How do the emotional and embodied experiences of international interveners influence their understanding and practice of peacebuilding?

Abstract

What happens if international interveners feel emotions that they consider unsanctioned, unwanted and unprofessional? What if they enact and manage their emotions in ways that they – or others – deem unacceptable? If international interveners face anxiety about being ‘too emotional’ or not feeling or expressing the ‘right’ emotions, does this challenge their sense of identity? And what consequences could this have for peacebuilding and the conflict-affected population in which they were working? Building on the growing body of critical peace and conflict scholarship that has analysed international interveners at the micro-scale, this article analyses how individual interveners’ emotional and embodied experiences influence their understanding and practice of peacebuilding. Based on a discourse analysis of the memoirs of 10 international interveners, this article identifies two primary interpretive repertoires that the interveners employed and argues that they generated two ideal-type subject positions: the intervener as objective, rational, technocratic ‘expert’ and the intervener as irrational, fallible, vulnerable ‘human’. These subject positions determined the feeling rules that the interveners followed and the dilemmas they faced. This, in turn, affected how the interveners perceived the conflict-affected societies in which they were working, and how they understood and practised peacebuilding.

Decolonising affect: Emotions and the politics of peace

“…de Rivera, 2011; Gobodo-Madikizela, 2002) to more recent work examining emotions in relation to the power dynamics between peace practitioners and the communities in which they operate (e.g. Travouillon, 2023; Wallis, 2023). Emotions and their more ephemeral bodily affects – including fear, anxiety, anger, guilt, remorse, shame and sorrow – are central to how individuals and collectives come to term with violence and work towards establishing peaceful societal relations.…”