Activating archives for the practice turn in International Relations

Abstract

International practice theory (IPT) posits the primacy of empirics over theorisation, but what counts as empirical data? In this article, we discuss IPT scholars’ methodological preferences, specifically their prioritisation of ethnographic research over text-based analysis, the latter being understood as providing inferior access to practices. To contribute to a revision of IPT’s dismissive stance towards document analysis, we suggest bringing IPT in conversation with Critical Archival Studies (CAS) – a body of scholarship grounded in a relational and dynamic ontology of archives and committed to analyses of their embeddedness in politics and power relations. We argue that IPT can benefit from activating an analytical sensibility towards the archival practices of record-making, record-keeping and record-using. To support this argument and demonstrate its analytical value, we revisit official accounts of the interactions between interveners and the ‘targets of intervention’ during the United Nations’ Transitional Authority in Cambodia. Through an in-depth analysis of a unique archival collection of 835 Khmer-language letters the Cambodian people sent to Radio United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in 1993, we provide new perspectives on the people’s lived experiences during the intervention, while also illuminating the implications of archives in the enabling and justification of dominant intervention practices.

Practice theorists have made an important contribution to the field of International Relations (IR) by exploring socially meaningful patterns of action, focusing first and foremost on practitioners’ perspective. This article offers a contribution to the vibrant body of literature on international practice theory (IPT) by broadening the discussion about how practices can be studied empirically, something ‘that has so far received the least attention from practice theorists’ (Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 457) while also being recognised as one of the future drivers of practice theory debate (Bueger and Gadinger, 2017: 10). This debate goes to the heart of what IPT stands for. For Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, ‘the best selling point for practice theory is a simple one: it tells you exactly what to look for among messy empirical materials – practices!’ (Adler and Pouliot, 2017: 3). ¹ This is indeed a compelling selling point and one of the crucial reasons why IPT has drawn a lot of attention in the field of IR. Further adding to the focus on the empirical nature of the project, Adler and Pouliot add, ‘the contribution of practice theory to IR may only be judged in terms of how it is put in practice in the course of empirical research’ (Adler and Pouliot, 2017: 3). This is where we think we have something to contribute to the conversation. In the key article launching the practice turn in IR Neumann (2002) argues for the value of empirical analysis in clear contradistinction to desk-based, ‘armchair’ analyses in IR. If the IPT scholarship is in theory open to all methods and approaches, there is therefore a notable prioritisation of specific qualitative methods at play, namely interviews and participant observation, judged better suited to get ‘closer’ to practices and enabling researchers to ‘be immersed and practices to be observed directly’ (Walter, 2019: 539–540; emphasis in original).

The general aversion towards what is dubbed ‘representational knowledge’ (Pouliot, 2008) in the IPT scholarship further substantiates this methodological preference. Written expression of thoughts are understood as necessarily entailing an element of (sub)conscious reflection. Documents that contain ‘individualized and often heroic narratives’ are therefore characterised as ‘ego-documents’ by one key IPT scholar (Bueger, 2014: 402). These documents provide ‘hints and clues about practices’ (Bueger, 2014: 402); however, a practice ‘exists beyond text’ (Ralph and Gifkins, 2017: 634). As such, texts ‘do not provide direct access to practices’, and hence should be ‘carefully interpreted’ (Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 457). One practice scholar goes so far as to declare texts potentially ‘manipulative’ (precisely, more manipulative than interviews) and thus to be used with even more caution (Cornut, 2017).

In the same breath, the IPT scholarship has also noted the promise of document analyses to observe ‘the politics and power relations’ of how documents are produced and used (Bueger, 2023: 152; Pouliot, 2020) or to complement other research methods (Adler-Nissen, 2014; Adler-Nissen and Drieschova, 2019; Cornut and de Zamaróczy, 2021). However, the prioritisation of the ‘field’ remains central in the IPT scholarship, with several prominent scholars noting the ‘lack of awareness on historical method’ (Wallenius, 2019: 115), the ‘demotion of historical analysis’ (Sending, 2017: 8) and a marginalisation of text-based analyses. Our article aims to further erode these methodological tensions by demonstrating how (critical) archival research can contribute to the study of practices in IR, but also in the sub-fields of diplomacy and history, notably through the analysis of the politics and power relations embedded in archives.

The article is divided into three main sections. In the first section, we discuss the methodological preferences associated with IPT, specifically its preference for immersive observational research. We argue that the concept of ethnographic sensibility creates a methodological opening to blur the unnecessarily sharp distinction between the proverbial desk and the field. In the second section, we expand on this discussion by bringing IPT in conversation with CAS – a body of scholarship that proposes a dynamic and relational ontology of archives. Crucially, the work in CAS draws researchers’ attention to the practices of record-making, record-keeping and record-using to assess and probe power relations and resulting biases. Here, an ethnographic sensibility finds its expression in the activation of archives, that is, an awareness of and reflection on the archives’ makings and doings, including their role in informing or supporting given configurations of power relations. Finally, we activate a set of archival collections on the UN intervention in Cambodia to uncover the lived experiences of ‘targets of intervention’ (Sabaratnam, 2017: 7) while also illuminating the implications of archives in the enabling and justification of dominant intervention practices.

