Abstract
Although the idea of the state pervades the scholarship and practice of international interventions, developing adequate knowledge of intervention contexts such as Solomon Islands requires decentring dominant perceptions about possible sources of socio-political order. In response, this article demonstrates the value of ‘relationality’ and ‘affect’ for analysing the diverse ways in which governance arises as an effect of social practice, without assuming that the state is unimportant or romanticizing statelessness. Giving conceptual priority to relations over entities while considering hitherto neglected affective forms of human interaction enables the identification of diverse micro-political forms of socio-political order and peace governance effects. An autoethnographic examination of relational-affective peace governance in post-conflict Solomon Islands shows that circulations of affect, feeling and emotion attach more strongly to customary and church institutions than they do to the state or to international interveners. This demonstrates the need to engage with unexpected sources of governance while the requirement to analyse findings within a broader historical frame signals the need to also engage with the state. A relational-affective approach, which has the potential for wider application, thus provides a way of analysing and engaging with diverse forms of political order in international interventions beyond the predilections of Northern scholarship.
Introduction
Contemporary international interventions feature the state, explicitly so in state-building efforts, and only slightly less overtly so in assistance conducted in the name of peace, security, governance, democracy or development. The state is taken to be the pre-dominant and overarching agent of political order, and the key institution for facilitating political, economic and social ventures. The recently ended 14-year Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), of immediate interest from an Australian vantage and contemporaneous with the high-profile intervention attempts to shape the states of Iraq and Afghanistan, is no exception. Initiated in 2003 to quell ongoing civic strife following a low-level war that was partially concluded through the flawed Townville Peace Agreement in 2000, the Australian-led yet regionally auspiced mission sought, amidst somewhat mixed messaging and political constraints, to bring about long-term transformation of the Solomon Islands state. RAMSI’s state-building focus resonated with locally informed analysis that identified a weak state as a serious problem for peace (Kabutaulaka, 2002). However, the same analyst also noted that ‘even prior to the civil unrest [which caused the state to largely cease to function], the state, while important, was often not the most influential institution in people’s everyday lives, or the basis for organizing the community’ (2004: 5). Change in Solomon Islands, as in many other contexts, also ‘def[ies] the teleological tropes of modernisation’ (Allen and Dinnen, 2015: 4) and is not easily engineered. It is now widely accepted that RAMSI has not achieved – despite the assertions of some proponents in recent 2017 exit celebrations – transformative state-building or addressed the underlying causes of the original conflict.
Questions about the relevance of the state and the efficacy of state-building in Solomon Islands resonate with experiences in more well-known contemporaneous cases of attempted state-building, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. These challenges suggest the need to seriously query the focus on the state in international interventions, with the idea of the state a natural starting point. This is a formidable task because an underappreciated corollary of state dominance in international political architecture is that political imaginations – especially in the social sciences – are frequently tied to the idea of the state, and often very deeply so. Pierre Bourdieu explains that ‘one of the major powers of the state is to produce and impose… categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world – including the state itself’ (1999: 53). Meanwhile, Jens Bartelson demonstrates that the ‘presupposed presence of the state’ has constituted discourse about modern political life, with the state imagined as the site and vehicle for pursuing freedom and to recognize our full potential as social beings (2001: ix). As Bartelson notes, ‘it is virtually impossible to envisage constellations of authority and community beyond the state without ceasing to be either political or scientific’ (2001: 185). These patterns are particularly pronounced in International Relations (IR), where the state is a central and singularly powerful presence that is strongly correlated with the very possibility of socio-political order.
The idea of the state is also contested, of course, and this is so both broadly and in relation to international interventions in particular. Recent decades have seen the critique of state-centric approaches to interventions, calls to recognize and engage ‘the local’ and moves to embrace ‘hybrid’, ‘polycentric’ or ‘good enough’ approaches to peace and governance. Yet, the state remains a stubborn presence in scholarship and practice, including in peacebuilding and development efforts that are not explicitly focused on the state. The tenacity of the state persists through critique of the state and the alternatives that are arrayed in relation to it. The former paradoxically gives the idea of the state life (Bartelson, 2001), and the latter occurs as discussions about alternative forms of socio-political order reference the state through the designation of derivative – and diminutive – categories such as ‘non-state’ or ‘informal’ actors. The idea of the state thus structures scholarship and practice even through efforts to critique and sidestep it. To this extent the scholarship and practice of international interventions is in the thrall of the state’s curious and apparently pervasive power to structure conversations about, and efforts to secure, socio-political order.
