Displaced security? The relationships,routines and rhythms of peacebuilding interveners

Abstract

This article considers what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. This is important because individual interveners are diverse, embodied agents who can impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected populations. It argues that applying an ontological security lens can provide a partial explanation for why interveners develop narratives and perform practices, including why they sometimes identify and behave in counterproductive, and even damaging, ways. The final section considers why an analytical focus on place is valuable, noting that place-based experiences and place-identities are formative of ontological security. It argues that treating interveners as a referent object provides opportunities to rethink the tendency to focus on home as the key site of emplacement in the ontological security literature. Building on this, it argues that examining the emplaced security of interveners invites us to examine the political nature and consequences of interveners’ physical and ontological security-seeking narratives and practices, including their creation of the material and ideational structures of intervention spaces and places.

Keywords

Everyday home ontological security peacebuilding place space

Introduction

The ‘local turn’ in critical peace and conflict scholarship has shifted focus from the geopolitical, normative or operational aspects of peacebuilding interventions at the international scale, to the agency and practices of conflict-affected populations subject to them at the local scale. In this context, scale refers to the ‘vertical organisation of space’ produced by discourse, practices and power structures (Ide, 2017: 547). Accompanying this shift has been an increased focus on what ‘space’ as a category of analysis can reveal about the dynamics of peacebuilding at the local scale. Space is understood as ‘the imaginary counter-side of material place’, composed of social practices, representations and principles (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 19; Lefebvre, 1991). This special issue engages with the spatial turn to consider the importance of security in place, that is, ‘emplaced security’. Place refers to a fixed location with a material form that is ‘loaded with an extra significance’ (Thrift, 2006: 552), as it is ‘interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt, understood, and imagined’ (Gieryn, 2000: 465).

I consider what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. Through their practices and representations, interveners create spatial structures which they legitimise by representing them as intervention spaces where peacebuilding work is performed, within which they create material intervention places. This ‘peacebuilding work’ encompasses the ‘many individual actions taking place each day between peacekeepers [or in my wider framing, interveners] and the people they are deployed to help’ purportedly in pursuit of creating, strengthening or solidifying peace (Rubinstein, 2008: 3).

International interveners – people who have been deployed to intervention spaces to perform peacebuilding work and who ‘operate according to the principles and standards set for international interventions’ (Flaspoler, 2016: 235) – are overlooked in much of the peace and conflict scholarship informed by the local turn. However, a small, but rich, body of work has analysed the impact of the spatial practices, habits and assumptions of interveners on peacebuilding (including Autesserre, 2014b; Goetz, 2017; Henry, 2015; Higate and Henry, 2009; Pingeot, 2018; Pouligny, 2006; Smirl, 2015). To build on this, Marsha Henry has called for scholars to ask ‘how does what peacekeepers do in their everyday lives affect peacekeeping, the mission environment, and the peacekeepers themselves? And how do peacekeepers justify their own, sometimes privileged, positions in these missions?’ (Henry, 2015: 373).

In response, I propose that using an ontological security lens to study the micropractices and identities of interveners can provide at least partial answers to these questions by examining and supplementing existing studies. The spatial turn is important for this analysis, as much of the literature assumes that being emplaced, usually at ‘home’, is an important source of ontological security. As interveners are dis-emplaced from their residential homes when they deploy to intervention spaces, this raises the question of whether they can become emplaced and feel at home in intervention places. This, in turn, raises the question of whether intervention spaces and places are – at least partly – created by interveners as a source of ontological security, particularly as they play a role in generating their peacebuilding identities. These are important questions, because the ontological security-seeking strategies of interveners can affect the way in which they exercise their agency, which can in turn impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected populations in intervention spaces.

I begin by outlining why we should study individual interveners engaged in peacebuilding work at the local scale, particularly how their relationships, routines and rhythms impact and are impacted by their peacebuilding identity. I then consider how to address the risks and methodological challenges of studying individual interveners at the local scale. I then build on existing work to analyse why we should study the ontological security of interveners. In the final sections, I consider why studying the emplaced ontological security of interveners offers opportunities to rethink the role played by ‘home’ and place as sources of ontological security.

Why should we study individual interveners at the local scale?

Much peace and conflict scholarship has seen the international scale as a space consisting of structures, norms and institutions, which has obscured the diverse nature of the people that constitute it. The literature frequently refers to a disembodied, homogenous ‘international’ that undertakes interventions, and there is often an implicit assumption that one international intervener is easily substitutable with another. But, while peacebuilding interventions are decided and designed by state governments and international institutions, interveners are seldom merely conduits of international policy; they instead exercise individual agency as ‘mediating actors’ to translate, interpret and reinterpret their mandates in their everyday lives (Hindman and Fechter, 2011: 5; Autesserre, 2014b; Pouligny, 2006; Rubinstein, 2008).

