Between Banyans and Battle Scenes: Contestation in Pragmatic Peacebuilding and Beyond

During the past years scholars of peacebuilding have increasingly turned from an unchallenged support of the diffusion of liberal norms to post-liberalism, pragmatism, and the study of complex global-local interaction patterns and hybridity. Contestation by the supposed beneficiaries of peacebuilding has taken center stage in this research. While scholars use the concept of contestation mainly with an analytical interest and emphasize an anti-foundationalist approach, the use of the concept has still – often implicitly – strong normative connotations. Contestation is seen as having democratic qualities itself: Formerly passive “objects” of international governmentality gain voice, struggles liberal norms facilitate deliberation and self-determination. Contestation, therefore, becomes itself a normative concept. This normative quality of contestation is, however, seldom spelt out. The paper will work out the different normative uses of the concept in the literature on peacebuilding specifically and in the wider research field of democracy promotion and norm contestation. A reconstruction of four approaches to contestation and resistance by Oliver Richmond, Milja Kurki, Amitav Acharya and Antje Wiener shows that these are – surprisingly – fairly conventional when it comes to their normative take on contestation. Contestation is largely seen as a means which – in the best case – leads to inclusive dialogue with norm promoters under the Banyan tree (a metaphor introduced by Amitav Acharya). Battle scenes – that is, conflicts over liberal norms of a more fundamental and radical kind – are either not considered or seen as normatively undesirable.