Beyond the desk? Debating methodological preferences in the practice turn

One of the key characteristics of IPT scholarship is its prioritisation of ethnographic methods, that is, interviews with practitioners or participant observation. As Pouliot argued, practice theory is less a substantive social theory than a thick methodology (Pouliot, 2016: 49), a commitment to the primacy of the empirical. However, what is the epistemological nature of this ‘thick methodology’ exactly? One of the starting points for many practice theorists, as expressed by the scholar who arguably launched the conversation in the field of IR, is the understanding of practices in contradistinction to ‘armchair analysis’ or ‘text-based analyses of global politics’ (Neumann, 2002: 628). As such, and in the words of key IPT scholars, ‘the concept of practice is valuable precisely because it also takes us ‘outside of the text’’ (Adler and Pouliot, 2011: 2–3). As a result of this epistemic position, the practice turn has come to be associated with a general focus on participant observation, the ‘gold standard’ in most ethnographic traditions (Sallaz, 2018: 482), ² along with interviews with practitioners, as valid and privileged methodologies to access practices and their evolution (Bueger, 2014: 399; Cornut, 2017; Pouliot, 2007: 369–370; Pouliot, 2012: 50). The main IPT methodological assumption is that ‘the social scientist must do field work to explain the world’ (Lequesne, 2015: 352). This is true even if IPT scholarship explicitly recognises the difficulties of doing ethnography (Nair, 2021: 1302), especially in terms of time and financial commitment (Bueger, 2014: 399–400; Cornut, 2017; Pouliot, 2007: 369; Pouliot, 2012: 48; Pouliot, 2014: 246).

These convictions manifest in a distinct methodological position vis-à-vis text-based or documentary research. Scholars have broadly described texts as providing only inferior access to practices and engaged in a general demotion of document analysis as a fallback plan for researchers, when ‘there is just no other solution’ (Cornut, 2017) or when ‘practitioners are not available to talk’ (Pouliot, 2012: 49; Pouliot, 2014: 248). As textual analysis is deemed insufficient to understand the practical logics that go into practices, research with documents is only justifiable ‘when other methods are not viable’ (Bueger and Gadinger, 2018: 151) or not available, such as in historical contexts (Pouliot, 2007: 366–367; Pouliot, 2012: 52; Pouliot, 2014: 248), ³ ‘which is not ideal’ (Andersen and Neumann, 2012: 464). Textual analysis, subsumed within the wider category of discourse analysis, is deemed insufficient to understand the practical logics that go into practices (Pouliot, 2012: 49). For Cornelia Navari for instance, ‘a focus on discourse or text alone threatens to leave practice behind’ (Navari, 2010: 622). Any text-based analyses of global politics need to be ‘complemented by different kinds of contextual data from the field’ (Neumann, 2002: 628). Practice theorists are therefore advised to ‘consider documents in so far as sayings and doings cannot be observed directly’ (Bueger, 2014: 389). In the best-case scenario IPT scholars present document analysis as complementing participant observations or interviews (Cornut and de Zamaróczy, 2021: 331–332; Adler-Nissen, 2014: 21, 202). Even when demonstrating the potential of tracing practices in documents, the original position of IPT as privileging participant observations and interviews is therefore not challenged.

To support a reconsideration of IPT’s methodological preferences to access practices, it is therefore useful to turn to broader disciplinary debates about what ethnography necessarily entails. Here, one can distinguish between two main positions. Some scholars narrowly equate ethnography with distinct methods, such as participant observation and in-depth interviews. Ethnographic research then requires a scholar’s ongoing and close engagement with their participants in the field; a valued principle that should ‘never be given up to armchair anthropology’ (da Col, 2017: 4). Importantly, however, this position is contested by scholars who favour a broader conceptualisation of the ethnographic approach as a methodology that is predicated on a researcher’s ability to hone an ethnographic sensibility to access the life worlds of others (Ingold, 2014; Jackson, 2008; McGranahan, 2018; Vrasti, 2008: 286). Where a focus on ethnographic methods underscores the distinction between fieldwork and deskwork, the concept of ethnographic sensibility can contribute to blur or even transcend this boundary.

As the practice of description that is ethnography (Ingold, 2014: 390) is premised on an intersubjectivity between researchers and researched (da Col, 2017: 3; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992: 8), ethnographic sensibility captures the acknowledged need for sustained reflexivity. Thus understood, the concept can be usefully expanded to a broader range of data collection or interpretation practices and inform, for example, a researcher’s ‘close readings of archival material, examinations of contemporary texts, interviews, and even survey data’ (Simmons and Rush Smith, 2021: 234; Schatz, 2009: 6). As Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith posit, ‘what matters most is how scholars approach the material gathered from these sources – that is, paying attention to the political meanings embedded in these materials’ (Simmons and Rush Smith, 2021: 234).