Interveners are also individual, embodied actors (Henry, 2015; Higate and Henry, 2009; McSorley, 2014; Read, 2018). Consequently, an intersectional analysis (Crenshaw, 1989) invites us to recognise that they come from different national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, racial, religious, family and social backgrounds. Studying them as individuals allows us to interrogate the differences between them and for the ‘implications of the power relations which provide these differences to be questioned’ (Read, 2018: 305; Duncanson, 2013; Henry, 2017). It also allows us to recognise the ‘diverse ways in which the personal is political’ for interveners, and how this can inform their practices and identities (McLeod, 2015: 52).

As noted, the local turn has highlighted the analytical importance of the local scale, where conflict-affected populations exercise ‘ordinary agency’ and perform their mundane and habitual micropractices (Mannergren Selimovic, 2019: 132; Acuto, 2014). This means that analysing the local scale involves recognising the significance of the everyday and ephemeral, rather than the exceptional, including the power of taken-for-granted quotidian routines and rhythms in shaping situations (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2016; Guillaume and Huysmans, 2019). This reflects the growing shift in the international relations literature towards uncovering the links between the local and international scales (Davies and Niemann, 2002; Montsion, 2012).

Individual interveners can constitute a link between peacebuilding practices at the local scale and peacebuilding structures and institutions at the international scale. Studying interveners at the local scale can help us to understand how the international is translated, negotiated and domesticated in their everyday micropractices, routines and rhythms. It also allows us to analyse the ‘inverse causal relationship’ between everyday practices and international structures and political dynamics, as people incorporate and reject international frameworks and dynamics in their everyday lives (Acuto, 2014: 353; Mac Ginty, 2019; Mannergren Selimovic, 2019). Therefore, focusing on everyday micropractices may reveal how identities, norms and power dynamics conjunct across the local and international scales. This includes how the subjectivity of individual interveners and members of conflict-affected populations interplays both between themselves and with broader socio-political processes (Acuto, 2014). When combined, and reflecting a constructivist approach interested in the role that agency plays in constructing and reconstructing structures, this can untangle how micropractices ‘can (or cannot) contribute to national and international peace’ (Autesserre, 2014a: 496; Rubinstein, 2008; Smirl, 2015).

However, we need to remain cognisant of the fact that, while the agency of interveners can influence and remake structures, they still operate within those structures (Duncanson, 2013). Indeed, a focus on everyday micropractices at the local scale can disconnect those practices from the broader structural and geopolitical context. In the context of intervention, this can see the blame for the failures of intervention laid at the feet of interveners, thereby obscuring the ‘structural violence inherent in intervention’ and the institutional, political, material and logistical constraints and pressures facing them (Pingeot, 2018: 365; Autesserre, 2014b).

How should we study individual interveners at the local scale?

Analysing the ordinary agency and micropractices of individual interveners at the local scale involves studying internal, embodied feelings and perceptions. Mindful that I am treating individual interveners as a referent object of security, and that their bodies are both ‘sensing physical’ and ‘emotional and thinking’ entities (Sylvester, 2011: 1), I identify two primary methodological approaches which are generally used in combination in existing studies.

First, guided by vernacular approaches (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2016), the narratives of individual interveners offer an important source. Narratives are ‘conscious and structured accounts of events across time’ (Gardner, 2002: 2). People construct narratives to ‘make sense of reality’ and form the meaning of their self-identity and experiences, including of security and insecurity (Mannergren Selimovic and Strombom, 2015: 193; Kinnvall, 2017). Narratives also tell us how that construction structures their relationships, attitudes, behaviours and routines (Andrews et al., 2008). Narrative analysis forms an important part of work by Smirl (2015) and Duncanson (2013).

The narratives of interveners can come from oral histories or from texts such as memoirs. We can analyse these narratives to gain insights into the stories that interveners tell about their sense of self-identity and the practices they perform during their deployments (Bueger and Gadinger, 2018: 90). Narratives are ‘particularly revealing about identity’, as the author is telling ‘their story as they want to tell it’ (Duncanson, 2013: 57). They also provide insights into embodied experience through ‘flesh witnessing’, which is based on having undergone an experience (Harari, 2010: 57).