Scholarship that foregrounds the state, though, is inadequate for understanding international interventions in Solomon Islands and beyond. In relation to the Global South, the thrall of the state enables the invocation of un-nuanced, sweeping and disengaged concepts such as fragile or failed states (Nay, 2013) and postcolonial disorder (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006). These notions involve unexamined assumptions about what the state is and how it works. Remedying this situation requires the development of a broader understanding of state forms, institutions, cultures and practices as they interact in an uneven and historically differentiated manner with other forms, institutions, cultures and practices in the broader production and reproduction of socio-political order. Of particular note in many intervention contexts is that chiefs, clans, religious leaders, secret societies, militias, private and community providers of security and so on are regularly encountered and are indispensable for the provision of governance and socio-political order. This is most notable where the state is absent, but also applies where state agencies are more or less present and operate in cooperation, competition or alongside other institutions and actors. Thus, although the idea of the state is stubborn and widely dispersed, its reach and importance for governance – and conflict resolution and peace – is highly varied. In these circumstances, scholarship that is heavily influenced by the idea of the state risks bypassing key actors and misunderstanding governance in intervention contexts, including by overstating the importance and centrality of the state to socio-political order. Instead of foregrounding the state, an adequate understanding of governance in international interventions requires decentring dominant perceptions of the sources of governing and political order, beginning with the central and influential idea of the state.
Because the question of how to rethink the state is not at all straightforward and requires prior rethinking of the underlying ontological framework, this article devotes considerable attention to some recent debates in IR and other areas of enquiry regarding ‘relationality’ and ‘affect’, which offer grounds for a compelling alternative approach. These concepts provide a way of understanding how the governance of socio-political order and peace (which I abbreviate as peace governance) arises as an effect of social practice. The first two sections review recent IR theorizing about relationality and affect to develop an analytical schema that can apprehend a wide range of sources of governance and political order beyond the state-frame, without making the untenable assumption that the state is irrelevant or unimportant. By foregrounding relations and interactions rather than entities or things, relationality generates the insight that the state is an effect rather than an intrinsic entity and directs us to a wider range of human action and interaction as potential sources of peace governance. Affect, meanwhile, provides a methodological channel for accessing human action, interaction, communication and meaning-making as constitutive of political order that has until recently been neglected in IR and social science more broadly.
In the third section I experiment with autoethnographic reflection drawn from long-term experience in both research fieldwork and peacebuilding practice in Solomon Islands. Here I document circulations of affect, feeling and emotion and accompanying effects for the production of socio-political order and peace governance. The final section shows that in Solomon Islands affect, feeling and emotion tend to attach to four core institutions or phenomena – kastom (or tradition), church (or religion), state (or government) and the RAMSI intervention. Moreover, relatively few positive relational-affective order and governance effects are associated with the state in comparison with kastom or the church. Building peace, including through international intervention, cannot be satisfactorily pursued by looking to the state and its agencies, at least certainly not in isolation from other institutions. The approach hereby developed moves beyond the thrall of the state, including culturally contingent figures such as the rational actor, assumptions about the shape and form of political power and notions of political evolution that elevate the state as the apogee of political development.
Theorizing relationality: Foundations for studying governance in interventions
Relationality has gained some traction in recent IR scholarship, beginning with an article by Jackson and Nexon (1999) that sets out much of what is at stake. Taking their cue from Emirbayer’s (1997) Manifesto for a Relational Sociology and the distinction between ‘substantialism’ and ‘relationalism’, Jackson and Nexon contend that a ‘focus on processes and relations rather than substances will enable scholars to formulate better theories of world politics’ (1999: 292). Where substantialism takes entities or ‘things’ to be the basic building blocks of analysis and knowledge, relationalism takes interactions and relations as primary, or as ‘logically prior to the entities doing the interacting’ (1999: 301). Giving greater priority to relations in social theory suggests a more fluid and dynamic understanding of politics, and this is reflected in Jackson and Nexon’s adoption of ‘process relationalism’ as their preferred term. Their argument is not that entities should simply be dissolved or bypassed in IR theory, an untenable stance because just as ‘entities do not exist absent processes and relations … (most) processes and relations do not exist without entities’ (1999: 304). Rather, the task is to recognize the priority of relations in order to address shortcomings of adherence to substantialism in IR theory.
Jackson and Nexon (1999) demonstrate the value of a relational approach to theorizing the state by showing that, contrary to substantialist accounts that pre-dominate in IR, the state can be conceptualized as a collection of ‘processes’ and ‘configurations’ joined in a ‘project’ that does not require an essence, prior intentionality or driving forces derived from key variables. Instead, the state arises out of a web of relations, activities and accompanying narratives that assemble the state and ‘contribute to the ongoing production of the “stateness” of the state’ (1999: 316). Contrary to what is commonly supposed, then, Nexon and Jackson argue that the state form does not derive from the demarcation of territoriality or of public versus private realms ‘exogenous to processes of state formation’, but rather ‘produces and reproduces [such phenomena]… by drawing and redrawing conceptual and territorial boundaries, declaring certain aspects of social life to fall within or outside the scope of state regulation, defining and enforcing standards of acceptable behavior… and so on’ (1999: 308, emphasis in original). As Timothy Mitchell explains, the state is an effect of relations rather than an ‘actor’ ‘with the coherence, agency, and autonomy this term presumes’ (1999: 84). The boundary of the state is thus ‘not the perimeter of an intrinsic entity … [but] a line drawn … within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained’ (1999: 83). In this way relationality provides a means of thinking beyond the thrall of the state without making the untenable move of simply bypassing or ignoring its obvious importance.
