The Practical Representation of Peacebuilding

Abstract

This essay explores international peacebuilding in post-conflict Tajikistan in terms of its representational practices of quantifying, visualizing and narrating ‘success’.1 It does so from a position of immersion in the environment of the professional evaluation of aid programmes. From this position I2 came to appreciate that peacebuilding in Tajikistan was a hybrid process, with aspects of formal reconciliation and underlying tension, of democratization and domination, of economic growth and exploitation.3 International resources for peacebuilding were coopted and redeployed by local elites, who served as gatekeepers of interventions.4 The practice of peacebuilding was the product of this kind of contestation between international interveners, local and national elites and the recipients of programmes. Academic researchers have diagnosed this as ‘hybridity’.5