Peacebuilding

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Precarious peacebuilding: friction in globallocal

encounters

Annika Bjrkdahl & Kristine Hglund

To cite this article: Annika Bjrkdahl & Kristine Hglund (2013) Precarious peacebuilding: friction
in globallocal encounters, Peacebuilding, 1:3, 289-299, DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2013.813170

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Peacebuilding, 2013
Vol. 1, No. 3, 289299, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2013.813170

Precarious peacebuilding: friction in global local encounters

Annika Bjorkdahla* and Kristine Hoglundb
a
Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden; bDepartment of Peace and
Conict Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
(Received 14 December 2012; nal version received 30 April 2013)

How can we understand the processes and outcomes that arise from frictional
encounters in peacebuilding? This special issue contributes to ongoing debates on the
precariousness of peacebuilding, by introducing the term friction as a way to capture
and analyse the conictual dimensions of global local encounters. We envisage six
responses compliance, adoption, adaptation, co-option, resistance and rejection
which arise as a result of meetings between actors, ideas and practice in global local
relationships. These responses create new realities as they alter power relations,
transform agency and mediate practices related to peacebuilding. Thus, the conceptual
framework and insights drawn from the articles in the special issue contribute to a
discussion about transforming the boundaries between the international and local, and
cast new light on agency in peacebuilding processes while challenging aspects of the
hybridisation of peace.
Keywords: peacebuilding; friction; conict; agency; hybridity

Introduction
Building sustainable peace is an inherently conictual process. It entails competing
ideas, political contestation and transformation of power relations. In such a dynamic
eld of power, the formal and informal, the external and internal, the state- and non-state
actors, struggle for inuence. This special issue aims to unpack the interplay between the
international/global and the local in peacebuilding as it engages the friction between
ideas, actors and practices. It opens up for an exploration of peacebuilding interventions
and its impact on post-conict societies and the everyday lives of the people living in
these societies. It unravels the question of agency, explores the balance between the
international and the local, and unsettles the boundaries between the international and
the local in peacebuilding. Lessons from empirical cases of societies emerging from
violent conicts clearly demonstrate the ambivalent and complex relationship between
internal and external actors, between short- and long-term impacts and the unintended
and counter-productive results peacebuilding interventions may generate. Thus, the
articles of this special issue engage in various ways with the key question of how can
we understand the processes and outcomes that arise from frictional encounters in
peacebuilding?
This special issue relates to three current and interlinked debates pertaining to the
precariousness of peacebuilding. A rst debate arises from the dismal track record of
international peacebuilding endeavours. While recognising that there is substantial
evidence suggesting that international peacekeeping interventions have an impact on the

*Corresponding author. Email: annika.bjorkdahl@svet.lu.se

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

290 A. Bjorkdahl and K. Hoglund

duration of peace,1 others have described the diversity of post-war countries and the
inuence of international efforts in shaping these societies.2 To capture this diversity,
scholars have used terms such as no peace, no war, frozen conict and unending
peace processes.3 The outcomes of peacebuilding processes have also been analysed
through the concepts of hybridity and heterotopias. Hybrid spaces denote situations in
which the meeting between international and local norms, actors and practices create new
arrangements, which display hybrid features where for instance liberal and illiberal
norms co-exist.4 Heterotopias serve as a term to describe situations in which a plurality of
peace(s) co-exists simultaneously.5 We contribute to this strand of research by
introducing and developing the concept of friction, which dees a simplistic
understanding of peacebuilding processes and instead recognises the inherent conictual
elements of such endeavours. While the encounters we focus on entail a contest between
actors, ideas, or practices the outcome of frictional engagements are by no means
determined to have negative consequences for the long-term prospects of peace,
development and democratisation. Instead, these frictions may serve as a catalyst for
change, which challenges the status quo of societies trapped in a negative spiral of
violence and instability.
A second debate follows from the rst and entails discussions on localness, local
agency, and romanticising the local. When the international peacebuilding industry has
entered into post-conict societies with the promise of delivering peace, liberal
democracy, good governance, rule of law and market economy, there has generally been
limited space for local actors to construct a peace of their own making. Post-conict is not
only applied to dene the period after conict following military defeat or a negotiated
settlement, but also denotes the continuation of violence in various forms and of
conict by other means in the post-conict society. In one sense, international