However, narratives should not be read only as the experiences of individuals; ‘the affects, feelings and emotions that . . . [they] document all emerged relationally through interactions with others’ (Brigg, 2018: 164). While narratives can help to identify these relationships and their impact, they can also be uncovered by analysing texts such as meeting minutes, policy statements or reports, which can represent the transformation of relationships into documentation (Green, 2011). Widening our textual analysis beyond narratives to documents generated during peacebuilding may also allow us to discover ‘hidden relational baggage’ in apparently rational and impartial documentation, such as peoples’ preferences or negotiating positions (Mosse, 2011: 12; Green, 2011).

Second, we can study the practices of international interveners. Practice research focuses on ‘concrete situations of life in which actors perform a common practice and thus maintain social orderliness’ (Bueger and Gadinger, 2018: 3). Practices are generally taken to be ‘socially meaningful patterns of action which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world’ (Adler and Pouliot, 2011: 6). Questioning why certain practices are taken to be competent allows us to identify the ‘economic, social, political, and cultural structures’ and power relations through which ‘competence is socially gained and recognized’ (Goetz, 2017: 25). Therefore, practices are not mechanistic, but have a ‘social sense’ and manifest ‘social structures’, that determine what people can do based on their social position, resources and goals (Goetz, 2017: 25–26). Practices form an important part of the work of Autesserre (2014b), Henry (2015), Higate and Henry (2009), Pingeot (2018), Pouligny (2006) and Smirl (2015).

Practices are embodied and may be studied ethnographically to examine the ‘lived experience of individuals and their constructions of meaning’ (Gieseking et al., 2014: xxiii; McSorley, 2014). This can reveal the apparently mundane routines and rituals which ‘over time accrete into a precarious and contingent security “mood”’ (Higate and Henry, 2009: 34). Practices can also be reconstructed from texts, using triangulation to ‘assess the overall coherence/incoherence of the stories emerging’ (Pingeot, 2018: 373; Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2016). A method of ‘textual ethnography’ has also been proposed, which involves ‘disciplined reading in which one engages in a kind of “participant observation” of the textual records . . . jotting “field notes” as one reads – much as one would when studying the social practices of some group of people’ (Jackson, 2006: 273).

Methodologically, it can be difficult to analyse the ‘cacophony of everyday life’ (Franklin, 2004: 64) in order to organise and distinguish between significant actions and ‘background noise’ (Montsion, 2012: 933). There is the risk that focusing on individual interveners may ‘individualise an experience that is collective or structural in nature’, in the process overlooking or obscuring power relations (Kappler and Lemay-Hebert, 2019: 167). Indeed, as analysing individual interveners often involves research that is ethnographic, qualitative and specific, ‘it can appear anecdotal, overly personal or not rigorous enough, and lacking generalizability’ (Autesserre, 2014a: 495). To address this, we need to keep structural factors in mind when we analyse and contextualise narratives and practices. It has been proposed that an intersectionality lens allows us to ‘view the individual experience as a specific translation of wider structures of disadvantage and privilege’ and to account for ‘the narrator’s agency in dealing with and resisting them on an everyday basis’ (Kappler and Lemay-Hebert, 2019: 170). Moreover, we need to be mindful that narratives ‘usually include a central frame or combination of frames’ which are ‘embedded in social routines, practices, discourses, technologies, and institutions’ and can consist of ideologies, assumptions and paradigms (Weick, 1995: 113, 118). Indeed, there are epistemological questions about ‘whether actors have anything interesting to say . . . and therefore whether we should take seriously the stories they tell’ (Pingeot, 2018: 370). An effective methodological approach must therefore consciously seek to avoid ‘celebrating the self-reflexivity of international interveners themselves’ (Chandler, 2013: 20).

Why study the ontological security of interveners?

Ontological security describes a person’s fundamental sense of safety in the world. Rather than physical security, it focuses on the stability of a person’s self-identity, that is, their sense of who they are. A person’s self-identity depends on them developing a ‘consistent feeling of biographical continuity’, based on a ‘narrative of the self’, that is, ‘the story or stories by means of which self-identity is reflexively understood’ (Giddens, 1991: 53, 243). Yet describing biographical continuity as consistent should not be read as implying that self-identity is fixed (Kinnvall, 2004). Instead, self-identity is stable if it is able to adapt and ‘cope with uncertainty and change’ in a way that does not fundamentally rupture biographical continuity and allows the person to ‘locate themselves and routinize their relationships with the world’ (Browning and Joenniemi, 2017: 35).