To expand the proverbial ‘field’ to archives, scholars have already proposed to approach records ‘partly as if they had been produced through field work’ (Ortner, 1995: 173) or analyse them as if they were ‘someone’s fieldnotes, attempting to reconstruct from them the world view and practices’ which produced them (Verdery, 2014: 39–40). Others have convincingly argued that ethnography extends beyond the empirical eye and that it is possible to do ‘ethnography in the archives’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992: 11), an ethnography of documents (Hull, 2012), or ‘history in the ethnographical grain’ (Darnton, 1989: 3). Diane Vaughan, for instance, implemented a ‘historical ethnography’ to understand NASA’s decision-making processes in the context of the launch of the Challenger and engaged in ‘an attempt to reconstruct structure and culture from archival documents and interviews to see how people in a different time and place made sense of things’ (Vaughan, 2008: 71). Work in IPT that reads practices as document-patterned ways of doing things (Pouliot, 2020: 754) has likewise demonstrated careful attention to ‘meaning-making, identity-forming and order-producing’ activities (Nicolini, 2013: 9).

Yet, to motivate a more emphatic inclusion of archival research into the methodological repertoire of IPT scholars, the concept of ethnographic sensibility needs to extend beyond a researcher’s efforts to carefully assess documents for their diverse meanings and include systematic reflections on the political interest and power relations that produce and sustain archives and their records. For this purpose, archival scholars’ dynamic conceptualisation of archives as actively engaged in the ongoing mediation of socio-political relations is particularly valuable.

Active archives: bringing IPT in conversation with CAS

Archival studies and practices have undergone a significant transition as a field in the last two decades. In reaction to classical or orthodox archival studies, we have seen the emergence of critical archival studies (CAS), with its twin understanding that power permeates every aspect of the archival endeavour (Schwartz and Cook, 2002) and that ‘there is no neutral in archives’ (Caswell et al., 2017). Departing from a critical interrogation of archivists’ relations to power and justice, CAS is engaged in an extensive theoretical, empirical, and political projects to reform archival research and professional practice. We think that the core tenets informing these scholars’ critical methodological work are useful to further probe the rationales for the dismissive treatment of archival research and text-based analyses in the context of IPT.

CAS is grounded in the conviction that archives are simultaneously expressive and constitutive of socio-political hierarchies. As such, the analyses of critical archival scholars invariably pay close attention to the political interests, social relations, and material conditions that create and sustain archives (Carbajal and Caswell, 2021). Many of the early and seminal works traced how oppressive systems of governance shaped dominant archival theories and practices (Bastian, 2003; Harris, 1997; Stoler, 2009). Rejecting the notion that archives merely document how elites and their institutions imposed rules and orders to their benefit, these scholars designate them with an agentic role in the shaping of power relations, holding the ‘very possibility of politics’ (Harris, 2005: 175). Making transparent how elites’ claims to knowledge and authority are intimately tied to (written) records and the status accorded to them in dominant systems of power and law, for instance, foregrounds archives’ direct and ongoing implication in the shaping of socio-political roles, hierarchies, memories, and identities. The definition of archives as active sites that shape ‘what is knowable and known’ about people and their communities (Blouin and Rosenberg, 2006: viii) does therefore see archives as epistemologically bound up in ‘the doing’ of politics.

The shared notion of archives as active furthermore entails a commitment to their conceptualisation as procedural and relational spaces. CAS’s decision to foreground and scrutinise the diverse processes and practices of record-making, record-keeping, and record-using concomitantly contributes to a revision of archival roles and responsibilities. The rejection of the view that records are merely collected, stored, and then accessed gives greater visibility to the multitude of actors that are (formally and informally) involved in the makings and doings of archives and reveals the responsiveness of their practices to shifting configurations of power. The creation of records is then, for example, no longer considered to fall exclusively within the purview of elites, but is instead conceptualised as embedded in broader, community-based processes – with important implications for concepts of provenance and ownership (Bastian, 2006). Archivists, for their part, are not merely responsible for collecting and preserving records as testimonies to past events, but are tasked with the critical appraisal, categorisation, or contextualisation of records and the moderation of their uses to confront injustices in the here and now (Caswell, 2021). For the same reasons, CAS scholars have repeatedly – and at times successfully – urged researchers from other disciplines to be mindful of the advancements in the field and review their own archival practices in light of pertinent theoretical and methodological innovations. Postcolonial scholars have, for example, benefitted from novel conceptualisations of archives and records to engage (archival) silences and elevate the lived experiences of marginalised communities; transitional justice scholars have benefitted from the shift of emphasis from records’ content to their contexts to assess their evidentiary character (Elander and Hughes, 2024); and humanities scholars and historians benefit from CAS’s insistence on the materiality of archives to conduct critical appraisals of their contributions to the theorisation and creation of archives in the digital age (Carbajal and Caswell, 2021; Kirschenbaum, 2013).

These transdisciplinary debates provide an encouraging opening to bring the IPT scholarship in close conversation with CAS. After all, Bueger and Gardinger (2017: 11) mused that fellow scholars could ‘ask other disciplines such as history or anthropology for their historiographic and ethnographic tools’ and critical archival scholars are insistent that such knowledge exchanges are necessary and beneficial. It is, however, important not to approach the insights offered by CAS in an all-too instrumental manner – to simply collect more or better data. As neatly captured by references to their work as a ‘movement’, its scholars engage in ongoing disruptions of archival ontologies and epistemologies for explicitly political reasons, namely, to uncover, explain, and rectify injustices (Carbajal and Caswell, 2021). We do therefore think that the most valuable entry point to rethink and revise IPT’s methodological stance towards archives and texts through CAS is provided by their scholars’ shared interest in the uncovering of people’s lived experiences of socio-political hierarchies.