1
Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and
Quantitative Analysis, American Political Science Review 94, no. 4 (2000): 779 801; Michael
W. Doyle, and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War & Building Peace: United Nations Peace
Operations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Virginia Page Fortna, Does
Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents Choices after Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008).
2
Kristine Hoglund and Mimmi Soderberg Kovacs, Beyond the Absence of War: The Diversity of
Peace in Post-Settlement Societies, Review of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 367 390.
Roland Paris Saving Liberal Peacebuilding, Review of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2010):
337 365.
3
Karin Aggestam and Annika Bjorkdahl, Just Peace Postponed: Unending Peace Processes and
Frozen Peace, in Building Peace, Creating Conict? Conictual Dimensions of Local and
International Peacebuilding, eds. Hanne Fjelde and Kristine Hoglund (Lund: Nordic Academic
Press, 2011): 25 46; Roger Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace
Processes and Peace Accords (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); Paul Richards, ed., No Peace, No War:
An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conicts (Athens and Oxford: Ohio University Press/
James Currey, 2005).
4
Anna K. Jarstad and Roberto Belloni, Introducing Hybrid Peace Governance: Impact and
Prospects of Liberal Peacebuilding, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and
International Organizations 18, no. 1 (2012): 1 6; Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding
and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Oliver
Richmond and Audra Mitchell, eds., Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-
liberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
5
Mathijs van Leeuwen et al., Thinking Beyond the Liberal Peace: From Utopia to Heterotopias,
Acta Politica 47, no. 3 (2012): 292 316.
 Peacebuilding 291

peacebuilding initiatives have tended to overestimate the attractiveness of the normative

package inherent in the liberal peace while under-estimating the power of local agencies to
resist.6 However, when international peacebuilding has made tentative attempts to connect
with people and place, it has been criticised for romanticising the local or for failing to
engage constructively with local agencies, processes and coping mechanisms.7 Partly this
is due to the uniform and formalised technical knowledge disseminated by peacebuilding,
which confronts localised and contextualised popular knowledge about conict
transformation.8 Liberal peacebuilding it seems is plagued by an illusion of local
ownership constructed in efforts to keep at bay echoes of colonialism.9 The calls for local
ownership have put the hybridised peace processes and the liberal-local hybrid peace in
focus as outcomes of the interplay between international and local.10 It thus becomes clear
that the liberal peacebuilding discourse from which most peacebuilding interventions are
designed, holds certain assumptions about the role of the international, local agency and
post-conict spaces. For example, this discourse upholds a simple division between the
internationals and the locals, it regards the local to lack agency and mobility, and
understands post-conict spaces to be empty spaces in need of new norms, practices and
governing institutions. This in turn has implications for how international peacebuilding
actors approach peace, reconciliation, democracy and governance as well as security in
recipient post-conict societies.
Finally, this special issue taps into research in sub-elds such as transitional justice
and reconciliation, democratisation and good governance, and security-related issues.
Adopting a broad notion of peacebuilding, we view peacebuilding as a range of efforts
aimed at political, institutional, social, and economic transformations in post-war
societies engaging a variety of actors. The overall aim of peacebuilding is to reduce the
risk of overt violent conict and to pave the way for durable peace and development. Our
understanding of peacebuilding also includes a recognition that peacebuilding has
become a powerful norm institutionalised into the discourses and practices of
international organisations, states and NGOs.11 We acknowledge that building peace is
fundamentally about politics and power and that the political processes in all of the issue
areas which are addressed need to be analysed. For this reason, agency and how it is
enabled, constrained, or transformed is central to understanding the power dynamics of
these processes.
This special issue thus contributes to these debates by analysing the conictual
elements of global local encounters, the transformation of agency and their consequences
for the process of building sustainable peace.