Beyond conscious self-identity, a person’s ontological security depends on their ability to rely on ‘a social normality, a predictability, which then structures their practical everyday interactions’ (Croft, 2012: 221). This ‘natural attitude’ permits a person to ‘bracket out’ the ‘potentially almost infinite range of possibilities’ open to them in order to perform everyday activities (Giddens, 1991: 36–37). However, both a person’s natural attitude and self-identity are constructed intersubjectively by ‘securing recognition . . . from significant others’ (Browning and Joenniemi, 2017: 42; Giddens, 1991). At least part of a sense of social normality is built on ‘trust relations’ which enable individuals to establish a ‘protective cocoon which “filters out” . . . many of the dangers which in principle threaten the integrity of the self’ (Giddens, 1991: 54). This sense of trust and social normality create ‘temporal and spatial emotional structures’ which can enable people to ‘make sense of themselves and the world around them’ (Kinnvall, 2017: 94).

A person’s self-identity is embodied, and their protective cocoon is sustained by the ‘routinised control’ of their body (Giddens, 1991: 56). Routines are the ways in which ‘everyday interactions and norms are reproduced to create a sense of order’, and are an important temporal and spatial structure that can create a sense of social normality, sustain self-identity and provide the cognitive certainty on which agency relies (Kinnvall, 2017: 97; Croft, 2012; Mitzen, 2006). When routines are conventionalised, repetitive, social, emotionally involving and meaningful, they can become ritualised (Rubinstein, 1993). Importantly, the rhythm, or lived, embodied time inherent in rituals can help to bolster self-identity (Solomon, 2014). When rituals involve more than one person and participants become caught up in flows of interactions and adjust their ‘cognitive and affective perceptions’ to bring their rhythms and dispositions into a loose synchronisation with those around them (Rubinstein, 1993: 555), they can ‘become entrained in each other’s bodily micro-rhythms and emotions’ (Collins, 2004: 47).

As noted, a small, but rich, literature has ethnographically studied the identities, practices, habits and assumptions of interveners, but it has not utilised an ontological security lens. Previous studies have demonstrated how interveners develop peacebuilding identities centred on their peacebuilding work. Building on research that has demonstrated how development workers identify as members of ‘Aidland’, which represents the idea that they are part of ‘the development world’ and ‘gives them a sense of belonging and continuity wherever they are posted’ (Hindman and Fechter, 2011: 13), Severine Autesserre has argued that interveners involved in peacebuilding work share a peacebuilding identity as members of ‘Peaceland’, a ‘community of international interveners’ with ‘a culture of their own’ who share ‘a common collection of practices, habits, and narratives that shaped their every attitude and action’ (Autesserre, 2014b: 1–2).

These studies have also analysed the ways in which interveners’ routine security micropractices constitute intervention spaces and the consequences they have on perceptions of security both by interveners and affected populations (Higate and Henry, 2009, 2010: 33). In later work Henry (2015) has argued for the importance of studying the ‘micro-details’ of interveners’ lives, including their rituals and routines. Indeed, Autesserre has found that the ‘mundane elements’, including the relationships, social rituals, security routines and the rhythms of interveners’ working lives, ‘strongly impact the effectiveness of intervention efforts’ by helping to reproduce ‘strategies, policies, institutions, and discourses’ and by explaining why interveners continue to work in ways that are ‘inefficient, ineffective, or even counterproductive’ (Autesserre, 2014b: 9; Mosse, 2011).

Autesserre has found that the relationships, routines and ritualised micropractices of interveners have generated a ‘dominant international peacebuilding culture’, propagated via a shared ‘set of ideologies, rules, rituals, assumptions, definitions, paradigms and standard operating procedures’ (Autesserre, 2011: 57). So influential is this culture that interveners are said to constitute a ‘transnational group’ which shares ‘common practices, habits and narratives’, into which newcomers are quickly socialised (Autesserre, 2017: 120, 2014b). Indeed, Catherine Goetz found that interveners share important commonalities grounded in ‘social origins, education, and their related value structure’, as well as a particular ‘personal and professional trajectory’ which shapes their peacebuilding work (Goetz, 2017: 68, 2). This suggests that interveners share a peacebuilding identity, which is both formative of, and formed by, the relationships, routines and rhythms of their peacebuilding work in intervention spaces.

Therefore, these studies have identified aspects of the identities and practices of interveners that are indicative of ontological security-seeking behaviour, including their narratives, relationships, routines and rhythms. I argue that applying an ontological security lens to the findings of these studies can help to provide a partial explanation for why interveners identify themselves and behave as they do, even when, as Autesserre (2014b) finds, those identities and behaviours are counterproductive and may even be damaging. Analysing interveners through this lens is worthwhile because their ontological security-seeking strategies can affect the way they exercise their agency and have consequences for the security and peace of conflict-affected populations.