To capture the mutually reinforcing interplay between critical archival theories, methodologies, and (political) practices, CAS scholars posit that archives are not accessed but activated. Rather than merely capturing the process of making a record or archive actively useful for a given purpose, the concept of activation draws attention to a researcher’s crucial positioning at the intersection between an archive’s inherent possibilities and the selective and varying manifestations of its potentials to (re)shape socio-political life. Each activation of an archive, as Caswell (2014: 69) puts it in reference to Verne Harris’ (2002) influential article, may only provide ‘a sliver of a window into the event’, but archives ‘are a glass house, made entirely of windows’. Researchers are encouraged to think of themselves and their work as becoming part of the social life of archives and observe the socio-political practices animated by the records as part of the archive’s doings (see also: Beerli and El Qadim, 2024).

Even without sharing the same strong normative commitment, the notion that archives are activated not accessed provides two important conceptual innovations for IPT scholars that align directly with their methodological preferences. First, the grounding of archives in a dynamic and relational ontology allows us to further blur artificial boundaries between the (so-called) field and the archives and second, its epistemology supports a practice of reflexivity in the archives that is sensitive to contextual knowledge. Importantly, the decisive shift from a passive view of archives and records as sources to an active understanding of them as constantly (re)created through a multitude of practices, provides the researcher with opportunities to assess, probe, and critically interrogate records for their (potentially biased) role in supporting a given configuration of power relations. In contrast to the somewhat helpless role evoked by the idea of ‘manipulative’ documents, the concept of activation preserves the researcher’s agency.

In a deliberate echo of Pouliot’s (2008: 285) call to ‘‘‘go to the village’ and recover the logic of practicality in social life’, we do therefore insist that IPT scholars can go to the archives for the same purpose. However, whereas scholars in the field need to approach their observations with an ethnographic sensibility for tacit understandings and their expression in (routine) practices and interactions, archival researchers must sharpen their senses in search of evidence for the practices of record-making, record-keeping, and record-using that make the archives and shape their doings. To illustrate the validity of these arguments, we are now turning to an archival analysis of United Nations peacekeeping practices. Previous ethnographic work has already shown how everyday practices of international interventions can shape implicit and explicit hierarchies and structures of international inequality (Autesserre, 2014; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Randazzo, 2017). Similarly, the existing literature on UN interventionism and knowledge production in peacebuilding has analysed how agents of intervention socially construct the policy problems conflict-affected countries are seen to pose and in doing this silence local dissenting voices and shape international interveners’ actions (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić, 2019). The activation of peacekeeping archives, we aim to demonstrate, can provide us with a new vantage point on these patterns of interactions and illuminate the enduring implications of archives in the enabling and justification of dominant intervention practices.

Archival research in action: tracing UN intervention practices in Cambodia

Our empirical illustration focuses on the documentary records of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (1992–93). More specifically, we activate archival records documenting the Information and Education Unit’s outreach campaign – designed to educate the Cambodian people about their role and responsibilities in the ongoing peace process – to probe and challenge dominant intervention narratives. As succinctly argued by Autessere, ‘narratives constantly interact with practices. To begin with, some narratives emerge from practices. [. . .] Furthermore, practices make possible and sustain dominant narratives already in existence [. . .]. Conversely, existing dominant narratives also enable and justify specific practices’ (Autesserre, 2014: 34–35). Critical archival studies, for its part, emphasise the importance of assessing how archiving practices contribute to the production of knowledge and narratives. Activation consequently entails a commitment to reflect on archives’ emancipatory potentials and the possibilities of records to disrupt elite-centred or otherwise marginalising accounts of events.

The analytical access provided by bringing CAS into conversation with IPT can notably support a broadening of the scope of observation on relevant patterns of interaction during the intervention and the practices informed and motivated by them. First, we provide a summary of the information campaign’s implementation and impact as related through firsthand observations by, and interviews with participating interveners and contemporary observers of these practices. Then, we consider how official accounts of the mission interact with archiving practices of the United Nations. Finally, we activate an archival collection of Khmer-language letters the Cambodian people wrote to communicate with the interveners in 1993 to decentre accepted notions of agency underpinning the dominant narratives and draw attention to hitherto disregarded patterns of interactions that informed and sustained emerging intervention practices. It is not our aim to dismiss or discredit interveners’ understandings of their doings at the time. Rather, we offer a subtle change of perspective on people’s lived experiences during the intervention to demonstrate the benefits IPT scholars can derive from bringing an ethnographic sensibility to their engagement with archives-as-practices.