6
Roger Mac Ginty, Routine Peace: Technocracy and Peacebuilding, Cooperation and Conict
47, no. 3 (2012): 21 35; Oliver Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2012).
7
Oliver Richmond, The Romanticisation of the Local: Welfare, Culture and Peacebuilding,
International Spectator 44, no. 1 (2009): 149 169.
8
Laurent Goetschel and Tobias Hagman, Civilian Peacebuilding: Peace by Bureaucratic Means?,
Conict, Security and Development 9, no. 1 (2010): 55 73.
9
Timothy Donais, Empowerment or Imposition? Dilemmas of Local Ownership in Post-Conict
Peacebuilding Processes, Peace and Change 34, no. 1 (2009): 3 26.
10
Roger Mac Ginty, Hybrid Peace: The Interaction between Top-down and Bottom-up Peace,
Security Dialogue 41, no. 4 (2010): 391 412.
11
Vivian Jabri Peacebuilding, The Local and The International: A Colonial or a Post-colonial
Rationality, Peacebuilding 1, no. 1 (2013): 3 16.
292 A. Bjorkdahl and K. Hoglund

Friction and precarious peacebuilding

The peacebuilding literature does not sufciently take into account the idea that the
global and the local are in constant confrontation and transformation with each other.
Instead, the literature constructs a dichotomy between those doing the peacebuilding
intervention, and those for whom the intervention is designed. This is not necessarily
helpful for gaining a nuanced understanding of the process and outcome of the global
local interaction. In fact, such encounters can be both a site for empowerment and for
domination.12 To address this lacuna in the peacebuilding literature we utilise
friction to analyse the assumptions embedded in global local encounters. The
concept of friction dees neat conceptualisations. In social sciences, much interaction is
regarded as frictional as power and resistance to power often come into play. This
special issue seeks to move beyond such discussions to examine the processes whereby
frictional interaction between the global actors, discourses and practices and the local
counterparts at peacebuilding sites produce new realities comprising global and local
elements.
The friction metaphor was introduced by Tsing to capture the diverse and unequal
global local encounters between actors, ideas and practices that produce new power
dynamics.13 Friction is a notion that highlights vertical and asymmetrical relations
between the global and local. As such, it illuminates how power is produced in
peacebuilding sites. As a metaphorical image Clausewitz understood friction as what
emerges between what was thought/planned and the realities on the ground.14 In a sense,
friction can be regarded as a force that decreases movement, and no matter which direction
a process is going, friction pulls it in a different direction. Friction can also be discussed as
a way to understand how global ideas pertaining to liberal peace are charged and changed
by their encounters with post-conict realities.15 Friction thereby brings to the fore how
the global actors, ideas and practices engages with localness, and helps to unpack localness
as it is portrayed in peacebuilding literature. Tsing suggests that [r]ubbing two sticks
together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick.16
A range of actors, ideas and practices rub against each other at sites of peacebuilding,
and these encounters create new power relations, agencies, ideas and practices that may or
may not resemble their originals. An understanding of friction as a process triggered by
conictual encounters rather than as an outcome is relevant when studying peacebuilding
and peace. However, the outcome is not necessarily a negative development for
the concerned societies, but the process arising from friction can facilitate change to
the better.
The notion of friction relates to concepts such as localisation, vernacularisation and
hybridisation. Localisation is dened by Acharya as the active construction (through
discourse, framing, grafting, and cultural selection) of foreign ideas by local actors,
which results in the former developing signicant congruence with local beliefs and