In addition, as an ontological security lens challenges us to analyse the formation of identities, applying it to interveners prompts us to question who has the power to articulate the narratives on which their peacebuilding identities are based, why they are articulated in the way that they are, and why interveners ‘become connected to particular identities or articulate claims to identities in the way that they do’ (Browning and Joenniemi, 2017: 40). In turn, this prompts us to analyse the consequences this has on their practices, habits and assumptions, and how this affects the way they situate themselves in broader peacebuilding narratives (Henry, 2015). The importance of this is underscored by Autesserre’s findings that peacebuilding identities shape interveners’ ‘understanding of the causes of violence, the paths towards peace, and the roles of foreign actors’ and ultimately ‘authorises and justifies specific practices and policies while excluding others’ (Autesserre, 2011: 57). She finds that this resulted in interveners justifying or legitimising practices, even when they were counterproductive or harmful to the populations they are supposedly there to assist. Similarly, Goetz found that ‘the worldview of interveners’ gets ‘in the way of their dealings with local politics and was anything but neutral in its effects on the way the peace missions were (and still are) carried out’ (Autesserre, 2017: 67).

Examining the formation of peacebuilding identities as a form of ontological security seeking by interveners can also prompt us to examine how the narratives on which these identities are based generate ontological insecurity in others, or ‘ontological asymmetry’, by marginalising and delegitimising other narratives (Rumelili and Betul Celik, 2017: 285). In this regard, an ontological security lens can provide an additional layer to existing studies of the ways in which interveners’ practices and narratives create boundaries between them and conflict-affected communities, including the idea that the claimed legitimacy of their peacebuilding identity gives them the perceived ‘moral high ground’ (Autesserre, 2014b: 13; Mosse, 2011). The claimed legitimacy of interveners’ peacebuilding work rests on their peacebuilding identities, as they ‘have to make themselves bearers or traveling rationalities, [with] transferable knowledge and skills, context-free ideas and universal applicability or purified moral action’ (Mosse, 2011: 16). This helps us pay attention to the politics of ontological security-seeking strategies and gives insight into how interveners’ security practices are perceived and contribute to perceptions of security among conflict-affected populations. It can provide a way to ‘link peacebuilding identity to peacebuilding practices on the ground’, including how it shapes their decision-making (Karim and Beardsley, 2018: 498).

This is not meant to imply that a peacebuilding identity is the only one held by interveners. Reflecting the call to examine the messy and complex nature of their everyday lives (Mosse, 2011), we need to bear in mind that no intervener will occupy a single role. Many interveners may hold ‘many, often competing and contradictory, identities at the same time’ (Featherston and Nordstrom, 1995: 104). Each intervener carries with them their own habitus, their own ‘set of cultures, prejudices, loves and hates, friends and enemies, and business alliances and political obligations’ through which they interpret the world and which in turn shape how they exercise their agency when performing peacebuilding work (Featherston and Nordstrom, 1995: 106; Goetz, 2017; Pouligny, 2006; Smirl, 2008).

Why study the emplaced ontological security of interveners?

An analytical focus on place is important when considering ontological security-seeking behaviour, because place is where practices, routines and rituals are performed and where the routinisation of relationships occurs. Therefore, place-based experiences, and the – often unconscious – sense of place they generate, are formative of a sense of ontological security, and consequently of agency. Indeed, a ‘sense of place’ is seen as an important source of ontological security because it provides ‘a psychological tie between the biography of the individual and the locales that are the settings of the time-space paths through which that individual moves’ (Giddens, 1984: 367).

Geographers and sociologists have had a particular interest in the role that a sense of place can play in forming identity. It has been argued that people can develop ‘topophilia’ (Tuan, 1990), a ‘place-identity’ which represents their ‘strong emotional attachment to particular places or settings’ and that can help them to feel secure in who they are (Proshansky et al., 2014: 77). Because place is a social construct, these unconscious cognitions are influenced by ‘norms, behaviours, rules and regulations’ that shape the use of these places (Proshansky et al., 2014: 78). Therefore, place-identities are ‘formative of agents’ (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 19) and central to self-identity, because they provide a predictable ‘compass of meaning’ for people’s actions, which enables people to recognise and understand the purpose and activities of spaces and places (Therborn, 2006: 517; Agnew, 2011; Proshansky et al., 2014).

While our identities can be shaped by our sense of place, the converse also holds: ‘our relationships to places are influenced by who we are’ (Manzo, 2003: 54). Therefore, a focus on emplacement as a form of spatial practice can also help us to analyse the political implications of place-identities. To do so, we need a ‘contextualised – and politicised – view’ of people’s relationships with place that locates them ‘within a social, historical and political milieu’ (Manzo, 2003: 54). Indeed, by the very fact that politics is performed by people, it occurs in place and is ‘structured through the places people make in their transactions with one another’ (Agnew, 2002: 218).