Jackson and Nexon have independently gone on to advocate the value of a relational approach vis-a-vis constructivism (Jackson, 2006) and revised approaches to systems theories in IR (Nexon, 2010). The affinities of relationality with practice theory are also apparent in recent IR scholarship (see especially Adler-Nissen, 2015; Sending et al., 2015), as are connections with other theoretical and methodological approaches, including agent-based modelling (Cederman, 1997, 2010) and complexity theory (see Bousquet and Curtis, 2011). If David McCourt’s (2016) recent theory note has the effect he desires, the future of relationality in IR is bright. He argues that constructivism, broadly defined, recurs as a ‘good idea’ in social theory (beginning with American pragmatism) only to become problematically narrowed. The most recent iteration of constructivism in IR has narrowed to focus on ossified notions of identity, norms and culture, but practice theory and relationalism are re-opening earlier constructivist insights with the promise of sustaining a ‘new constructivism’.
The case for relationality has also been made, again recently, in a rather different way by Yaqing Qin’s (2009; 2016) argument that culture matters in IR theorizing (2016: 33). Qin suggests that relationality is widespread – to ‘relate is human’ (2016: 45) – while arguing that relationality is embedded in a relatively longstanding and profound way, at least vis-a-vis the West, in Confucian cultural communities (2016: 33). In Confucian settings ‘the world is conceived as being composed of continuous events and ongoing relations rather than substantial objects and discrete entities’ (2016: 35). Where IR theories tend to foreground individual rationality, Qin demonstrates that actors are always and already ‘in-relations’ (2016: 36). He thus reprises the key relational themes covered by Jackson and Nexon (1999), but also elaborates a Confucian-infused relationality for understanding and doing (world) politics that brings out, for instance, an inclusive approach to relating entities through the yin–yang meta-schema (2016: 39–40). Qin’s approach is not always convincing, including because he posits actors (including states) without accounting for how they come into existence within a relational theoretical frame. Nonetheless, Qin alerts us to both the Eurocentrism of mainstream IR scholarship and the fact that there are antecedents and analogues for relationality in many knowledge, spiritual and religious traditions of the world.
Relationality, then, introduces fundamental challenges to substantialist theoretical approaches in IR that foreground entities such as the state. As Qin’s analysis suggests, relationality is likely to resonate with peoples, traditions and ways of ordering social and political life beyond the West. For these reasons, relationality may be particularly valuable as a means of moving beyond the thrall of the state and recognizing diverse forms of governance and socio-political order in intervention contexts. Most directly, putting the state into question and analysing it as an ‘effect’ rather than an intrinsic entity helps to diminish the central position it typically holds in political analyses and imaginations. However, to realize this promise requires conceptualizing and analysing a potentially very broad array of forms of governance and order that might be at play in intervention contexts, and hence a very catholic approach to how governance arises in social relations. This requires ‘micro-moves’ (Solomon and Steele, 2016) beyond the usual subject matter of IR.
To approach governance and socio-political order in terms of micro-moves requires paying attention to the interplay of human behaviours and faculties (action, communication, meaning-making, imagination and so on) that lead to the regulation of personal and social life, including through the production and maintenance of institutions, which in turn contribute to meta-effects such as the state and nationalism. Indeed there are strong precedents for attending to these types of everyday relations and their concatenation rather than relying upon reified conceptions of individuals or systems (Tilly, 1999: 409–410) or the place of sovereign power and violence (Foucault, 1980: 121). Violence and threat of violence, for instance, is power exercised at the very point of slipping into domination (Foucault, 1987: 12), and this quite simply is not the most common way in which, in Tilly’s (1999: 409) terms, ‘links among interacting states of consciousness, simultaneous or successive, in the same individual or connected individuals’ operate in the regulation of behaviour and the production of ordered social and political life.
Most ordering of human personal and social life, and by far the largest proportion of governance, occurs through subtle and quotidian interactions involving the interplay of human action, communication, meaning-making, imagination and so on. While to canvas these phenomena comprehensively is not possible, patterns of affective exchange – including the capacity of one person to act indirectly upon another, the ‘feeling’ of community and various forms of social contagion – deserve particular attention because they have tended to be neglected in IR but are now beginning to come into focus though the ‘affective turn’. Affective phenomena do not totalize the range of order-making that may be occurring in intervention contexts, but examining them does provide a concrete and catholic way of examining an important and neglected sub-set of governance relations in interventions and beyond the thrall of the state.
Affect theory and governance in interventions
While affect has historically been neglected in the study of politics, this has rapidly changed in the past decade or so following a wider affective turn in the social sciences and humanities. A selection of prominent contributions in IR include those by Bleiker and Hutchison (2014), Crawford (2000), Fierke (2012), Ross (2014) and Hutchison (2016). Meanwhile, there is related literature connected with (neuro-) psychology (Halperin, 2016; Long and Brecke, 2003) and anthropology (Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015b; Navaro-Yashin, 2002; 2012). The efflorescence of affect research in IR has involved significant divergences in theoretical and methodological approaches. For instance, although IR emotions scholarship has burgeoned, it is yet to substantially engage with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) seminal theorizing of affect (Solomon and Steele, 2016: 9). In addition, despite the rather delineated approach to affect advocated by Deleuze and Guattari, IR and other literature on politics and affect often use the key terms ‘affect’, ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ ‘interchangeably, without specifying what differences of meaning are implied’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015a: 4).
