EXPLORATION OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO INTERNATIONAL PEACEBUILDING
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TOC o “1-3” h z u HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739900” 1.0 Introduction PAGEREF _Toc40739900 h 3
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739901” 2.0 Research Question PAGEREF _Toc40739901 h 4
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739902” 3.0 History and Background of International Peacebuilding PAGEREF _Toc40739902 h 4
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739903” 4.0 Concept Operationalization: Epistemology of International Peacebuilding PAGEREF _Toc40739903 h 6
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739904” 5.0 Critical Assessment of Epistemological Approaches to International Peacebuilding PAGEREF _Toc40739904 h 7
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739905” 5.1 The Liberalist Approach PAGEREF _Toc40739905 h 7
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739906” 5.2 The Constructivist Approach PAGEREF _Toc40739906 h 10
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739907” 5.3 The Realist Approach PAGEREF _Toc40739907 h 13
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739908” 5.4 The Pragmatist Approach PAGEREF _Toc40739908 h 15
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739909” 6.0 Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc40739909 h 18
HYPERLINK l “_Toc40739910” Reference List PAGEREF _Toc40739910 h 19
1.0 IntroductionIn international relations, the concept of peacebuilding is a distinctively multifaceted and multidimensional long-term process. This process entails reforming social institutions and transforming relationships between and among nation-states towards ending structural violence, war, and destructive conflicts. It is imperative as it emphasises reconciling people and their institutions, restoring social cohesion, and stabilising post-conflict zones (Catholic Relief Service 2018; Dudouet, and Schmelzle, 2010; Ehrhart and Schnabel 2005). So, international peacebuilding is a broad, participatory, people-centred, and relationship-building initiative not confined to post-violence situations. It transcends conflict resolution to include pre-emptive conflict containment and management through violence prevention and a greater focus on determining and curtailing root causes of peace inhibitors (Autesserre 2017). It also includes creating conditions vital for sustainable and enduring global peace and altering potential conflict situations to avert conflict resurgence (Carl and Pospisil 2019; Futamura and Notaras 2011).
With the global peacebuilding field witnessing expanding research interest, several contemporary research methods have been employed in conceptualising this construct. Accordingly, scholarly international peacebuilding research focusing on varied themes studied through diverse qualitative and quantitate research approaches is plenty. Examples of themes and perspectives broadly addressed are mainstream peace sustainability, peacebuilding frameworks and methodologies, policymaking perspectives of global peacebuilding, impacts of internal organisational structures on peacebuilding, and ethnography of peacebuilding (Alliance for Peacebuilding 2019; Gawerc 2006, Miklian and Medina Bickel 2020). However, research aimed at operationalizing the epistemology of various paradigms that form philosophical underpinnings for research methods used in studying international peacebuilding is significantly limited.
Towards addressing this research gap, this essay explores the epistemological merits, concerns, and challenges associated with four international relations theories that form the philosophical keystones that guide different approaches to international peacebuilding research. These theories include pragmatism, constructivism, realism, and liberalism (Ralston 2011). Specifically, my study identifies and provides an account of the strengths and weaknesses of pragmatist, constructivist, liberalist, and realist approaches to researching global peacebuilding. To accomplish this task, I draw on academic literature and theoretical outlooks relating to these paradigms as they apply to international peacebuilding. The paper delineates the research question, presents the concept’s historical background, address concept operationalization, and critical analyses each of these epistemological approaches. It concludes with asserting that the pragmatist approach is the most suitable paradigm in research methods for intellectualising international peacebuilding.
2.0 Research QuestionWhich epistemological paradigm provides the most appropriate philosophical underpinning for research methods that investigate international peacebuilding?
3.0 History and Background of International PeacebuildingThe international peacebuilding concept dates back to the mid-1940 when World War II ended. During this time, European nations, the United States, and their allies began to establish restorative long-term post-conflict initiatives and interventions programmes (Kim and Richmond 2019). These initiatives and programmes focused on reconstructing continents after the war-induced destruction and centred on the doctrines of peacemaking and peacekeeping (Bakker 2010; Dudouet and Schmelzle 2010; Randazzo and Torrent 2020). Examples of these initiatives included three Bretton Wood institutions, namely, GATT (today’s World Trade Organisation), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and IBRD (today’s World Bank) and the Marshall Plan (Holt, 2011; Omojarabi 2016).
