The Pragmatic as Neutral? The Politics of Knowledge Production and Research Partnerships

By focusing on ‘what works’, pragmatic approaches to peacebuilding seek to move forward from the international-local dichotomy which underpins liberal peace approaches and which is not entirely overcome by the prolific critiques. This might be seen as a rejection of international ‘expertise’ and a turn towards organically and contextually produced knowledge about what policies are most likely to work at a given moment in a given society. Our paper asks whether such an approach is really able to sidestep the politics of knowledge production on ‘peacebuilding’ with a claim that ‘what works’ is somehow an epistemologically neutral exercise. In fact, defining what works is potentially as political as parachuting in ‘expert’ knowledge from international organisations. We need to know more about the epistemologies of determining success of different policy options, which approaches are even allowed on the table and which are silenced by the power relations and contestations which are necessarily part of any society. Our paper consists of three parts: we first detail the epistemological and theoretical underpinnings of our claim on the agenda-related nature of so-called “workable” peacebuilding-approaches. We then proceed with a two-step illustration of our assumptions looking first at power dimensions of knowledge production including the concept of research partnerships. This research formula can be described as one of the most pragmatic within the realm of existing research schemes as it is particularly open to influx from local contexts at all stages of research. We finally illustrate our claims with three short examples from the field of peacebuilding in the areas of transitional justice, fragility, and mediation.