Knowledge production in conflict and intervention: finding âfactsâ, telling âtruthâ
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Roland KostiÄ
ABSTRACT
This article has a twofold aim. First, it discusses the contributions to the scholarly field of conflict knowledge and expertise in this special issue on Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention: finding âfactsâ, telling âtruthâ. Second, it suggests an alternative reading of the issueâs contributions. Starting from the assumption that prevalent ways of knowing are always influenced by wider material and ideological structures at specific times, the article traces the influence of contemporary neoliberalism on general knowledge production structures in Western societies, and more specifically in Western academia, before re-reading the special issueâs contributions through this prism. The main argument is that neoliberalism leaves limited space for independent critical knowledge, thereby negatively affecting what can be known about conflict and intervention. The article concludes with some tasks for reflexive scholarship in neoliberal times.
Introduction
Over recent years, knowledge-focused explorations of conflicts and interventions have mushroomed. This is evidenced by a steep rise in the number of publications and of research groups and centres that have formed around the topic, contributing to the institutionalization of conflict knowledge/expertise as a field of research.1 While the surge in conflict and intervention studies focusing on the role of experts and knowledge is relatively recent in the discipline of International Relations (IR) this type of enquiry is not entirely new. Berling and Bueger (2016; based on Bueger 2014) distinguish the role that expertise has played in IR into three âgenerations of researchâ. While the âfirst generation intends to isolate experts as a distinct type of actor in world politics and aims at studying their causal influenceâ, the âsecond generation develops a broader understanding of expertise and shifts emphasis to language, rationalities and meaningsâ. The third generation, finally, focuses âon the practices of expertise and how these are situated in various historical situations and material arrangementsâ.
The three generations of knowledge-related research in IR constitute a useful background for an overview of studies on knowledge and expertise in the field of conflict and intervention. Here, the first generationâstudies that isolate experts as distinct actors and explore their influence on policymakingâcomprises works which look into the organizational structure, advocacy work and culture of conflict expert organizations such as think tanks (e.g. Medvetz 2007, 2012; McGann and Sabatini 2011), or which study the influence of academic knowledge on statebuilding practitioners (e.g. Waldman 2014). Works on strategic knowledge production as a central technique in diplomatic counter-insurgency, with their focus on specific actors and their aim to determine the course of policymaking in intervention contexts outside of formal structures, may also be seen as part of such first-generation studies (e.g. Leroux-Martin 2014).
Examples of the second generation of expert/knowledge studies about conflict and interventionâstudies revolving around language, rationalities and meaningâare the works of Autesserre (2012), Dunn (2003) and Koddenbrock (2014). These authors focus on the discourses which constitute the type of international policy problem a conflict-affected country, here the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), is seen to pose and highlight how the images and interpretations of âthe Congoâ shape international intervenersâ actions. Studies focusing on myths as the part of political knowledge that âgoes without sayingâ, such as KĂŒhnâs (2016a) and Goetzeâs (2016) studies of myth-making about Afghanistan and Afghan warlordism, respectively, also belong to this generation, as do works which try to uncover the hidden/local discourse behind, or paralleling, the dominant âpublic transcriptsâ of international peacebuilding interventions (e.g. Heathershaw 2009; Bliesemann de Guevara and KĂŒhn 2015).
Third-generation studies in the field of conflict/intervention comprise works that are focused on the epistemic practices of conflict knowledge production and expertise (e.g. Denskus 2014, on peacebuilding conferences and research as ritual), or on the limiting effects that material structures and objects can have on our representations of conflict and intervention, such as Kosmatopoulosâ (2014) study of the effects of the format of the crisis report on representations of violence in Lebanon (see also Smirl 2015; KĂŒhn 2016b). These generations are not clear-cut and many authorsâ studies straddle the analytical boundaries erected here. It can be argued, for instance, that Sendingâs (2015) work on expert authority in global governance with its basis in the Bourdieusian relational understanding of authority as recognition could be placed at the intersection of the second and third generations (see also Stampnitzky 2014). Far from doing justice to all the interesting works produced over the last years, this brief overview illustrates the wide variety of approaches existing in the field of knowledge/expertise on conflict and intervention, and to which the contributions in this special issue seek to make distinctive, thought-provoking contributions.
All articles assembled here start from an understanding of knowledge as socially constructed and as the result of distinct (discursive and non-discursive) practices. While the authors do not deny the existence of a material conflict and intervention reality âout thereâ, nor that this reality can have substantial effects on ways of knowing (e.g. when access is difficult), they share the epistemological view that this reality can only be accessed through individual and inter-subjective interpretation. Engagement with conflict and intervention spaces is furthermore seen as mostly mediated, adding another filter between the material reality and the beholder. Beyond this shared understanding, and taking the contributions on their own terms, however, each author (team) pushes the boundaries of a specific, different aspect of the broad field of conflict knowledge and expertise studies.