Informing and educating the Cambodian people: accepted narratives of the UN intervention

The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was tasked with the implementation of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements between Cambodia’s four conflict factions and 18 other nations. For the first time in the organisation’s history, the UN took over the administration of a country to facilitate the transition and organise free and fair elections. Headed by the Secretary-General’s Special Representative Yasushi Akashi, the peacekeeping force of the transitional authority comprised more than 20,000 staff members and was supported by a USD 1.6 billion budget. The establishment of a new, internationally recognised Cambodian government by means of a free and fair nationwide election was critical to the success of the ambitious mission and the implementation of the country’s agreed-upon rehabilitation plan. To effectively implement their public information campaign, the Information and Education Unit (Info/Ed) created its own radio station. Radio UNTAC, as this station is widely known, was located in the capital Phnom Penh. In cooperation with Cambodian staff members, UN officers fluent in the local Khmer language prepared and presented information related to the peace process from 9 November 1992 until 22 September 1993. Thereafter, the radio station was closed. Initially its audience could only listen to them for a half-hour news segment each day, but the airtime was continuously increased. In the lead-up to the elections the station broadcast for up to nine hours a day. On Election Day, more than 90 percent of Cambodia’s eligible population cast their vote. Contemporary observers immediately credited Info/Ed’s work for this surprising outcome, concluding that ‘the voter education campaign, in particular that conducted by the [United Nation Volunteers] and Radio UNTAC, had worked’ (Findlay, 1995: 86; Chon, 2001).

In their evaluations of the mission, observers consistently praised the station’s provision of clear information about voting procedures and formalities, democratic principles and human rights, as well as the radio’s role in countering misleading information by the former warring factions (Doyle and Suntharalingam, 1994: 124, 136; Doyle, 1995: 55; Doyle and Sambanis, 2006: 176–177; Findlay, 1995: 43, 76, 86; Marston, 1996; Zhou, 1994). ‘In assessing how well its own message was being received by Cambodians’, Michael Doyle wrote, ‘Info/Ed developed what may have been the UN’s first political intelligence Department’ (Doyle, 1995: 55). The ability to ‘tailor and refocus its programmes to correct misperceptions or misunderstandings, as well as to identify gaps in understandings among the Cambodians’ was credited as having enhanced the mission’s credibility and instilled people’s trust in the mission (Lehmann, 1999: 64–65). These sentiments were echoed by the UNTAC leadership. In an interview live from a polling station on Election Day in April 1993, for instance, an audibly emotional Akashi stated that the high voter turnout showed that ‘you [the Cambodian people] believe in democracy and that you believe in UNTAC’. ⁴ General Sanderson, the leader of UNTAC’s Military Unit, was likewise convinced that the ‘key to success in Cambodia lay in UNTAC’s ability to ‘forge an alliance with the Cambodian people’’ (Findlay, 1995: 112).

In interviews, former UNTAC officers confirmed these assessments. International staff members frequently emphasised that their deliberate work on presenting news and the goals of the mission in a balanced tone and simple, relatable language had played a crucial part in instilling a more open, democratic culture in Cambodia. UN officers who had worked in the Information and Education Unit regularly referred to Radio UNTAC as ‘UNTAC’s voice’, the ‘mission’s voice’, or the ‘international voice’. ⁵ These statements were furthermore routinely grounded in implicit and explicit assertions about the presumed educational and psychologically transformative impact that the peacekeepers’ well-designed and widely distributed messages had on the Cambodian people – statements that played a central role in assessments of the campaign’s impact (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, 1993: 3, 59–60). ‘What we’d been trying to do at Radio UNTAC’, as a former producer critically framed the intentions of the station’s programmes, was to ‘purposefully influence ordinary people’s behaviour’ (Head, 2022). His former colleague, a programme director, gave the same idea a more positive spin, when he asserted that ‘we had to be the one voice people could trust, that is a big responsibility’. ⁶

The broadly hailed success of UNTAC’s information campaign significantly contributed to establish its status as a model for future missions (Holguin, 1998: 642; Lindley, 2004). Formal recommendations for future peacekeeping missions encouraged the UN to ‘emulate UNTAC’s success in employing the power of the media in the cause of peace’ (Findlay, 1995: 153), and build on the ‘revolutionary’ achievements of UN officials (Azimi, 1994: 42), who, by their own account, had taken ‘[UNTAC’s’] mandate at its word and ran with it’. ⁷ Several UNTAC officers immediately transferred to new positions in other missions and put these recommendations into practice. Here, these self-avowed ‘novices in the purposeful communications game’ ⁸ applied their experiences and knowledge to the design and implementation of information campaigns in Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and other post-conflict zones. ⁹

Probing the gaps and silences of the UN archives

In order to question or challenge dominant peacekeeping narratives researchers rely to a considerable extent on the documentary evidence produced and preserved in the context of these missions. Official records are collected by the UN Archives and Records Management Section, which has two main functions according to its website: to preserve and provide access to the organisation’s archives; and to be a service agency to the Secretariat, meaning to provide records and information management services to the UN Global Secretariat. The latter is the main function of the United Nations Archives according to the former UN Archives Director, Robert Claus (1948: 195). As such, the UN archives, like other archives from international organisations, ‘have been produced for a purpose, and this purpose is not primarily to serve academic researchers’ (Ravndal, 2023: 129; italics in original). Instead, these archives are designed to contribute to the effective functioning of other offices and to preserve the institutional memory of the institution. Most UN archives are limited to official use, and archiving practices include withholding numerous documents under the seal of confidentiality. Even when documents are available, one cannot fail to notice that local responses and interactions with local populations are ‘fragmentary and (. . .) obfuscated by an elite or racialised lens’ (Tudor, 2023: 26). As Margot Tudor argues, ‘the silences or gaps in UN reports and private communication speak to the types of voices that were valued – and thus preserved – by the UN bureaucracy’ (Tudor, 2023: 26).