Decades later, the international peacebuilding narrative expanded following the input of Johan Galtung. He was an eminent peace researcher who coined the peacebuilding concept in 1975. In his work on peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding, Galtung sustained that peace assumes a structure that differs from ad hoc peacemaking and peacekeeping (Kim and Richmond 2019; Wall 2018). For him, peacebuilding mechanisms should rest on this structure to ensure the removal of roots of war, social change via socio-economic reconstruction, social integration and harmony, and the provision of alternatives to violence in war-saturated situations (Hove 2015; Simangan 2020). Galtung primary emphasis was a shift from coercive and aggressive structures to a culture of positive peace by adopting a bottom-up approach that advocates the decentralisation of economic and social structure (Kim and Richmond 2019; Wall 2018).
As incidents of the varnishing Cold War halted, John Lederach, an American sociologist, furthered the advocacy for the bottom-up approach to peacebuilding in 1997. This catalysed post-World War-II global peacebuilding narrative (Dudouet and Schmelzle 2010). Lederach’s position was the grassroots-level engagement of local, regional, and international actors and non-government organisations towards inclusive, transformative, sustainable, and lasting peacebuilding processes (Omojarabi 2016; Simangan 2020; Wall 2018). This encompassed leveraging local capacity-building, interpersonal relationships, and institutions and international cooperation in peacebuilding. Lederach’s contribution to peacebuilding conceptualisation still reflected Galtung’s novel vision for positive peace, meaning that Galtung greatly influenced the contemporary models of international peacebuilding (Hove 2015; Kim and Richmond 2019).
Over time, global peacebuilding expanded to integrate new dimensions. These elements included reconstructing civil society, administrative, economic institutions, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR), creating participation-oriented democratic institutions, political transition, human rights promotion, and rehabilitating wounded societies (Holt, 2011; Hove 2015; Omojarabi 2016; Randazzo and Torrent 2020; Wall 2018). The Agenda for Peace, led by former UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, popularised these dimensions. Further peacebuilding developments culminated in the peacebuilding architecture, established at the 2005 World Summit based on recommendations by former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. This UN peacebuilding architecture advocated the establishment of three institutions, namely, the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, UN Peacebuilding Commission, and UN Peacebuilding Fund all aimed at enabling the UN Secretary-General to harmonise peacebuilding efforts (Bakker 2010; Philipsen 2014; Randazzo and Torrent 2020). Today, nation-states are responding to the growing worth of global peacebuilding as reflected in their peacebuilding budgets, processes, and security programmes.
4.0 Concept Operationalization: Epistemology of International PeacebuildingWhile international peacebuilding generally covers the external interventions, programmes, and initiatives designed to alleviate and curtail eruptions and reappearances of violence in a global frame, critical contrasts exist among scholars regarding its conceptualisation and operationalization. Barnett et al. (2007) submit that these differences become manifested in diverse interpretations over the operationalization of global peacebuilding, culminating in differences in perceptions over appropriate paradigmatic research methods for studying this construct. Even so, different epistemological paradigms define the scholarly, strategy, and practice nexus in the academic debate on peacebuilding (McCandless 2014).
An interesting observation that I have made during my research is that over the years, scholars who endorse one of these contemporary epistemological paradigms have tended to critique those who advocate other epistemological models. They do so by pinpointing flaws, biases or shortcomings of the alternative research methods under the paradigms they criticise when it comes to operationalizing international peacebuilding (Hercus 2013; Newman 2009; Paris 2010; Wall 2018). Specifically, advocates of pragmatic approaches to international peacebuilding have often tended to expose faulty assumptions and preconceptions associated with research methods for styling peace research under the liberalist, constructivist, or realist approaches. This way, for example, epistemological critiques of liberalist approaches to peacebuilding research have initiated the emergence of pragmatic approaches as popular in peacebuilding research, as Bargués-Pedreny (2015) and De Coning (2018) observe.
My endeavour is to critically evaluate each of these epistemological paradigms separately using academic literature. This undertaking assists in determining the one that offers the most sound and apposite grounding for research methods for studying international peacebuilding.