Contributing to second-generation studies, David Lewis (2017) argues that the dominant framings of discourse and knowledge in conflict and intervention studies are inadequate to describe the multiple competing conceptualizations of war and peace in todayâs international politics. He starts from the observation that both liberal and emancipatory conflict and intervention studies are dominated by Foucauldian or Foucault-inspired approaches, which see power and knowledge as intrinsically linked in hegemonic regimes that dominate all ways of knowing about war and peace at specific times. In contrast, Lewis argues that only approaches accounting for discursive contestation are able to capture the dynamics of international conflict- and violence-related knowledge production with its multiplicity of alternative approaches to peace-making today. This applies specifically to what he terms authoritarian peacebuildingâthat is, illiberal forms of conflict management by authoritarian states. Lewisâ contribution thus pushes the boundaries of whose and which practices are counted as peace-making in international politics and research.
More space for nuance and ambiguity is also what Suda Perera (2017) calls for in her auto-ethnography of research in the DRC. She argues that research on conflict and intervention needs to account for messiness encountered during fieldwork, but which due to institutional constraints and demands such as methodological rigour and policy relevance often does not make its way into research outputs. By highlighting the oft-encountered impossibility to triangulate information into a coherent picture of âthe situation on the groundâ, her contribution calls on us to avoid the tendency of simplification that has characterized not only mainstream top-down conflict analyses, but also critical bottom-up studies of violent conflict. Rich in empirical detail, Pereraâs article contributes to critical conflict and intervention studies by showing the need to find ways in which messiness and the type of triangulation of data that raises more questions than it provides answersâor what she calls âBermuda triangulationââcan be accounted for in both the research and policymaking processes.
While the contributions by Lewis and Perera focus most on the âsecond-generationâ questions of creation of meaning, the following two contributions zoom in on the âthird-generationâ question of practices employed by different knowledge producers to create authenticity of their knowledge claims. Julika Bake and Michaela Zöhrer (2017) focus on the techniques used in the production of knowledge expertise in two seemingly very different genres: human rights reporting and comics journalism. Specifically, they analyse representations of field research methodologies and personifications of truth in the figure of the witness by Human Rights Watch and by comics journalist Joe Sacco. Despite some differences relating to these genres, the authors are able to show how in both cases âhaving been thereâ and having access to people involved in abuses is at the heart of claims to authenticity and truth. With its unusual comparison, the contribution not least productively blurs the boundaries of what is considered a genre worthy of analysis in conflict knowledge and expertise studies.
In a similar vein, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (2017) argues that politiciansâ travel to spaces of conflict and intervention needs to be understood as an epistemic practice, which enables claims over authentic insights and knowledge on the grounds of âhaving been thereâ and forms the basis upon which expert status is ascribed to policymakers by peers and the broader public. Bliesemann de Guevara claims that such visits are just one among many performative techniques in a wider struggle over the social construction of roles and problem definitions in democratic politics. By focusing on knowledge-producing practices of policymakers, her study upends conventional notions of who should be considered a knowledge producer in international politics, and it provides interesting insights into the value attached to located knowledge, which qualify the general finding that universal knowledge generally trumps located knowledge in intervention contexts.
The last two contributions take a more actor-centred perspective on the strategic side of knowledge production through management of access to the field and the manufacturing of strategic narratives, thereby suggesting new takes on first-generation knowledge/expertise studies. Jonathan Fisher (2017) focuses on the bunkerization phenomenonâthat is, the tendency by international interveners to remain confined to gated aid compounds, thereby not least severely hampering their ability to know about the intervened country. Contrary to existing literature, which attributes this tendency to factors such as risk aversion among interveners, Fisher pushes the boundaries of this literature by redirecting the focus to the agency of Southern governments. Using the example of Ethiopia, he shows that Southern states themselves are and have historically been key promoters of bunkerization behaviour and mentality in their interaction with peripheral areas/peoples on their territory. Controlling access to these areas in conflict/intervention is thus as much or more in their interest as it is in the intervenersâ, leaving the latter little choice in the matter.
