as well as amongst its non-western challengers where contemporary ambitions for peace seem extremely limited once more (in the light of the various responses to wars in Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and others).

At the same time, the epistemological and political possibilities for a networked global civil society, within the global commons, are greater than ever in history, as is the scale of the international peace architecture itself (even if much of it is a legacy from past systems and their breakdowns). Furthermore, the local turn may have helped lay the ground for future innovations in peacemaking in trans-scalar and transversal, perhaps pluriversal terms, just as civil society and social movements have often endeavoured to do over the last few centuries. ¹²⁶ Its practical failure to challenge hierarchies in IR, however, has led to its bureaucratization and depoliticization and risks undermining its emancipatory salience.