The EU Administration of Mostar: Implications for the EU’s evolving peacebuilding approach

This article explores the EU’s efforts to reunify and reconstruct Mostar through the seminal experiment of EUAM (1994-1996), which combined peacebuilding with urban reconstruction in an innovative way. The aim is to identify lessons to be learned from the experiences of EUAM that can assist the EU to adjust its peacebuilding approach to better address post-conflict divides in cities where the EU currently is engaged. Cities divided by violent conflict tend to freeze the conflict, as they remained divided regardless of a conflict settlement, and they become serious obstacles to peace and a challenge to peacebuilding. Far too little is known about the role of urban space in building peace in ethno-nationally contested cities. By marrying critical urban studies with critical peacebuilding literature this article brings novelty to EU-studies and advances our understanding of the EU’s role in peacebuilding as well as in the Western Balkans

Spaces of Peace

This chapter shows that war-making and peace-making “take place” and that sometimes the legacy of conflict obscures manifestations of peacebuilding. The analysis of a “bridge that divides” in the city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo and a “wall that unites” in Belfast, Northern Ireland, casts light on the benefits that a spatial reading of peace can provide to understand the ways in which spatial infrastructures are lived by the people who use them. The process of space-making (the generation of meanings from a material location) will help explain the agency that emerges by the creators, users, and inhabitants of (post)conflict spaces

Peacebuilding, Structural Violence & Spatial Reparations in Post-Colonial South Africa

Traditionally, peacebuilding approaches have placed emphasis on the restoration of political relationships as well as more symbolic notions of community reconciliation and dialogue, resulting in limited attention to the material causes of violence. One example of this is South Africa, wherein the historical structural economic violence of the unequal distribution of resources has been maintained, and after the formal end of apartheid, a lack of equitable distribution of resources is ongoing. This article conceptually and empirically argues that distributive justice and spatial reparations are a way of compensating those affected by structural economic violence and addressing structural inequalities. Reparations should be considered as mechanisms to support readjustment of the socio-economic causes and consequences of violence and war in conjunction with long-term projects promoting social justice

The ‘Field’ in the Age of Intervention: Power, Legitimacy, and Authority Versus the ‘Local’

This article highlights the semantic and socio-political meaning of the ‘field’ as it is used in both academic research and policy practices: as a geographic and material space related to forms of intervention in International Relations (IR), and not as a disciplinary space. We argue that the notion of the ‘field’ carries colonial baggage in terms of denoting ‘backwardness’ and conflictual practices, as well as legitimising the need for intervention by peacebuilding, statebuilding, and development actors located outside the field. We also show how academic practices have tended to create a semiotic frame in which the inhabitants of the research and intervention space are kept at a distance from the researcher, and discursively stripped of their agency. Along similar lines, policy-practice has reinforced the notion of the field as being in need of intervention, making it subject to external control. This article suggests that the agency of the inhabitants of the field has to be re-cognised and de-colonised so that political legitimacy can be recovered from ‘intervention’

Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding:The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

This paper examines ‘the local’ in peacebuilding by examining how ‘local’ transitional justice projects can become spaces of power inequalities. The paper argues that focusing on how ‘the local’ contests or interacts with ‘the international’ in peacebuilding and post-conflict contexts obscures contestations and power relations amongst different local actors, and how inequalities and power asymmetries can be entrenched and reproduced through internationally funded local projects. The paper argues that externally funded projects aimed at emancipating ‘locals’ entrench inequalities and create local elites that become complicit in governing the conduct and participation of other less empowered ‘locals’. The paper thus proposes that specific local actors—often those in charge of externally funded peacebuilding projects—should also be conceptualised as governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors’ voices and their agency, and thus (re)construct ideas about what ‘the local’ is, or is not

Republika Srpska – The Becoming of a State

Conceptually, this paper is about make-believe states and how such state is a socially constructed space, imagined and performed by those who perceive themselves as belonging to that state. It asks through what imaginaries and performative practices does a state come into being? Make-believe is here employed as an analytical category to refer both to the work of the imagination and to the materiality of performance. More specifically, the paper investigates how the imagined state is performed during war hoping to offer insights to the co-constitution of war and the state, and to the entangled processes of war–making and state-making. The analysis of the make-believe state and its suspended state-building process sharpens our eyes to the make-believe quality of every state and may provide insights to what it is that makes a state believable. It may also shed light on the constitutive relationship between war-making on one hand and state-making or state-breaking on the other, as it explores an embryotic process of crafting a state in the midst of war. Empirically, this paper investigates the statebuilding process of Republika Srpska (RS) through the conceptual lens of the make-believe state. Here RS figures both as a real space to be described empirically, and as an example of a make-believe state to be conceptually explored. In particular it reads the irredentism of RS to justify its territorial claims on the basis of real or imagined historic or ethnic affiliations within the context of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the parallel statebuilding projects that remade the Western Balkans