In the ontological security literature there has been a tendency to focus on home as the key site of emplacement, based on an assumption that ‘a psychological need for home is central . . . to subjectivity’ (Giddens, 1991; Mac Ginty, 2019; Mitzen, 2018: 1374). In most cases, the assumption has been that home is represented by a physical dwelling in a fixed location, usually – although not always – a house (Wardhaugh, 1999). The emphasis on home as a key site of emplacement has grown out of the sociology, and particularly housing studies, literature. It has been argued that ‘without exception, the home is considered to be the “place” of greatest personal significance’ (Proshansky et al., 1983: 60; Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Relph, 1976). Consequently, home is taken to imply a place of ‘familiarity and comfort’ that people ‘move towards for ontological security’ (Taylor, 2013: 397; Macgregor Wise, 2014). In respect of ontological security, home can play a role in a sense of biographical continuity; it can be a ‘bearer of security’ which links a material place with a ‘deeply emotional set of meanings relating to permanence and continuity’ (Kinnvall, 2004: 747). Home is often also theorised as the place where people experience their most significant ‘affective family and social’ trust relationships (Macgregor Wise, 2014; Wiles, 2008: 116–117). Therefore, home ‘constitutes identities – people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and imaginative experiences of home’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 24).

In addition to playing a role in identity and biographical continuity, home is frequently assumed to provide a constant, predictable place where the ‘daily routines of human existence are performed’, creating life-cycle rhythms (Kinnvall, 2004: 747; Douglas, 1991; Newton, 2008) which contribute to ‘a sense of mastery and control’, which is a key source of ontological security (Padgett, 2007: 1926; Dupuis and Thorns, 1998). Importantly, home is characterised as the place where most people realise social normality, as they are ‘free to be themselves and at ease, in the deepest psychological sense, in a world that might at times be experienced as threatening and uncontrollable’ (Dupuis and Thorns, 1998: 25; Saunders, 1984). Indeed, home is said to play an important role in identity construction because our identity is ‘comprised of habits’ and home is where we perform most of them (Macgregor Wise, 2014: 179).

Refining conceptions of emplacement at home

Yet the concept of home is relatively undertheorised in ontological security analyses. Building upon Jennifer Mitzen’s recent attempt to ‘reclaim a more plural concept of home’ (Mitzen, 2018: 1375), I argue that analysing the ontological security of interveners offers opportunities to rethink conceptions of ‘home’ and the role that it plays in ontological security. This is because mobility is an ‘intrinsic feature’ of interveners’ lives (Fechter, 2011: 143), suggesting that a static concept of home may not adequately characterise the ways in which interveners seek to emplace themselves and generate a sense of ontological security. Moreover, thinking through how interveners seek to make themselves feel ‘at home’ when creating intervention places allows us to analyse the ways in which their identities and agency are developed in more personal, private ways than does a focus only on their practices and assumptions in public fora (Watson, 2019).

A focus on the ontological security of interveners prompts a recognition that, while representations of the ‘ideal home’ as a house privilege a material structure in a fixed place, home is not necessarily a place, but instead can be a space where ‘social meanings and identities are expressed’ (Wardhaugh, 1999: 94; Briganti and Mezei, 2012; Mallett, 2004). Therefore, the concept of home can be ‘multi-scalar’, shifting from house, to neighbourhood, to city, to country of origin, to the globe, which seems particularly relevant to interveners (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 27; Ahmed, 2000). This suggests that we need to consider ‘a spatialized understanding of home’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 22), as for interveners, like travellers, migrants or exiles, ‘home comes to found in a routine set of practices, a repetition of habitual interactions, in styles of dress and address, in memories and myths, in stories carried around in one’s head’ (Rapport and Dawson, 1998: 7; Jackson, 1995). On this reading, analyses could be based on the ‘experience of “being-at-home” in the world’, and therefore study ‘the diverse ways people “do” and feel home’ (Mallett, 2004: 97; Jackson, 1995). This would also recognise the varied ways in which people from different cultural and social settings create and experience home (Ahmed et al., 2003; Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Jackson, 1995; Mallett, 2004).

