Emotional Practices and Listening in Peacebuilding Partnerships

The Invisibility Cloak

Pernilla Johansson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032060507
• eBook ISBN: 9781000485356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes the everyday emotions of international peacebuilding practitioners as practices that hinder – and potentially help – them to listen more receptively to their local partners. It develops ''emotional practices'' as an analytical concept by integrating critical feminist perspectives insights into practice approaches.

Effective peacebuilding requires international actors to listen to local partners. This sounds simple enough but often fails in practice. Examining how everyday emotions help or hinder internationals' receptivity to local perspectives, the book challenges the conventional wisdom that emotions do not matter – at least not those of internationals who are the privileged party in peacebuilding partnerships. The book is based on interviews with peacebuilding practitioners, donors and researchers working in the Balkans and East Africa, as well as in the UK, the US and Sweden, and gives a detailed and no-nonsense description of daily dilemmas regarding listening and partnerships. Johansson provides concrete recommendations of how internationals can practice personally, organizationally, and geopolitically to build emotional capacity that will help them listen better to local actors.

Drawing on the author's expertise in political science and peace and conflict research, this volume speaks to scholars in international relations, political theory, sociology, cultural studies, development studies, critical theory, and anthropology.

1 The listening puzzle

Why are internationals in peacebuilding so bad at listening to local partners, even though they want to and know they should?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200468-1

Most painful [in the partnership evaluation], was to hear that we don’t ask [local partners’] advice, because we think we do it all the time, and base everything we do on what they tell us.

(INGO practitioner during staff discussion on partnership)¹

This quote from a professional practitioner in an international non-governmental organization (INGO) expresses both a central peacebuilding norm and the difficulty of its implementation. The norm is that of equal partnerships between international actors and their local partners,² in which local ownership is key. In other words, internationals should listen to their partners’ advice and, as the quote indicates, “base everything [they] do” on what locals tell them. The difficulty is that their local peacebuilding partners do not feel heard. On the contrary, they think internationals do not care for their expertise or opinions. The gap between the normative consensus and its implementation gives rise to the overall research question: Why are internationals so bad at listening, even though they want to and know they should? In this book, I address this gap by examining what I first overlooked, the emotions expressed at the beginning of the quote.

There, the speaker states that this gap is nothing less than “painful.” This expression of emotion was ignored by the practitioners themselves and pushed aside by my interviewees and me (at first) as beside the “real” point in conversations about partnership. What internationals feel is simply not considered relevant to competent peacebuilding practice. On the contrary, in this book I argue that paying attention to the emotions INGO practitioners experience during their daily activities helps us understand the listening gap and to identify obstacles to as well as possibilities for receptive listening, that is, listening likely to be felt by their local partners because it means internationals are open to change.

Emotions are relevant to listening because they affect how one perceives things and can process what is heard. In particular, I focus on what INGO practitioners’ emotions can tell us about how they perceive who they are and what they do in relation to local partners and to existing norms of peacebuilding. I argue that how they perceive these things makes it easier for them to hear some kinds of input from local partners rather than others, and that this is likely to reproduce rather than change the present state of affairs, where internationals think they listen while locals do not feel heard. As an example, consider the “How will I know?” taboo, named after the Whitney Houston song and discussed in Chapter 2. I find that INGOs anxiously search for signs that locals even want to be their partner but are unable to ask directly. Any answer may put their competence in question and either risk their funding, their identity or both. If locals say no and the project ends, INGOs may lose their funding. If locals say yes, but INGOs are still not sure, they may question their identity as competent in choosing partners. If their partner gets offended by the suspicion, both may be in jeopardy. Another example is the capacity contradiction where I find that INGOs walk a fine line in eagerly praising their local partners’ capacity as agents for change, while claiming these partners still need vital capacity building by the INGO itself. Having to toe this line makes INGOs tensely cling to standard scripts of complementary knowledges between “internationals” and “locals.” This way, they avoid losing either partners by treating them as less than equal, or donors who could fund capable local actors directly. Thus, the tension discourages INGOs from hearing partners’ expressions of needs and capacities outside the accepted scripts. These are only two examples of how emotions influence INGOs’ possibilities to listen receptively.