My task is not to comprehensively review IR’s engagement with affect studies, or resolve terminological or methodological issues in an overall sense, but two methodological commitments are particularly relevant for developing adequate understandings of relational-affective peace governance effects in Solomon Islands; the intervention context I consider in the next section. Firstly, I distinguish among affect, emotion and feeling to develop an analytical schema as broad and nuanced as possible for identifying diverse ways in which governance and political order can emerge. Secondly, I privilege ‘being there’ – and hence either ethnographic or ‘ethnographically informed’ methods – in an effort to understand diverse everyday ways in which governance and political order emerge in intervention contexts.
Laszczkowski and Reeves (2015a: 4–6) provide an instructive discussion of key distinctions among affect, emotion and feeling and the accompanying methodological issues for ethnographic research. Using their work and that of others as a foundation (e.g., Shouse, 2015) leads me to the following typology.
‘Affect’ refers to a corporeal and sensory intensity, the pre-cognitive push and pull experiences of existence that come with the capacity to act and be acted upon. They can be intersubjective but equally may be linked with the material world, including sites or things. This rendering of affect is broadly consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) theorizing and that of their translator Brian Massumi (2002: Chapter One). ‘Feeling’ refers to ‘subjectively perceptible experiences’ (Ross, 2014: 20), individual or group, that arise in response to affect or other experiences of the world. They are personal and biographical, and at least partially cognitive because they involve subjective interpretation and labelling (Shouse, 2015: § 3). While feeling is not commonly discussed in IR literature (affect/emotion are the more usual key terms), it serves as a useful bridge between affect and emotions. ‘Emotions’, meanwhile, are culturally and socially produced and inflected renderings of feelings (Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015a: 4). Emotions thus narrate, shape or otherwise fix affective currents (2015a: 7), and may at times be manufactured or confected.
This typology helps to specify phases on a continuum of human experience ranging from partly pre-conscious sensory reactions to produced psychological and social phenomena. Each of these has, as will become clear, somewhat different valences vis-a-vis forms of governance and socio-political order.
While it is analytically helpful to delineate between affect, feeling and emotion, they are not wholly distinct – or easy to distinguish – from each other in human experience. Affect is a generative source of feeling and emotion, but emotion can feed back into feelings, and if emotion manifests in especially powerful forms alongside social action (e.g., rallies or violence) then this may generate affects. Similarly, it is not easy to distinguish among particular affective phenomena, especially through time. Andrew Ross provides a rich and compelling account of how affects and emotions tend to blend, mix mutate and migrate through ‘processes of social interaction’ in what he terms ‘circulations of affect’ (2014: 16–18). Because affective phenomena do gravitate and move, as Ross suggests, it is hard to not be sympathetic to the interchangeable use of the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’. Equally, the case of those who argue for a strong distinction is also particularly strong. Brian Massumi, for instance, notes Spinoza as the philosophical precursor for understanding the ‘irreducibly bodily and autonomic nature of affect – for seeing affect as a suspension of action-reaction circuits and linear temporality…’ (2002: 28). In this rendering and the typology I propose, affect has a somewhat distinct status.
To specify a distinct status for affect – especially through the Deleuzian understanding of affect as a corporeal and pre-cognitive intensity – does, though, present methodological challenges, including for ethnographic research. Laszczkowski and Reeves (2015a) draw on suggestions from within anthropology to propose that one way around this challenge comes by recognizing that affects are not wholly ‘inner’ phenomena but effects of interactions among humans and the material world (Navaro-Yashin, 2012: 159). Because affects also circulate through various social milieus, this enables access and analysis, including through ‘detailed ethnographic description to trace capillary movements and exchanges and to register the difference often made by the seemingly insignificant, contingent, or ephemeral’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015a: 6). No doubt accessing the transit of affects through description is one means of methodological access, and ethnographers have recently begun to study how governance and political order emerge through the tying of affects (through feeling and emotion) to political symbols and discourses in particular spaces or places (Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015a: 6). However, to emphasize description of the ‘seemingly ephemeral’ belies the extent to which a researcher’s self is necessarily mobilized in the participant-observation as a resource for ‘catching’ the affect – ephemeral or otherwise – that is at play as affects ‘propagate’ (Ross, 2014: 3) among people.
