A Post-Liberal Ontology of Peacebuilding Practice

Abstract

The meaning of emancipation and the limits of power have become trapped between the liberal peace and the local. Liberal-local hybridity maintains and projects an a priori relationship between power and emancipatory agency onto the complex ontological processes though which this relationship is continually contested and transformed. In other words, the liberal-local explanation of hybridity produces a problematic paradox: it conceals the expressions of power and emancipatory agency that are actively reshaping post-liberal world. Rather than exposing the active, ontologically transformative properties of hybridity liberal-local hybridity preserves hybridity as an outcome, a by-product, a secondary effect of a more fundamental, more significant tension between liberal international power and emancipatory local agency. However, concealed within the paradox of liberal-local hybridity, there is an alternative and previously unidentified emergent post-liberal project. By way of comparison, the explanatory orientation is epistemological in nature; its purpose is developing concepts, analytical frameworks and theoretical distinctions in order to make sense of the overwhelmingly complex ontological phenomena. The emergent approach, however, is ontological in nature. It is oriented toward mapping ontological complexity and tracing the post-liberal surplus: activities that exceed and reshape the distinctions on which explanatory hybridity depends.