With this book, Séverine Autesserre extends the contribution of her earlier work, The Trouble with Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (2010). Peaceland again uses ethnographic methods, this time to analyze not micro-level dynamics of rural violence but, rather, the inhabitants of what she dubs “Peaceland”—the transnational, itinerant community of nongovernmental organization workers, peacekeepers both civilian and military, aid workers, diplomats, humanitarian workers, peacebuilders, observers, and others. While this group constitutes an impeccably cosmopolitan and varied group of individuals who work for a range of different organizations in diverse conflicts and countries, Autesserre shows that the Peacelanders are remarkably insular and uniform in their expectations, career profiles, and behavior in the field. It is this that legitimates treating Peaceland as a single unit of analysis. Her book presents a systematic catalog of error, ignorance, institutional pathology, complacency, dysfunction, maladministration, racism, arrogance, mutual resentment, misunderstanding, confusion, and maldistribution of resources. Such outcomes and behaviors recur from Central America through Timor-Leste to South Sudan—all in spite of individuals’ best intentions.
The typical Peacelander is youthful and well educated. Deployed for brief stints to the field (a few years at most) across a range of different countries, the typical Peacelanders have few incentives to learn a local language. They will spend plenty of time in an office compiling regular reports using quantitative metrics based on questionable proxies, which will be sent to funders and superiors far away. The infrastructure, facilities, and salaries available to them will be vastly superior to those available to local government authorities. Peacelanders’ compounds will tend to be set behind barbed wire, armed guards, and sandbags (the practice of so-called “bunkerization”). The logos of international agencies and funders will be prominently displayed, thereby reinforcing Peacelanders’ segregation from the local population, emphasizing their international priorities and their status as wealthy, powerful patrons and benefactors. Peacelanders’ movement off base will be restricted, subject to curfews and extensive security procedures and usually only in air-conditioned, vehicular convoys—convoys that will be armed if comprising peacekeepers. Downtime will be in exclusive gatherings either at expensive bars and restaurants or parties on base, barred even to local elites. Here, Peacelanders will bond by complaining about the locals’ corruption and sniggering about outré peacekeepers from developing countries. Locals will, unsurprisingly, find Peacelanders remote and patronizing. The same cycle repeats itself with every new batch of Peacelanders.
Autesserre attributes these systematic outcomes across time and place to Peacelanders’ truncated time horizons, resulting from a concatenation of short-term field deployments, short-term planning cycles, hand-to-mouth funding cycles, the securitization and professionalization of Peaceland, and Peaceland’s externally oriented accountability structures. All of this mitigates against the development of locally rooted expertise and networks that would provide the kind of data, authority, and social connectedness that could facilitate more adroit peacebuilding respected by local people. There are exceptions to this pattern, as Autesserre notes, both in terms of individuals and organizations. She gives the example of atypical Peacelander James Scambary in Timor-Leste, who—simply by virtue of socializing with Timorese neighbors rather than with Peacelanders—foresaw the 2006 riots in that country that otherwise took “virtually all interveners by surprise” (p. 186). But generally as with any large organizations struggling to maintain coherence, deviant individuals are disciplined into conformity or expelled (p. 189). The few—often religious—organizations that have escaped the pathologies of Peaceland, by their nature will tend to be smaller and less well known by virtue of their deep entrenchment in particular countries and communities.
Although Autesserre is not the first ethnographically to investigate the everyday practices of international intervention, hers is the best of such efforts. She weaves together her own extensive fieldwork and experience across nine sites with an excellent and apposite synthesis of a wide literature. While the other works that study interveners rather than the “intervened in” are often inspired by postcolonial theory, the author employs a more empirical approach, based on solid theoretical selection, systematic data collection, and careful attention to questions of research design. She uses, for example, the comparatively wealthier and safer conflict zones of Cyprus and Israel/Palestine as controls for the other, much poorer, and more violent cases that she studies (Afghanistan, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Timor-Leste). The whole book is a model for the way to mobilize and analyze large amounts of ethnographic data in a lucid and systematic manner.
Autesserre also deserves credit for being willing not only to question conventional wisdom and policy but also to broach the controversies surrounding sex in Peaceland. Thus, she criticizes both the overweening international focus on sexual violence in Congo at the expense of other, no less grave atrocities, as well as the “zero-tolerance” policies that effectively treat all Peacelanders as if they were predatory sexual deviants and all locals as if they had no will or agency of their own (although the author’s main concern on this latter point is to draw attention to such policies and how they further inhibit contact between locals and Peacelanders). That said, Autesserre does not fully succeed in extricating herself from Peaceland. This is visible, for example, in her reliance on categories such as “stakeholders,” “sustainability,” and, to a lesser extent, even “peacebuilders.” Such is the language of Peaceland bureaucratic reporting, but it is high time that it was expunged from social science. Instead of bundling together all sorts of varied actors and institutions under such terms, better to refine analytical categories to be specific to the type of actor in question.
Several issues are raised by this work for the wider literature and peacebuilding as a whole. For the sake of brevity, only a couple can be addressed here. First, one has to wonder about the complacency of scholars and peacebuilders that it requires the mobilization of such a prodigious amount of research, effort, and scholarly authority to put forward what should be, by any measure—at least outside of Peaceland and its academic hinterland—straightforward and obvious propositions, for example, “not all local authorities are interested in prolonging war” (p. 108; see further p. 93). This speaks to how deeply inequality is embedded in peacebuilding.
While ethnography can capture how this inequality is expressed at the level of the everyday, it is unable by definition to observe the underlying structures of international inequality. For this, there is no escaping international relations theorizing. Indeed, if we bring power dynamics at the international level into focus, these power relations might well express themselves through Peacelanders’ practice, even if all Peacelanders embraced Autesserre’s prescriptions. It is not difficult to see this even on the author’s own terms. Her skepticism about the appropriateness of Westphalian statebuilding (pp. 143–46) might, in a different context and policy environment, become an orthodoxy no less patronizing than the tenets of Peaceland. For the implication underpinning such skepticism is that Africans are incapable of achieving, and are unsuited to, the institutional forms of Western modernity. Autesserre notes that alternative social and institutional options, such as the “anarchist civilizations” studied by James C. Scott are excluded from peacebuilding by fiat, even though such alternatives may avoid the “woes” of “state-based organization,” such as “conscription, taxes, famine, epidemics, servitude, and warfare” (p. 146). But the thought of blue helmets and aid workers seeking to cultivate “anarchist civilizations” in Congo does not inspire confidence. Autesserre concedes how she was struck by the fact that “every Congolese person I talked to, from poor peasants to high-level policy-makers … hoped that state reconstruction would eventually better their living circumstances” (pp. 146–47).
Finally, the ambition and systematic character of this book marks a threshold in the field. With the publication of Peaceland, the study of peacebuilding is now effectively bifurcated. On the one hand, there are those large-n studies and surveys that mostly class peacekeeping and peacebuilding as a successful enterprise that measurably reduces violence, while on the other hand, there are the studies such as Autesserre’s, which trace systematic patterns of malfunction and oppression. The next stage of peacebuilding research will perforce require arbitrating between and/or reconciling these contrasting views and results emerging from the research. Peaceland is welcome for making this scholarly reckoning less avoidable. It deserves to become the touchstone for ethnographic studies of international intervention, and it is a must-read for all interested scholars, certainly for all Peacelanders, and is an indispensable addition to university reading lists on international intervention.