12
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, Remembering and Forgetting After War (Gothenburg: University
of Gothenburg, School of Global Studies, 2010).
13
Anna Lowenhapt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
14
Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1874) (Republished 2008) Wilder Publications, LLC. Radford.
15
Annika Bjorkdahl, A Gender-just Peace: Exploring the Post-Dayton Peace Process, Journal of
Peace and Change 37, no. 2 (2012): 286 317.
16
Tsing, Friction, 5
 Peacebuilding 293

practices.17 A crucial aspect of localisation is that local actors actively choose and import
the global idea. Hence, global ideas are not imposed by external actors but local actors
actually own the initiative of seeking change. By doing so, the local actors choose global
ideas and practices that have similarities with local realities, and then re-formulate and
adjust these global ideas and practices so they make sense for local actors. Bjorkdahl
argues that localisation is a frictional process where so-called universal ideas become local
practices, but without fullling their promise of universality.18 It is only when global
ideas assume concrete form as local institutions and processes that they move from one
part of the world to another. In the practical implementation of global discourses its ideas
and practices may dissolve, unmake, and remake the global discourse and how it works.
Levitt and Merry refer to such a process of appropriation and local adoption as
vernacularisation, as global ideas connect with locality, they take on some of the
ideological and social attributes of the place, but also retain some of their original
formulation.19 Originally associated with anthropology, sociology and post-colonial
studies, hybridity has become a buzzword and applied in peace and conict research.20
Hybrid peace, hybrid political orders,21 hybrid peace governance,22 as well as hybrid
subjects23 are ways in which hybridity has been conceptualised in relation to
peacebuilding. The notion of hybridity in peacebuilding is used to capture the intertwined
relationship between the global and the local, the formal and informal and the liberal and
the illiberal. The outcome of such global/local interplay is the hybrid peace, which in the
literature often is seen as a more authentic alternative to the liberal peace, as it taps into
local knowledge, broadens the peace constituency, and generates legitimacy.24 Yet, few
studies have assessed the quality of the hybrid peace and whether or not it is an outcome
welcomed by the local people on the ground. It has been used both as a problem-solving
concept equated with interaction and mixing, producing a fusion peace, and as struggle
concept that simultaneously describes and intervenes in social realities associated with
critical analysis of power-relations in peacebuilding spaces.25 In a different sense
hybridity seems to hold both uidity and relativity, which may be problematic as nothing
can be certain. But, it also holds an ability to translate and negotiate difference as it moves

17
Amitav Acharya, How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional
Change in Asian Regionalism, International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 239 275, quote at
p. 245. See also Rosalyn Shaw and Lars Waldorf with Pierre Hazan, Localizing Transitional Justice
(Stanford Studies of Human Rights, 2010)
18
Bjorkdahl, A Gender-just Peace, 292.
19
Peggy Levitt and Sally Merry, Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Womens
Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States, Global Networks 9, no. 4 (2007): 441 461, quote
at p. 446.
20
Laffey and Nadarajah, The Hybridity of Liberal Peace, Security Dialogue 45, no. 5 (2012): 403
420.
21
Volker Boege et al., On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States: What is Failing: States in
the Global South or Research and Politics in the West?, Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series, no. 8
(2009): 15 35; Mac Ginty, Hybrid Peace: The Interaction between Top-down and Bottom-up
Peace; Richmond, The Romanticisation of the Local; Richmond and Mitchell, Hybrid Forms of
Peace; Roger Mac Ginty and Gurchathen Sanghera, Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development:
An Introduction, Special issue, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 7, no. 2 (2012): 3 8.
22
Jarstad and Belloni, Introducing Hybrid Peace Governance.
23
Laffey and Nadarajah, The Hybridity of Liberal Peace.
24
Mac Ginty, Hybrid Peace.
25
Laffey and Nadarajah, The Hybridity of Liberal Peace.
294 A. Bjorkdahl and K. Hoglund