The common usage of the metaphor of home as a source of comfort and belonging has also obscured the fact that many people have ‘negative and ambivalent feelings’ towards home (Manzo, 2003; Wardhaugh, 1999). Indeed, for many people home can be ‘a site of fear and isolation, a prison, rather than a place of absolute freedom and ontological security’ (Mallett, 2004: 72; Blunt and Dowling, 2006). This highlights that, with its emphasis on a ‘happy phenomenology of the home’ (Sibley, 1995: 94), the negative aspects of place identity have seldom been explored in the ontological security literature. This opens up broader questions about the politicised nature of home that recognises ‘the processes of oppression and resistance embedded in ideas and processes of home’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 22). This would recognise that ‘houses/homes are always part of power structures’ (Handel, 2019: 1048). Drawing on feminist approaches, it highlights that, for many people, home can be a place of violence, fear and oppression, in which gendered power structures mean that it represents a place of both ‘belonging and alienation’ (Blunt and Varley, 2004: 3) or ‘refuge or prison’ (Wardhaugh, 1999: 94). Consequently, it may be that some interveners feel more at home and ontologically secure in intervention spaces and places than in their residential houses.

Thinking about how people ‘do’ home invites us to explore the dynamic processes and transactions that transform a place into a something perceived and experienced as home. For example, if interveners come to identify closely with their peacebuilding identities and the relationships, routines and rhythms of intervention spaces, could intervention places come to feel like home? If intervention spaces and places constitute a source of ontological security for interveners, what impact do interveners’ home-making narratives and micropractices have on their behaviour in those spaces? Could some interveners become so ‘at home’ in intervention spaces and places that they become an important source of ontological security, and consequently they seek them out? What impact might this have on their peacebuilding work, and consequently on the security and peace of conflict-affected populations? Could interveners unconsciously or inadvertently act to prolong or exacerbate conflict in order to satisfy their peacebuilding identities?

The material and ideational aspects of emplacement

Examining the emplaced security of interveners also invites us to examine the political nature and consequences of their physical and ontological security-seeking narratives and practices in intervention spaces. Previous studies have identified how the material structures that interveners construct to emplace themselves in intervention spaces can displace, dispossess and disrupt conflict-affected communities in ‘socio-economic, structural and demographic’ ways, as the built environment has agency that shapes patterns and routines of behaviour (Mannergren Selimovic, 2019: 139; Smirl, 2015). Indeed, these material structures have effects for subjectivity and personal agency, particularly in the form of the fortified, or walled and gated, compound, which can create a sense of persistent danger and lead to a lack of contact with conflict-affected populations (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016; Duffield, 2010; Smirl, 2008, 2015). This can isolate interveners from these populations and lead them to ‘develop distorted ideas about their interaction with local people’, including fear and paranoia, leading to ‘mistaken assessments’ and ‘disproportionate reactions’ (Pouligny, 2006: 145). This has meant that intervention places are ‘more and more distantiated from the places in need of assistance’ with interveners interacting with conflict-affected populations ‘in highly securitized or ritualized ways’, potentially reproducing colonial power relations (Smirl, 2015: 5). This can generate ontological insecurity which can affect interveners’ behaviour; most seriously, it may provoke hostility or violence (Giddens, 1991; Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2017). Indeed, interveners may seek to deflect their ‘ontological anxieties’ about the unknown by ‘turn[ing] them into the manageable certainties of objects of fear to physical security through securitization’ (Browning and Joenniemi, 2017: 38). This means that intervention places can generate ‘everyday moments of high insecurity’ for both conflict-affected populations and interveners (Mannergren Selimovic, 2019: 139), particularly if it leads interveners to treat communities with suspicion, or more seriously, as a source of threat. When interveners are armed, this may have serious consequences, as the number of civilians killed due to miscalculation or misperception during peacebuilding missions attests.

By creating boundaries between interveners and conflict-affected populations, the material structures of intervention places can undermine the ability of interveners to build trust relations and encourage them to isolate themselves from the population in the intervention space (Duffield, 2010; Read, 2018). Therefore, the way interveners materially operate influences how they ‘think about the places and people that they are assisting’, including by generating stereotypes such as of ‘donor/beneficiary and of saviour/victim’ (Smirl, 2015: 4, 9–10). This can also insecuritise conflict-affected populations in which they are deployed, particularly if they are treated as potentially threatening. Consequently, it has been argued that heavy fortifications constitute a form of ‘latent violence’ in intervention spaces (Mannergren Selimovic and Strombom, 2015: 195).

