Relational peacebuilding

Abstract

This chapter argues that the language of relationality is a useful vehicle for navigating the complexities of contemporary peacebuilding and for articulating the best impulses and possibilities of recent developments while retaining a focus on meaningful change and on politics. The task of implementing ambitious societal and political transformations in conflictual settings, frequently across strong cultural and religious differences, has often not achieved expectations. Neologisms are routinely associated with definitional confusion and contestation. Consider, for example debates around the meaning of sustainable development’ and even peacebuilding itself. Relationality also certainly comes with ethical, political and practice-related risks, and these are cause for caution. However, many of the risks that accompany particular forms of relationality can also be managed through relationality itself. Thicker relationality also suggests more thoroughgoing forms of self-reflexivity. Where thin relationality takes in reflexivity about one’s self, thicker relationality requires reflexivity about the mode of self-reflexive positioning.