away from binary combinations such as the global and the local, and thus conceptualise the
global/local as both/and rather than either/or. While the concept of hybridity has
provided useful insights to the asymmetric interactions between the international
peacebuilding industry and the local post-conict realities, it has not sufciently analysed
the conictual encounters potential for both empowerment and disempowerment, which
the concept of friction brings to the fore. Friction is thus able to capture and situate
empowered and disempowered local agency, which contributes to an understanding of
the transformation of agency and thus shed light on what hybridity leaves relatively
under-theorised.
In this special issue we advance friction as a conceptual lens through which conictual
engagements between global and local ideas, actors and practices in peacebuilding can be
identied and analysed. Well aware of the considerable critique of the use of the terms
global and local we use friction to problematise these terms beyond spatial referents. The
reference to global is often seen to encompass the ability to move across borders,
universal moral frameworks and cosmopolitan awareness. In contrast, local tends to stand
for lack of mobility, particularities, authenticity, and contextuality. Our analyses
demonstrate, in congruence with other studies, that ideas and discourses we call global are
often circulating locals.26 The conictual dimensions of peacebuilding interventions will
be framed around the concept of friction, which is developed, problematised and/or utilised
in the various contributions. Friction brings to the fore the give-and-take relationship that
transforms both the local landscape, and its global counterpart. By conceptualising friction
in this manner we are better able to grasp the abrasive and unpredictable ways in which the
global peacebuilding discourse interplay with post-conict realities. For instance, attending
to the frictional travel of ideas and practices pertaining to peacebuilding means that both
repressive top-down imposition of peace and local responses in terms of compliance,
adoption, adaption, resistance, co-optation and rejection can be captured. This opens up for
an understanding of local agency both as oppositional but also as accommodating. Hence,
encounters may produce hybrid outcomes of peacebuilding that contain components of
both the local and the global obscuring their boundaries.

Frictional encounters
Having discussed and conceptualised friction, we want to understand the process whereby
frictional encounters are produced and reproduced. The interplay between the global
peacebuilding discourse promoted by the international peacebuilding industry and the
practices of post-conict societies depicts an asymmetrical relationship that is diverse and
unequal with no predetermined outcome. Friction is thus seen as the awkward, unequal,
unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across differences.27 The process of
friction should not be regarded as a contestation between various peacebuilding ideas and
actors or a confrontation between the global and the local with a predetermined outcome,
but rather as an uneven, unexpected and uncertain process in which global and local
conuence to mediate and negotiate difference and afnity. Friction thus tends to change
facts on the ground as it creates new and messy dynamics, agencies, and structures as well

26
Sally Engle Merry, Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle,
American Anthropologist 109, no. 1 (2006): 38 51.
27
Tsing, Friction, 4.
 Peacebuilding 295

as unexpected coalitions built on awkwardly linked incompatibles based on either

universal or particular ideas.28 At times frictional interplays can be moderated by certain
actors that take on the role as translators. Translators master both the local and the global
discourse and may function as lubricant in frictional global/local encounters and may
contribute to localise the international discourse and translate it into local practices.
According to Merry, translations take place within elds of unequal power, and
translators negotiate a middle space in this eld of power and potentiality. They work
within established discursive elds that constrain the repertoire of ideas and practices
available to them as they seek to place the discourse of liberal peacebuilding in the post-
conict experience.29
The articles in this special issue use friction as a conceptual tool to understand outcomes
resulting from encounters or intersection in the wake of peacebuilding initiatives. We focus
on friction between: (1) actors/agents; (2) discourses; and (3) practices. We recognise that
this is a stylised and simplied way of portraying the processes at play, but it will serve as a
starting point which can be problematised. For instance, friction and a focus on encounters
between actors may reinforce the image that actors can be clearly delineated. These
frictional encounters may result in outcomes comprising elements of the global and the
local relating to peace and security. For instance, in the realm of transitional justice, friction
can fan or create new forms of violence; it can undermine the rule of law and encourage
impunity; give a partial or biased account of the past; and aggravate ethnic or social
tension.30 Alternatively, it may result in more democratic politics that build on local
governance institutions but which has now opened up for inclusion and broader
participation.
Within this overarching framing of the problematique, the articles have made use of
the concept of friction, but put emphasis on different phases in the process. Various
theoretical and methodological approaches are drawn upon in the research, including in-
depth case analyses and the probing of diagnostic sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo,
Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Afghanistan, to cover themes such as democratisation
and governance reform, security-related issues, and transitional justice. The cases display
variation in the structural conditions surrounding the peacebuilding initiative: peace
agreement or victory, power asymmetry, and degree of international involvement. There
are also different outcomes: in Afghanistan we have for instance seen an increase in
violence, while in Mostar we notice the persistence of ethnocracy. In Sri Lanka the victors
peace cements asymmetrical power relations.
From the various empirical investigations of global and local interactions at
peacebuilding sites, different forms of frictional encounters emerge. At times, global
actors try to impose their discourses and practices of peacebuilding on local realities. The
result may be counterproductive as the developments in Mitrovica demonstrate. Here
internationally engineered institutions have been either boycotted or hijacked by local
actors (Bjorkdahl and Gusic). In other places, global actors hold the capacity to incentivise
local actors to cooperate and adopt global discourses and practices pertaining to peace.