The case of UNTAC’s Information and Education Unit highlights how the inherent biases informing the UN’s practices of appraisal, collection, and categorisation impede a researcher’s ability to observe the mission’s interactions with the intervened population. The records deemed relevant are categorised to demonstrate the unit’s activities as they relate to other units, not the Cambodian people. Voices and contributions of the Cambodian people are predominantly preserved in English-language documents, where they are represented and framed by foreign observers. Original Khmer-language documents are obscured, fragmented, and decontextualised by systems of classification that locate agency in the transitional structures of the mission. In form and content, UN peacekeeping archives do furthermore exhibit a strong bias towards the documentation of a mission’s original mandate and hence narrowly towards the tasks elite actors implemented to meet their stipulated goals. Despite the fact that policymakers and observers widely praised Radio UNTAC as having played a pivotal role in advancing the mission’s crucial goal of holding nationwide elections (Bonacker et al., 2014; Doyle, 1995: 55; Findlay, 1995: 43, 76, 86; Marston, 1996; Zhou, 1994), the official UNTAC archives in New York have therefore preserved records that document the station’s creation and reported impact, while largely excluding the records created in the context of the radio station’s daily work during the intervention.

To establish an alternative vantage point on UN intervention practices in Cambodia and demonstrate the social embeddedness of elite intervention practices our analysis relied on the activation of three main collections: The collection Letters from Listeners, a private collection located in France, the Radio UNTAC Archive, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Cambodian Election Materials 1992–1993, housed at the Centre for Research Libraries in Chicago. All three collections survived due to the initiative of UN officials directly involved in the creation of Radio UNTAC and the implementation of the unit’s information and education campaign. Notably, the majority of collections documenting the UN mission to Cambodia are therefore located outside of the country – a fact that further exacerbates the exclusionary dynamics of the archive’s makings and its potential doings.

In the following illustration we concentrate on our analytical work with the archival collection Letters from Listeners. This private collection comprises 835 original Khmer-language letters written by the Cambodian people to Radio UNTAC and sets of preparatory materials, response scripts, and statistics, detailing key topics. Most of these letters were sent from the capital Phnom Penh and its adjacent provinces in the South of the country between April and September 1993, that is, before and after the UN-organised election in late May 1993. However, the radio station received letters from every province in Cambodia as early as October 1992. Literacy rates in Cambodia were extremely low at the time. The writers tend to be educated males, with students, civil servants like teachers, political administrators, and monks making up the majority of writers, often acting on behalf of their peers or communities; yet farmers, soldiers, urban and rural workers also contacted Radio UNTAC with descriptions of their livelihoods, ideas, and concerns (See Figure 1). The writers addressed their letters to Radio UNTAC, where Khmer-speaking UNTAC officers responded to selected letters during a designated programme, yet most of the letters’ authors aimed for a wider audience. The Cambodian national and provincial leadership are regularly named as desired recipients of the messages. In addition, the Cambodian people sent hundreds of elaborate essays and self-composed poems to reach out to their compatriots. Radio UNTAC invited Cambodian artists to perform selected compositions on air. ¹⁰

Figure 1.

Map illustrating the available demographic information from the collection Letters from Listeners.

Activating UNTAC archives: widening the lens of observation, disrupting accepted narratives

The activation of peacekeeping archives entails a practice of observation and interpretation that is sensitive to the biases inherent in official or authoritative collections on the subject matter and strives for their mitigation. For the purpose of our archival work with the collection of letters, this sensibility finds its expression in the following analytical decisions.

Mentions of the letters in official reports or the established literature tend to narrowly focus on those that were written to seek advice on democratic institutions and principles or to express gratitude towards the interveners. To broaden the scope of observation and challenge accepted notions of hierarchies between interveners and the targets of interventions we decided to focus on Cambodians’ responses to the rapidly changing economy during the UN-led intervention. Unlike many of the proposed political reforms, economic shifts had an immediate and consequential impact on people’s lives and the letters provide vivid accounts of these changes in their own words. For the same reasons, the analysis committed to centre the authors’ agency. By approaching the letters as manifestations of letter-writing-as-practice, we were careful not to reduce the individual letters to complaints or questions. Instead, we capture how the authors drew on embedded knowledge and skills – such as their assessments of indicators for changing socio-political hierarchies, their use of idioms and comparisons, and their use of (at times dark) humour in the writing of poetry – to partake in discussions on how to address and alleviate issues of concern for the changing local and emerging national community.

In doing so, we understand practices less as tacit knowledge, inarticulate know-how, and micro-alterations of competent performance (Adler and Pouliot, 2011; Pouliot, 2008: 7), and more as tactics deployed by actors to navigate the complexity of politics. In this way, and recognising that ‘there are different ways to study practices’ (Pouliot, 2014: 238), we move beyond the Bourdieusian understanding of practices ‘currently dominating the ‘practice turn’’ (Schmitt, 2020: 923; Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 454). Our understanding of practices is informed by Michel de Certeau’s focus on ‘ways of operating’ or doing things (de Certeau, 1984: xi), with certain actors appropriating momentarily situations and spaces structured by ‘strategies’ of the powerful though tactical practices aimed at creating room to manoeuvre for themselves. ¹¹

Finally, we aimed to disrupt commonly accepted narratives about the dynamics of interaction between peacekeepers and the local population, by understanding the latter as co-creators of significant socio-political relations. This position echoes Janice Bially Mattern’s point about the importance of interpreting the ‘doing’ of actors ‘not in reference to abstract criteria, but in reference to the local criteria of the social environment in which they are positioned’ (Mattern, 2011: 82).

