Pragmatic Approaches to Peacebuilding

The politics of international peace building is currently undergoing changes with regards to both its conduct and theory. On the backdrop of the bankruptcy of orthodox liberal peace approaches to fragile states and conflict settings, policy makers and academics from different fields, have started to move towards a more pragmatic position with regards to the means and ends of peacebuilding. This workshop explores this new area of pragmatic approaches and International Practice Theory. Pragmatic approaches consciously seek to go beyond the Liberal Peace paradigm. Pragmatic approaches do not assume that international interveners necessarily have the knowledge or the power to set out predefined policy goals or lead the processes of attaining them. Where Liberal Peace approaches tended to set up a discursive divide between international interveners and local groups and organisations, based on superior attributes of power, resources, knowledge and values, pragmatic approaches seek to build upon existing 'everyday' capacities, institutions and practices on the ground. Pragmatism, in brief, has the connotation of an anti-foundationalist approach that derives theory from practice and is grounded in actual experiences, rather than in the abstractions of normative frameworks. Rather than emphasising external resources and knowledge, these approaches start from existing capacities and understandings and seek to build upon them, to reach solutions to context-specific challenges. This workshop seeks to explore pragmatic approaches, based upon both field research and conceptual and methodological argumentation, in order to discuss the advantages and possibilities as well as the drawbacks or limits to Pragmatic Peace and International Practice Theory.