So while regular ethnographic description can be valuable, the need to study the micro-political processes of contagion and circulation of affect and feeling among people (which concatenate to generate a sense of community, or the generation of forces for the regulation of behaviour or a platform for collective action) suggests the value of turning more explicitly to the researcher’s self as a methodological resource. A researcher must draw upon the capacity for his or her autonomic nervous system to be ‘moved’ or affected; to contract, for instance, ‘dread’ or ‘exhilaration’ that may then translate as feelings of ‘fear’ or ‘pleasure’ and circulate more widely. Recognizing this ‘autoethnographic’ dimension of ethnographic knowing points to wider options for registering affects in the field, and it does so by directly acknowledging the contagions and affects at play among researchers and informants alike (for an introduction to autoethnography in IR, see Brigg and Bleiker, 2010). Expanding methods in this way involves partially unlearning conventional social science techniques. Rather than conventional efforts to render the self absent, such innovation works at making the self more present.
Autoethnography: Relational-affective peace governance in Solomon Islands
In recent decades scholars in some social science disciplines have begun to experiment, against longstanding conventions, with drawing upon the self as a methodological resource (see Brigg and Bleiker, 2010). Centring the researcher’s experience provides a means of accessing phenomena, including affect, feeling and emotion, which cannot be readily grasped through conventional social science methods. To experiment with an autoethnography of affect in governance, peace and order in Solomon Islands I present an overall picture drawn from my experiences in conflict resolution, training and in fieldwork. This is not conventional autoethnography. A detailed narrative account – the most usual approach in autoethnography – would preclude me from drawing upon the full range of my roles and experiences, something I want to do here to be as comprehensive as possible. Instead I proceed in three steps.
Firstly, I contextualize my experiences with peace governance in Solomon Islands. Secondly, I present three vignettes to give a sense of the types of experiences and analysis I draw upon. Each vignette identifies a particular affect, feeling or emotion, followed by a short analysis. Thirdly, I document, in abbreviated tabular form, exemplary (sometimes composite) instances of the circulation of particular affects, feeling or emotions and the implications for peace governance. To systematize my analysis I first note the particular affect feeling or emotion, then the associated phenomena, process or institution (e.g., violence, reconciliation or the church), then the particular character or quality of the affect, feeling or emotion and finally the (micro-) implications for peace governance. The table thereby enables the compression of my experiences and some accompanying analysis. This in turn is the basis for an initial analysis of the link between affective relations and peace governance in Solomon Islands.
I first spent time in Solomon Islands, a Pacific Islands country situated between Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu to the northeast of Australia, in 1995. The archipelagic country of approximately 600,000 people is a former British colony that became independent in 1978. Since 2002 I have followed or analysed conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts attempting to deal with the aftermath of a period of civil unrest that is locally termed the ‘ethnic tension’ and that is taken to run from 1998 to 2003. I have periodically been part of these efforts, both in the capital Honiara and in remote locations in the country. My roles, as technical advisor, trainer, observer and researcher, have involved me observing or assisting in conflict resolution processes, providing training, developing peacebuilding policy, commenting on programme design, reviewing training materials and so on. I have worked closely with both individuals and with groups. My hope has been that my long-term familiarity with people and places, along with a reasonable knowledge of elements of local cultures and fluency in Solomon Islands Pijin (the local lingua franca), help my understanding of conflict issues and positively support the efforts I have been involved in. However, it is my capacity to be affected that has, for most of my involvement, been central to my attempts to understand and to do the best I can in the roles I have performed.
The capacity to be affected is foundational to my professional experiences in Solomon Islands; without being moved, the prospects for connection through language and culture, and hence for knowing and acting in conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts, would be severely attenuated. Being able to be affected has also enabled me to ‘catch’, for instance, the damage and despair of those who have been tortured and tormented during the conflict, or the adrenalin rush accompanying the unscheduled arrival and intervention of a powerful and high-profile player who threatens to derail political talks. These are the types of experiences I draw upon to prepare the following vignettes and Table 1.
Solemnity (an affect) ripples through participants and observers alike. One of the local mediators has switched to indigenous dialect, invoking the voices of ancestors to remind people of their shared ties and responsibilities. He summons the institutions of kastom
1
in an appeal for peace. I am observing the second day of a mediation centring on grave grievances between two communities stemming from the civil unrest. Progress has been slow and difficult. The micro-governance effect of the mediator’s intervention is palpable and immediate; reverent acquiescence emerges among participants and observers, a polity re-gathers. Some people appear mildly astounded that a relatively young man has the knowledge to speak of these matters. Nonetheless, it is not clear that this intervention alone will be sufficient to bring about resolution in this case. Frustration (a feeling) emerges in this focus group much as in previous gatherings that we have convened in other locations on this research trip. It has arisen slowly but perceptibly, and is directed at a range of key actors – at government officials, chiefs, police (and courts), as well as politicians. The frustration is palpable but not volatile; resigned rather than explosive. This feels demoralizing and disheartening vis-à-vis the prospects for peace governance. People report that prospects for peace and security are compromised as their repeated calls for the justice system to provide services and the government to take local capacities seriously are not heeded. Pride (an emotion) has spread through the group over the past half hour or so, and it is hard to not share in the positive feelings of strength and satisfaction that come with the celebration of kastom of this region. This emotion has emerged as speakers have been asked to present their version of how traditional mechanisms of peace previously operated and might operate in the future. Participants report not only traditional mechanisms, but also broader capacities for governing themselves.