Recentring the lived experiences of Cambodians during UNTAC

To shed light on little-studied patterns of interactions between UN practitioners and the Cambodian public in the context of UNTAC’s information and education campaign, we ground the empirical illustration in a subset of 251 letters with Cambodians’ own descriptive and analytical accounts of economic changes. Unlike many of the proposed political reforms, economic shifts had an immediate and consequential impact on people’s lives. While official accounts frame the celebrated UNTAC-organised election in May 1993 as an important end- or turning point in the intervention, the letters establish clear discrepancies between the interveners’ propagated promises of peace and prosperity and the people’s lived experience of violence and poverty. In the months after the elections, Cambodians continued to raise their concerns about the inflation of basic goods, the sudden dollarisation of the economy, the predatory behaviour of corrupt local power holders, and the ballooning sex industry. ¹² In addition to providing a unique perspective on otherwise marginalised intervention experiences, the letters provide a window of observation into how Cambodians drew on their own locally embedded knowledge to raise, address, and mitigate the socio-political fallout from the mission’s unexpected, detrimental impacts on the local economy. ¹³

First, these letters, in both form and content, allow us to observe Cambodians’ initiative in the identification of issues in need of addressing. Indeed, in many instances, the people’s demands for more information were intertwined with demands for accountability from the transitional authority. Cambodians living in the capital Phnom Penh and the countryside, for instance, consistently raised the sudden bouts of inflation and the high rates of unemployment among returnees and former soldiers as contributing to social tensions, insecurity, and rising crime. ¹⁴ ‘[The] issue with the currency [causes] so much unrest these days and [leads] all of us, the poor, to be furious with the tradespeople who do not accept the 50-Riel notes’, a group of villagers wrote. ¹⁵ The people, a woman alerted UNTAC, ‘cannot find food, goods are increasingly expensive, and the salary is not sufficient’. ¹⁶ In view of the widespread issues caused by the instability of the local currency, writers frequently framed the assurances of the domestic and international elite as insufficient and ineffective. ‘On the State of Cambodia’s radio, they made clear announcements that [the market vendors] who refuse to accept the 50-Riel notes will be punished according to the law’; yet, the practice prevailed. ¹⁷ People expressed suspicion and concerns about UNTAC’s ¹⁸ or the government’s role ¹⁹ in the unstable prices and declining value of the Riel and many demanded better oversight of trading practices to help address the complex issues faced by poor vendors. ²⁰ ‘[The] exchange rate (Riel) has been fluctuating like a tide’, a student notes, ‘I hope that Radio UNTAC will inform the people [about this issue]’. ²¹

Second, these letters allow us to challenge ingrained assumptions about inert hierarchies between the expertise of UNTAC officials and that of the Cambodian people. As demonstrated by interveners’ own accounts of their deliberate work on UNTAC’s ‘international voice’, presumptions about Cambodians’ lack of relevant knowledge about the dynamics of the political transition are integral to practitioners’ assessment of their work as effective and meaningful. By contrast, the analysis of the letters to Radio UNTAC shows that many of its listeners initiated contact with the transitional authorities to push back against the interveners’ perceived complacency and naivety in dealing with issues the people considered pivotal to the success of the proposed political reforms. People vividly described the stifling impact of the abuse of power and violations of people’s rights, and the ‘disease’ ²² or ‘cancer caused by a virus named corruption’. ²³ Disregarding this problem’s prevalence, they warned the interveners, would build the new government on ‘fragile or weak [pillars]’, bound to ‘collapse in the near future’. ²⁴ Cambodians all over the country observed that far from undermining oppressive socio-political hierarchies, the country’s celebrated nationwide election had instead emboldened many provincial powerholders who were greedily ‘doing business on the backs of the people’ and visibly lived beyond their means. ²⁵ The sudden influx of the dollar and other foreign currencies, as writers contended, disproportionally advantaged corrupt powerholders, exacerbating existing inequalities. ²⁶ These new markets, the people observed, furthermore fuelled illicit and immoral businesses, such as land grabbing ²⁷ or prostitution, which ‘has grown like a mushroom’. ²⁸ Such accounts may be exaggerated, carried by bias or ulterior motives. Regardless, they demonstrate the extent to which interactions between interveners and the Cambodian population were animated by the people’s concrete observations and analysis of the intervention-induced changes and their immediate, problematic interactions with established patterns of corruption and oppression.