5.0 Critical Assessment of Epistemological Approaches to International PeacebuildingThe theoretical and practical study of global peacebuilding has provoked a plethora of international relations scholars to endorse different epistemological methodologies of peacebuilding research. The four that I critically analyse in this section include liberalist, constructivist, pragmatist, and realist approaches.
5.1 The Liberalist ApproachThe epistemological position of liberalist peacebuilding scholars is that civilisations can peacefully coexist as they are not always on the verge of violent conflicts (Körppen 2011). These scholars’ reasoning revolves around the presumption that despite the persistence of anarchism and armed conflicts, many nations are not usually at war. Within the liberalist peacebuilding discourse, such peaceful coexistence encourages the key tenets of promoting functioning liberal democracy, privatisation, sustaining human rights, and the rule of law (Newman 2009; Lemay-Hébert 2013). Other tenets include ensuring commercial and market economic reforms, stabilising and rebuilding conflict-affected states, and establishing state and domestic institutional conditions that drive peacebuilding (Newman 2010; Wallis 2018).
Liberalist peacebuilding researchers advocate strategic partnerships among different international actors towards providing peace and securıty and augmenting socioeconomic and socio-political interactions (Siradag 2012). Furthermore, the liberalist peacebuilding school of thought supports the notion that liberally instituted nations are more internally humane, peaceful, and prosperous compared to non-democracies, realising the multifarious peace-producing benefits of democratisation (Newman 2009). Based on this notion, these scholars build their research on the theoretical doctrine that liberal governments run based on people’s approval are politically stable, eventually leading to international stability and peace (Bindi and Tufekci 2018). Nonetheless, they still suggest that relations between states are never always a zero-sum game where one actor loses when another one gains. Here, the paradigm views the termination of violence between such nations as a window of essential change opportunity.
On my research question, the liberalist approach to global peacebuilding research encourages the application of a hybrid study methodology that combines qualitative and quantitative research methods. These methods focus on observation, ideological reasoning, discourse analysis, and analytical synthesis of archival research (Wall 2018). Two peace theories form the conceptual basis for these research methods, namely, democratic peace theory and institutional peace theory. The former posits that stable democracies neither participate in militarised and political disputes nor engage other democracies in war as their shared norms and institutions have powerful liberal contributions to global peace discourses (Bindi and Tufekci 2018; Lemay-Hébert 2013; Newman 2009; Zambakari 2016). This extension of democracy culminates in international peace and security. The institutional peace theory focuses on pursuance of long-term interests, sustained cooperation in situations of anarchy, and realising absolute societal gains over relative gains to coax people into coexisting peacefully.
Proponents of the liberalist paradigm claim some advantages attributed as its strengths in conceptualising peacebuilding. Firstly, they associate it with adaptability to and resilience against social and political changes (Jip, 2009). Their argument for this strength is the paradigm’s scepticism towards dangerous forms of totalitarian politicisation of social life aspects, which is vital in depoliticising peacebuilding (Körppen 2011; Newman 2009; Newman 2010; Schwarzmantel 2008). The second strength is that the approach adapts to multiple analytical tools and policy prescriptions that enable international peacebuilding researchers to maximise their scholarly scope as Newman (2009) alludes. Lastly, proponents of the application of this paradigm in peacebuilding research argue that it fosters state protection and constructively drives peaceful relations amongst liberal states by promoting equal opportunity, preserving human rights, and protecting the economic environment.
Critics of using the liberalist approach in global peacebuilding research have raised numerous criticisms that show its weaknesses. One of these flaws is that the paradigm overly relies on unrealistic basis assumptions (Philipsen 2014; Riis Andersen 2011; Zambakari 2016). For example, liberalist scholars assume that civil society mediates identity issues by introducing rational and self-maximising individuals, thereby shaping community interactions methods (Hercus 2013). Another assumption is that exchanges between states are constantly competitive, equal, and free, implying that globally integrated market-oriented policies and democratic institutions sustain international peace (Simangan 2020). Another assumption is the Hobbesian dilemma that suggests that states’ inability to exert control triggers the emergence of chaos (Körppen 2011; Riis Andersen 2011). The second weakness is that operational liberal peacebuilding strategies perpetuate the interests of capitalist societies characterised by aggressive foreign policy (Paris 2010; Siradag 2012; Wall 2018; Wallis 2018). Furthermore, the approach is flawed for artificially separating economics from other societal aspects, accepting the existence of socio-political frameworks as absolute. This dilutes the essence of international peacebuilding that requires considering multiple societal aspects. The approach’s fourth drawback is the failure to comprehensively facilitate our understanding of the international political economy and virtual empowerment, which are pivotal in global peacebuilding research (Newman 2009; Lemay-Hébert 2013). Lastly, this paradigm ignores the justice of economic activity, making liberalists’ analyses of economies static (Zambakari 2016). Despite these weaknesses, the liberalist approach has enhanced our understanding of intentional peacebuilding as revolving around war termination.