Affect, feeling, emotion and accompanying relational effects in Solomon Islands peace governance.
RAMSI: Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands; NGO: non-governmental organization.
The foregoing experiences, and those that are documented in Table 1, are all personal, but it is nonetheless important to note that they are not individual. They do not spring forth from me in isolation from others. Quite to the contrary, the affects, feelings and emotions that I document all emerged relationally through interactions with others. As Ross (2014: 153) makes abundantly clear, this experience is commonplace because ‘emotions have a life outside the hearts and minds of individual actors; they are part of what connects us as human beings and social actors’. While scholarly and popular prejudice has held that feelings are private and internal, we are beginning to learn that affects and feelings are transmitted among people, both socially and physiologically, including through the recent discovery of so-called ‘mirror neurons’ that lead a person to repeat an action performed by another. It is thus relationality that generates the micro-effects that I refer to in the above vignettes and in Table 1. In short, the micro-political peace governance effects that I document here autoethnographically are only possible because affective phenomena propagate and circulate among people.
Affect and relationality beyond the thrall of the state
The foregoing autoethnographic exercise provides a foundation for an analysis of existing and prospective peace governance in Solomon Islands. Rather than beginning with the state and accompanying assumptions and categories, centring affect enables an inductive and relatively open approach to examining the sets of forces and interactive effects that have purchase in people’s everyday lives. Taking the next step, a preliminary analysis of the link between affective relations and peace governance, requires considering how the chains of interactions among people that are documented in the Table 1 link to the patterning of peace governance effects. Central here is how chains of affect, feeling or emotion link with particular phenomena, processes or institutions. I focus especially on positive effects and on institutions because this combination is of particular interest for the prospects for durable political means for advancing peace, including through international intervention.
Of the three affects documented – dread, awe and passion – awe is most definitely linked with positive peace governance, through the phenomenon of God and the institution of kastom. These affect relations thus directly coalesce upon two key categories of institutions – the church and kastom. Because these institutions are not seen as the usual state-based vehicles of peace and political order in IR, this finding gives a preliminary signal about the relative efficacy of key governance institutions in the lives of Solomon Islanders and, conversely, the undue weight typically given to the state. This raises the question of whether the raw intensity of affect should lead us to give affect, and the findings drawn from analysis of it, greater weight than feelings and emotions. It may be tempting to treat affect as intrinsically powerful because it is in some senses foundational vis-a-vis feelings and emotions. However, such a move is unsatisfactory for two reasons. Firstly, affective relations blend, mix and propagate through social relations in non-linear ways (Ross, 2014), including in ways that can see emotions feed into feelings and (back) into affects. This means that it is not possible to accord affect any intrinsic priority. Secondly, because these are relational phenomena, it would be a mistake to attempt to seek out (yet again) a foundational basis for analysis. Relationality suggests, instead, the value of attending to the circulation of relations, and thus to avoid analysis that gives undue weight to affects vis-a-vis feelings or emotions.
A relatively large number of feelings, including reverence, respect, gratitude and relief, connect with positive peace governance effects through a variety of institutions, including kastom, church, state and a range of government agencies (e.g., police, chiefs) as well as the international intervention (RAMSI), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and tribe. The most numerous and prominent of these positive peace governance effects are those linked to kastom, church or militarily backed international intervention. Those feelings bound with negative governance effects – frustration and impatience – are linked with government and, to a lesser extent, chiefs, police and intervention efforts.
Finally, a relatively small number of emotions are linked with largely positive relational governance effects through kastom (including tribe and region) and churches. There are limited or no negative governance effects linked with emotions, although emotional attachments to localized order may be read as a possible risk to national order.
This initial analysis leads to three key observations. Firstly, circulations of affect, feeling and emotion tend to coalesce around and attach to a number of core institutions or phenomena – kastom (or tradition), church (or religion) and state (or government), and international intervention. Secondly, the micro-political peace governance effects documented here are largely positive, a pattern that may be linked to the fact that conflict escalation and direct violence were not present during the period under consideration. Thirdly and most strikingly, very little in the way of positive relational-affective governance effects were linked to the state (or to government or nation) when compared to kastom and the church. This suggests that kastom and the church are relatively stronger vehicles for the pursuit of positive peace governance.
The third finding, the relative absence of positive relational-affective peace governance effects linked to the state, challenges dominant IR expectations of the centrality of the state in socio-political ordering. This finding, which applies especially strongly away from the national capital in regional or rural areas, is unlikely to be surprising to those familiar with Solomon Islands or other similar contexts. In these areas, much of the work of producing and maintaining socio-political order occurs through religious and cultural institutions. Circulations of affect, then, not only swirl through the social fabric, particular geographic locations or sites and people’s being, but they also attach to and affirm – or contest – the political institutions operating in the milieu, operationalizing or disabling the forces and governance effects of these institutions. The upshot is that in Solomon Islands and similar contexts, understanding and working for peace governance cannot be adequately pursued by looking to or thinking in terms of the state and its agencies, at least not in isolation from other institutions.
