Making Sense of Violence: Practice and Authority in Conflict Prevention Expertise

The prevention agenda gained renewed traction during the last three decades in light of the international community’s failure to adequately respond to large-scale violence. As international conflicts can constitute a threat to international peace and security, prevention is the one of the first measures in the repertoire of UN peace operations and is often referred to as the single most important pillar of the R2P doctrine. It has prompted the development of elaborate instruments, such as early warning and monitoring systems, which now produce the knowledge that is intended to inform decisions on international intervention. To date, a constructivist problematisation of knowledge production in early warning and monitoring efforts beyond discussions of effectiveness is largely absent from the literature, particularly with respect to epistemic practices. Using the case of preventive efforts in South Sudan, this paper thus asks how micro-processes of knowledge production in international prevention efforts relate to the global complex of expertise which shapes decisions and actions on conflict prevention. Drawing on primary documents, interview data and participant observation, this paper combines practice-theoretic and materialist lenses to conceptualise processes of assembling epistemic power in the interplay of actants and practices that make up conflict prevention expertise. In this way, it traces how crisis and conflict is ‘made known’ to the complex constellation of international actors, which include IOs, INGOs, think tanks, and academics. By analysing the ways in which actors construct a ‘moment of crisis’ that requires international attention, this study thus fills the gap in the scholarship concerning a critical analysis of epistemic power in security knowledge and governance.