Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention by Severine Autesserre (review)

In Severine Autesserre’s 2014 work titled Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, she has uncovered and delineated for students and practitioners of conflict resolution the transnational culture—designated as Peaceland—that expatriates share across the globe’s conflict zones. Autesserre, an aid worker as well as a scholar, has the in-country experience and intellectual tools necessary to analyze the efficacy of Peaceland in conflict zones. Chronicling her experiences throughout the worldwide network of Peaceland, she methodically combines her interviews of expatriates and local populations with her own keen insights to identify a growing expatriate subculture separated from the host population. As an intervener and researcher in regions ranging from Central America to Central and Southeast Asia, Autesserre superbly identifies the negative consequences concomitant to a subculture that functions apart from the people aid workers are charged with helping.

It is the everyday behavior of the expatriates of Peaceland—a universal tool kit of practices and tactics transposed on all conflict zones—that Autesserre illuminates as the most important factor that limits the effectiveness of interventions. She has uncovered the existence of Peaceland and its universality across conflict zones due to the importance she places on the everyday practices and the dynamics of these areas. This is the result of Autesserre’s desire to shift researchers’ focus away from the macro-level dynamics of conflict resolution to the micro-level. Believing that any researched perspective of intervention is incomplete without a thorough examination of the ground-floor dynamics, her scholarship is a breath of fresh air for the narrative of aid workers, offering a new perspective that allows scholars and practitioners to get to the core of why interventions so often fail.

Autesserre attributes failure to the dynamics of Peaceland. Its subculture, one in which interveners are separated by a wide gulf from the local population, counteracts the efforts of aid organizations, virtually guaranteeing the alienation of the host nation. Successful peacebuilding, Autesserre postulates, demands a thorough understanding of the host’s political, religious, and cultural history. This nuanced approach, however, is so often absent from peacebuilding initiatives due to the international community of interveners’ appropriation of universal thematic tactics that can be applied to all conflict zones, regardless of their relevance to the situation on the ground. Within this international community, Autesserre notes that there is essentially a tug-of-war taking place between proponents of “thematic” and “local knowledge,” which she labels as the “politics of knowledge,” in which practitioners of thematic methods dictate strategy. By local knowledge, Autesserre is referring to aid workers with “country expertise” who know the nations’ histories, languages, and more often than not have spent considerable time there. This allows the intervener an intimate understanding of the host populations’ dynamics and, as a result, builds a bridge of understanding between Peaceland and the host population. Diametrically opposed to this is thematic knowledge, otherwise known as “technical expertise.” Rather than being cultivated by on-the-ground experience, thematic knowledge is gained through formal education that creates a universal understanding of managing conflict resolution.

The wide-ranging acceptance of the thematic approach is the result of three elements at play with respect to the conditions of today’s interventions. First, Autesserre cites the wide scope of conflict zones in the modern international system. Since conflict is occurring in a fast-paced international system, universal knowledge is beneficial because it allows the international community to send aid workers anywhere, regardless of their knowledge of the host nation. The benefit of having the option of quickly deploying aid workers, combined with modernity’s obsessive prerequisite of credentialed knowledge, heavily favors the cause of the so-called experts of thematic knowledge. Another factor, today’s conception of peace as a universal condition applicable anywhere in the world, solidified the belief that there was one true path to...