Other more fine-grained analysis is also possible, although is limited here due to space constraints. It can be observed, for instance, that while God and kastom are associated with the affect ‘awe’, and positively with order, peace and harmony, the operational touchpoints of both God and kastom – the church and chiefs – tend to register rather more prosaically. Secondly, some associations may be positive for peace governance, including through feelings of ‘respect’ for chiefs, for instance, but also have negative associations – chiefs are also associated with ‘frustration’. Thirdly, the category of emotion, the most ‘constructed’ of affect, feeling and emotion, is wholly associated with positive peace governance effects. This result likely arises because most of the analysis for this study related to a time of conflict de-escalation. However, it is easy to imagine a very different result, for example, as fears are aroused and circulate in an escalation phase. Distinguishing among affect, feeling and emotion enables these and similar analyses and observations.
Finally, and most importantly, extending the analysis allows some commentary about how socio-political order emerges through circulations of affect, feeling and emotion. The affects ‘solemnity’ (per vignette) and ‘awe’ (per Table 1) are implicated in the production of socio-political order in the way they apparently connect individuals with otherworldly (including transcendental) phenomena of kastom and God that deliver certainty about the source of order and its durability. Feelings of ‘reverence’ and ‘exaltation’ do much the same. The emotions of ‘rapture’, ‘joy’ and ‘pride’, meanwhile, all involve the emergence of a ‘we’ as previous differences and tensions fade, although ‘pride’ is far more thoroughgoing than either ‘rapture’ or ‘joy’, as it is more particularly implicated in producing and affirming a sense of being able to regulate (through kastom) a wide range of behaviour, relations and domains.
Turning to an overall discussion of this exercise and its benefits and limitations, relational-affective autoethnography enables analyses of micro-political governance effects beyond the influence of the state without making an a priori assumption about the irrelevance or relevance of the state. Instead, I have analysed how salient peace governance (including socio-political order) effects arise in Solomon Islands. The relational-affective study of governance effects, then, provides an open and sensitive way of analysing for extant micro-political governance effects in intervention contexts. Identifying circulations of affect goes beyond and complements many existing approaches by enabling the apprehension of a wide range of sources of governance and political order beyond the thrall of the state. Here I have experimented with autoethnography and suggested that ethnographic methods and ‘being there’ are important to studying circulations of affect in intervention contexts. Nonetheless, it is no doubt possible, depending upon the case, to use other methods, including those that reconstruct emotional worlds and infer the impact of affective circulations by drawing upon academic and journalistic sources to track the traces they leave behind (Ross, 2014: 62), or through analysis of representations that express emotions (Hutchison, 2016). The possibility of deploying diverse methods indicates the potential for the development of more formalized methodologies for the study of circulations of affect in international interventions and other peace and conflict resolution efforts, including for informing conflict analysis and peacebuilding programming.
Equally, it seems likely that the relational-affective approach needs to be accompanied by additional contextual knowledge and analysis to generate sufficiently nuanced understandings of peace governance dynamics and challenges in intervention contexts. The peace governance effects that might be revealed through relational-affective study at a particular point in time are necessarily nested within a broader set of historical relational dynamics that may not be immediately obvious and may generate more or less ossified configurations in which current relational-affective effects arise. The nature and effects of particular circulations of affect, feeling and emotion vary, as Laszczkowski and Reeves (2015b: 8) note, according to ‘specific histor…[ies] of subjectification and particular experiences of rule, whether colonial, authoritarian, apartheid, or clientelist’. Relational-affective inquiry into intervention contexts therefore needs to be contextualized within particular historical dynamics. A related consideration for the overall approach developed here is that the near-ubiquity of the state means that the contextual analytical work is often likely to lead back, at least to some degree, to the state, even as other forms of governance, including indigenous governance, are in play.
This article has prioritized the difficult goal of reconceptualizing how we understand the state and other sources of order in theoretical, ontological and methodological terms, and therefore there remains insufficient space to provide adequate contextual and historical analysis. Nevertheless, such an analysis would need to explore how, in the case of Solomon Islands, the experience and expectations of governance today have been shaped in important ways by the longer history of British colonial rule, including through the transition from direct to indirect rule that was gradually institutionalized from the 1920s. The 1930s saw native tribunals or arbitration courts, and native councils, ruling on matters of ‘custom’ in various parts of the country (Bennet, 1987: 281–282). By the time of independence in 1978, these institutions ‘became area councils and local courts’ (Allen and Dinnen, 2015: 6). However, from the 1980s these bodies became ‘overwhelmed by disputes arising from logging on customary land’ (McDougall, 2016: 2), and this system ceased to operate in 1998 (Allen et al., 2013: 10). State institutions retreated further with the ethnic tension of 1998–2003, continuing a process that many perceive as a ‘gradual retreat of the central government from their everyday lives’ (Allen and Dinnen, 2015: 2; Allen et al., 2013: 12).