5.2 The Constructivist ApproachThe epistemological position of constructivist peacebuilding researchers is that social structures, culture, and frameworks of human institutions are indispensable elements in conceptualising international relations, hence global peacebuilding. Their perspective is that belief systems, norms, ideas, realities, values, and shared intentions that are socially constructed through actor interactions are critical to realising human security, therefore attaining global peacebuilding initiatives (Bakker 2010; Franke and Weber 2012). Constructivist peacebuilding scholars are concerned with how social agents and structures establish each other (Bercovitch, Kremenyuk, and Zartman 2008). They also focus on the socially constructed nature of social actors and their interests and identities and how normative, ideational, and discursive factors shape international political realities. This has imperative effects on global peacebuilding discourses and policy. Further, they consider bureaucratically technical processes, constitutive social relations, material factors, and causal social mechanisms when studying the construction of peace (Lemay-Hébert 2013; Wallis and Richmond 2017). A notion they uphold similar to liberalists is that the world exists in anarchy, but states remain constrained by an international structure shaped by their behaviour and identities (Galeano-Munoz 2018).
Constructivist peacebuilding researchers argue that violent political behaviours and associated resolutions and prevention depend on the ideas, norms, and social beliefs upheld by those portraying these behaviours in quests for money, sovereignty, and specific rights (Conteh-Morgan 2005). This assertion corroborates Bercovitch, Kremenyuk, and Zartman (2008) that the constructivist approach address international peacebuilding from the perspective of offering a holistic and multidimensional comprehension of conflict, war, and conflict resolution. Contextualising international peacebuilding from the conflict research standpoint entails focusing primarily on conflicts’ the momentum and self-selectivity (Bernshausen and Bonacker 2011). Concisely, constructivist peacebuilding scholars propagate the idea that constructivism offers an insightful paradigm for comprehensive inquiries into how ontological assumptions generate the methodological and epistemological frameworks underpinning arguments about the nature of global peacebuilding (Wallis and Richmond 2017).
Relative to my research question, the constructivist approach borrows broadly from various positivist and post-positivist research methods and incorporates several quantitative and qualitative study approaches (Wallis and Richmond 2017). It concentrates on discourse analysis, narratives, daily micropolitics, and texts, including case studies. Other research methods include counterfactuals, process tracing, and comparative methods, along with interpretive methods such as ethnography, genealogy, and narrative synthesis. These methods and their related theoretical frameworks develop a deeper understanding of local and social dynamics of social order and its discursive influence in forming critical global peace. They also reflect reliance on the structuration theory that deals with the creation and development of social systems, structures, and agents, together with understanding how these elements drive peacebuilding (Bakker 2010).
Proponents of the constructivist approach identify some merits that reflect its strengths. Firstly, the paradigm shifts the focus from interstate relations to intrastate relations, thereby concentrating peacebuilding to grassroots engagements (Wallis and Richmond 2017). It does so by enabling the realisation of human security at the personal, cultural-structural, and institutional levels (Conteh-Morgan 2005; Galeano-Munoz 2018). Secondly, it accounts comprehensively for structural changes and global political agents that influence peacebuilding, which other mainstream theoretical perspectives fail to explain (Bakker 2010). Thirdly, the constructivist approach provides a greatly compelling picture of how societies individually construct their reality versions that shape their identities, structures, and discourses around peacebuilding (Bernshausen and Bonacker 2011; Bercovitch, Kremenyuk, and Zartman 2008; Kim and Richmond 2019). Lastly, the paradigm offers a complementary and confirmatory framework for conflict resolution, which is imperative to peacebuilding.