Who this book is for and why: bringing different perspectives into dialogue

I imagine that readers mainly approach this book from three perspectives, which I have myself come through in the following order: peacebuilding practitioners, mainstream peace researchers, and critical researchers in international relations.³ These groups are of course diverse, but often have different aims and terminologies that make it harder to learn from each other. (Even the wording in this paragraph will most likely create irritation, which is why I keep it as short as possible.) Simply put, practitioners who work in organizations or institutions with projects or financing often want to cut to the chase with the question “so, how can we use this?,” mainstream peace researchers emphasize systematic investigations into causal connections, and critical researchers focus on power inequalities and systemic conditions. I would very much like the book to bring these perspectives into dialogue through what I see as a shared and genuine interest: understanding the listening puzzle based on a strong empirical case.

Therefore, I start in practitioners’ actual experiences and aim to describe these so that they recognize themselves and so that researchers get draw into the practical and ethical details of practitioners’ many listening-related dilemmas. Doing so, I hope, will spark curiosity enough for all to follow a systematic and critical investigation, a step-by-step analysis and theorizing, where concepts and literature are introduced in each chapter to develop the arguments of the book incrementally. While these arguments may seem already obvious to critical researchers as they align with overall insights long accepted in feminist, queer and decolonial scholarship regarding embodied and normative power dynamics and the coloniality of interventions, they are not generally accepted or seen as actionable by mainstream researchers or practitioners. To avoid these two groups opting out in the first chapter because my starting points are too overarching or ideological and the third getting stuck in my definitions of concepts, I have decided to lead with empirics. I then introduce my eclectic mix of analytical resources from peace research, political theory, cognitive research and critical feminist scholarship step by step in each empirical chapter to develop my arguments. For readers who want to jump into the action straight away, I therefore recommend going directly to Chapter 2, while readers who like framing first can continue with Chapter 1, where I lay out my argument next.

What I argue

My book makes three main claims which broadly follow the chapter structure. First, emotions matter to listening (and the lack of it) in peacebuilding practices (Chapter 2). Second, emotions matter because many such practices are still “sticky” with a colonial hierarchy where all the focus is on improving the local actor (Chapter 2). Doing so leaves internationals with the privilege of “invisibility” as political actors, as if they wear an “invisibility cloak” (Chapter 3). That is, competent peacebuilding means that we focus on what local actors do, which is constantly questioned and interfered with as a part of the partnerships while internationals are off the partnership table. Hidden under the invisibility cloak, they remain comfortable and able to carry on as usual, with their sense of the game, themselves, and the future intact (Chapter 4). And third, change, or learning how to listen, means practicing purposefully failing to stay under the invisibility cloak, and dealing with the uncomfortable emotions that come with “appearing” as political actors with stakes in the partnership (Chapters 4 makes the case and Chapter 5 goes into how to do it). It is these emotional consequences that every day orient internationals’ choices away from change and hinder them from listening receptively. In other words, the pain expressed in the introductory quote is productive and depending on how internationals deal with it, it will either contribute to reproduction or to change.

To make my argument, I treat emotions as practices,⁴ that is, as one aspect alongside discursive, physical, and material aspects of what practitioners do. While practice-based approaches have been on the rise in International Relations (IR)⁵ the last decade, few of these scholars explicitly analyze embodied aspects of practices. In parallel, emotions research is surging in the discipline, but to my knowledge few empirical research projects so far have systematically treated emotions data as practices.⁶ While foundational texts (Bourdieu 1990) establish that emotions are central in practices and their reproduction, recent applications (e.g. Adler and Pouliot 2011b) mostly leave emotions aside. Therefore, I draw on additional traditions in order to analyze my data from interviews and observation with practitioners from three peacebuilding INGOs as well as with their donors and researchers in the field. Specifically, I turn to the well-established and rich knowledge about emotions within feminist, post-/decolonial, and queer traditions, what I will simply call “feminist.”⁷ As a result, my study contributes to the theoretical capacity of practice-based approaches to analyze emotional practices. Together, practice-based and feminist theories help me analyze my data and develop my main claims about listening across structural hierarchies.