In effect, the colonial (and missionary) impact has been partial in the sense that it has not fulfilled linear modernizing or developmentalist visions. The recent retreat of state institutions has seen the ‘expansion of clientelist institutions and a proliferation of alternative, non-state structures and configurations of local level governance’ (Allen and Dinnen, 2015: 2), leaving Solomon Islanders grappling with an amalgam of governance resources drawn from kastom, church and state. Here is not the place for analysis of the relations among these different sets of governance resources. Rather, the foregoing brief historical background to this constellation of governance forces leads to the observation that the relative density of affective, feeling and emotional attachments to kastom and the church does not automatically lead to the conclusion that Solomon Islanders do not want or need state governance. It is understandable that Solomon Islanders have stronger affective-relational attachments to kastom and the church, perhaps because it is here, rather than in the empty homogenous space of modernity, with its abstract conceptions of politics, that people are more likely to dwell (Chatterjee, 2004: 6). Nonetheless, Solomon Islanders demand services of their state, and want the choice to have certain matters – including matters that they recognize cannot be readily managed by kastom and the church – dealt with through state channels. They combine a pragmatic desire for a better life (including through expectations of the state) with strong ties to – and expectations of – kastom and the church, even though these pragmatic desires are not currently aligned with modernity as typically conceived by interveners or with accompanying conceptions of phenomena, such as civil society and a ‘public sphere’.
While the contextualizing of relational-affective analysis of peace governance within broader historical dynamics may, as is the case with regard to Solomon Islands, lead to a need to consider the state and its agencies in understanding and working for peace and order, this does not diminish the analytical value of the relational-affective approach developed here. The aim of the experiment pursued here was to develop a catholic and sensitive means of analysing for peace governance effects beyond the thrall of the state rather than beyond the state per se. In relation to Solomon Islands, the foregoing analysis shows the relevance of institutions – kastom and the church – that have historically been neglected because of developmentalist assumptions about political progress, the secularization thesis and the overwhelming influence of the state in IR and political science scholarship. This suggests the need to for a recalibration to engage with kastom, the church and the state – as well as other actors – in order to work positively for peace governance in Solomon Islands. More broadly, the affective-relational approach developed here can readily be adapted to provide a catholic and responsive means to analyse the circulations of affect that generate governance and socio-political order in diverse intervention contexts. This offers not only a path to better social science, but also a way of not reducing people and their socio-political relations to the state-based logics of Northern IR and social science.
Conclusion
The state is at the centre of IR, of political imaginations (especially so in the Global North) and of international interventions. However, an adequate understanding of peace governance (including socio-political order) in intervention contexts requires thinking beyond the thrall of the state, and hence decentring dominant approaches to the study of international interventions. To contribute to such a decentring, this article has drawn upon recent developments in IR theorizing and micro-political methodological innovations to explicate and experiment with a ‘relational-affective’ approach to peace governance. Relational theorizing turns our attention to relations and interactions rather than entities or things (such as the state or the individual), and affect provides access to hitherto neglected dimensions of human action, interaction, communication and meaning-making. When utilized together, relationality and affect enable an analytical schema that is both non-discriminatory and sensitive enough to apprehend diverse sources of governance and order beyond the state. The relational-affective approach does not exclude the state as a potent source of governance, but it does not begin with a priori assumptions about the importance of the state.
A relational-affective approach can be applied in diverse ways to analyse micro-political peace governance effects in intervention contexts, and this indicates potential beyond the methods I have deployed here, including possibilities for informing conflict analysis and peacebuilding programming. In this article I have privileged ‘being there’ through ethnographically informed methods, and have experimented with an autoethnography of affect to examine peace governance in post-conflict Solomon Islands. Drawing upon my experience as a technical advisor, trainer, observer and researcher in conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts, and my experience of the circulation of affects, feelings and emotions in this work, I developed a composite picture of relational governance effects. These experiences are personal, but because they emerged through interactions with others they are not simply individual. Affects, feelings and emotions are in many respects relational phenomena, and here I have considered how they link with particular phenomena, processes or institutions (e.g., violence, reconciliation or the church) and the (micro-) implications for governance, order or peace.
The key finding of a relational-affective autoethnography of peace governance in Solomon Islands is that circulations of affect, feeling and emotion – and the effect of peace governance, including socio-political order – attach more strongly to kastom and the church than they do to the state. The implication is that in Solomon Islands and similar contexts, understanding and working for peace governance cannot be adequately pursued from within the thrall of the state and its agencies. There is a need, instead, to engage with sources of peace governance unfamiliar to IR that can be accessed through a relational-affective approach. Other more fine-grained analysis is possible through the distinction among affect, feeling and emotions, including understandings of the different values attached to abstract phenomena (God, kastom) vis-a-vis their prosaic counterparts (the church, chiefs). Associated historical and contextual analysis may, as in the case of Solomon Islands, refer us to the necessity to engage with the state and its agencies, but a relational-affective approach nonetheless provides a means of doing so without having our political imaginations and analyses of intervention contexts held hostage to the thrall of the state.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