Opponents of the constructivist approach have identified four flaws. Firstly, international norms advocated by this paradigm cannot create global cooperation or lessen uncertainties in international politics under a global anarchic order (Siradag 2012). Simultaneously, social interactions cannot facilitate the unification of actors to establish cooperation in such a system. Secondly, the paradigm overlooks many mechanics of anarchy, thereby failing to evaluate it properly. The third weakness is the paradigm’s overstatement of the roles of identities. Critics believe that while cultures, beliefs, and historical connections are important in creating cooperation, other factors, including economic and political, are also essential (Siradag 2012). Lastly, the approach is flawed in failing to balance the relationship between material elements and social elements. Despite the critiques, the constructivist approach offers unique insights into our understanding of the true nature of collective violence, societal emancipation, cultural identity, and other international relations concepts relevant in peacebuilding.
5.3 The Realist ApproachWhile this approach has not been greatly applied in conceptualising peacebuilding research, its role in intellectualising international peacebuilding is not ignorable. The epistemological stance of realist peacebuilding researchers is that nations pay attention to their interests first. In other terms, these scholars sustain that competition between nation-states drives international relations, necessitating them to advance their interests first. From the peacebuilding perspective, realists hold that states prioritise themselves primarily, strengthen their authority towards ending conflicts, and maintain stability, implying that peacebuilding must first be about state-building (Antonovskaya 2015; Newman 2009; Spears 2012). So, the paradigm pays less attention to democratisation, political power-sharing, and human rights while focusing more on establishing and rebuilding feasible state institutions and containing conflict escalation (Hove 2015; Wallensteen et al. 2018). This repression of conflicts sets the stage for advancing and preserving hegemonic interests of international peace and stability, which is the basis for realist global peacebuilding (Newman 2010; Omojarabi 2016; Waller 2015).
Also, the realist approach hinges on the notion that actual conflict sources are less important than the transformation of political arenas from anarchic situations (Spears 2012). Therefore, the attainment the realist peace begins with resurrecting individual nation-state and translating this to the international level. Realist peacebuilding scholars are also aware of other concepts relating to the relationship between war and peace. The first is that economic and military power of state matters in abstracting peace. The second is that nation-states should always seek peace with others, but prepare for war. The third is that war is inevitable, and anarchy continues to persist, but the preservation of security and peace is absolute (Antonovskaya 2015; Kim and Richmond 2019).
On my research question, the realist approach to global peacebuilding research integrates mixed-methods research designs involving experimental and quasi-experimental studies and relational research methods. Mixed-methods research designs conjoin elements of qualitative and quantitative methods, and allow for triangulation, augmenting the validity of research outcomes (Hove 2015). Using mixed research methods in studies with the realist paradigm enables the elucidation of integrated peacebuilding processes and the related cause-effect mechanisms. From a realist viewpoint, these research methods facilitate the comprehension of ontological underpinnings of the domain of reality within mechanisms and forces that drive peacebuilding (Eastwood et al., 2018). Relational studies allow for the dichotomisation of ethnographic ontologies in realist peace and violence from the perspective of methodological philosophies such as reductionism, nationalism, and intellectualism.
Advocates of this paradigm approach highlight its strengths, one of which is its reliance on realistic assumptions, unlike the liberalist approach. Secondly, they assert that its three core assumptions, namely, statism, survival, and self-help are applicable in many situations of peace research, broadening its relevance, especially in reducing liberalist zero-sum game of international peacebuilding (Kat 2015). The last strength is that the approach has high empiricism, theoretical specification, distinction, rigour, parsimony, and verification (Cacioppo, Semin, and Berntson 2004). These attributes provide clarity that peacebuilding interventions are dynamic systems.
Even so, critics identify some flaw of this approach, the first of which is its tendency to perpetuate egoism and self-interest actions in states (Siradag 2012). Secondly, the paradigm is condemned as lacking precision and showing contradictions in addressing national interests, power, anarchism, and power balance the conceptions of which are also inconsistent with non-European politics. Thirdly, contrary to proponents’ claims, the approach supports a zero-sum game mentality characterised by confirmatory biases and oversimplification. Nonetheless, these weaknesses do not erase the paradigm’s value in enhancing our understanding of state-building priorities in enhancing national peace toward building international peace.