There has been less consideration of how intervention spaces and places in an ideational sense are created and understood by interveners and conflict-affected populations (with Higate and Henry, 2009 a notable exception). This analysis requires thinking through how intervention spaces are produced by practices and routines, but also how and by whom they are represented and understood. These questions matter because they help to determine the politics of those representations, including of how intervention spaces are legitimised, who is seen to belong in them and who is left out, and how power is distributed within them (Creswell, 2004; Manzo, 2003). The ideational structures that interveners construct to emplace themselves in intervention spaces, particularly relating to their peacebuilding identities and the legitimacy that it claims over conflict-affected populations, may insecuritise both them and the affected population (Higate and Henry, 2010). Interveners’ security routines and rituals can also have implications for both their ontological security and that of the conflict-affected population in which they are deployed. While performing routines can help to create a sense of order and social normality, the routines of peacebuilding work are often highly securitised, involve maintaining or passing through checkpoints, conducting foot or vehicle patrols, and maintaining and displaying ‘props’, including weapons or other security-related apparatus such as helmets or body armour (Higate and Henry, 2009: 101). How interveners conduct their routines and what props they carry can also influence others’ sense of security. Small differences in their routine behaviour, such as whether they stand or sit when operating checkpoints, whether they travel on foot or by vehicle, or if (and how) they carry weapons, can signal to populations in intervention spaces the interveners’ sense of security and, in turn, how (in)secure they should feel (Higate and Henry, 2009).

Taken together, this suggests that more needs to be done to think through the consequences of both the material and ideational aspects of the creation of intervention spaces and places, including the influence of interveners’ physical and ontological security-seeking behaviour. While bringing people together in places can lead to increased engagement between them, it can equally lead to estrangement, whereby people are ‘recognised as not belonging, as being out of place’ (Ahmed, 2000: 21, emphasis in original). This recognition justifies boundaries being drawn between ‘we’ and ‘them’. When applied to interveners, it suggests that, by creating and narrating peacebuilding identities, and material and ideational intervention spaces and places, interveners imply who is estranged from those identities or places. This is a political act that can generate forms of social exclusion, segregation, difference and hierarchy, limit mobility, contribute to subordination and spatialised social control, and affect the exercise of political power. And, if those strangers as perceived as dangerous, this may encourage violence against them (Ahmed, 2000; Gieryn, 2000; Manzo, 2003).

Conclusion

It is important to analyse individual international interveners, since they can act as conduits, translators and links between the international and local scales. Building on previous studies, I propose that an ontological security lens can help to explain why interveners become attached to their peacebuilding identities, relationships, routines and rhythms, which can become a source of ontological security for them, even when this leads them to sometimes identify and behave in counterproductive, and even damaging, ways. This suggests that, while developing peacebuilding identities may provide a sense of ontological security to interveners, it may limit their ability to recognise the agency of conflict-affected populations and to engage with their – often locally legitimate and effective – peacebuilding practices. Therefore, peacebuilding identities may limit the flexibility and ability of interveners to innovate, since to admit that conflict-affected populations may have the answers challenges their claimed expertise and moral high ground. These findings can inform broader analyses of how collective identities are developed, whose sense of ontological security they advance, who experiences insecurity as a result and how they respond.

Analysing the ontological security of individual interveners also highlights why an analytical focus on place is valuable, as place-based experiences and place-identities are formative of a sense of ontological security. Treating interveners as a referent object invites us to rethink the tendency to focus on home as the key site of emplacement in the ontological security literature. In particular, it provides opportunities to rethink conceptions of home and the role that it plays in ontological security, by illustrating how home can be multi-scalar and spatial, rather located in a fixed place. It also invites us to examine the political nature and consequences of interveners’ physical and ontological security-seeking narratives and practices, including their creation of the material and ideational structures of intervention spaces and places. Bringing interveners and conflict-affected populations together in intervention spaces and places can lead to productive engagement between them, but it is equally likely to generate estrangement, create or sustain segregation, difference and hierarchy, limit mobility and influence the exercise of political power.

By analysing the ontological security of individual interveners, I do not intend to overstate their agency, elevate them above the conflict-affected populations in which they are deployed, or overlook broader influences. Indeed, micro-level analyses need to recognise that the agency of interveners is influenced and constrained by power dynamics rooted in geopolitics, international institutions, colonialism and global capital. Instead, I want to highlight that the ontological security of individual interveners can have a significant effect on the way they practise peacebuilding work and ultimately on the security of the conflict-affected populations in which they have been deployed to help build security and peace.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP160104692.

ORCID iD

Joanne Wallis

Author biography

Joanne Wallis is professor of International Security in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Adelaide. Joanne is the author or editor of seven books, including Consitution making during State building (CUP 2014) and Pacific Power? Australia’s Strategy in the Pacific Islands (MUP 2017). She is the chief investigator on two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects analysing peacebuilding and security the Pacific Islands.

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