28
Tsing, Friction, 16.
29
Merry, Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism, 40.
30
Alexander L. Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after
Genocide and Mass Violence (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Rosalind Shaw and
Lars Waldorf, eds., Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
296 A. Bjorkdahl and K. Hoglund

In Rwanda, the elite have been successful in adapting the commemoration of the genocide
to a global memory template, using the globalised cosmopolitan story to legitimise their
own place-based story of the genocide, indicating a merging of two powerful narratives
into one (Mannergeren Selimovic). In certain peacebuilding spaces, local discourses and
practices negotiate with, subvert, exploit, and resist the global peacebuilding intervention
and its version of peace come to the fore. In Sri Lanka, the resistance from the government
against international advocates of transitional justice have resulted in a construction of, for
instance, the UN as an external enemy which serves as target of local mobilisation
(Hoglund and Orjuela). Finally, in a few peacebuilding sites, local actors, discourses and
practices are able to construct and uphold alternatives to the liberal peace promoted or
imposed by the peacebuilding industry. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the commemoration of
the mass-atrocities which took place at Srebrenica displays a fractured picture. While
some groups use the global narrative of remembrance and commemoration to carve out
space for agency, other groups reject the global narrative and uphold an alternative version
focusing on denial of genocide and of external intervention as imposition of ideas which
has no resonance among the local population (Mannergren Selimovic).
Table 1 outlines some of the responses and outcomes envisaged as a result of these
frictional encounters between primarily, but not exclusively international and local
actors.
The new realities, which emerge from these encounters, will in turn create feedback
loops which may create new encounters (see Figure 1). For instance, the partial adoption
of external norms at the local level, may spur resistance and violence from spoiler groups,
which change realities on the ground and give rise to new exchanges. This type of spoiling
behaviour is seen in Afghanistan where violent resistance to internationally designed
Security Sector Reform (SSR) has produced insider attacks so called green on blue
violence straining the relationship between the international and the local (Jarstad).
Several conclusions concerning friction and peacebuilding can be inferred from the
articles. A rst conclusion concerns friction as manifested in a variety of sites where local
and international discourses and practices on peacebuilding meet. These spaces may be of
a physical nature, as in the city (Bjorkdahl and Gusic) or in memorial sites (Mannergren
Selimovic). Space is not only physical and material but immaterial and social as it is
constituted by interactions, and for Lefebvre space is never empty: it always embodies a
meaning.31 As such it is inuenced by different dynamics of power and sometimes
conicting forces, and thus it can always be viewed as contested.32 Here, space draws
together interactions between discourses, actors and place. However, the focus on actors,
which is present in many of the articles, conveys that these spaces are often transcended
as actors, their concerns, and ideas travel across space. For instance, the Tamil
diaspora residing in Western countries are actively engaging in lobbying, and efforts to
initiate legal proceedings against Sri Lankan leaders in domestic courts outside of Sri
Lanka (Hoglund and Orjuela). In Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, a transnational
commemoration industry which includes the ocking of celebrities and statesmen to
memorial sites has opened up for selective and de-territorialised memory-making
(Mannergren Selimovic).

