It’s the Little Things: The Role of International Interveners in the Social (re)Construction of the International Peace Architecture

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much peace and conflict scholarship groups individual international interveners together as ‘the international’, treating them more as an ideational structure – the international peace architecture – than as individual agents. This article brings foreign policy analysis scholarship into conversation with constructivist scholarship to propose analytical questions that can be used to study the role that individual international interveners play in socially constructing the international peace architecture. It proposes questions at both the micro scale of individual international interveners and the meso scale of the international peace architecture, that is, the organisations that make peacebuilding policy and practice peacebuilding work. Analysis guided by these questions could inform future considerations of what peacebuilding means, who is a suitable candidate for performing peacebuilding work, the way that peacebuilding is practiced, and ultimately on the security of the conflict-affected populations in which peacebuilding interventions are conducted.