5.4 The Pragmatist ApproachThe pragmatic paradigm for piloting international peacebuilding research is emerging as a contemporary alternative for responding to the shortcomings and failures of the liberal peace doctrine (De Coning 2018). As the liberalist peacebuilding era wanes, global peacebuilding is witnessing a pragmatic turn characterised by giving primacy to and empowering local institutions and practitioners and their capabilities, structures, capacities, and aspirations instead of emphasising external agendas, norms, and resources. Thus, the pragmatist approach to international peacebuilding research underscores the enablement of the understandings of idiosyncratic local epistemologies that have non-western and non-universalist knowledge towards achieving successful post-conflict transition (Finkenbusch 2016). This creates a rational ethos that infiltrates peacebuilding as hybridised actors, networks, institutions, and norms collaborate and consort to explore and experiment ways of shaping peace-oriented change and stability from the grassroots (Bargués 2020). This comes along with using systems thinking to facilitate resilience for new forms of enhanced, genuine engagement with local milieus (Kim and Richmond 2019; Moe and Stepputat 2018). This way, a pragmatist approach adumbrates the notion of building peace without peace.
The pragmatist approach supports the replication of positive peacebuilding practices from the perspective of global norms and rejecting cultures of corruption, deviance, and violence (Newman 2009). It ignores assumptions that international peace interveners must necessarily have the authority and knowledge to define predefined policy goals for peacebuilding and direct the processes of attaining these goals. Furthermore, pragmatist peacebuilding researchers borrow from anti-foundationalism that emphasises leveraging existing capacities, normative abstractions, and understandings and building upon them to reach new context-specific peacebuilding solutions without accentuating external resources, aesthetics, and knowledge (Moe and Stepputat 2018). The approach also acknowledges hybrid peace and the multifaceted, non-deterministic, and non-linear peacebuilding elements and progressions. These attributes make the pragmatist approach the preferred paradigm for international peacebuilding for the United Nations. UN peace operations are based on this paradigm also because it is ductile to evolving local dynamics without being constrained by predetermined peacebuilding goals (Simangan (2020).
Relative to my research question, studies with pragmatic research philosophy incorporate multiple research methods that range from qualitative and quantitative to mixed, participatory action, relational, and ethnographic research methods and designs. Deductive and inductive research approaches of either qualitative or quantitative nature allow for the exploration of axiological, epistemological, and ontological themes in international peacebuilding. This can be from multidimensional standpoints such as dualisms of peacebuilding agent and structure, the idealism of normative and strategic actions, and metaphysical aspects of peace (Frankel Pratt 2016). Ethnographic research with pragmatic underpinnings can be employed in perception-seeking peacebuilding studies (Carl and Pospisil 2019). Lastly, participatory action research can be focused on collective inquiry and experimentation to uncover the social experiences of local communities regarding peacebuilding.
Advocates of the pragmatic approach highlight numerous advantages that constitute its strengths. Firstly, it offers a full-bodied conceptual framework that expansively accounts for the conventional signification of phenomena while encompassing experiential, symbolic, and qualitative and quantitative modality of extra-conventional signification (Halton 2011). Secondly, it corrects other theoretical perspectives with adequate justifications by addressing practical questions directly and explicitly. Also, it provided a broad gamut of philosophical options for researchers to select (Frankel Pratt 2016). The fourth strength is the capacity to respond to and overcome most of the liberalist approach’s shortcomings. Lastly, the paradigm gives room for constantly revising human knowledge and ideas, a demonstration of its dedication to uncovering truth and determining reality practically.
Opponents of this approach critique it by identifying only three flaws. The first is that pragmatism fails to entirely cover the meaning of the ‘turn to ontology’ of peacebuilding, which seems to ignore post-conflict realities of political and security challenges (Bargués-Pedreny 2015). The second flaw is that its endorsement by European countries appears to propagate colonialism effects in Africa (Siradag 2012). Lastly, leftist critics argue that this approach does not offer a significant moral and political resistance prevailing institutional and social and relations. Even so, these weaknesses do not diminish the paradigm’s value in augmenting our understanding of the importance of grassroots actors in the global peacebuilding community.
6.0 ConclusionThe international peacebuilding agenda and discourse are progressively expanding, attracting different multidisciplinary scholars with divergent philosophical orientations to adopt different epistemol