Finally, the activation of this archive allows us to observe how Cambodians engaged proactively with their compatriots during the intervention to deliberate and address the opportunities and dangers of the socio-political reforms. Many writers composed educational or motivational poems that captured issues of national significance in relatable and entertaining language. A sarcastic ode to the 50-Riel note, for example, expresses how the devaluation of the local currency adversely affected people’s sense of personal worth and national pride. ²⁹ Monks sent poems with moral and uplifting messages for peace and national solidarity that drew on Buddhist chanting traditions. ³⁰ Another writer composed a satirical poem called ‘Cambodia is developing now’ to raise awareness of HIV and humorously encourage condom-use (don’t forget to ‘put a raincoat on’). ³¹ In addition, the activation of the archive makes the very process of writing and sending the letters observable as embedded in local practices of communal life. Letters that were sent on behalf of a group, for instance – as evident from both the letters’ wording and signatures – were frequently authored by educated men of relatively high social standing in the communes or villages, that is monks, public servants, or teachers. ³² These letters show how Cambodians managed the obstacles posed by illiteracy and a lack of education through the mobilisation of existing relations of kinship and community.

Our analysis aimed to illustrate the empirical and methodological potential of archival work for practice analysis. In form and content, the activation of this archival collection can correct prevailing views of the Cambodian public as mere receivers of cleverly designed educational UN messages. As demonstrated at the outset of the empirical analysis, official and scholarly accounts of intervention centred on the interveners’ ability to design simple yet effective messages in the local language to counter misinformation and ‘convince an uneducated and fearful populace’ to partake in their country’s political transformation (Findlay, 1995: 152). The activation of the Letters from Listeners permitted us to observe little-studied patterns of interactions between interveners and the Cambodian public. Importantly, these observations allowed us to decentre the agentic role conventionally assigned to the UN officials as the main, if not sole, architects of the socio-political environment under observation – a presumption that is reinforced and reified by the archiving practices of the United Nations.

Publicly, UNTAC officers discussed or responded to only a minority of these letters. Yet, through programme scripts, statistics documenting numbers and key topics of the received letters at a given date, interview requests to international experts, audio-recordings of Cambodian artists performing selected poems on air, as well as memos that circulated within and between the units to discuss rumours or public perceptions of the intervention, many patterns of (elite) activity can be traced as initiated or informed by the Cambodians’ own practices during the intervention.

The possibility to observe the interveners’ activities and practices – counting, sorting, selecting, filing, and translating the letters, commissioning interviews and hiring artists, designing programmes and organising broadcasts etc. – as embedded in a network of relations beyond the narrow confines of social interactions in the radio station or UN units broadens the observational scope in small but significant ways. For one thing, it foregrounds the reactive, ad hoc, and often tentative nature of the same practices that UN practitioners and observers themselves immediately communicated (and likely apprehended) as purposive elements of an education and information strategy. More importantly though, our broadening of the observational scope by means of these archival records reveals the crucial role that the Cambodian people’s own practices played in instigating and sustaining the type of socially meaningful patterns of activity that allowed UNTAC officials to experience and therefore describe their work during the intervention as ‘building trust with the Cambodian people’ and their own purpose as ‘being trustworthy’.

Conclusion

This article departed from the observation that the IPT scholarship has generally been cautious with text-based research, seen as reifying representational knowledge produced by and for specific elites. As such, texts or documents, including archival records, are conceptualised as potentially manipulative and dismissed as a fallback methodological plan for researchers who ‘cannot do better’. To contribute to a revision of this position, we suggest embracing the active and dynamic conceptualisation of the relationship between archivists, records, and their users (including researchers) proposed by CAS. This proposition entails a methodological and political recognition of archives as actively involved in and responsive to shifting configurations of power. Herein, we argue, lies the key to confronting perceived limitations in the observational scope provided by documentary or archival research head-on.

Archival documents provide neither an immediate nor a holistic account of events. Yet this does not justify their outright dismissal or denigration as manipulative. Instead, it is the role of the researcher to engage with the possibility of bias, constantly and transparently, much in the same way as they would engage with the challenges posed by ethnographic fieldwork or interviews. An emphatic endorsement of archives as actively involved in the ‘doing’ of politics can help us to draw the interpretative work that norms and principles of research ethics and integrity encourage into the realm of documentary research.

Second, we demonstrated that archival research can establish a unique vantage point to observe the development of actors’ socio-political environment and the evolution of practices therein. CAS’s insistence on revisiting engrained notions of power and privilege by means of a more diverse archival practice and scholarship is instructive in this regard. Our analysis of UN intervention practices illustrated the extent to which the Cambodian people partook in shaping practitioners’ understandings of their positions and purpose. Significantly, the possibility of making these relations transparent relied on an epistemic positioning that centred the agency of the Cambodian public – a fact indicating that artificial hierarchies between different methodologies may be less decisive in determining the value and validity of empirical data than analysts’ decisions about who should be recognised as a competent actor.

The revised ontology and epistemology of archives offered by an integrative reading of IPT and CAS can therefore benefit the IPT scholarship in several ways. It can support historical and contemporary analysis of continuity and change by shedding new light on the social environment that practices are embedded in. Set in the context of IR’s ongoing reckonings with its epistemic foundations, our call to activate archives can also advance broader (inter)disciplinary goals. Finally, activating archives for the practice turn in IR has the potential to provide new impetus to important debates on the political and analytical costs of neglecting the nexus between processes of political, theoretical, and methodological marginalisation.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-ejt-10.1177_13540661251408736 – Supplemental material for Activating archives for the practice turn in International Relations

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ejt-10.1177_13540661251408736 for Activating archives for the practice turn in International Relations by Katrin Travouillon and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert in European Journal of International Relations