31
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell 1991), 157.
32
David Harvey, Contested Cities: Social Processes and Spatial Form in The City Reader, eds.
Richard T. LeGates and Fredric Stout (London: Routledge, 1997/2003), 227 234.
 Peacebuilding 297

Table 1. Global local interaction in peacebuilding

Frictional encounters Response Outcome

Contested/conictual encounters Compliance Forced adherence or submission to global/external
between actors discourses discourses and practices.
(norms and ideas) and practices Adoption Adoption at the local level of global/external
norms and practices
Adaptation Adaptation and contextualising of global/external
norms and practices to local characteristics
Co-option Strategic adoption of the global/external into the
local as a means of averting pressure
Resistance Dominance of local characteristics, limited
adoption of global/external norms and practices
Rejection Exclusion of global/external norms and practices
from the local

A second conclusion refers to disconnects which emerge between discourse and

practice, and which is sometimes a cause of friction and at other times a response to
friction. For instance, Bjorkdahl and Gusic analyse scripted agency as part of the response
by domestic actors as a means to sidestep pressure from international actors, while at the
same time avoiding real transformation. A disconnect in terms of discourse and practice
has also been present in international agents of peacebuilding, who may use strategies vis
a`-vis domestic actors, which may undermine the very norms they intend to promote. Such
disconnects introduce a sense of indignation among domestic actors and can be used by
local actors, including governments, critical of the peacebuilding, to discredit the
international efforts and to claim them illegal. In Sri Lanka, the Westerns powers
advocating accountability for war crimes were themselves providers of arms to the Sri
Lankan government during the war (Hoglund and Orjuela).
A third conclusion concerns the relationship between friction and hybridisation.
Several articles illuminate how hybrid arrangements are outcomes of friction between the
international and the local. In Cambodia, the insertion of liberal democracy and related
reforms (such as judicial reform) has triggered the birth of new politics and new
arrangements, which has adopted liberal institutions, but in which its patrimonial features
are retained (O jendahl and Ou). In Afghanistan, friction arising from international actors
different views of security organisation, has led to an uneasy coexistence of formal and
informal institutions which rests on power balance between militias, rather than a
monopoly of violence (Jarstad). Through the focus on friction several of the articles
challenge the growing romanticisation of the hybrid peace as a qualitative peace that

Encounter

Outcome Response

Figure 1. Friction and feedback loops.