In the final contribution, Roland KostiÄ (2017) offers a re-reading of the knowledge produced on the intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time of the government crisis in 2010â11. He employs a diplomatic counter-insurgency lens to highlight the strategic side of knowledge production and policy narratives resorted to by different networks competing over dominance in the intervention process. KostiÄâs article shows how a focus on informal networks and their strategic production/use of knowledge leads us to different interpretations of external interventionsâ courses and logics, thereby pushing the boundaries of intervention studies well beyond their liberal core. Yet, the contribution is also wary of interpreting too much power into such informal arrangements: the author shows how diplomatic counterinsurgency is ultimately bound to fail, when strategic narratives and actual practice diverge in incommensurable ways.
Knowledge production in neoliberal times
These valuable original contributions notwithstanding, in the remainder of this introduction we would like to suggest an alternative reading of this special issue: as a critique of the contemporary conditions of conflict/intervention knowledge production in Western academia and society at large. Policy-relevant knowledge is never produced in a void. Those specializing in itâacademics, experts, consultants and similarâare bound by broader dominant structures of their times, both material and ideological (Kauppi 2014). While these structures do not determine what knowledge exactly is being produced, they nonetheless create opportunity structures for certain ways of knowing, and foreclose alternatives to accepted bodies of knowledge. What influences policy-relevant knowledge production today, we argue, are the material and ideological practices of neoliberalism.
To understand knowledge production in neoliberal times, we have to take into account the specific historic context of ideas and practices of making Western states surpassingly smaller, more efficient and more business-like, and the effects that this has had on policy knowledge producers. Guiding government policy in the UK and US since the 1980s, neoliberal ideas of new public management and the redesigning and privatization of state bureaucracies gained global sway in the early 1990s (Wedel 2009, 29; Sussman 2010, 13; Monbiot 2016). Their stated objective has been to turn âsluggish centralized bureaucracies, their preoccupations with rules and regulations and their hierarchical chains of commandâ into governments based on flat hierarchies, decentralized decision-making, productivity-enhancing technologies, quality and customer satisfaction, in response to information-rich, knowledge-intensive society and the economy of the 1990s (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Osborne 1993, 1; 2007). In this process, different aspects of state functions have been privatized, allowing for the expansion of global capitalism, while making bureaucracy more informal, multi-layered and diffuse (Wedel 2009; Sussman 2010). The outcome of neoliberal redesigning has been the state that functions as a network in which all nodes consisting of government and quasi-government entities interact and are equally necessary for the performance of the stateâs functions in relation to the demands of transnational capital (Castells 2011a).
The legitimization and reproduction of the state are enacted through decentralization and images of citizensâ participation in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), making them an essential part of the networked state (Carnoy and Castells 2001, 14). At the same time, the privatization of politics has displaced voluntary citizen engagement with corporate versions, which rely on networks of professional actors that straddle the boundary between business consultants, public opinion pollsters, PR specialists and lobbyists (Shore and Wright 2003, 5; Wedel 2009; Sussman 2010, 16; Castells 2011b, 371; Suhonen 2014, 71â87). Not surprisingly, the multiplication of policy knowledge producers and experts of all colours is one of the most acknowledged developments in global policymaking over the last two decades (Leander 2014). The multiplication of actors has gone hand in hand with a democratization of voices in the sense that there are no clear hierarchies of knowledge when it comes to a political issue. Lay persons who happen to be affected by a policy problem may be on a par with scientists in the public perception of who is authorized to speak on a matter and whose contribution is judged as legitimate (Morin and Orsini 2013; Leander 2014).
In terms of foreign and security policy, the neoliberal reinvention of the state has meant that the state has reserved the right to use military force, although many aspects of foreign policy as well as military and security tasks, including diplomacy and intelligence, have been subcontracted to private actors (Brand 2005; Wedel 2009; Bliesemann de Guevara 2014; Gentry 2016). In this process, classic roles have become considerably blurred. For instance, it has been observed that contemporary US diplomats are seen as part-activists, part-lobbyists and part street-smart policy entrepreneurs, who rely on PR tactics such as opinion polls and focus groups to identify shared objectives, project images and build networks in order to ensure peaceful transitions, while reducing the cost of military interventions (Fouts 2002, 22). Some traditional diplomatic and intelligence functions have been outsourced to global think tanks, whose legitimacy is not based on their cooperation with the state, but on their seeming independence and legitimacy as non-governmental organizations and the cultural and social capital of the academics and other professionals working for them (Bliesemann de Guevara 2014; Gentry 2016). Given the âflexing natureâ (KostiÄ 2017) of the activities and identities of individuals straddling the institutional boundaries between state and non-state, public and private, local and global, and academia and consultancy, static categories of âpolicymakerâ, âdiplomatâ, âconsultantâ, âacademicâ, âthink tank expertâ, âNGO practitioner...