In fact, these findings may be applicable in any social change where privileged actors also are required and/or want to change. For example, today, we hear increasing calls from social movements for action by white people to counter racism and by men to counter sexism. But the action of privileged groups can often be ineffective or even make things worse, as this chapter will show. Therefore, we need to increase our understanding of their possibilities to act for change and the consequences, as this book does. Below, I start by laying out what is already known about listening in peacebuilding partnerships between international and local actors, the role of emotions in receptive listening, and practices and emotions respectively to introduce my take on emotional practices. I also share more about research design and choices – including my decision to analyze emotions at all. Doing so was unplanned, but necessary to make sense of the data which did not fit pre-existing explanations. My aim is also to reflect this process through the chapter structure.

The aim of the book is not to test a theory which has been prepared before the study starts. Rather, I use theory as bell hooks (1991, 1), “to comprehend – to grasp what was happening around and within me.” More specifically, to make sense of complex – if ordinary – processes described by practitioners and experienced by myself in my own work at a peacebuilding INGO,⁸ as I was trying to listen to local actors and, just as the practitioners in the initial quote, “build everything we do on what they tell us.”

What we know and need to know

There is already a lot of knowledge to draw on in the investigation of internationals’ listening practices. Even though few works deal with listening directly, many give valuable insights into partnership dynamics. Here, I outline the main works I draw on regarding peacebuilding partnerships, and how emotions matter to listening, to articulate what I call the listening puzzle. In the first of five sections, I briefly introduce the “international” and “local” actors I am talking about, what we know of the complexity of using such categories, and what we need to know about them. Second, I establish that there is a normative consensus that international peacebuilding actors should listen to local actors to secure local ownership and thereby legitimacy and sustainability of peace processes. Third, I contrast this insight that internationals need to listen with the research on local actors, which finds they rarely feel heard. So far, I thus develop the “so what?” or why we should care about the listening puzzle. Fourth, I draw on a diverse literature to describe what I call receptive listening that is open to “understand differently” (Davison 1998). These works include political and social theory, organizational learning and management literature, and neuroscience.⁹ Together, these works demonstrate that listening is about how attention is directed in practice and that emotions are vital in shaping this direction. Fifth, I briefly examine alternative explanations to the listening gap. Together, these five steps set the stage to conceptualize emotional practices.

Complex categories: “internationals” and “locals”

Who are these “internationals” and “locals” that I am studying, what do we know about using such categories, and what do we need to know? Here, I give a brief introduction on my labelling, and what it may highlight and hide. I use the “international” and “local” to note different positions, not identities, that are in a relation to each other (as does Sabaratnam 2017). My starting point is partnerships between organizations doing peacebuilding projects together. The ones I call “international” are based in Northern (Western) countries and do more of the funding, while the ones I call “local” are based in Southern countries where the peacebuilding is supposed to take place and they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The listening puzzle: Why are internationals in peacebuilding so bad at listening to local partners, even though they want to and know they should?
• 2. Emotions matter: Tense, stressed, and anxious internationals playing contradictory games
• 3. Orienting emotions: Proud, achieving, and responsible internationals listening within limits
• 4. The invisibility cloak: Hiding politics – hindering partnership
• 5. How can the Subject learn to listen?: Practicing purposeful failure and dealing with feelings
• Conclusion: Emotional practices – privilege – hope for peacebuilding (and) scholarship
• References
• Index