Mapping Peacebuilding Practice: A Post-Liberal Methodology

Abstract

Engaging the post-liberal politics of hybridity requires a methodological orientation rather than a theoretical one. As the previous two chapters outlined, the uncertain material ontology of politically contested post-liberal practices is emergent in nature. Practices may be organized but the relationship between organization and performance is unstable. A performance only takes shape as it emerges and may express new meanings and introduce different ways of performing. Therefore, a theoretical approach in which the limits of power and emancipation have already been established is less attuned to exposing the processes through which these limits are exceeded and redefined. Hence, a methodological orientation is needed to explore the emerging post-liberal world, one which is attuned to how the limits of power and meaning of emancipation are continually contested and reshaped. However, critical methodology remains underdeveloped in critical PCS where the epistemological distinction between international power and emancipatory local agency is often maintained. As a result, important expressions of post-liberal power and emancipatory agency slip by undetected.