298 A. Bjorkdahl and K. Hoglund

brings together the international and the local versions of peace in post-conict societies.
O jendal and Ou raise the important question concerning hybridity and the characteristics
of peace: what does hybridity actually mean for the quality of peace? Moreover, it
advances the discussion about local ownership and its impact on the quality of peace.
Fourthly, the articles underscore the blurring of boundaries between different analytical
categories commonly used in the study of peacebuilding. While several contributions have
an actor-oriented perspective as a starting point, it is recognised that these actors are not
homogenous and hold conicting approaches and norms towards peacebuilding. In fact,
Kappler shows in her study of peacebuilding interaction in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
South Africa that Andersons notion of imagined communities can usefully be extended
to any political group. Actors are shaped by their own understanding of belonging to a
community and as part of a cluster of agency whose boundaries are dened by a shared set
of norms and values (Kappler). However, the boundaries become politicised and contested,
since any actor belongs to multiple communities. Such blurring of boundaries is
particularly manifest in, for instance, diasporas as actors in peacebuilding. In Sri Lankas
pursuit of post-war justice, the diaspora is an agent which obscures the boundaries between
the local and international arena, by engaging in efforts to hold Sri Lankan citizens
accountable for war crimes not in Sri Lankan courts, but in their countries of residence
(Hoglund and Orjuela). A different terminology to highlight the blurring of boundaries is
used by Laffey and Nadarajah, who refer to diasporas as hybrid agents.33 The analysis of
Mostar and Mitrovica demonstrates that the dichotomy between the international and the
local is often arbitrary, as is the supposed homogeneity of the categories (Bjorkdahl and
Gusic). Here diverse local agencies such as ethno-nationalist political elites, but also
grass-roots movements played a key role in dening the boundaries between the
international and the local and how these frictional encounters condition the possibility of
international liberal peacebuilding interventions.
A fth conclusion concerns frictional encounters as essentially contests over power.
Peacebuilding entails asymmetrical relationships. Peacebuilding interaction can thus be
said to hold both vertical frictions upholding asymmetrical relations between the
international and the local and horizontal frictions as these interactions impact the mutual
relationships between different actors in the post-conict landscape altering local power
relations (Kappler). Prevailing and powerful actors in struggles over discourse and
practice thus risk marginalising and silencing important communities. In this sense,
several of the responses to friction such as compliance and adoption may result in
increased domination. However, under certain circumstances the response to friction for
instance in the form of resistance or rejection can cause empowerment of previously
marginalised groups. For instance, a comparison of memorial sites in Rwanda and in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, illustrate how asymmetrical narrative encounters between [ . . . ]
packaged past and present power struggles lead to the marginalisation of some actors and
narratives and the empowerment of others (Mannergren Selimovic). The same conclusion
can be drawn from the analysis of spaces of interactions where the international
peacebuilding industrys state-centric focus contributes to empower the political elites that
are able to represent themselves as liberal peacebuilders, while marginalising critical
agencies that question, resist and/or reject the international, liberal peacebuilding
discourse and favour locally constructed visions of peace.

33
Laffey and Nadarajah, The Hybridity of Liberal Peace.
 Peacebuilding 299

Finally, an analysis of peacebuilding with the use of friction as an analytical concept

opens up for an exploration of a range of questions related to the broader implications for
peace, reconciliation, development and democratisation. An analysis of the nature,
directionality and quality of friction in the post-conict landscape seems crucial to
understanding the dynamics and transformative impacts of peacebuilding in the short-,
medium- and long-term. In the short-term perspective (as in the Sri Lankan and
Afghanistan cases) it allows for an analysis of efforts by the international community to
inuence the course of events, and highlights how some initiatives may be detrimental to
the very purpose they are intended. In an analysis of friction in the long-term perspective
(as in the cases of the Cambodia, South Africa, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) the feedback
loops created by long-term engagement can be analysed and the resulting outcomes often
in the shape of new and unexpected arrangements bringing to the fore the question about
the quality of peace that emerges from the international/local encounters.

Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to SIDA for funding research for this article.

Notes on contributors
Annika Bjorkdahl is Associate Professor at Lund University. Her recent research unpacks the
multidimensionality of peacebuilding, and rescales peacebuilding to the urban in order to examine
peacebuilding efforts in divided cities such as Mostar, Nicosia, Belfast and Sarajevo. Among her
publications are Rethinking Peacebuilding: The Quest for Just Peace in the Middle East and the
Western Balkans (Routledge, 2013) and articles in Peace and Change, International Peacekeeping,
Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
Kristine Hoglund is Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Conict Research, Uppsala
University, Sweden. Her research has covered issues such as violence and peace negotiations,
mediation and other third parties, and the causes and consequences of electoral violence. Her work
has been published in journals such as Democratization, Review of International Studies,
Negotiation Journal, International Negotiation and International Peacekeeping. She is the author of
Peace Negotiations in the Shadow of Violence (2008, Martinus Nijhoff) and is the co-editor of
Understanding Peace Research: Methods and Challenges (2011, Routledge).